Gibson on Article XXXI: Of the one Oblation of Christ finished upon the Cross

The alterations which have been made in this Article since it was first put forth in 1553 are insignificant and immaterial In 1553 the English of the title was “of the jperfect oblation of Christ made upon the Cross ” ; and in the last clause of the Article the ** sacrifices of Masses ” were said to be ** forged fables,” while ” culpa ” was translated ” sin ” instead of ” guilt,” and there was nothing in the Latin corresponding to the word ” blasphema,” which was only introduced in 1563.

The wording of the Article as a whole does not seem to be actually based on any earlier document ; but some expressions in it may be traced to a draft Article prepared by Cranmer for the Conference of Anglicans and Lutherans in 1538, but not actually accepted by the

• In the majority of modem editions of the Articles this is incorrectly printed as “priest.”

fk

divines who then met together. This is headed “De missa privata,” and in it occurs the following passage : —

“Damnanda est igitur iinpia ilia opinio sentientium usum Sacramenti cultum esse a sacerdotibus applicandum p7v aliis, mvis et de/unctis, et mereri illis vitam ieternam et remissionem cnlpce et posnce idqiie ex opere opera to.” ^

The expressions here placed in italics reappear, it will be noticed, almost word for word in our own Article. Besides this, as will be shown presently, the general thought, if not the actual words, of the Article may be abundantly illustrated by language that had been previously used.

The object of the Article is by a restatement of the doctrine of the perfection of Christ’s atonement to condemn current theories of the Eucharistic sacrifice which seriously conflicted with it, and which led to grave practical abuses. The subjects treated of in it are thus two in number :

1. The sufficiency of the sacrifice of the Cross.

2. The condemnation of the ” sacrifices of Masses.”

[…]

The offering of Christ once made is the perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction for all the sins of the whole world, both original and actual; and there is none other satisfaction for sin but that alone. It is clear

from the position of this Article in the series, as well as from the connection of the two clauses, the second of which is introduced by wherefore, that the doctrine of the Atonement is only here introduced in order to assert

[…]

\f:

emphatically the ground on which the “sacrifices of Masses ” are condemned. This first sentence, therefore, need not detain us long. Its language, which is very similar to that used in the opening of the Prayer of Consecration in the Order of the Holy Communion,^ is in entire harmony with the teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews, in which special attention may be drawn to the following passages : —

vii. 26, 27 : “For such a high priest became ns, holy, guileless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and made higher than the heavens; who needeth not daily, like those high priests, to offer up sacrifices, first for His own sins, and then for the sins of the people : for this He did once for all (e^^Traf), when He offered up Himself.” ix. 11-14 : ” But Christ having come a high priest of the good things to come, through the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this creation; nor yet through the blood of goats and calves, but through His own blood, entered in once for all into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling them that have been defiled, sanctify unto the cleanness of the flesh ; how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish unto God, cleanse your conscience from dead works, to serve the living God ? ”

ix. 24-28: “Christ entered not into a holy place made with hands, like in pattern to the true ; but into heaven itself, now to appear before the face of God for us : nor yet that He should offer Himself often ; as the

• “Almighty God, our heavenly Father, who of Thy tender mercy didst give Thine only Son Jesus Christ to suffer death upon the Cross for our redemption ; who made there (by His one oblation of Himself once offered) a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world.”

‘I

\W’

high priest entereth into the holy place year by year with blood not his own ; else must He often have suffered since the foundation of the world : but now once (aTraf ) at the end of the ages hath He been manifested to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. And inasmuch as it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this Cometh judgment; so Christ also, having been once offered to bear the sins of many, shall appear a second time, apart from sin, to them that wait for Him, unto salvation.”

X. 10-14: “By which will we have been sanctified, through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all (e^aTraf). And every priest indeed standeth day by day ministering, and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices, the which can never take away sins : but He, when He had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever,^ sat down on the right hand of God ; from henceforth expecting till His enemies be made the footstool of His feet. For by one offering He hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified.”

