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Anglican Spirituality
and the Book of Common Prayer
By The Rev'd Dr. Robert Crouse
It is evident, I think, to
most of us - however much we may have been sheltered by the highly
selective reporting by our national and diocesan Church press - that
the Anglican Communion has entered a time of severe crisis, in which
the character, and indeed the very existence, of Anglicanism is
radically in question. Most of us are painfully aware of certain
aspects of that crisis, by virtue of our own painful experience of
stresses and contentions in our own dioceses and our own parishes,
the evidence of which even the bravest shows of episcopal and
synodical solidarity cannot effectively obscure.
By some, as, for instance, by the recently retired Archbishop of
Canterbury in his lectures at the Trinity Institute in New York,
this is regarded principally as a political crisis: a problem having
to do with the structures and forms of such quasi-authoritative
bodies as the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council,
the Primates' Meeting, Provincial and General Synods, and the like.
Archbishop Runcie, in those lectures (as reported by the Church
Times),
analyzed the changes in secular authority over
the past twenty years characterized, he said, by oscillation
between radical permissiveness and reactionary authoritarianism
- and claimed that these swings were mirrored in the Churches.[1]
In terms reminiscent of Professor Sykes' well-known thesis about
The Integrity of Anglicanism, Dr. Runcie observed that authority
in the Anglican Communion "had been characterized by a 'dispersed'
model, using a combination of different sources, aspects and levels
of authority,', and that contentious issues now dividing Anglicans
"had demonstrated an inadequacy in the central structures of the
Communion", which, he said, would need to be "examined".
No doubt, the 1988 Lambeth Conference devoted some attention to
examining such questions as, indeed, Lambeth Conferences have done
regularly ever since their beginning over a century ago. But, as the
late Dr. Gareth Bennett remarked in his fine and notorious Preface
to the current edition of "Crockford", "no one should 'underestimate
the capacity of a Lambeth Conference to take its real decisions by
doing nothing". [2] Meanwhile, the
various bodies which constitute the Anglican Communion will continue
to act according to that interpretation of Anglican
comprehensiveness which Dr. Bennett ascribes particularly to Bishop
Spong of Newark: "that everyone should do what seems right to him in
conscience and that everyone else should accept it."
[3] And that is what the Archbishop's concluding
evocation of what he calls "the Gamaliel principle" seems to come
to. As Dr. Bennett puts it, quoting Mr. Frank Field, "the Archbishop
is usually to be found nailing his colours to the fence."
[4]
Questions of Church politics, and "central structures", are, of
course, important, but I don't think that they are really the
fundamental questions just now for Anglicans. Anglicanism,
world-wide, has never had, after all, a universal synod with power
to define and legislate in matters of doctrine, worship, morals, and
pastoral practice. There is no Pope, and no Holy Office. Canterbury
does not qualify for that role; nor, I'm afraid, does Jarvis Street.
Each bishop is largely independent in his own diocese; except. that
he is bound by his solemn oath, at his consecration,
to hold and maintain the Doctrine, Sacraments,
and Discipline of Christ, as the Lord hath commanded in his holy
Word, and as the Anglican Church of Canada hath received and set
forth the same,
and his promise of "due obedience" to the Metropolitan, who has
taken a similar oath (BCP. p.661). No one vows to obey the
General Synod, or the Lambeth Conference.
In this, there is no principle of authority other than the Word
of God in Holy Scripture, as understood and expressed in the Book
of Common Prayer. And the mandate of General Synod itself is
defined in the same way in its own "Solemn Declaration, 1893"
(BCP, p. viii):
We are determined by the help of God to hold and
maintain the Doctrine, Sacraments and Discipline of Christ as
the Lord hath commanded in his Holy Word, and as the Church of
England hath received and set forth the same in 'The Book of
Common Prayer'... and in the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion;
and to transmit the same unimpaired to our posterity.
I think it is not too much to say that that principle of authority
has been, and remains, the only enduring and effectual principle of
cohesion in Anglicanism. Through the centuries of Anglican history,
the common liturgy has been the standard against which the ephemeral
fancies and fads, the theological and devotional exaggerations and
aberrations, have always been measured. The integrity of
Anglicanism, as a distinctive form of Christian life and witness,
has been sustained and nourished by, and radically depends upon,
that Prayer Book tradition.
The 1948 Lambeth Conference, addressing the question of
authority, found all its necessary elements unified and expressed in
the Prayer Book liturgy; [5] and
in 1950, the Archbishop of Canterbury (Dr. Fisher) felt able to
write, with what now seems painful optimism:
Wherever we go throughout our Communion we find
ourselves at home in worship scriptural, catholic,
congregational, understanded of the people, simple and profound,
of which the standard and exemplar is the Book of Common
Prayer. That knits us together indeed. That lies at the root
of our fellowship with one another. And it is deeply moving to
know that the older and younger Churches of one Communion find
alike in this tradition the same values of Catholic truth,
scriptural soundness and evangelical zeal. [6]
"Deeply moving", no doubt, but, within a generation, all that has
radically changed. As Dr. Bennett remarks in his "Crockford"
Preface:
No change in Anglicanism during the last thirty
years has been more remarkable than the virtual disuse of prayer
books based on the English Book of Common Prayer. . .
