How far we have departed from our foundations... The extent of the change would have been obvious to anyone walking into a fully reformed English (CofE) church building in 1553… Three new pieces of church furniture stood out amid the hastily adapted and purged remains of the old. A wooden table, moveable into the body of the church for communion services, symbolized the overthrow of the old mass, with all its associated theology of sacrificing… to emphasize this rejection the table was placed at right angles to the alignment of the old altars. A poor box to collect alms… an official reminder that peoples charity was to be directed not to masses or graven images, but to needy people made in Gods image. A pulpit reinforced the message… that God was to be approached directly through His biblical word: even where the pulpit was inherited from the old pre-Reformation days, it was now used exclusively for preaching, not for leading the recital of the rosary or the… bidding of the bedes. The pulpit would remain the central visual emphasis of most English parish churches down to the nineteenth century, when the Oxford Movement, in a remarkably successful piece of alchemy, restored the primacy of the altar. - Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant pp. 159-161
Posted on: Thu, 22 May 2014 21:29:53 +0000
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