Foundational Claims
In his preface to the first Book of Common Prayer of 1549, Thomas Cranmer laid out a number of principles for liturgical revision.Footnote 2 Foremost among these is a claim of fidelity to the ‘ancient fathers’ of the early church. Cranmer asserted that the ‘godly and decent order’ of the primitive church had been so altered, broken and neglected by the sixteenth century that change was imperative. According to Cranmer,
There was never any thing by the wit of man so well devised, or so sure established, which in continuance of time hath not been corrupted….Footnote 3
Thus, some purification was essential. Cranmer goes on to extol the extensive proclamation of Scripture in the liturgy, but complains that the
godly and decent order of the ancient fathers hath been so altered, broken, and neglected, by planting in uncertain stories, Legends, Responds, Verses, vain repetitions, Commemorations, and Synodals …Footnote 4
that restoration of primitive authenticity was necessary. In this preface, Cranmer also calls for the use of the vernacular in liturgical worship, as well as criticizing the degree of difficulty in decoding the various liturgical books that preceded the Book of Common Prayer, saying this
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.Footnote 5
The underlying mythos of this narrative suggests that (a) there was an ‘original’ Christian liturgy whose one basic form, structure and perhaps even text was employed by the apostles themselves, (b) the church had deviated wildly from this one true standard, and (c) we should do our darnedest not only to discover exactly what it was but especially to recover it for our own use.
Subsequent Reiterations
Cranmer's founding ethos found resonance in future generations, as well. The Articles of Religion published in 1563 relate Scripture and the practice of the early church in establishing a call for the use of the vernacular, stating,
It is a thing plainly repugnant to the Word of God, and the custom of the Primitive Church, to have public Prayer in the Church, or to minister the Sacraments, in a tongue not understanded of the people.Footnote 6
The assumption being that practices repugnant to the custom of the Primitive Church are a fond thing, vainly invented, to be rebuked openly. The assertion of the normative status of the early church will not often be stated explicitly, but frequently – as here – it is an integral part of an underlying ethos.
The Thirty-nine Articles assert a number of diverse claims, of course, including the authority of ‘every particular or national church’ to make changes to liturgical texts (what the Article calls ‘Traditions and Ceremonies’), so long as ‘nothing be ordained against God's Word’.Footnote 7
Freed from state control over their rites in 1689, the Scots eventually turned to ancient Eastern liturgies to serve as some of the models for their liturgical reform. In line with such Englishmen as Edward Stephens, William Whiston and John Henley, the Scots looked to these early church texts for inspiration in a lengthy process that lasted well into the eighteenth century.Footnote 8 According to Massey Shepherd, a favorite was the Liturgy of St James, which they mistakenly believed to be authentically apostolic.Footnote 9 They had high regard for these models, but were restricted in their understanding by serious limits to their scholarship. Some Anglicans held such a high regard for Apostolic Constitutions that they may also have believed them to contain the authentic liturgical structure and texts of the Twelve themselves. Given the title of the manuscript, this can perhaps be excused.Footnote 10 While we might be tempted to ridicule their naïveté, we must recognize that they did their best with what they had; scholarship simply had not yet advanced enough to recognize that something attributed to a saint or the apostles might only derive from something actually authored by them, and many important manuscripts lay undiscovered.
The emerging American church, in its first prayer book of 1789, did not enumerate a concern for ancient sources. But they did indicate their desire to deviate from the Church of England only so far as was absolutely necessary:
It seems unnecessary to enumerate all the different alterations and amendments. They will appear, and it is to be hoped, the reasons of them also, upon a comparison of this with the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England. In which it will also appear that this Church is far from intending to depart from the Church of England in any essential point of doctrine, discipline, or worship; or further than local circumstances require.Footnote 11
Their ‘principal care’ was to make alteration with regard to prayer for civil rulers as opposed to the monarchy, not to unfetter the liturgy from its inherited tradition.
