Non-negotiable: The Book of Common Prayer

Dr. Derek Olsen, who runs the blog Haligweorc, has written a tremendously thoughtful and helpful article on The Book of Common Prayer over at the Episcopal Cafe:

If we want to renew and strengthen the Episcopal Church in light of these very real challenges that are facing us, then the one thing that we dare not mess with is our commitment to the contents and spirit of our 1979 Book of Common Prayer…

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I’m not saying the book is perfect. There are certainly some things that I’d change if I had the chance. But recognize this: 1) it is an authentic expression of the historic Western liturgy that has nourished literally millions who have come before us. 2) It is an authentic expression of the English devotional experience. (The importance of this is not that it’s English, of course, but that it is a rooted, embodied, inherited tradition that has been embraced and passed on by a diverse group over a period of centuries—not just dreamed up by a few people last week.) 3) It is an authentic expression of historic Anglican liturgy that balances reform of Western norms with Scripture and the theological and spiritual practices of the Early Church. That’s actually quite a lot of things going for it—and it’s more things than would be going for most services either you or I would dream up.

Most people I know don’t go to church on Sunday morning to experience the rector’s latest exciting innovation; they go to church because they hope to experience God and to get a concrete sense of what it means to live out love of God and love of neighbor. Using the book doesn’t guarantee any of this, but it is a big step in the right direction…

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…[T]he Book of Common Prayer isn’t just the book for Sunday services. Instead, the Book of Common Prayer offers a full integrated spiritual system that is intended as much for the laity as the clergy and which is founded in a lay spirituality that arose in the medieval period. If you look at the book as a whole, it offers a program for Christian growth built around liturgical spirituality. The best shorthand I have for this is the liturgical round. It’s made up of three components: the liturgical calendar where we reflect upon our central mysteries through the various lenses of the seasons of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ and in his continuing witness in the lives of the saints, the Daily Office where we yearly immerse ourselves in the Scriptures and Psalms, and the Holy Eucharist where we gather on Holy Days to most perfectly embody the Body of Christ and receive the graces that the sacraments afford…

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For me, this is where the church lives or dies. Are we forming communities that embody the love of God and neighbor in concrete actions? Not just in what programs the institution is supporting, but are we feeding regular lives with a spirituality that not only sustains them but leads them into God’s work in a thousand different contexts in no way related to a church structure? Are our parishes witnessing to their members and to the wider community in their acts of corporate prayer for the whole even when the whole cannot be physically there? Therefore this is why, when we worry about the fate of the church, my answer will be a call for more liturgy. Not because I like to worship the worship, but because of the well-worn path to discipleship found in the disciplined recollection of God that the liturgy offers.

My firm belief is that if membership is a problem, our best move is to head for spiritual revitalization. People who are being spiritually fed, challenged, and affirmed by their church will be more likely to show it, to talk about it, and to invite their friends and neighbors to come and see it for themselves. This won’t—it can’t—fix all situations, but even if it doesn’t, spiritual revitalization is what the Church is called to be about…

 

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Offices for the Dead

I wish I had seen this in time for All Saints and All Souls, but late is better than never.  From Haligweorc:

Following the discussion here on kinds of votive offices, these are replacement offices—offices intended to be said in place of (rather than supplemental to) the regular morning and evening offices.

So, here they are:

The Office for the Dead: Morning Prayer

The Office for the Dead: Evening Prayer

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Salvation in the Anglican Tradition

From the newly discovered Conciliar Anglican:

Classical Anglicanism is minimalistic about all of this. The 39 Articles are fairly clear on several points: that salvation comes through Christ alone, that justification is by faith alone, that works above and beyond our duty to God do not add to our salvation. These points are further elucidated by the Catechism, which moves from law to grace, assuring the cathecumen that he or she cannot fulfill God’s call to live a holy life by will power. In all of this, Anglicanism is consistently Protestant.

