THE ORIGINS OF MODERN
ANGLICAN LITURGIES
If you are grieved as well as perplexed, it may not be much comfort to be told that the Church of England is mainly to blame for your problems, and now has problems of its own like yours. But to discover the origins of our perplexities or problems is the way to understand those perplexities, and is at least the first step towards solving those problems. In this address, I will be trying to trace what those origins are, and to point out eight landmarks in the process which has brought the new liturgies into being and ousted the familiar Prayer Book from its honored place.
It all began with the end of the Second World War, when the church at last gained a breathing space from the great issues of life and death. freedom and slavery, and once more found leisure to direct its thoughts to questions of its own internal ordering. Whether it was wise to do so, and ought not rather to have directed its energies to reclaiming the unchurched masses, loosened from their roots by the upheaval of war, may in retrospect be doubtful, but it is easy to understand that it did.
The very year that the war in Europe ended, 1945, saw the publication of a massive but readable book. by a writer who seemed to know everything about liturgy and had some original ideas about the way Prayer Book Revision should go. This was The Shape of Liturgy (Dacre Press) by the late Dom Gregory Dix. It proved to be perfectly timed, and although its learning has not stood up to scrutiny, it has had a worldwide influence, both within the Anglican Communion and outside it.
Dix was an Anglo-Catholic monk, who had no appreciation of the Reformation, or of Cranmer's reformed liturgies, except as bad things done welL They were the wrong starting point, if you wanted an Anglo-Catholic outcome, he considered. His proposal was therefore that instead of beginning liturgical revision from the existing Prayer Book, as had always been the policy hitherto, the Prayer Book should be set on one side, and the reviser, should begin their work directly from the ancient liturgies.
In 1947, two years later, the Church of South India was formed by a union of Anglican and non-episcopal churches. Several of the non-episcopal churches were also non-liturgical. However, the Christians from a liturgical background naturally wanted the new church to have a liturgy; yet a liturgy drawn from Anglican sources would have made the united church look like a take-over by the Anglicans.
The church therefore decided to draw up its liturgy from a neutral standpoint, and, looking around for ideas, seized upon Dix's Shape of the Liturgy, with its proposal of being from the surviving liturgies of the early church. Anglo-Catholics were not strong in the CSl. and had indeed opposed the form of its union scheme; but for quite other reasons, and very understandable reasons at that, of an ecumenical kind, the CSI decided to take up the new Anglo-Catholic policy on liturgical revision. It produced a liturgy of the 'Lord's Supper' in 1950, and subsequently a whole 'Book of Common Worship'.
Thus, two converging influences, from quite different quarters and with quite different interests, made themselves felt as soon as the war was over, and between them had a far greater effect than either could have had alone. Nevertheless, the influence of the policy adopted by the CSI gained still greater force for two other reasons: first, the conspicuous ability with which its new liturgy was executed, and secondly, the fact that this was happening in the heyday of the Ecumenical Movement, when all eyes were upon the CSI, as setting the pattern for what was expected to be a long succession of united churches all over the world.
Of course, we now know that nearly all these other union schemes came to nothing, but at the tiem no one knew or thought this was going to happen, and what the CSI did attracted the most serious attention from churches all over the world, who expected shortly to be following in their footsteps.
In 1954, Archbishops Fisher and Garbett appointed a Liturgical Commission for the Church of England. The Standing Liturgical Commission of ECUSA was already in existence. as its name implies. and in 1949 it had been authorized 10 start publishing proposals for revision, which it did under the title of Prayer Book Studies (Church Pension Fund).
However, at this stage it was thinking merely in terms of a modification of the American Prayer Book of 1928, and Prayer Book Studies l-XVI all reflect this conservative attitude. In Canada, the Anglican Church was still engaged in the production of its 1962 revision of the Prayer Book, which similarly took the existing Prayer Book as its starting-point. and preserved its general character.
The English Liturgical Commission, however, had other ideas. The two best liturgical scholars on it were Anglo-Catholic disciples of Gregory Dix, the late Prof. E.C. Ratcliff and Canon A.H. Couratin. Dix was no friend of the Reformation, but Ratcliff and Couratin were more liberal Catholics than Dix, and had no great affection for the Bible either.
It was they who, by virtue of their knowledge and their adventurous ideas, formed the policy of the new body. In 1957 its first publication appeared, the report Prayer Book Revision in the Church of England (SPCK). which proposed that the traditional Prayer Book should not in the future be the starting-point for revision, and should not even be a standard of doctrine for the new services (ch. 6). The latter of these proposals was entirely unlawful, and still is, but the effect of it has been that the Liturgical Commission has been producing services which sit loose to the doctrine of the Church of England, while the legislation prepared by Church Assembly and the General Synod to authorize new services for use has required that only services which conform to the doctrine of the Church England may be authorized! Inevitably, the legislators have often had to stretch a point in giving their assent to the Liturgical Commission's productions.
The following year, 1958, the Lambeth Conference met. One of its subcommittees was given the topic of the Book of Common Prayer, and all the bishops were supplied with the new English report. When Archbishop Fisher had seen this report, he had evidently been horrified, and had thought it necessary not only to write the standard preface but to add, as an appendix, a collection of the statements on the Prayer Book made by previous Lambeth Conferences, up to and including that of l948, so as to demonstrate how completely at variance the new proposals were with standard Anglican teaching. He probably thought this would he sufficient to neutralize the effect of the report.