The Chicago Quadrilateral of 1886, in its call for Christian unity, affirmed the importance and value of the early church, insisting that
Christian unity … can be restored only by the return of all Christian communions to the principles of unity exemplified by the undivided Catholic Church during the first ages of its existence, which principles we believe to be the substantial deposit of Christian Faith and Order committed by Christ and his apostles to the Church unto the end of the world, and therefore incapable of compromise or surrender by those who have been ordained to be its stewards and trustees for the common and equal benefit of all men.Footnote 12
This statement, albeit somewhat simplified, would be adopted by the Lambeth Conference in 1888, marking the nineteenth-century confirmation of the sixteenth-century principle.Footnote 13
Through the Scottish Episcopal Church, the Episcopal Church in the United States also inherited a particular strand of Anglican liturgy – one containing a fuller eucharistic prayer, based on the models of those liturgies presumed to be more authentically apostolic. Thus begins a trend that culminates in the more radical revisions of prayer books in the twentieth century: early church evidence trumps Reformation concerns about eucharistic sacrifice. Writing in 1964, Stephen Bayne put it this way:
Now the historic argument seems almost a museum-piece. Indeed, the Lambeth Committee [of 1958] felt that as the result of new knowledge gained from Biblical and liturgical studies the time has come to claim that controversies about the Eucharistic Sacrifice can be laid aside … and the way prepared for the making of a liturgy in God's good time which will in its essential structure win its way throughout the whole Anglican Communion.Footnote 14
This interest in ‘new knowledge’ was focused on emerging understanding of the ancient, undivided, primitive church – a shared concern of Cranmer, the Non-Jurors, and many parts of the Liturgical Movement of the twentieth century.
The 1958 Lambeth Conference adopted 131 resolutions, including eight pertaining to the Book of Common Prayer, of which four concern only the commemoration of saints.Footnote 15 Resolution 73 commends the ‘contemporary movement towards unanimity in doctrinal and liturgical matters by those of differing traditions in the Anglican Communion as a result of new knowledge gained from biblical and liturgical studies’.
At the same time, Lambeth 1958 wrote of the ‘changed situation of to-day’, with regard to the status of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as the basic pattern for Anglicans.Footnote 16 The bishops gathered in 1958 deliberately moved away from seeing the Prayer Book as the source of unity for Anglicans, and instead asserted unity through ‘federation’.Footnote 17 In addition to delineating six features in various Prayer Books that are ‘essential to the safeguarding of the unity of the Anglican Communion’, Lambeth 1958 asserted eight features that maintain the traditional doctrinal emphasis and a further six ‘suggested modifications or additions for the further recovery of other elements of the worship of the Primitive Church’.Footnote 18
In the twentieth century, the Anglican concern for the early church was restated by various authors. Writing his apology for the 1979 American prayer book, Massey Shepherd put it thus:
the Churches that now form the Anglican Communion have always maintained basic continuity in doctrine, polity, and worship with the ancient churches of the New Testament and patristic times.Footnote 19
In this simple statement, Shepherd reiterates a fundamental shared assumption of Anglicanism. He calls it ‘basic continuity’, but he could as easily have claimed we have long maintained the godly and decent order of the ancient fathers.
John Fenwick and Bryan Spinks attribute a rekindled interest in the early church with the Liturgical Movement, writing,
A rediscovery of the early Church as a model: This is not antiquarianism in the sense of ‘escaping’ to a supposed golden age (though there has been some of that), but an attempt to get back to ‘purer traditions,’ before medieval and Reformation developments. The intention has been not to repeat but to rediscover certain principles of worship that had been forgotten or overlaid. ‘The practice of the undivided Church’ still has a powerful appeal.Footnote 20
It is as if these two Anglican scholars implicitly assert that the rest of Western Christianity has finally followed the lead of the Anglican Communion in this regard. Note here that they place the Reformation alongside medieval developments – as if to say that the reforms of the sixteenth century were themselves accretions that also masked the primitive purity of the rites. And, Fenwick and Spinks introduce a further point of finesse here: we no longer seek to do exactly as the golden age did, but to rediscover and apply principles of worship that had been neglected or obscured.
Hence, Massey Shepherd makes an appeal for the authenticity and continuity of the basic structure and outline of the 1979 Episcopal Church prayer book, not to the texts of certain prayers:
Many new influences from the patristic age are evident in the revised rites. The order of both Rite One and Rite Two is … the heart of it from the lesson to the act of communion … basically the same as that described by Justin Martyr in the middle of the second century.Footnote 21
This shift – from one of complete fidelity to the early church to one of relative congruence in broad principle – is evident in a variety of twentieth-century works. Austin Farrer, in his contribution to The Parish Communion of 1937, asserts a concern for ‘the Parish Eucharist, the local fellowship, which has stepped into the place of the ancient Episcopal Eucharist as the effective unit’.Footnote 22 Farrer highlights two things here: (1) the normativity of the ancient Eucharist at which a bishop presided; and (2) the subsequent substitution of the modern parish Eucharist, with priest as celebrant, for that event.