And yet, there is little official mention of sanctification. The articles make positive statements about the sacraments as means of grace, that they are “not only badges and tokens” but “effectual signs of grace” through which God “works invisibly within us” (Article XXV). This certainly implies an ongoing need for sanctification, but it doesn’t spell out why or how such a thing should take place, nor does it relate the topic back to justification. The liturgies of the Prayer Book reveal a similar emphasis, highlighting justification, acknowledging sanctification, but without making explicit how exactly we are to think about the whole thing.

The result of this lack of specification has been that Anglicans have often looked elsewhere for their soteriology. John Henry Newman attempted to harmonize justification by faith with the Council of Trent, which remains the approach of some Anglo-Catholics today, though Newman himself eventually found such an approach lacking. John Wesley, of course, took a unique approach which remains alive in Methodism. A large number of modern Anglicans, particularly in Africa, subscribe to a Pentecostal view. The Lutheran view is espoused by contemporary Anglican Evangelicals like Paul Zahl and Alister McGrath. FitzSimons Allison tends more towards the Reformed approach. Even the Eastern Orthodox view of salvation as theosis has had its Anglican proponents through the ages, most notably Charles Chapman Grafton and Michael Ramsey.

Since Anglicanism has never pronounced definitively on this topic, all of these approaches are acceptable. This doesn’t mean that they’re all correct, but merely that one cannot be deemed outside the bounds of the tradition so long as one holds a plausible rendering of justification by faith and an unswerving conviction in the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as savior. The rest remains unsettled, not because Anglicanism is wishy-washy on this topic, but rather because one of the hallmarks of the Anglican approach to theology is a strong reluctance to say anything definitively that wasn’t said definitively by the early Church. The Anglican Reformers were willing to commit to justification by faith because it seemed to them to be plain in the reading of scripture and not in contradiction with the Fathers. But they were not agreed upon anything more, and to insist upon something that is so clearly unsettled is to invite schism and heresy.

Salvation, the Sacraments, and the Church

I would agree with the Anglican Reformers that an absolute dogma on the topic of sanctification is unwarranted when the Church exists, as she does today, in a state of disunity and disarray. We are all in schism. Novel pronouncements only serve to deepen the divide and further damage the Body of Christ. Nevertheless, there are implications to be drawn from the mind of the undivided Church on this matter. The focus of the Fathers upon the divinity and humanity of Christ is not just about our understanding of who Jesus is but also about our understanding of who we are in relation to Him. The creeds are not explicit about the nature of the atonement, and yet they do insist on belief in “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.” The nature and purpose of the Church was a very important topic for the Fathers, just as it is in scripture. Any orthodox notion of salvation, therefore, must make reference back to the Church as the chief means through which Christ’s work on the cross is realized. We are not saved merely as individuals. We are saved through our participation in Christ’s sacrifice by being drawn up into His Body, the Church, as Paul makes clear in any number of places. Indeed, Romans 6, which is a primary text for Luther and for Calvin, speaks explicitly of the death of the old body so that we might be brought into the new life of Christ. That new life is made manifest in the new Body. “Therefore, my brethren, you also were made to die to the Law through the body of Christ, so that you might be joined to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God” (Romans 7:5).

Furthermore, while there is great latitude in how Anglicans may come to understand the sacraments, our formularies make clear that the sacraments are a means of grace and not merely symbols. As such, while we cannot necessarily say much definitively about how salvation works, we can say boldly, with the full backing of scripture and the Fathers, that the sacraments are a chief means by which saving grace is imparted to us. There is a reticence in pan-Anglican conversation to make too much out of the sacraments, for fear that such talk might unsettle those of a low church persuasion. But a firm conviction about the place of the sacraments in salvation does not necessitate a rejection of justification by faith alone, nor does it behold a person to believe in transubstantiation or any other way of understanding how Christ’s presence in the sacraments is actualized. Nevertheless, it does necessitate putting aside the strange and novel idea that Anglicans have ever believed that the sacraments were simply memorialist ordinances that have no value in and of themselves. Classical Anglicanism understood just what the early Church understood, that Baptism and the Eucharist are means by which God gives Himself to us, that we cannot be united to the Body of Christ unless we are incorporated into the Body of Christ, and we cannot be incorporated into the Body of Christ unless we are willing to receive the Body of Christ when it is tangibly, wholly, beautifully offered to us.