These passages are absolutely conclusive as to the perfection of the sacrifice once offered on Calvary. The language of the Article is entirely covered by them, and exception to this first clause in it could hardly be taken by any well-instructed Theologian. But if so much is admitted, an important consequence follows, for the words are entirely destructive of any notion that in the Eucharist there can be any sacrifice suppletory or additional to the sacrifice made ” once for all ” on the Cross. They prove, therefore, that (to borrow the words of a most careful Theologian) ” the Eucharistic sacrifice, even in its highest aspect, must be put in one line (if we may so say), not with what Christ did once for all on the

Cross, but with what He is continually doing in heaven ; that as present naturally in heaven and sacramentally in the Holy Eucharist, the Lamb of God exhibits Himself to the Father and pleads the Atonement as once finished in act, but ever living in operation ; that in neither case does He repeat it or add to it” ^

But since the Article is not concerned with the statement of the true doctrine of the Eucharistic sacrifice, which has been called “commemorative, impetrative, applicative,” * the subject need not be further considered here. We may therefore pass at once to the second part of the Article.

XL The Condemnation of ” the Sacrifices of Masses.”

The sacrifloes of Masses, in the which it was commonly said (vulgo dicebatur) that the priests did offer Christ for the quick and the dead to haYe remission of pain or guilt, were blasphemous fables, and dangerous deceits (blasphema

figmenta sunt, et pemiciosae importunae).

Public attention has been recently directed to this statement, and an altogether unreasonable amount of importance has been attached to it in connection with controversies on the validity of Anglican Orders. A desperate attempt has been made in some quarters to represent it as a denial of the Eucharistic sacrifice, whereas the terms in which it is drawn ought to have made it clear to every reader that this could never have been its object. Had it been the intention of its compilers broadly to deny this doctrine, nothing would have been easier than for them to use words which would have conveyed their meaning without any ambiguity.

[…]

y f

As a matter of fact, however, it is not even ** the sacrifice of the Mass” which is condemned, but the sacrifices of Masses (missarum sacrificia), and in connection with them a current theory (” in which it was commonly said,” quibus vulgo dicebatur) rather than a formal statement of doctrine.

What those who are responsible for the Article had before them was the whole system of private Masses, and the ” opinion ” which gave such disastrous encouragement to them (besides being the fruitful parent of other superstitions), that ” Christ satisfied by His Passion for original sin, and instituted the Mass, in which might be made an oblation for daily sins, both mortal and venial” ^ Whether this dreadful perversion of the truth was ever authoritatively taught or seriously maintained by Theologians of repute is not the question, though it has been attributed to more than one.^ The words just cited ttom the Confession of Augsburg are fair evidence that the error was sufficiently widely spread to demand notice;^ and it alone will account for the emphasis

[…]

quod Christus sua passione satisfecerit pro peccato originis, et instituerit

missam, in qua fieret oblatio pro quotidianis delictis, mortalibus et

venialibus.”— Con/. August, Pars H. art. iii. De missa. Syllogt Can-

/essionurrif p. 139.

*£.g, a Spanish Theologian, Vasquez (1551-1604), attributes it to Catharinus, one of the Tridentine divines ; and, as was pointed out in the first volume of this work, p. 149, the error is contained in a series of sermons attributed to Albertus Magnus. It has been replied that Catharinus has been misrepresented (see the Tablet for 1895, referred to in the Ohureh Quarterly Bsview, voL xlii. p. 41) ; and it now appears that the sermons De 8, Eucharistice Sacramento are not the work of Albertus Magnus (see the references as above, and Vacant, ffistaire de la Conception du Sacrifice de la Messe, p. 40). The authorship, however, of the sermons matters little. There they are ; and nothing could be plainer than their language on the subject, as quoted in vol. L p. 149. It conveys proof positive that the error was tau^jht ; and that is sufficient.