Thus, with the developments in scholarship and subsequent liturgical reforms of the twentieth century, we began to see a new notion: that of the early church norm, yes, but not by way of nostalgia or to replicate that elusive simplicity – instead as a kind of model from which to develop rites and texts appropriate to contemporary times.
Gregory Dix further develops this notion of stemming from, rather than adhering to, early church norms. He asserts that pre-Nicene eucharistic rites had ‘a clear-cut outline of the most austere simplicity’, without such components as we now consider integral (the Sanctus and Lord's Prayer, for instance).Footnote 23 While seeking an ‘authentically primitive language’,Footnote 24 Dix attempted to make a distinction between permanent enrichments to the liturgy and adiaphora that obscure the truth:
Formal theological teaching concerning the Eucharist is not entirely a static thing in Christian history, though it has probably changed less than most departments of theology. The Liturgy too undergoes considerable developments, though they are for the most part true developments and not revolutions. Some of these changes of teaching and rite have permanently enriched the Christian understanding of the Eucharist, while others have expressed only passing devotional fashions, and laid false emphasis on unessentials to the obscuring of the real meaning of the sacrament.Footnote 25
In this essay, Dix also correctly pointed out that Anglican reformers of earlier ages could not have produced authentically ancient rites:
The truth is that the primitive Eucharistic rite could not be reconstituted in 1550 because the technical historical knowledge was not then available. The historical ignorance concerning Christian origins which had brooded more and more darkly over the Middle Ages only began to be lifted at the end of the sixteenth century.Footnote 26
Thus have Anglicans continued, over four and a half centuries, to return to the models of the primitive church for inspiration in matters liturgical. From an original misbelief that by clearing away medieval accretions we could return to the simplicity of the one common root known to the apostles, through the long period of slight changes in which – far from intending to depart from the Church of England – the newly emerging autocephalous churches of the Anglican Communion modified only that which they thought they must change, to the recent period – in which scholars have recognized that adherence to early church norms has always been a combination of speculation, partial knowledge and later development.
By the twentieth century, the notion of the normativity of the early church had itself changed – from a hopeful replication of apostolic simplicity to an investigation to rediscover and apply principles of worship that had been neglected or obscured. A discussion of some of the ramifications of that discovery will follow later in this essay.
'But One Use’ – A Parallel Concern
In the preface to the first prayer book, which was partially discussed above, Thomas Cranmer also laid out a parallel concern to that of fidelity to the holy church of the ancients. As he put it, from Whitsunday 1549, ‘now from henceforth, all the whole realm shall have but one use….’Footnote 27 In these somewhat broad and sometimes even contradictory principles of Thomas Cranmer, we find the emerging ethos of Anglicanism:
there was a single book containing all the necessary material for the celebration of the sacraments in the vernacular with the intent that the church of the realm should be united through its use of a single liturgy.Footnote 28
One book, containing all texts necessary for liturgical worship: this was an innovation of the sixteenth century.
‘The uniformity of worship which we accept as part of the Anglican tradition was an entirely new idea when it was introduced in the sixteenth century’, writes Colin Buchanan.Footnote 29 The Roman rite of the Middle Ages required a variety of texts, published in separate books. Even a fairly simple celebration of the Eucharist might involve separate texts for the epistle reader, gospel reader and homilist – as well as different manuscripts for the collect and other prayers, for the eucharistic prayer itself, and for numerous choir chants and songs (introits, graduals, etc.). Beyond these, separately produced documents might also direct the actions of each person – as if our modern categories of rubrics and prayer texts were published separately. Our medieval inheritance, therefore, is not one book – but many discrete volumes. We have no evidence to suggest that the experience of the early church was much different. Without the printing press and moveable type, the apostles could only transmit texts by the painstaking and expensive method of hand-copying. It would, therefore, have served their purpose – and their pocketbook – to keep each manuscript as simple as possible.