 

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Ash Wednesday

From Father Robert Hart, part of the Anglican Continuum:

On Easter morning we will sing St Paul’s words, “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” Today we begin with the first part of that antithesis, with words which echo Genesis 3, “Remember, O man, that dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.” It is too bad that the advocates of politically correct language have dropped the key word of that solemn formula, “O man.” As each man woman and child is marked with ashes, we are reminded of a jarring fact. Each of us is a member of the human race and is therefore “in Adam.” The address “O man” is directed simultaneously to the individual and to the entire human family. To delete it obscures that truth.

The formula is adapted from even more solemn words in Genesis 3, from that painful conversation which God held in turn with the serpent, with Eve, and with Adam just before they were banished from the garden. After He had dealt with the Serpent and with Eve, God said to Adam:

Cursed is the ground because of you,

In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;

thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you,

and you shall eat the plants of the field.

By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread

till you return to the ground,

for out of it you were taken.

for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

However you choose to read the mournful tale of Genesis 3 (as myth, or as poetry, or as a parable which echoes a terrible moment in clock-time history), we have in those words a powerful description of the human condition. Doomed to death after a lifetime of drudgery in a world where the very ground itself is cursed. This terrible predicament did not just happen at the caprice of a cruel god. No, this is the result of Adam’s sin.

On Ash Wednesday we make not one but two trips to the Altar rail. The first trip reminds us again of what St Paul wrote, “For as in Adam all die.” We are all, by virtue of our humanity, under that curse which sent our first parents out of the garden into a world of thorns and thistles. But the second journey to the Altar rail, when we receive the Body and Blood of our Saviour, reminds us that “even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” The first trip recalls the terrible moment when, in Milton’s words at the end of Paradise Lost, “They, hand in hand, with wand’ring steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way.” But in the second journey, we are permitted to run breathlessly like the disciples to the empty tomb of Jesus of that first Easter morning.

The ashes on for foreheads remind us that we are truly “in Adam.” The Body and Blood which we will receive remind us that we are “in Christ.”

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On Doxology

A great post by Haligweorc on doxology:

The Morning Offices of the Western Church are, to me, our clearest documents of purpose. Mat(t)ins begins thus: Open thou our lips, O Lord/And our mouth shall proclaim thy praise. Then the Venite itself issues a call to praise God as the One who holds all creation in being and the One who guides his people as a flock. The festal Te Deum offers us a doxological perspective of the created order, showing us our place as beings most fully alive when oriented with the rest of creation in its uncorrupt state towards and in praise of God. Finally the ultimate Lauds psalms (from which the Office earns its appellation) echo and expand the Te Deum.

There are two reasons that we praise. The first is because we are creatures offering the praise due our Creator. As made beings, we owe our existence to the One who made us and who should be praised for it. The second is thanks to our Baptism: in our Baptism we are consciously and intentionally joined to and made aware of our membership within the Body of Christ. We become conscious participants within the life of God. Within these our boundaries our praises take on a deeper and greater valence—we participate in the internal dialogue of the Trinity. Expressed most perfectly in the Eucharist, we as the divided members of the Body of Christ come together as part of the eschatological Body of Christ who offers his own self and praises to God the Father in and through the Holy Spirit.

Now—creation continues without our praise; the dialogue of the Trinity continues without us. However, we as individuals and as a community most clearly express our nature when we are oriented in praise towards God.