^ Cf. Gardiner’s language, which can only have been called out by existing false teaching : ** For when men add unto the Mass an opinion

which IS laid twice over ^ in the Articles on the fact that the death of Christ is the perfect satisfaction for all the sms of the whole world, both (yrighial and actual. The Tndentine decrees upholding private Masses, and laymg down that the sacrifice of the Mass is “truly propitiatory (vere propitiatorium) both for the living and the dead,” ^ were certainly not present to the minds of

[…]

^Cow. TrUeiU. Sess. xxii. cap. ii. : On these decrees see Mozley. Lectures and olh^r Theological Papers, p. 216: “The popular belief of later times exaggerated the Eucharistic sacrifice till it became, to aU intents and purposes, a real one, and ’ the priest offered up Christ on the altar for quick and dead, to have remission of pain and guilt ’ • that is to say, offered Him up as a Victim in a sense which could not be distmguished from that in which He was offered up by Himself on the Cross. It IS true that the decree of the Council of Trent just saves itself by cautious, not to say dissembling language, from the extreme and monstrous conclusion that the sacrifice of the Mass is the same with that upon the Cross. It distinguishes between a bloody and an unbloody oblation ; and it states that the fruits or consequences of the bloody oblation or the sacrifice on the Cross are ‘received through the unbloody one (oblationis cruentae fructus per banc incruentam percipiuntur) ; but at the same time it asserts that the sacrifice of the Mass is a really propUiatory sacrijice-vere propitiatorium. Now undoubtedly there are two senses in which an act may be said to be propitiatoiy. The act of Ohnst s sacrifice on the Cross had an original propitiatory power ; that is to say. It was the cause of any other act, or any act of man, or any rite being propitiatory, that is, appeasing God’s anger, and reconciling Him to the agent. We may allow that in common language a man may do something which wUl reconcile God to Him, and restore him to God’s favour ; but then all the power that any action of man can have for this end is a derived power, derived from Christ’s sacrifice, from which any other sacrifice, the Eucharistic one included, borrows its virtue and without which it would be wholly null and void. There is, then an original propitiation and a borrowed propitiation, a first propitiation’and * secondary one. Why then did the Fathers of Trent, when they had

I?

mm-

\\

those who formulated the Article, for they were not in existence, as the subject was only considered at Trent in the autumn of 1562, nearly ten years later. And it has been recently pointed out that these decrees are ” the beginning, not the end, of a discussion which has been going on ever since,” for ” it is remarkable how little attempt there is in the Middle Ages to formulate the doctrine of the sacrifice of the Eucharist, and how little theological interest is spent upon it.” ^ It was the popular teaching alone which the Reformers had before them ; and no one who knows anything of the history of the Reformation can doubt that the gravest abuses were connected with the whole system of private Masses, and that its “practical outcome … was to intensify the belief that Christ’s once perfected oblation had to be reiterated and supplemented.” « The system had fallen, swept away by the Acts for the suppression of Chantries passed in 1545 and 1547. It only remained to guard against any revival of the erroneous teaching on which it’ largely rested, and this was effectually done by the promulgation of the Article which has now been considered.

all human language at their command, deliberately choose to call the sacrifice of the Mass vert propitiat(ynum ? They may have said that it was vere propUiatoHum in the secondary sense ; but no one can fail to see the misleading etfect of such language, and that nothing could have been easier to the divines of Trent, had they chosen, than to draw a far more clear distinction than they did between the sacrifice of the Mass and the sacrifice on the Cross. It is evident that, as ecclesiastical statesmen, they were afraid of interfering with the broad popular esteblished view of the Mass, while, as theologians, they just contrived to secure themselves from the responsibility of a monstrous dogmatic statement.”

^F. E. Brightman in Church Historical Society Lectures, Series i.

pp. 193, 194. .

Notes

• On the punctuation of these words, see Bp. Westcott, The Epistle to the HebreioSf p. 314.
• Brighfs Ancient Collects^ p. 144, note.
• Church QuarUrly Review, vol. xlii. p. 45. The whole discussion of this Article in the Review (pp. 38-49) is well worth consulting.