“When will we ever learn?” (Psalm 78)

Late last month the city of Halifax announced the membership of a new committee. Its assigned task is to advise City Council on “proposed changes to the commemoration of Edward Cornwallis” and on “recognizing and commemorating the indigenous history in the lands now known as Halifax”[1]. It was not long ago that Cornwallis was hailed as a great military leader, the first Governor of Nova Scotia and founder of the city of Halifax. In my year 2000 copy of the Canadian Encyclopedia no mention is made of Cornwallis’s infamous “Scalping Proclamation” or of his later being brought twice before courts martial in 1756 and 57. (To do him justice, he was exonerated in both cases).

It has been said that history is written by the winners.[2] And in many cases that may be so, which means that its authors often try very hard to present a sanitized—and in some cases glorified—version of the past. So we need to be careful to examine what goes under the title of “history” with a critical eye.

On the other hand, one of the refreshing features that I find about the Bible is that it can be disarmingly candid about the past. Moses’ violent temper; Samson’s uncontrollable lust; King David’s adulterous affair and his murderous attempt to cover it up; Jonah’s unwillingness to preach to the people of Nineveh; the disciples’ arguments over who should sit at Jesus’ right hand; Peter’s thrice-over denial of Jesus… No doubt if we had the time you could give me numerous other examples as well.

This morning I want us to look together at the first eight verses of Psalm 78. It is one of a dozen psalms composed by a songwriter named Asaph. Asaph was a member of the priestly tribe of Levi. He played the cymbals and he and his brothers were also singers. After King David established Jerusalem as the centre of the government and worship of Israel, he appointed Asaph in charge of the men who led the music of the tabernacle. Their task was to minister before the Ark of the Covenant by giving constant praise and thanks to God and asking for his blessings upon his people (1 Chronicles 16:4). King David’s charge to Asaph and his fellow musicians was as follows:

Give praise to the Lord, proclaim his name;
     make known among the nations what he has done…
     tell of all his wonderful acts.
Glory in his holy name…
Remember the wonders he has done,
     his miracles, and the judgments he pronounced…
(1 Chronicles 16:8-12)

And that is exactly what Asaph does in the psalm before us this morning.

If you turn to it in your Bible, you will notice that Psalm 78 is seventy-two verses long. But we’re just going to look at the first eight. Those verses form a prologue to the following sixty-four, but in many ways they also follow from them.

Overall the psalm is a long lament over the people of Israel’s sorry inability again and again over the course of four and a half centuries to take in the lessons that God was seeking to teach them—from the time of Moses to the time of King David. They had hardly crossed over the Red Sea before they were yearning to go back to Egypt. God gave them water from a rock and nourished them with manna but it was not good enough for them. He drove out nations before them but they turned away from him to worship idols.

Now at the time of writing King David is on the throne and prosperity has returned to the land. It is a time for new opportunities, new beginnings. But the question remains: Will the people take the opportunity that God is giving them?

God’s Deeds (1-4)

So it is that the psalmist begins what he has to say with a plea: “My people, hear my teaching; open your ears wide to what I have to say.” He is bringing them a message of urgency, a warning of the utmost importance. It reminds me of what I found myself doing on September 11^th, 2001. I was rector of St Paul’s Church on the Grand Parade at the time. I had just heard about the passenger jet striking the first of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. It was still tourist season and I knew that there would be many American visitors passing through the building. I also suspected that most of them would not have heard the news. So I stood at the door and when I encountered someone from the U.S. I would ask them to sit down before I told them what was happening in their country.

Unlike my experience, Asaph was not going to inform the congregation of anything new. Quite the contrary: what he was about to tell them was long known and familiar to all. “I will utter … things from of old,” he sings, “things we have heard and known, things our ancestors have told us.” All of it was a story that everyone in Israel had been familiar with since childhood. Every year at the annual celebration of the Passover, God’s rescue of the nation from their slavery in Egypt was recited in both word and action. Centuries before, Moses had warned the people, “Be careful, and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them fade from your heart as long as you live. Teach them to your children and to their children after them” (Deuteronomy 4:9).