nothing is more apparent than Anglicanisms' break with its
liturgical past, and any attempt to define Anglicanism by its
tradition of worship is now on very insecure ground. It is
sometimes said that the new Anglican services have a 'family
resemblance' but this may be only a reflection of the common
forms of the ecumenical liturgical movement. Certainly it does
not take a very close examination to detect that the liturgies
have distinct doctrinal differences from each other. This would
indicate that they are not so much a factor for unity as a sign
of increasing diversity. [7]
"Virtual disuse" is certainly an exaggeration: In Canada, and in
other parts of the world, there are countless parishes which remain
faithful to Prayer Book standards in doctrine and worship, and
multitudes of individuals, especially among the laity, who are
staunchly determined to maintain what they rightly regard as their
heritage as Anglicans, and to resist what some of our bishops seem
fond of describing as "the direction in which our Church is moving".
We have not reached the point -and I hope we shall not reach it -
when we must sing a lamentation, or threnody, for the Book of Common
Prayer. But the issue is critical, and much will depend upon the
prayerful, informed, and outspoken activity of those who understand
what is at stake.
The questions involved are numerous and vast: there are serious
theological questions, questions of liturgical scholarship and
theory, questions of the literary and esthetic dimensions of
liturgy, and so on, as well as questions of practical politics, all
of which must be insistently raised and addressed at every level;
and I think that the Prayer Book Society should be greatly
encouraged by the very rapid and widespread development of serious
interest in these matters - though it is, of course, still extremely
difficult to achieve any meaningful debate about these things in the
higher echelons of Church government.
But most Anglicans are not, of course, theologians, or liturgical
or literary scholars, and are nevertheless deeply concerned about
the defence of the Book of Common Prayer; not, I think,
because they are naturally "conservatives", or "reactionaries", or
"nostalgic" (though some of them may be), but because they have a
deep sense of the worth of our traditional liturgy as spiritual
nutriment in an increasingly secular world, and are dismayed by
experimental liturgies which seem to reflect and express the
conventions and thoughtless conformities of the present age.
Precisely what they do not want is a liturgy, such as the BAS claims
to provide, which wears "the idiom, the cadence, the world-view" of
the present age. Their problems with the new liturgies are not so
much the problems of theology in any very specific sense, but rather
the more immediately practical problems of devotion, or
spirituality.
The Book of Common Prayer is not conceived (as are its
current alternatives) as a kind of resource-book for worship, from
which one may choose elements according to one's tastes or
inclinations, or have them chosen for one by the clergy or by some
"worship and spirituality" committee, more or less ad hoc.
The Prayer Book is, rather, a spiritual system, biblical,
traditional, and logical, which includes, but at the same time
transcends and corrects the subjective inclinations of the
worshipper or the spirituality committee. It is the common
prayer of priest and congregation, and corporate in a way in which
the self-conscious "gathering of the community" can never be.
Liturgical resource books will not do. The prayer of the Church
becomes the common prayer of the people only when its variants are
few enough that they can become thoroughly familiar and habitual,
and thus can be genuinely prayed. William Beveridge, several
centuries ago, put the matter cogently:
... If I hear another pray, and know not
beforehand what he will say, I must first listen to what he will
say next; then I am to consider whether what he saith be
agreeable to sound doctrine, and whether it be proper and lawful
for me to join with him in the petitions he puts up to Almighty
God; and if I think it is so, then I am to do it. But before I
can well do that, he is got to another thing; by which means it
is very difficult, if not morally impossible, to join with him
in everything so regularly as I ought to do. But by a set form
of prayer all this trouble is prevented; for having the form
continually in my mind, being thoroughly acquainted with it,
fully approving of everything in it, and always knowing
beforehand what will come next, I have nothing else to do,
whilst the words are sounding in my ears, but to move my heart
and affections suitably to them, to raise up my desires to those
good things which are prayed for, to fix my mind wholly upon
God, whilst I am praising of him, and so to employ, quicken, and
lift up my soul in performing my devotions to Him. [8]
That comes from the seventeenth century, of course, and is therefore
supposedly unintelligible to twentieth-century Anglicans; but I
think that anyone who has tried to guide a stranger through the
intricacy of such a document as the 1979 American Prayer Book or its
more recent Canadian offspring the BAS - book in one hand,
and bulletin in the other - will somehow feel the force of
Beveridge's words. Experimental liturgy and the new breed of service
books, whatever may be the good intentions of the compilers (and I
do not doubt their good intentions), by the provision of multiple
alternatives, and various forms and translations of those
alternatives, tend to destroy the very possibility of prayer. One is
reminded of the strictures of the 1549 Prayer Book against late
medieval service books, that "....the manifold changings of the
service was the cause, that to turn the Book only was so hard and
intricate a matter, that many times there was more business to find
out what should be read, than to read it when it was found out."
