A Synthesis of Sacramental Theology Part II

After the Church of England’s break with Rome, the ritualism of the Church and the sacramental theology of Transubstantiation came under severe attack. Although Cranmer retained, in faith, the notion of the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacraments consecrated in the Liturgy of the Eucharist, it took the theological genius of Richard Hooker [1554-1600], to ground those notions of Real Presence within the framework of a sustainable systematic theology. For Hooker, the only proper way to look at the Real Presence of Christ within the consecrated gifts of bread and wine was through the lens of the Christology developed in the early Ecumenical councils of the Church. In particular it was the Council of Chalcedon in 451 which had discerned that in Christ were two natures, Man and Divine, contained within the person of Christ, but neither mixed nor confused. For Hooker, Cranmer, and those who followed them, the gifts of bread and wine, consecrated within the liturgy of the Eucharist took on this same two-fold nature, an earthly nature and a divine nature, contained with the presence of the gift, but the natures neither mixed nor confused. In this new Christological formulation, they, totally rejected the notion of Transubstantiation, where one nature ceased to exist, and another came into existence. The deeper, spiritual consequence of this new apprehension of the mode through which grace flows from the sacraments, was that the divine nature of Christ within the sacraments provided a spiritual efficacy.