So once again Asaph recites God’s deeds on behalf of his people: dividing the Red Sea so that they could cross over into safety while their enemies were engulfed; guiding them step by step along their journey with a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night; providing them with fresh water to drink from a rock; feeding them with manna and quail, more than they could eat; driving out the nations before them so that they could settle in the land he had promised…

These were all stupendous acts. Yet in verse 32 Asaph is forced to lament, “In spite of all this, they kept on sinning; in spite of his wonders, they did not believe.” (32)

God’s Decrees (5-6)

From reminding them of God’s amazing deeds among his people in verses 3 and 4, Asaph shifts his focus in verses 5 and 6 to God’s decrees. Aside from his miraculous interventions in the life of his people, the Lord also gave them a second gift: what the Bible calls God’s law—his torah. The word torah in Hebrew means something much broader than is suggested by our word “law”. While it includes individual rules and regulations, for the most part it has much more to do with teaching or instruction. “Listen my son, to your father’s instructions,” says the father in Proverbs, “do not forsake your mother’s torah” (1:8).

The latter half of Psalm 19 is an eloquent hymn to the glories of God’s torah:

The torah of the Lord is perfect,
     refreshing the soul.
The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy,
     making wise the simple.
The precepts of the Lord are right,
     giving joy to the heart.
The commands of the Lord are radiant,
     giving light to the eyes…
The decrees of the Lord are firm,
     and all of them are righteous.
They are more precious than gold,
     than much pure gold;
they are sweeter than honey,
     than honey from the honeycomb.
By them your servant is warned;
     in keeping them there is great reward.

It’s more than likely that Asaph had even sung that psalm himself, as it was composed by King David for his director of music (presumably Asaph).

But the torah was not only to be praised. Its teachings were to be passed down from generation to generation. “Impress them on your children,” we read in Deuteronomy (6:7). “Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.” More significantly still, in fact all-importantly, the torah was to be lived on a daily basis.

Right in the middle of downtown Boston there is an old historic church called King’s Chapel. If you look beyond the pulpit, there on the far wall you will see four large tablets displaying the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed. The irony is that King’s Chapel is a Unitarian church and they rejected the tenets of the Apostles’ Creed more than two hundred years ago. But there it stands today, nothing more than a monument to the past.

Sadly, that was the same kind of thing that happened to Israel. The torah, God’s gracious teachings were ignored, pushed aside, relegated to the past and left to gather dust. “But they did not keep his statutes.” Asaph laments,

Like their ancestors they were disloyal and faithless,
     as unreliable as a faulty bow. (56-57)

Jesus warned about this in his parable of the soils. Do you remember the seed that fell among the thorns? It stood for those for whom their daily preoccupations and their longing for greater prosperity took the place of God’s word in their lives.

God’s Desire (7-8)

The picture Asaph paints is a tragic one of a lost and wayward people, as he mourns over how they have failed again and again to respond either to God’s miraculous deeds or to his wise decrees. Yet none of this leaves him without hope. He looks forward to a day when God’s people would not just know about him, but actually know him. And that is what makes all the difference.

Generations later the prophet Jeremiah expressed that same hope in these words:

 “The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
     “when I will make a new covenant
         with the people of Israel
     and with the people of Judah.
It will not be like the covenant
     I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand
     to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
     though I was a husband to them,”
declares the Lord.
“This is the covenant I will make
with the people of Israel
     after that time,” declares the Lord.
“I will put my law in their minds
     and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
     and they will be my people.
No longer will they teach their neighbour,
     or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
     from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the Lord. (Jeremiah 31:31-34a)

This was the hope that ignited a fire in the heart of Asaph. It was the hope that the day would come when God’s people would not just know about the Lord either through his deeds or through his decrees, but that each one would know God and his daily, living presence.

Asaph’s dream was also the prayer of our Lord Jesus. On the night before he went to the cross John’s gospel tells us that he looked toward heaven and prayed for his followers, “that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3).