Yet with Parliament's injunction of 1549, Anglicans started out down the path of unity perceived through commonality of prayer and worship texts. As late as 1964, Stephen Bayne called the prayer book ‘a major tool of unity’ for Anglicans.Footnote 30 Calling it one of our deepest secrets, Bayne praised the prayer book for helping the Anglican Communion overcome our sometimes exotic differences in dress and modes of worship in order to pray together using a unifying common text.
At the Lambeth Conference of 1930, the bishops in attendance put forth this definition of the Anglican Communion:
a fellowship, within the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, of those duly constituted Dioceses, Provinces, or Regional Churches in communion with the See of Canterbury, which have the following characteristics in common:
(a) They uphold and propagate the Catholic and Apostolic faith and order as they are generally set forth in the Book of Common Prayer as authorized in their several Churches;
(b) they are particular or national Churches, and, as much, promote within each of their territories a national expression of Christian faith, life, and worship; and
(c) they are bound together not by a central legislative and executive authority, but by mutual loyalty sustained through the common counsel of the Bishops in conference.Footnote 31
Anglicanism was now officially proclaimed to adhere to what was generally set forth in the words of our common prayer. Such a text-bound tradition is not, however, without its advantages. As Bayne put it,
Our prayers do not depend on our pastor's skill or depth or holiness. We are guaranteed a full, rich, balanced liturgical life no matter what his abilities or limitations.Footnote 32
The prayer book serves as our greatest pedagogical source, as it teaches us ‘our Bible and the outlines of the Christian life’ – mainly by our praying together as part of our worship. According to Bayne, the prayer book serves as the guardian of the living tradition, and our best watcher of the supernatural and the holy. ‘No matter how the world swamps and captures the Church’, he wrote, ‘there is always, in this book, an unfailing reminder of the church’.Footnote 33 In this statement, Bayne has reaffirmed assertions of the Lambeth Conference of 1930.Footnote 34
Yet by 1964, Bayne himself began to question the notion of what – if anything – is ‘generally set forth’ in the prayer book, perhaps following his reading of the publications of the Lambeth Conference of 1958, of which there will be more discussion later. Calling the words of Elizabethan English a ‘dead language’, Bayne asked whether the prose of the prayer book was in danger of becoming
not a vessel for prayer but a formula which imprisons prayer and even presumes to imprison God? That all the violent, astonishing, explosive action of God in our history can be entombed in familiar words, so that we think the essential doctrine of the Church is an it and not a He? That we shall not be taught by the prayers, but rather think that we possess them?Footnote 35
Calling the 1930 definition of Anglicanism ‘anachronistic’, Bayne pondered whether the ‘one use’ of the prayer book was yet another bond of unity among us destined to collapse – not unlike British colonial descent, being fundamentally an English-speaking fellowship, or even being in ‘full communion’ with the See of Canterbury. He wrote,
The time may not be too far off, I believe, when, like ‘Full Communion,’ ‘Prayer Book’ is going to be too loose and perplexing a concept to be of much use in distinguishing ourselves from other Christians.Footnote 36
Bayne returned to the Lambeth Conference of 1930, which, he asserted, put forth the definition of Anglican unity through the prayer book by the ‘historic argument’ that – by 1964 – seemed ‘almost a museum piece’. As a corrective, he turned our attention to another aspect of that 1930 conference, in which a vision of Christian unity was put forth:
as the result of new knowledge gained from Biblical and liturgical studies the time has come to claim that controversies about the Eucharistic Sacrifice can be laid aside … and the way prepared for the making of a liturgy in God's good time which will in its essential structure win its way throughout the whole Anglican Communion.Footnote 37
By privileging ‘essential structure’ over common prayer texts, Bayne set the Anglican Communion on a slightly different path, one in which abandoning the tradition of like prayer books would not threaten our unity. His prophetic voice has not entirely gone unheeded – even if the average parishioner still holds to the shared ethos of Anglicans being a ‘people of the book’.Footnote 38
Regardless of one's particular position on the issue of unity through essential commonality of prayer texts in the Anglican Communion, the notion that this has been a point of resonance through our history remains unchallenged. Are these two claims of the Anglican Communion – liturgical fidelity to the early church and textual uniformity today – even compatible?