[9]
Novelty and variety certainly have a place in devotional life. It
can be very refreshing, for instance, sometimes to hear a familiar
passage of Scripture in a new translation, and a new version of a
Psalm may call one's attention to aspects of the meaning which one
had missed before. But if that process is carried very far, it can
also be devotionally destructive, by confusing and destroying one's
devotional vocabulary. For countless Anglicans, all down the
centuries, and in our own generation, the language of the Book of
Common Prayer, the language of the King James Version of the
Bible, the language of the Coverdale version of the Psalter, have
been deeply engraved upon minds and hearts. They have become an
habitual language of devotion, rich with associations; words ready
to hand, which come to mind and tongue in times of weariness, or
sickness, or despair, when we have no heart to invent new words, and
when the words of contemporary liturgical revisers seem shallow and
banal.
What is in question is not an antiquated language - not Crammer's
"images, cadences and world-view" - but a genuinely liturgical and
devotional language, thoroughly biblical in its images and
inspiration. What is gained in revisions of that language? What, for
instance, in the tentative substitution, as in the BAS, of a
new American translation of the Psalter? Nothing much, certainly,
from a literary standpoint; a little bit, possibly, from the
standpoint of intelligibility. But what is lost?
Simply a rich and deeply meaningful language of devotion, which
has shaped the spiritual vocabulary of Anglicans - literate and
illiterate -for many generations. One must ask similar questions
about other matters, such as new versions of the Lord's Prayer, the
Canticles, the Creeds, and so on, which are now thrust upon us.
What, really, do we gain? And what do we lose? Quite simply, we lose
our Christian memory, our recollection: and surely few things can be
so debilitating as that for the growth and development of spiritual
life.
Anglican spirituality is basically a liturgical piety, nurtured
by the Book of Common Prayer. It is a rich and glorious tradition,
and I, for one, am unwilling to see it undermined or discarded. No
doubt much dedicated labour and much expense have gone into the
production of our alternatives; and certainly much energy, as well
as much heartbreak, have gone into the promotion of them. No doubt,
as with the famous "Curate's Egg", "parts of it are excellent"; but,
as far as I can see, the general effect, from the standpoint of
spirituality, has been disastrous, and is likely to be more so. At
best, as an alternative, our new rite can produce a kind of
spiritual schizophrenia; at worst, it can produce profound and
lasting destruction of the Anglican tradition. And, as a matter of
fact, in so far as any alternative clearly contravenes "the
Doctrine, Sacraments and Discipline of Christ" as set forth in the
Book of Common Prayer, its use violates the bishop's oath and
the Solemn Declaration of the General Synod, and must not be
condoned.
It has been said in another connection that the owl of Minerva
flies only at dusk. Times of crisis are times of confusion and
danger, but they are also times of great opportunity. Now, as never
before - at least, within this century - Anglicans are compelled to
think about what Anglicanism means; and here and there, all across
this country, people who had taken the Prayer Book pretty much for
granted, are discovering its spiritual importance, and, more and
more, actually using it daily for Morning and Evening Prayer.
Furthermore, they are becoming unwontedly vocal about it. Perhaps
Shakespeare best sums it up.
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.
Let me conclude with a quotation from Jeremy Taylor, a holy and
learned 17th century bishop, who was deprived of his benefice and
three times imprisoned during the Commonwealth period, when the
Book of Common Prayer was suppressed.
This excellent book hath had the fate to be cut
in pieces with a pen-knife and thrown into the fire, but it is
not consumed. At first, it was Sown in tears, and now is watered
with tears; yet never was any holy thing drowned or extinguished
with tears... Indeed, the greatest danger that ever the Common
Prayer Book had, was the indifferency and indevotion of them
that used it as but a common blessing - . But when excellent
things go away, and then look back upon us, as our blessed
Saviour did upon St. Peter, we are more moved then by the nearer
embraces of a full and actual possession. I pray God that it may
be so in our case, and that we may be not too willing to be
discouraged: at least that we may not cease to love and to
desire what is not publicly permitted to our practice and
profession.' [10]
- The Church Times (London), January 22,
1988
- Anonymous (G. Bennett), "Preface",
Crockfords' Clerical Directory, 1987/88 (Church House
Publishing, London, 7987), p.65
- Ibid., p.67
- Ihid,p.68
- Cf. S.W. Sykes, "Authority in the
Anglican Communion" in Four Documents on Authority in the
Anglican Communion (Anglican Consultative Council, Lond., 1987),
p. 13
- G. Fisher, "The Mission of the Anglican
Communion", Pan-Anglican, I (Lent, 1950), p.5
- G. Bennett, op.cit., pp.62-63
- W. Beveridge, "A Sermon on the Excellency
and Usefulness of the Common Prayer" (1681); excerpt in P.E.
Hore and F.L. Cross, eds., Anglicanism (London, 1935),
pp.626-627
- Book of Common Prayer (Canada, 1962),
p.715
- Jeremy Taylor, An Apology for Authorized
and Set Forms of Liturgy, Preface; reprinted in More and Cross,
op.cit., pp.177-178.
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