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An Anglican Argument That Never Closed

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An Anglican Argument That Never Closed

Anglicanism has never settled which eucharistic position its formularies require, and receptionism is one contender rather than the official answer. The Prayer Book of 1552 added a rubric explaining that kneeling to receive implied no adoration of any corporal presence of the natural flesh and blood of Christ. It was dropped in 1559 and restored in altered wording in 1662, and the history of that single paragraph is a fair summary of the whole question. The words of administration tell the same story: the 1559 book joined the 1549 sentence, which speaks of the body of Christ, to the 1552 sentence, which speaks of taking and eating in remembrance. Holding both together was a deliberate act of comprehension rather than an accident of compilation.

Richard Hooker, writing in the 1590s, is regularly claimed for receptionism, because he turned attention away from the elements and towards the recipient and refused to define the mode of the presence. The Caroline divines of the following century pressed further towards an objective presence without accepting transubstantiation. From the 1830s the Tractarians and their Anglo-Catholic successors rejected receptionism outright and restored reservation and adoration in many parishes, so the argument runs inside one communion and not only between communions.

Where Thomas Cranmer himself stood is a live scholarly argument rather than a settled fact. Serious cases have been made for reading him as a receptionist, as a virtualist, and as holding the Reformed doctrine of a spiritual presence. The evidence is his own successive revisions of the rite, and they do not all point the same way.

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