However, Bishop Dunlop, the chairman of the English commission, was a member of the sub-committee, and the bishops devoted their whole attention to the main text of the report and ignored Archbishops Fisher's preface and appendix. The result was that the subcommittee's report, included in the printed report of the 1958 Lambeth Conference, was wholly in line with the new policy, and spread it throughout the Anglican Communion. Anglican provinces which had previously given no thought to revision now started to think about It, and adopted the Lambeth subcommittee's report as their textbook: while provinces which had already carried out a revision, based on the Prayer Book, took it into their heads that they needed to do the work all over again, on this new pattern.
Hence the recent spate of new liturgies all over the Anglican Communion, completely destroying the high degree of common worship which it previously enjoyed. The only parts of the Lambeth subcommittee's report which have not influenced these new liturgies are its few cautious suggestions, e.g., that it would be wise to handle the Prayer Book ordination services conservatively. This has been completely ignored.
He also tells us that the doctrinal aspect of the new policy. i.e. that the existing Prayer Book should not be taken as a norm of doctrine for revisers, any more than as their norm of worship, was wholeheartedly adopted by the Standing Liturgical Commission, and that its work since that date, issuing in the 1979 American Prayer Book, was a conscious attempt to alter the doctrine of the American church. A study of the 1979 Prayer Book shows the results of this attempt, but since ECUSA was not told at the time what its Standing Liturgical Committee was attempting, it would have defeated their purpose to make the signs more obvious than they have.
In Canada also the new policy was adopted In both its aspects, liturgical and doctrinal, and final approval had scarcely been given to the 1962 Prayer Book before the first preparations started being made for something different. The ultimate outcome was the Book of Alternative Services (1985), where not only the character of the book but the compilers' Introduction make their intentions very clear.
It should not go unmentioned. however, that there are two provinces of the Anglican Communion (Australia and Kenya) which have departed from the new policy by taking as the starting-point for some at least of their services the services of the Prayer Book The same two churches, together with Tanzania and Chile, have made a conscious effort to preserve Prayer Book doctrine.
Beginning with the publication of the late Bp. John Robinson's Honest to God (SCM, 1963), the influence of Bultmann took over the Initiative in the field of English-Speaking theology, and a radicalism almost unprecedented in its negative and destructive character burst forth. 'Secular Christianity', the 'New Morality' and the 'Death of God theology' quickly followed, and radicalism extended its activities well into the 1970's. while in some churches (notably ECUSA) it is the prevailing theology still. And this was the very period in which the new services were being drawn up! Their doctrinal character is therefore quite understandable, although at the same time totally unacceptable.
The earliest of the new services were composed in a traditional idiom of English, following the lead of the CSI liturgy. The first Anglican church in which a departure was made was that of New Zealand, which published its new eucharistic liturgy in 1966, addressing God as 'you' not 'thou', and generally using an everyday sort of language. This quickly created a vogue. The 'Liturgical Movement' had already been emphasizing corporateness and congregational participation, very properly. but congregational participation now started being made casual. A cult of informality developed. and a man-centered emphasis in worship replaced a God-centered emphasis. A decadent art was at hand to help things along, so cacophonous liturgical music and crude new hymns started to proliferate, all in the interest of being 'congregational' and 'up to date'.
In 1969, following the decisions of the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic liturgy began appearing in a modestly revised form, and trans lated into English. The use of the vernacular was, of course, an entirely new step for the Church of Rome, and having no tradition of liturgical English they simply translated the liturgy into modern English of the kind which had started to be used in the new Anglican services. For ecumenical reasons particularly, great attention began being paid to the new Roman services by Anglican revisers, and this both confirmed their decision about the sort of English they would use, and also their decision about taking the services of the early church as their starting-point; for the Roman liturgy, never having to endure the critical scrutiny of the Reformation, retains its pre-Reformation shape, undeterred by the theological aberrations which had been read into this shape in the course of the Middle Ages.
In North America, the Canadian 'Book of Alternative Services' (1985) describes itself in a similar way, but the 1979 US volume simply takes the traditional title of the 'Book of Common Prayer', despite the fact that, Iike these other volumes, it is basically a collection of new services. The American book contains, as alternatives, four service-forms in traditional language, and the Canadian and English book contain one, all of which are probably intended to be dropped in the next edition. The English book contains one alternative form based upon the pattern of a Prayer Book service. though in the mode idiom of language, but only in the Australian and Kenyan books are there a full range of alternatives of this kind.
Whether the book of new services is called the Book of Common Prayer or not, seems to make little difference in practice. The book may be technically an alternative, but in practice most of the bishops and clergy are treating it as a substitute. This seems to be a worldwide Anglican phenomenon. In the U. S., of course, it is not even technically an alternative: the traditional American Prayer Book of 1928 is the alternative, and the General Convention regulation gives rather grudging permission for it to be used, subject to the authority of the local bishop.
In a situation like the present, where the worship of the various Anglican provinces is ceasing to be recognizably the same as elsewhere, and where the worship of local Anglican parishes is ceasing to be recognizably the same as it has been since the Reformation, the danger of the alienation of congregations from the clergy and of one province from another has become acute. The danger is being exacerbated by failure to maintain historic Christian faith and morality In many quarters of the Anglican Church, and by the increasing tensions between province and province over the ordination of women presbyters and women bishops.
But we ought to make up our minds that the historic Prayer Book is the proper norm of Anglican worship, and a norm of such importance that unless it is treated as such there is no reason to expect the Anglican Church to survive.
The Rev'd Roger Beckwith is Warden of Latimer House, Oxford University.
LIBRARY