Some Early Church Evidence
Without claiming to summarize or even define anything so broad as ‘the early church’, I nevertheless wish to debunk the notion of searching for that one unified and simple structure (or, for that matter, text) for the worship of the apostles. In his groundbreaking work on eucharistic celebrations that do not fit neatly into the ‘one root, many branches’ theory of eucharistic development, Andrew McGowan asserts that
the tendency for scholarship to disregard some of the evidence in the quest for a normative pattern is problematic.Footnote 39
McGowan lays out evidence for ‘a stage at which the meal was substantial as well as symbolic’,Footnote 40 a commonly held scholarly view. But he also delineates Eucharists with and without water in the cup, with water only, with cheese, milk, honey, oil, vegetables, olives and salt. Quite simply, he puts it thus: ‘the diversity of early eucharistic practice is real’.Footnote 41
Since McGowan's work investigates only some few particular criteria – and none of the texts – we should at least consider some further evidence from the early church:
• Writing in the early third century, Origen gives this description of the eucharist: ‘Wisdom has prepared his table for us with various abundances. On it he not only places the bread of life, but also sacrifices the flesh of the Word, and not only mixes his Wine in a bowl, but also provides apples, quite fragrant and sweet.’Footnote 42
• The Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus offers a wide variety of offices or categories for Christian people: confessors, widows, readers, virgins, catechumens, subdeacons, teachers – as well as the surviving ordained ministries of deacons, presbyters and bishops.Footnote 43
• The fourth-century deacon Ephrem of Edessa serves as a powerful witness that a concern with feminine imagery for the divine is not a new enterprise within Christianity. ‘He was lofty but he sucked Mary's milk/and from his blessings all creation sucks.’Footnote 44
• Egeria describes a liturgy at Golgotha lasting six hours, with multiple sermons, and everyone coming forward at one point to kiss the bishop's ring.Footnote 45
• Justin Martyr, who was put to death about the year 167, writes in his first Apology of a clear pattern of Christian initiation:
First of all, those who believe in the truth of our teachings and discourses promise that they can live in accordance with it. Then they are taught to pray and, while fasting, to ask God for the forgiveness of their past sins…. Next, we bring them to a place where there is water, and they are reborn in the same way as we ourselves were reborn with them. That is to say, they are cleansed with water in the name of God the Father and Master of the universe, and of our Savior Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit.Footnote 46
Only after this sequence of teaching, profession of belief, fasting, prayer and Baptism does one receive communion. Says Justin, ‘After we have thus cleansed the person who believes and has joined our ranks, we lead him in to where those we call “brothers” are assembled’,Footnote 47 where they greet one another with a kiss. The anaphora over bread and a cup of wine mixed with water follows. No one may share in this food, says Justin, unless one ‘believes that our teaching is true, and has been cleansed in the bath of forgiveness for sin and of rebirth’.Footnote 48
Does Justin omit precise details because he thought them uninteresting to his readers, or were some of the practices of the early church perhaps more flexible than today? Can Egeria really be setting us up for a six-hour prototype to emulate? – and how comfortable will evangelical Anglicans be with the notion of kissing the bishop's ring? Shall we all line up to suck from the goodness of creation? – or is that metaphor perhaps too graphic for almost all Anglicans? Shall we revive not only the medieval minor orders, but also widows, virgins and other offices of Hippolytus? And, is Origen's language just poetic liberty – or were apples really in use in eucharistic celebrations in his specific time and place?
While this brief catalogue can hardly be claimed as exhaustive, it does nevertheless point to one specific attribute of the liturgy of the church from the time of Justin Martyr and into the fifth century: namely, not simplicity or unity of any meaningful sort – but substantial complexity and considerable diversity. As Bradshaw has written, ‘the quest for the earliest pattern of eucharistic praying reveals diversity more than commonalities’.Footnote 49 Can we, therefore, read even this tiny selection of the evidence and assert a single common textual root, let alone a single common structure?
What ‘Early Church’ Are We Talking About?
