Catholicity of Prayer I

Those who esteem the old Prayer Book are used to sniping from opposite sides – from catholics, that it is “too protestant”; from evangelicals, it is “too catholic”. It’s a pattern of criticism that can be traced back to the recusants (non-conforming papal loyalists) and puritans (nonconforming advanced protestants) of the 16th century. What those apparently contradictory criticisms point to is the “via media” or “middle way” of classical Anglicanism. In more recent thought, Anglicanism’ “middle way” is thought to mean a muddled compromise of protestant and catholic – but nothing could be further from the mind of the classical Anglican divines. For them, the moderate quality of Anglicanism meant its keeping the mean between two extremes. Thus the preface to the 1662 Prayer Book states: “it hath been the wisdom of the Church of England, ever since the first compiling of her publick Liturgy, to keep the mean between the two extremes, of too much stiffness in refusing, and of too much easiness in admitting any variation from it”. This moderation meant a church that was firmly anti-papist, and firmly antipuritan. With the puritans (and against the papists) it held to reformed evangelical orthodoxy on the doctrines of sin and grace – but with the papists (and against the puritans) it maintained ancient catholic forms and customs of liturgy and ordained ministry. This “middle way” both reformed and catholic but neither papist nor puritan is what Simon Patrick (1626-1707), Restoration bishop of Ely, memorably called “that virtuous mediocrity which our church observes between the meretricious gaudiness of the Church of Rome and the squalid sluttery of fanatic conventicles.” First articulated by the 16th century divines, Cranmer, Jewel, and Hooker, this distinctive position, tested first by the Marian reaction and later the Cromwellian commonwealth remained the acknowledged position of the Church of England at home and abroad (including the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America) well into the early 19th century.

The erosion and fragmentation of Anglican churches in our time is directly related to the disappearance of this understanding. Many modern Anglicans understand it merely as a variant of revivalism, or merely as a variant of romanism, or some kind of schizophrenic medley of the two. More commonly, they claim to have transcended those divisions, by some imagined return to unity before the division began – this is the view of the 1979 Prayer Book revisers. All these positions deny that Anglicanism has any kind of distinctive identity of its own. Over against that theological amnesia, however, the most interesting theological scholarship of our time has been the recovery of the historic character of Anglicanism not as a muddled compromise of catholic and reformed, but as a tradition that stands fully within the orthodoxy of the reformation, while standing fully in the catholic tradition.

That’s something of a paradoxical claim, but it is not merely a verbal flourish. This reformed and catholic character is evident at the heart of Cranmer’s revision of the daily office (daily services) was his provision for the immersive and largely sequential reading of (almost) the entire Bible. On the one hand, Cranmer does not scrap the pre-Reformation services, but simplifies, condenses, and translates them into English – so that is both “catholic” in retention of tradition and “reformed” in the revision. At the core of the services, was the reading of Scripture in large continuous chunks – a distinctively Protestant emphasis, one might think, and indeed late medieval and counter-reformation breviaries (daily office books) reduced the reading of scripture to mere snippets. Yet Cranmer justifies this practice as a restoration of authentic catholic tradition: “if a man would search out by the ancient Fathers” what was the “first original and ground” of these daily services,

he shall find, that … they so ordered the matter, that all the whole Bible (or the greatest part thereof) should be read over every year; intending thereby, that the Clergy, and especially such as were Ministers in the congregation, should (by often reading, and meditation in God’s word) be stirred up to godliness themselves and be more able to exhort others by wholesome Doctrine, and to confute them that were adversaries to the Truth; and further, that the people (by daily hearing of holy Scripture read in the Church) might continually profit more and more in the knowledge of God, and be the more inflamed with the love of his true Religion.

Precisely where Cranmer’s Prayer Book seems to be most “protestant” it is (at least here) most catholic.

(To be continued)