Recently we’ve been looking at the letter to the Philippians. There, in chapter 3, Paul tells of his own experience of moving from knowing about God to actually knowing him. He had done everything right—here’s how he put it:

Circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless. (Philippians 3:5-6)

But then he goes on:

Whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord… I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him… (Philippians 3:7-8,10)

Someone has said that the church is always one generation away from extinction. And that will surely be the case if we see our task as simply carrying on as we’ve done in the past. But we are not here to maintain an institution. We are not here to preserve a tradition. We are here to carry forward a mission—to help women and men and children come to know the Lord our God and their lives become a day-by-day walk with him. And we have his promise, “I will be with you always, to the end of the age.”

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[1]     Administrative Order Number 2017-012-GOV

[2]     The saying is attributed to George Orwell in a column written on 4 February 1944.

Our Anglican Heritage: (24) A Worldwide Communion

Deacons, priests and bishops are a tiny minority in the church. In actual fact, they exist only to offer leadership and service to the nearly eighty million people around the world today who call themselves Anglicans. While Anglicans can trace their historic roots back to the Church of England, the Anglican Communion in this century has become a truly international body, of which the Church of England and those of English descent, have been a minority for more than a generation. Anglicans in Uganda, for example, outnumber Anglicans (Episcopalians) in the United States by nearly four to one; in Nigeria by eight to one.

Today the Anglican Communion is made up of thirty-eight national or regional indigenous church bodies (often called “provinces”) found on every continent. Some of these, like the Episcopal Church, came about originally as a result of British colonial expansion. Some, such as the church in the southern cone of South America, began with the faithful and painstaking work of nineteenth-century missionaries. Others, such as the Reformed Church of Spain and the Mar-Thoma Church of India, are independent bodies that have chosen to enter into communion with the Anglican Church. Still others, such as the Church of South India, are union churches which have retained their links with the Anglican Communion while remaining in fellowship with other denominational bodies.

For the past century or more the Anglican Church has been a leader in ecumenical dialog. In recent years, the Anglican–Roman Catholic International Consultations have received the greatest publicity. This has sometimes eclipsed the other ongoing discussions with Lutherans, Methodists, the Reformed churches and Eastern Orthodox bodies (not to mention the ill-fated Anglican-United plan of union in Canada). In recent years dialog with the Lutheran Church in the United States and Canada has led to sharing at the Lord’s table and a full mutual recognition of ministries.

Our Anglican Heritage: (23) Apostolic Succession

Through the course of the Reformation, the Church of England retained this three-fold structure. At the same time, the reformers recognized that this was a matter of choice, and not an essential feature of the church. Article 19, “Of the church” clearly states what the church is in its essence without any reference to government or structure:

The visible church of Christ is a congregation of faithful [people], in which the pure word of God is preached, and the sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.

Following the Act of Uniformity in 1662 the position of the church became much harder. Ordination at the hands of a bishop, rather than being regarded merely as the Church of England’s way of doing things, became a requirement. This position was given further legitimacy in a document which evolved over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, known as the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral. The statement was designed to set forth conditions under which Anglicans would be prepared to enter a formal union with other church bodies. It contains the following four requirements:

(1) acceptance of the holy Scriptures as the word of God containing all things necessary to salvation;
(2) adherence to the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds as sufficient statements of the faith;
(3) recognition of the two sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s supper as instituted by Christ himself; and
(4) recognition of the historic episcopate, locally adapted to the needs of various regions and peoples, as the keystone of governmental unity.

Of the four conditions, the last is surely the most controversial, particularly after a study of the New Testament. For there can be no question that the episcopate, as this statement understands it, is a development in the church that came well after the New Testament period.

Many people would be much more comfortable if the Chicago-Lambeth quadrilateral called for episcope rather than episcopoi—that is, responsible supra-local oversight, rather than bishops per se.

The insistence on bishops and on episcopal ordination stems (in my view) from a faulty understanding of apostolic succession. Gradually (and mainly to refute the refusal on the part of the Roman Catholic Church to recognize the legitimacy of Anglican orders) it became popular to try to trace the consecration of Anglican bishops by the laying-on-of-hands right back to apostolic times and to Christ himself. This, it was thought, would legitimize the Anglican episcopate. Of course, such arguments require resorting to dubious traditions and legends, and hold little water when examined historically. It is evident that the laying-on-of-hands was observed in New Testament times, but how universal it was and what significance it was given are matters of debate.

