The Book of Common Prayer as the constitutive matrix of Anglican Identity
This week we have commemorated St. Augustine of Canterbury, the first Archbishop of Canterbury, so it was not unfitting that I found myself at a conference looking at the topic of the Book of Common Prayer in the United Kingdom and United States.
This topic could not be more appropriate when there is currently so much anguish about the seemingly fissiparous state of the world-wide Anglican Communion and even uncertainty, within some its member provinces, as to how to define the nature, limits, and obligations of what it means to be Anglican.
In the midst of all this, there are now quite radical proposals being explored under the Anglican Consultative Council (under its Secretary General, our recent guest in the parish, Bishop Anthony Poggo), that would modify how the worldwide Instruments of Communion would operate in the future. These instruments comprise the Archbishop of Canterbury, The decennial Lambeth Conference, The Primates’ Meeting and the ACC. The Nairobi-Cairo proposals, if implemented, would modify the role of the Archbishop of Canterbury as well as the prevailing expectation hitherto that all Anglicans be in full communion with each successive incumbent of the Chair of St. Augustine – which would be dropped.
In such a context, at such an historic moment, there could be no better time to reflect on the one indisputably central thread which is shared in common by all Anglicans, namely the Book of Common Prayer.
No other documents in Christian history have exercised so determinative and sustained a role within any particular Christian tradition as have the Books of Common Prayer within Anglicanism.
From Thomas Cranmer’s pioneering 1549 edition through to the especially authoritative 1662 text, and on to the later successor volumes worldwide, the Book of Common Prayer has not only served to regulate worship, but has also defined what it means to be Anglican doctrinally, pastorally, and culturally. It has also grounded Anglican spirituality and even anthropology given its fundamental historic role undergirding the global Anglican Communion we see today.
I have only recently stressed, in the weekly Note to the Parish the ways in which the Anglican Prayer Book tradition reflects the patristic axiom of lex orandi, lex credendi (the law of prayer is the law of belief). We have seen too the important difference between Anglicanism and confessional Lutheranism or Reformed Protestantism, which is comprised by the fact that Anglicanism has never produced a binding specifically confessional document analogous to the Augsburg Confession or the Westminster Confession of Faith.
For Anglicans therefore it is – in unity with the Holy Scriptures – that the Prayer Book (containing our formularies, the creeds and rites for our sacramental lives as well as ordinations, and consecrations) functions, uniquely, as both liturgy and confessional witness to our faith.
As the eminent Anglican scholar from Canada, Robert Crouse observed:
“More than any other factor, that common liturgy has served as a principle of cohesion, providing common standards of worship and teaching, among Churches in many ways diverse. Through radical changes in polity, through revolutionary movements in Church and in society in general, through frequent “theological shifts” of some sort and another, the relative stability of the Prayer Book tradition has provided a focus of unity, in which Anglicans could recognize their self-identity. Everything distinctively Anglican is embraced by, fostered by, and preserved by that tradition, so that the Prayer Book constitutes, in fact, the fullest expression of the consensus fidelium for Anglicans, ….[who] have no distinctive confessions of faith, but only the creeds of Catholic Christendom, no Pope or Bishop with universal jurisdiction, and no Holy Office, and not even a universal synod or convocation with legislative authority…
….over and over again, through the course 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 been measured.
…it is not too much to say, that the integrity of Anglicanism as a distinctive form of Christian life and witness has been sustained by, and really depends upon, the continuity of the Prayer Book tradition.”
But it is the celebrated and systematic Anglican Divine, Richard Hooker (in his Laws, V, Preface) who has perhaps provided the most succinct Anglican defence of the Prayer Book’s mediating and unifying function against those who would otherwise corrupt the integrity of the faith, when he wrote:
“When the minds of men are once erroneously persuaded that it is the will of God to have those things done which they fancy, their opinions are as thorns in their sides, never suffering them to take rest till they have brought their speculations into practice.”
And mere speculation is exactly what the Prayer Book tradition provides a bulwark against in preference for proper continuity.
This is important to state firmly as we recognise the challenging vocation we embrace, when we say that we are Anglican.
It is an important thing to recognise that, as Anglicans, we forsake easier alternatives such as a naïve biblicism on the one hand, or the abdication of judgement involved in surrendering to a constructed and solitary ecclesial authority on the other. Instead, we embrace the task and fruits of that authentic private judgement through which we are each called, by God’s grace, to embrace the fulness of belief and practice that is our Christian faith as Anglicans have received it.