Paul calls us to “pray without ceasing.” To pray without ceasing is to be in constant awareness and embodiment of life in contact with God. It is to live the praise of God in all of our actions, proclaiming through daily virtues the victory of God in Christ and the triumph of love and light over darkness, hatred, and all the forces that seek to corrupt the works of God. It is for us to recall our right mind—for the Body of Christ to be directed by the Mind of Christ. (That there would be my own type B inclinations coming up to the surface…)

While this is our goal, we fall short of its embodiment. While Anglican spirituality as laid out by Martin Thornton in English Spirituality gives us the central tools to direct us in this way—formal periodic liturgies in combination with habitual prayer of recollection—as individuals in the world we will fail to reach our aspirations while on this side of the veil. Thanks be to God, however, that we are not alone in this task. I think not only of the Te Deum but of its paraphrase in the hymn “Holy God we praise thy name” where, in Walworth’s words, “And from morn to set of sun/Through the Church the song goes on.”

We are members of the Body of Christ. And one of the ways that this is expressed locally is that we are members of a liturgical community. In our corporate nature, the living organism in which we subsist can more completely embody prayer without ceasing than any of its constituent members apart from the whole. We are just starting up public daily Evening Prayer at our parish. Some days it’s just two of us. Other days it’s five or six (when M and I and the girls can be there; G insists on doing one of the Scripture readings; H’s task—since she’s still learning to read—is to start the Lord’s Prayer). As our priest said when announcing the effort at church, we’re doing corporately and publicly what the rest of us should be doing individually at home. When it may just be the two of us—or even one solitary person—standing in the choir of the cold sanctuary, we are indicating our community’s commitment to a corporate liturgical life and the hope and promise of a life turned towards God. It doesn’t mean that we’re succeeding, that we’re meeting Paul’s challenge of praying without ceasing. What it does means is that we are making a public proclamation that the effort is worth doing, that we recognize that a life of praise is one of the central aspects of the Christian life.

Read it all here.

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Liturgy: Manifestations of the Divine

The following is a wonderful look at liturgy, what it is, and how it functions.  Though written by an Orthodox priest, I think its approach is Catholic and Universal:

The Divine Liturgy (the Holy Eucharist) is not a ritual action of the Church which we attend, as though it were some sort of program. It is one of the greatest manifestations of the Divine Life that God has given us – dwelling in us, among us, with us, uniting us, and ascending from God to us and through us back to the Throne of Grace. Please forgive the exercise in prepositions in the last sentence – but the very nature of the Divine Liturgy demands such an exercise of language (cf. St. Basil).The habits gained from our cultural life always threaten to invade our life as the Church – when our life as the Church should constantly be invading our life in the culture. Culturally we tend to gather for assemblies in which the deformed philosophy of secularism (dominant among most modern Christians) has offered us shape, form and understanding. The Divine Liturgy has no commonality with this philosophy.

We do not gather as a collection of individuals who share a common interest. The actions of the priest are not a program presented for our intellectual, emotional, psychological or religious improvement. We do not stand apart from the actions of the Liturgy and approve or disapprove them as if we were an audience.

We assemble for the Liturgy as the Church, the Body of Christ, the Pillar and Ground of Truth, the Fullness of Him Who Filleth all in all (Scripture synonyms for the Church). We are never an audience. We assemble as a single Body, who share in a single Life. No one can distract me from the Liturgy for the Liturgy is everything that takes place in the assembly of the Body. A child crying is a liturgical action (in the Liturgy). Equally a parent caring for a child and exercising discipline or offering solace are also liturgical actions. Our pains, our boredom, our interests, the very cry of our hearts are all among the lives that have assembled into the One Life.

There is one prayer – the Prayer of the Holy Spirit Who prays to the Father through the Son. This one prayer is given voice by priest, deacon and people. Nothing falls outside the concern of this one prayer for we offer to God everything. The sins of our lives are not excluded (else we would be barred from the Liturgy). Rather, we are told in Scripture that “God made him [Christ] to be sin, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21). This is the great exchange of worship – that we offer to God all that we are and have – even those things that seem unworthy – that we might receive in exchange that which transcends all worth.

To gather together in the Liturgy is to enter a new life. The habits of the old life are brought in only to be transformed – not to dictate to God the nature and character of the new life. The Life of the Liturgy is “on behalf of all and for all.” We must yield to the fact that the salvation of each and all is now the proper concern of each and all.

All of these things are simply what it means to love one another.

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