The Book of Common Prayer was born of a time of \u201cWar and Tumults.\u201d\u009d In Europe, a powerful anti-Catholic movement had found its boldest leader in Martin Luther, who excoriated the Church in his Ninety-five Theses (1517-18). Luther attacked the Church\u2019s practice of apparently offering salvation (or, at least, partial remission from sins) through the sale of indulgences. Luther came to believe that absolution and salvation were not in the power of the Church but were freely bestowed as gifts by God. The sinner is justified\u201d\u201dredeemed from sin, made righteous\u201d\u201dby faith alone in God, not by doing good works or by buying ecclesiastical favors. Along with this emphasis on faith went a necessary stress on the sinful helplessness of man, and on our spiritual fate as predestined by God (since we cannot earn our own redemption). Luther and his fellow-reformer John Calvin appealed to the Church fathers as theological sponsors. Both Paul and Augustine, after all, were preoccupied by the narrative of our original sin, and Augustine had argued that God\u2019s grace was bestowed, not earned. The Catholic Church struggled internally after the Reformation with the problem of \u201cdouble predestination\u201d\u009d\u201d\u201dthe idea that God has already decided who will be in the elect and who will be damned.<\/p>\n
Pope Leo X could not see the Catholicism in Luther\u2019s Protestantism: he excommunicated the insurgent in 1521, sealing a schism that Luther had probably not desired. In the next twenty years, Lutheranism became a German church; Calvin established a kind of Protestant theocracy in the city-state of Geneva; Protestantism spread to France, the Netherlands, Scotland, and Scandinavia; and the Catholic Church in England severed its ties with Rome. Thomas Cranmer was at the middle of this revolution. Henry VIII had used him in 1527 on diplomatic business, as one of the theologians tasked with arguing the rectitude of the King\u2019s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Henry, who made him Archbishop of Canterbury in 1533, was probably less of a reformer than Cranmer: he wanted the Pope out of his business, but saw himself as \u201cDefender of the Faith,\u201d\u009d a faith still essentially that of English Catholicism. (The British monarch is to this day the \u201cDefender of the Faith.\u201d\u009d)<\/p>\n
Only when Henry was succeeded by Edward VI, in 1547, could the reform that Cranmer wanted truly proceed. Cranmer\u2019s Book of Common Prayer was revised in 1552, three years after its publication, in order to intensify the Protestantism of its theology….<\/p>\n