@wscal Grateful for his service and saddened that he’s no more at my seminary. I hoped to one day send a young boy I baptized and catechized for him to train for the ministry so that he could experience what I had through Dr. Scott Clark. I’ll keep him in my heart and prayers
March 21, 1556 | Thomas Cranmer is burned at the stake for recanting Roman Catholic heresies
“Public sin demands public repentance.”
For the Reformers, living out this requirement meant far more than issuing a press release or apologetic tweet.
After Thomas Cranmer infamously recanted his long-held Protestant beliefs in early 1556, Bloody Mary’s Roman Catholic church required him to proclaim his reasoning publicly. In their minds, this would likely have encouraged the remaining Protestants in England to follow suit.
So, having seen his friends Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley burned at the stake only a few months earlier, Cranmer stepped into the pulpit of University Church in Oxford. His last recorded words are found in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs:
“And now I come to the great thing, which so much troubleth my conscience, more than any thing that ever I did or said in my whole life, and that is the setting abroad of a writing contrary to the truth: which now here I renounce and refuse, as things written with my hand, contrary to the truth which I thought in my heart, and written for fear of death, and to save my life if it might be; and that is, all such bills and papers which I have written or signed with my hand since my degradation; wherein I have written many things untrue. And forasmuch as my hand offended, writing contrary to my heart, my hand shall first be punished therefor; for, may I come to the fire, it shall be first burned.
“And as for the pope, I refuse him, as Christ’s enemy, and antichrist, with all his false doctrine.
“And as for the sacrament, I believe as I have taught in my book against the bishop of Winchester, the which my book teacheth so true a doctrine of the sacrament, that it shall stand at the last day before the judgment of God, where the papistical doctrine contrary thereto shall be ashamed to show her face.”
For this courageous action, Cranmer was immediately burned at the stake, hand-first.
Soli Deo Gloria.
Amen.
Meredith G. Kline never published a full treatment on the prophets of the Old Testament. However, Greystone Theological Institute is pleased to host his nearly 30 hours of lectures on the prophets—newly edited and remastered—for FREE on Greystone Connect.
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