by CCW | 13 December 2017 21:00
This is the second of two Advent Meditations on the Book of Common Prayer Prefaces. The first meditation is posted here[1].
The prefaces to the Book(s) of Common Prayer are intriguing and instructive. They have a certain quality of restraint about them that is remarkable given the turmoil and controversies about theology and polity in the 16th and 17th centuries. They advance modestly and firmly a spiritual ideal and purpose. The Original Preface of 1549 Concerning the Service of the Church, altered slightly in 1552 and again in 1662, identifies what was a common concern for both Roman Catholics and Reformers; namely, a sense of the primacy of Scripture and the desire to provide a clear and easy method of reading through the whole Bible “or the greatest part thereof” in the course of a year. Cranmer quotes the Spanish Cardinal Francis Quignonez almost verbatim in describing the problem and in advocating the solution.
The only difference between them was about whether that method would be in principle for all people or just the clergy and about translation from Latin to the vernacular. Even on that point there was some common ground. While the Roman Catholic liturgy would remain in Latin, there would be translations of the Scriptures authorized by the Roman Catholic Church and preaching would be largely in the vernacular tongues of the emerging national states.
What the Prayer Book Original Preface by Cranmer discloses, however, is a central and essential principle that underlies the idea of Common Prayer. It has to do with an attitude and outlook towards the reading of the Scriptures as ‘a doctrinal instrument of salvation’ wonderfully expressed in Cranmer’s homily on A Fruitful Exhortation Unto the Reading and Knowledge of Holy Scripture as well as in the beautiful Collect for The Second Sunday in Advent. “He that keepeth the word of Christ is promised the love and favour of God and that he shall be the dwelling-place, or temple, of the blessed Trinity.” That means attending to the Scriptures. “The Scripture of God,” he says, “is the heavenly meat of our souls; the hearing and keeping of it maketh us blessed, sanctifieth us, and maketh us holy. It turneth our souls; it is a light lantern unto our feet. It is a sure, steadfast, and everlasting instrument of salvation.” Scripture is a doctrinal instrument of salvation because it is written for our learning. It turns our souls to God “that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life.”
What both Cranmer and Quignonez were both concerned with was the daily and weekly reading of Scripture in the Divine Offices. Both take for granted the centrality of the Eucharistic lectionary. Cranmer and Luther, too, take that pattern over more or less directly and while there would be some unfortunate dislocations of the relation between the Epistles and Gospels that the Tridentine Reform in the Roman Catholic Church would introduce in the mid-sixteenth century (1545-1563) with respect to what would come to be called the Trinity Season, that lectionary which reaches back to the 5th and 6th centuries remained common for Rome and for the English and Lutheran reform. That is quite remarkable.
But this approach to the reading of Scripture was a central feature of the Cranmerian vision of Common Prayer. It marks the beginning of a theological tradition that lasted from 1549 until the 1960s. The decision of the Lambeth Council of the Anglican Communion in 1959 to jettison the Book(s) of Common Prayer as the basis for liturgical revisions resulted in a welter of rites and liturgies throughout the Anglican Communion and while the term Book of Common Prayer is sometimes used, as in the case of the 1979 American Book of Common Prayer, there really is no longer any common prayer apart from those Book(s) that belong intentionally and self-consciously to the Common Prayer tradition. Our present Canadian Prayer Book authorized in 1962 is one of the few modern Book(s) of Common Prayer that belong to that tradition.
For the most part, the liturgical landscape is a wasteland of various collections of alternative rites and liturgies. Instead of common prayer we have confused prayer. In England after decades of alternatives, there is no longer common prayer apart from allowing the continuation of the use of the 1662 BCP. There is Common Worship but that, as it is recognized, is not the same thing as common prayer.
Liturgy now is more about a common shape – loosely considered – with respect to the structure of the Eucharist largely based on certain historical assumptions about The Shape of the Liturgy, to reference the title of a famous book by Dom Gregory Dix. What has been lost, in my view, is the formative and foundational structure of the creedal reading of Scripture at the Eucharist and in the Offices and the ideal for both catholic and reformed about a way to read the whole of the Bible “or the greatest part thereof” each year.