One of the biggest unresolved questions is that of exactly what we mean when we use terms like ‘early church’, ‘ancient fathers’ or ‘primitive simplicity’. According to Paul Bradshaw,
in a large measure it appears to be the fourth and fifth centuries onwards which are seen as the classical period of liturgical development, since many of the features retained or restored in today's rites are first known to us in the liturgy of that time.Footnote 50
Bradshaw goes on to question whether this period is not something of a ‘surprising choice’ for contemporary worship, as the church was struggling to adjust to
what can be described not unreasonably as the most fundamental change in the whole of its history – the union of church and state which followed the triumph of Constantine.Footnote 51
The church of the latter twentieth century, he argues – and by extension the church of the early twenty-first century – has more in common with the pre-Constantinian church: numerically our congregations are smaller, and the church is more and more marginalized, set apart from an increasingly secular society.
Now, here's the rub: we have little evidence from the first few centuries of the Christian church. Bradshaw suggests this has led to two unfortunate developments: (1) a reliance on inappropriate sources, from the fourth century and later, and (2) an over-reliance on what few manuscript traditions date from earlier. The nature of the written tradition, with its fragmentary manuscripts in differing languages, with various strata overlying and sometimes obscuring the original text, can lead to too much importance being attached to, for instance, the document known as the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus.Footnote 52
In spite of numerous caveats, texts derived from the Apostolic Tradition have appeared in all sorts and conditions of liturgies.Footnote 53 Instead of trying to understand the multilayered nature of the many manuscripts that have been redacted into an English translation of the Apostolic Tradition, those who crafted new rites – and even liturgical scholars! – have preferred to assume that what lies before them is substantially what Hippolytus wrote, exactly what was happening in third-century Rome, and very similar to what the apostles themselves actually did.Footnote 54
Instead of slavishly following redactions of Hippolytus, Bradshaw sensibly calls for a return to even earlier sources, mostly those of Scripture:
The way in which the Eucharist was celebrated at Rome in the middle of the second century, for example, would have been barely recognizable to the apostles, to say nothing of the difference in the way in which it was understood: their evening meal had been transformed into an early morning service; the sevenfold action had been telescoped into the fourfold shape; and the whole rite was now prefaced with readings and prayers derived from the synagogue order, in place of the more informal verbal contributions which had accompanied the meal in their day. Hence if we wish to conform our worship to the most ancient traditions, then it is to the New Testament pattern that we must turn.Footnote 55
In other words, if we want to find out what apostolic simplicity really was, we need to try harder to reconstruct what evidence we have from that period, rather than continue to ‘read back’ evidence from later times – even from the second century.
This call to search out pre-Patristic fundamentals will help us judge our continuing fidelity to the revelation of God in Christ, according to Bradshaw. As he states it, this is an ongoing and developing task of the church – not a one-time pruning back, as the Reformation leaders saw it:
Again and again, therefore, we need to return to those roots to re-examine our practice in the light of the tradition of the Church, and especially of the formative years of the patristic period, not because our forefathers were incapable of error but because that offers us a different perspective from our own, and one which is nearer to the events from which our faith takes its origin.Footnote 56
Our claims for conformity to early church norms, therefore, are not static or permanent but part of the ongoing process of the church's revelation.
At All Times Divers
Not every Anglican has bought into the notion of ‘one use’, nor even of the notion of the ‘one root, many branches’ theory of liturgical development. Massey Shepherd put it this way:
Although the essentials of the faith and order have never been seriously challenged in the Anglican Churches, the worship of the Church, on the other hand, has always been evolving since apostolic times with elements of both tradition and innovation.Footnote 57
Shepherd held to this essential faith and order when he discussed what he called ‘innovations’ in the prayer book. The Episcopal Church's changes of 1979, for instance, were not simply excisions of more recent material, thus pruning back to that common root, but frequently restorations of more ancient usages – usages that reflect the diversity of the early church. For instance, the eucharistic prayers authorized all conform to the full West Syrian pattern, the third- or fourth-century hymn Phos hilaron was incorporated into Evening Prayer, and the rite for the ordination of a bishop employs a prayer derived from the Apostolic Tradition.Footnote 58
Shepherd lamented the truncated calendar of saints’ days inherited from the sixteenth century, writing,
On the surface it would appear that there had been no heroic sanctity in the Church since New Testament times. No doubt it was an over-reaction to the theological and devotional abuses in the medieval cultus of the saints. This is evident in the re-writing of nearly all of the collects for saints’ days in order to stress their exemplary life rather than their heavenly merits and interventions.Footnote 59
Implicit in this discussion is a belief that we have transcended the Reformation divisions of Protestant and Catholic, allowing us to restore what Shepherd calls a ‘central core’, including numerous ancient customs.Footnote 60 But what is that central core?
