and rationalist apologists have explained, could rightly tell us what to do and what to believe. Cranmer himself seemed to press this point in 1535, enjoining the monks at Worcester Cathedral Priory not only to read the Bible through, but to expound it “according at least to the literal sense.”13 The link between reading the Bible “through” and its “literal sense,” however, is a clue that something beyond clear teaching was being held in view. What Cranmer desired was that the Bible’s own intrinsic
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