Cranmer’s genius in the 1549 and 1552 Prayer Books was to hold together, in fruitful tension, the Catholic which is to say universal inheritance of the Western church together with the Reformation principles of sola scriptura, sola fide, and sola gratia. We have thus always upheld the ancient threefold orders of bishop, priest, and deacon while retaining too the centrality of the means of grace in our sacramental rites.
This deliberate comprehensiveness was not the result of theological timidity, but rather a principled ecclesiology through which Cranmer engineered liturgical texts that allowed a certain theological breadth, while maintaining theological continuity with the church’s faith of the ages. It has been well said that the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, is a document expressive of the “’Reformed Catholic’ identity at the core of Anglicanism”, which, as such, reflects a perspective that has persistently resisted both the ultimate Romanization and ultimate Protestantization of Anglican doctrine.
The BCP’s saturation in Scripture reinforces this balance, as Cranmer’s famous Collect for the Second Sunday of Advent reminds us, through the BCP we are called, to “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” the Holy Scripture to which we are thus committed with a Protestant zeal, while recognising nonetheless, the formative role of the church in structuring the interpretation to which we give our individual assent.
The BCP thus rightly functions as what sociologists of religion might call a ‘thick’ identity marker — which is to say one that does not merely signal group membership but actively constitutes it through repeated communal practice and affirmation of faith. What this has enabled is a capacity for unity-in-diversity that has proved especially important as the Anglican Communion came into being and came to enjoy ultimately the world-wide reach we see today.
The BCP has been translated into over 150 languages and is used across more than 50 countries. Each autonomous province of the Communion possesses its own localized Prayer Book, yet “the global church continuously strives to pray with a singular, unified voice” shaped by the common Prayer Book inheritance.
But we must remember too that, even beyond its doctrinal and ecclesiological functions, the BCP has long shaped the interior spiritual life of Anglicans, through what might be called our distinctive Anglican spiritual anthropology.
The pattern of Daily Office — Morning and Evening Prayer offered as the opus Dei of the people of God, by which is most certainly not meant merely those in Religious life — made universal the monastic ideal of ora et labora. All the baptized, lay and ordained alike, are invited into a rhythm of Scripture, psalmody, and prayer that had all too often before the Reformation been confined to monastic communities or cathedral chapters.
The regular recitation of the Psalms and Canticles, General Confession and the assurance of Absolution; the Comfortable Words and the Prayer of Humble Access at the Eucharist; the collects that consistently articulate human dependence and need for divine grace — these are not merely verbal formulas but formative exercises that, over a lifetime of repetition, inscribe a particular way of understanding the human condition and divine mercy upon the practitioner.
The Book of Common Prayer has also shaped Anglicanism’s distinctive approach to pastoral care through its occasional offices. The rites of Baptism, Confirmation, Marriage, Visitation of the Sick, and Burial have not only structured the great moments of life, from beginning to its earthly end, but have embedded theological convictions about grace, covenant, mortality, and resurrection into the cultural memory of generations of English-speaking Christians.
As one scholar notes, “till death do us part,” “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” and “peace in our time,” are all phrases that have “transcended their religious origins to become part of the shared cultural vocabulary of many Western cultures” — demonstrating how liturgical formation leaks beyond the church’s boundaries into the wider culture.
Hence we can see too that, through the work of translation and adaptation – but above all in its continuity – the Prayer Book tradition has across the Anglican Communion come to embody one of the most significant successes in liturgical inculturation in Christian history.
When the Church of England’s missionary activity carried the Prayer Book to Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific, it carried with it not merely a text but an entire theological and devotional world — a world that had to be, and was able to be, re-expressed in profoundly different cultural idioms. But the result has been a family of related Prayer Books, each bearing the genetic imprint of the Cranmerian originals while speaking to the particular spiritual and cultural needs of each community and culture.
There is therefore a “transgenerational continuity” of huge import here when we as contemporary worshippers pray in unity with Cranmer, the Caroline Divines, the Tractarians, and the great Anglican saints of every age — a reality which represents perhaps the most powerful formative gift the BCP has bestowed upon Anglicans worldwide. For Anglicanism is in the end “not merely a method of worship, but a living communion across time.”
Viewed in the light of all this the words of Thomas Cranmer himself, in the Prayer of Humble Access (BCP 1549/1552), are powerful indeed and capture most evocatively a very Anglican sense of we are when we come together and say and know:
“We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy.”