It may be helpful here to recall another Anglican formulary, excerpted from one of the Articles of Religion:
It is not necessary that Traditions and Ceremonies be in all places one, or utterly like; for at all times they have been divers, and may be changed according to the diversity of countries, times, and men's manners, so that nothing be ordained against God's Word. … Every particular or national Church hath authority to ordain, change, and abolish, Ceremonies or Rites of the Church ordained only by man's authority, so that all things be done to edifying.Footnote 61
It seems that from our formative period, Anglicans have always held that a certain amount of liturgical difference was to be expected. Thus – even as we insisted on ‘but one use’ – we have admitted to diversity at all times, a curiously delicious paradox. Perhaps the contradiction comes only in our preconceived notions of how things are – and always have supposedly been.
Bryan Spinks reminds us that the liturgical use of the creed did not come until about ad 1014 – and even then only by imperial edict, rather than synodal action of any ecclesial body.Footnote 62 Also, that we in the West regard the hymn Agnus Dei as ‘Western’ testifies to the phenomenon of the West appropriating Eastern elements – and then forgetting their original sources. Spinks calls this ‘creative recycling’ of material.Footnote 63 Spinks's point is not simply that we are just plain wrong if we subscribe to the ‘one root, many branches’ theory of liturgical development, but to do so is to deny the divine gift of our diversity:
Diversity of culture reflected in the Christian Church and its liturgical traditions is a gift of creation, and a reminder that God's saving grace is worked out in the contingent universe, in the space-time continuum, on this planet earth in the evolution of mankind. The diversity of the liturgical traditions witnesses to the richness of God's creation, which takes place in the Church as well as elsewhere. The variety of doxological traditions is itself part of [humanity's] doxology to God.Footnote 64
Honoring and encouraging diversity ought not to threaten either the claim of fidelity to the primitive church or a sense of Anglican identity. For our unity, I pray, is based on Jesus Christ, and not in sectarian separatism. This will continue to be a matter of some controversy, as it doubtless was when Stephen Bayne wrote,
Anglicans do not, as a matter of policy, regard the Anglican Communion as an eternal fact, but rather only as an accidental historical configuration, which came into existence as part of the general violation of visible unity in the West and which will and should disappear as those divisions are healed.Footnote 65
Will encouraging diversity result in a loss of pink-cassocked bishops, processions of choirs in flowing surplices, baptism via sterling-silver clam shells, and meticulously laundered Irish linens with impeccable embroidery? Doubtlessly so. As lamentable as it seems to acknowledge this, does it mean for some – perhaps even many – these adiaphora are what it means to be an Anglican? Thus, the gospel call to privilege Christian unity over all else, including Anglican denominational identity, remains the primary stumbling block to the full embracing of our God-given diversity.
Vital Continuity with the Golden Age
Until fairly recently, it was common to hear Anglicans proclaim ourselves the ‘people of the book’.Footnote 66 Until the mid-twentieth century, most member churches in the Anglican Communion exclusively employed some variant of Cranmer's text, in some fairly clear analogical relationship to the first liturgies in English. Variations between the various churches – though they reflected hotly debated issues – were, in reality, relatively minor. Thus, the textual continuity was maintained – albeit in a loosely defined and readily adapted manner.
Today, however, the diversity of our liturgical rites, with their many local variants and options – and the increasing lack of similarity between the various books – makes it more difficult to claim the same sort of textual continuity. And, as some have noted, it is unclear even that we will continue to have a book to be the people of – as some current church leaders predict a multiplicity of ‘resources’, available in a variety of media, providing an ever-widening set of possible liturgical options.
According to Clayton Morris, sometime liturgical officer of the Episcopal Church, our ‘reliance on a bound prayer book decreases’Footnote 67 as we continue to revise current texts and introduce many new or previously unknown ones. Morris predicts the demise of the prayer book as such, saying,
One imagines that never again will it be possible to think of the Church's liturgy as something so static that it can be held safely between the covers of a book.Footnote 68
In this view, Anglicanism risks being wedded neither to Cranmer's idea of having ‘but one use’ nor to concerns of being faithful to the early church tradition, whatever that may be. And being bound to neither of these would represent a major paradigm shift so great that it would threaten our identity.