There are now many lectionaries and, to be honest, many rites. We are back to the use of Salisbury, Hereford, Bangor, York and Lincoln, only far more so. The ironies are huge. The Canadian Book of Alternative Services – I stress the word alternative – contains several lectionaries but they are not part of a coherent whole and they do not provide what Cranmer and Quignonez envisioned. The Eucharistic lectionaries throughout the modern world have a common shape – three readings, one from the Old Testament, an Epistle and a Gospel – but there are great differences with respect to the principles that determine which passages from Scripture are read. The further paradox is that the BAS and the 1979 American Book of Common Prayer (so-called) provide a Eucharistic lectionary which neither Church uses having adopted instead the so-called Revised Common lectionary which is not common with respect to the Ordo Lectionum Missae of the Roman Catholic Church, the product of the Vatican II liturgical reforms.
But is not all this testament to Cranmer and Quignonez’ observation that “there was never any thing by the wit of man so well devised, or so sure established, which in continuation of time hath not been corrupted”? And therefore an argument for trying to reclaim what has been lost and forgotten, destroyed and dismissed? Or perhaps to the rather modest and restrained observations in the preface Of Ceremonies: Why Some be Abolished and Some Retained (1549) about things being done “in a decent order in the Church” if only and simply “because they pertain to edification”? And therefore an argument for calmly going along with things without question or thought? Or perhaps even more to the point in the 1662 Preface that wisdom lies in “keep[ing] the mean between the two extremes, of too much stiffness in refusing, and of too much easiness in admitting any variation”? And therefore an argument attempting to justify the present state as “being things in their own nature indifferent, and alterable”? I can only raise the questions and call attention to the current dilemmas.
It seems to me that the current state of affairs liturgically is more about matters polity in which institutional power trumps Creed and Scripture. Behind that lies a deeper malaise, a kind of ambivalence and even antipathy to thinking theologically. A sociological, therapeutic and political way of reading Scripture in the life of the Church has supplanted and circumvented the authority of Scripture as well as the role and place of tradition and reason in thinking theologically. At issue are the principles that define the Church’s way of receiving and reading the Scriptures.
It is a most important question because it relates spiritually and theologically to the nature of our life in Christ. There are, of course, changes in everything but at issue is not that there are changes but what kinds of changes and upon what basis.
The church is “a heap of broken images”, to use an image drawn from Scripture in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, when it no longer stands “under the shadow of a great rock in a weary land”; in short, when it no longer stands under the Word of God. The church is in ruins when it turns away rather than towards God in his Word towards us. The church is only the church, we might say, in the turning towards God. That turning is a kind of circling, a circling around and around and into the mystery of God revealed in Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit by the witness of the Scriptures and in the Church’s faithfulness to that witness. The Book of Common Prayer is about that kind of circling, that redire ad principia that is the nature of our participation in the life of God. It is, we might say, its distinctive feature.
It is all a kind of circling, a going forth and a return to a principle, to God. The classical Book(s) of Common Prayer are not a collection of rites but a complete pattern of spiritual life, a way of thinking and living in and with, for and to God as well as in and with, for and to one another. It is centered on the idea of Scripture as a doctrinal instrument of salvation. That pattern of spiritual life is organic and dynamic not static and mechanical; it is our life as ordered to God through God’s turning to us. That turning is about our participation in the life of God even in the ruins of an age and in the ruins of a church.
This is at the heart of the mystical theology of the Common Prayer tradition. It is the counter to the collapse of theology into the discourses of naturalism, historicism or scientism which dominate church and culture. John Webster has called this “the de-regionalization of theology”. The theological disciplines “have been pressed to give an account of themselves in terms drawn largely from fields of enquiry other than theology.” Such is a loss of theology altogether.
These are our concerns but they cannot be thought about without reference and without respect to the form of Christian life that we have received. This suggests that there is something for our souls in thinking seriously about the Common Prayer tradition and especially where that pattern and practice still continues. It is about more than “fragments I have shored against my ruin,” a kind of clinging to the bits and bytes of the ruins of our age. There is another kind of gathering found in the witness of the Scriptures.
The profound story in John’s Gospel about the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness speaks to our world and day. There Jesus offers an image of redemption. It is the gathering up “of the fragments that remain that nothing be lost.” It suggests the idea of our being made whole in Christ and living in Christ through our turning to him who turns to us. As Cranmer says about the Scripture: “it turneth our souls.”
“Heaven and earth shall pass away”, we hear in the apocalyptic words of Luke’s Gospel, but “my words,” Jesus says, “shall not pass away.” Such is “the patience and comfort of thy holy Word” by which “we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life.” But only if we attend to the Scriptures as “written for our learning” and so “in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.”
“Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not pass away”
Fr. David Curry
Advent Programme II
December 13th, 2017
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2017/12/13/advent-meditation-2-book-of-common-prayer-prefaces/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.