ABSTRACT
The Lutherans recognised, however, that the word ‘sacrifice’ had been applied to the mass since the earliest days of the church. Melanchthon had already addressed this point in his Apology and the Loci, and he defined several kinds of ‘sacrifice’. A Eucharistic sacrifice is a thanksgiving, and in this sense — and only in this sense — can the sacrament, or taking part in it, be called a sacrifice. King Henry’s comments on the ‘sacrifice’ provide the clue to the way that his mind was working. Augustine saw the re-enactment of Christ’s unique sacrifice not only in the special Paschal services, but also in the daily sacrament. In the earliest times the word ‘sacrifice’ was liberally applied to various pious activities including prayer and worship. Henry had a theological wheeze: keep the private mass for devotional rather than propitiatory reasons, and agree on a definition of the ‘sacrifice’ that would be less offensive to the Lutherans.