Yet Anglicanism continues to bear witness to the importance and centrality of a liturgical expression of Christian worship. Anglicanism ‘defines itself through its liturgy’Footnote 69 and ‘Episcopalians are Christians whose denominational identity is most clearly and accurately articulated in liturgy’,Footnote 70 in the words of Stewart-Sykes and Morris, sequentially. If these very different authors can agree in principle, then we can imagine ourselves as people of an action, rather than merely of the text of a book.Footnote 71 Can it be that what we do, rather than the words we publish, can stand as the fundamental symbol of our identity and unity?
In this, perhaps we find some resonance with Paul Bradshaw, who laments tendencies toward liturgical nostalgia, writing,
Liturgists, like many others in the Church, have always been prone to look back to some supposed perfect age in the past and to attempt to recreate it – or more often a highly romanticized version of it – in their own times. For some the age has been that of the Reformation, for others it has been the medieval era, while in our own day the desire to get behind these times to the sources of Christian worship has led to the patristic period being singled out as the golden age of liturgy, and consequently all modern liturgical rites are to a considerable extent reconstructions of supposedly primitive practice.Footnote 72
If, therefore, we wish to continue to proclaim the ‘early church’ as our golden age, we must be willing to re-examine the evidence, allowing for the possibility that new manuscript discoveries, scholarly insights, and revelations may provide powerful and compelling correctives to our most-cherished assumptions.
Only by openness to be led where the Spirit calls us can we be truly faithful Christians – whether this requires us to abandon some treasured signs and symbols of our identity as Anglicans, or even that very denominational identity itself. Not unlike other denominations, the Episcopal Church is in serious decline.Footnote 73 We are not alone. As one United Methodist official put it, ‘our current culture and practices are resulting in overall decline that is toxic. Business as usual is unsustainable.’Footnote 74 Yet, conversation about this often turns to the perceived need to cultivate quaint and obscure liturgical practices, esoteric and archaic language, and supposedly definitive historical evidence – all in the name of being more genuinely ‘Anglican’. Like the Roman Catholic curia and their pronouncements in Liturgiam anthenticam,Footnote 75 some Anglicans seek to assert a distinct denominational identity based on an erroneous view of this past, and to privilege this over Christian unity. This has ramifications far beyond quaint and nostalgic liturgies, as it represents a radical break from the significant achievements of the liturgical and ecumenical movements of the twentieth century. As Bradshaw writes,
… the Christian faith is essentially historical, grounded in particular events in the past, the elements of continuity with that past are vital: once it becomes divorced from its roots, Christianity can easily cease to be Christianity.Footnote 76
A Christianity that continues to be authentically Christian can and must accept the notion of plurality in its liturgy, employing a wide diversity of authorized, commended and experimental texts in a variety of appropriate languages. This means much more than accepting the texts of A New Zealand Prayer Book – but also the inevitability of liturgies for the blessing of the relationship of two women (or two men), or of grieving the loss of a companion animal. It means openness to a wide variety of texts and rites, perhaps even Eucharists with cheese, milk, honey, oil, vegetables, olives or salt. This probably also means acceptance of archaic forms of liturgical expression – authorizing ongoing use of the 1549, 1662 and 1928 Prayer Books, for instance. While there are great implications for sacramental theology in the use of such diverse materials, the federation known as Anglican is capable of withstanding the theological tension and ambiguity that could result.
Within this diversity, care must be taken that the faith continues to be grounded in particular Jesus events in the past, and the recommendations of the Lambeth Conference in 1958 may well serve as apt criteria for assuring this. In addition to their six features that are essential for our unity, it would be well to consider other assertions. ‘Forms of worship in the vernacular’, for instance, cannot be equated simply to worship in the English language in this increasing multilingual communion of ours.Footnote 77 With other writers, I am committed to recovering more of the plurality of the earliest church.Footnote 78 By this means, we of the Anglican Communion can move beyond our historical ties to the words of Cranmer to a deeper understanding of what it is to be authentically Christian.