A more constructive and defensible understanding of the episcopate comes about if we view apostolic succession as a succession of doctrine—that is, that the church and its bishops are called to be faithful to the teachings handed down by the apostles. Secondly we should see the episcopate as a way that the church as found useful to establish a co-ordination and a discipline which is more than merely local. It is a way of saying that local churches are not independent units, but that they are part of a wider body, the universal church of Christ which stretches around the world and across the centuries. In this sense, bishops serve as a link both between the parish and the wider church and between the church of the present and nearly two millennia of Christian history.

Our Anglican Heritage: (22) Bishops

When we come to the office of the bishop, we can once again trace it back to the New Testament, this time to the word episcopos, which quite literally means an “overseer”. It is apparent, however, that in the New Testament episcopos and presbuteros are interchangeable terms. The biblical authors do not differentiate between them. Indeed, in the passage we read from 1 Peter, the apostle exhorts the elders (presbuteroi) to serve as overseers (episcopoi).

If there is any distinction to be made, it may be that presbuteros was the term used by Jewish congregations deriving from the synagogue and episcopos was the word that the primarily Gentile churches employed. Michael Green also helpfully points out that, while the word “presbyter” indicates an office within the church, “overseer” describes its function.

Of bishops or episcopoi Paul writes,

Here is a trustworthy saying: If anyone sets his heart on being an overseer [episcopos], he desires a noble task. Now the overseer must be above reproach, the husband of but one wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him with proper respect…. He must not be a recent convert, or he may become conceited and fall under the same judgment as the devil. He must also have a good reputation with outsiders, so that he will not fall into disgrace and into the devil’s trap.

It is clear from what Paul writes that the bishop must be a person of spiritual maturity and personal integrity. As with the presbyter, the episcopos has a ministry both to the congregation and to those outside. Once again, this is reflected in the Prayer Book Ordinal, where the newly consecrated bishop is exhorted,

Be to the flock of Christ a shepherd, not a wolf; feed them, devour them not. Hold up the weak, heal the sick, bind up the broken, bring again the outcasts, seek the lost. Be so merciful, that you be not too remiss; so minister discipline, that you forget not mercy: that when the chief Shepherd shall appear you may receive the never-fading crown of glory…

It is ironic, and not a little revealing, that these words, addressed to bishops, are derived from words which in the New Testament are addressed to elders.

If we cannot find biblical justification for separate offices of bishops and priests, there is good evidence that within a century or so of the New Testament period the two offices began to be distinguished from one another. Gradually, presbyters became associated with a local congregation, while bishops took on a more regional role.

There are good historical reasons for this development. By and large, new churches were formed as daughters of earlier congregations, usually centered in the larger towns or cities. Initially these churches would have had as their pastors a group of elders with a shared ministry, of whom one might have been designated as the chief pastor or bishop. Eventually the mother church would have become known as a cathedral and the bishop’s role more specialized and less localized. Among other functions, the bishop would have represented the churches at larger gatherings and consultations and conversely would have brought the resolutions of those convocations back to his local area (or diocese).

The term diocese, by the way, was simply one which the church borrowed from the secular Roman world. It referred to an administrative district within a province.

Our Anglican Heritage: (21) Priests

In spite of the fact that it is misunderstood, the Anglican reformers chose to retain the term “priest”. They did so because they knew that it had an honorable etymology. We must be careful to understand that our English word “priest” is derived from the Greek word presbuteros, which means an elder.

In fact the English word priest has come to be used to translate two Greek words: presbuteros with the meaning of an elder or pastor, and hiereus with the meaning of one who offers sacrifices at an altar on behalf of the people. It is clear that the hiereus style of priesthood came to an end when our Lord Jesus Christ offered himself up once and for all on the cross. Because of his sacrifice, all who trust in him have direct access to God’s throne of grace, with him alone as mediator. For this reason, to avoid confusion, the Church of South India has chosen to call its clergy presbyters.

What is the role of a priest in this sense of presbyter or elder? As with deacons, we meet with presbyters in the earliest church in Jerusalem. Without any introduction or explanation (suggesting that they were an established and accepted part of the church’s structure) we are told in Acts 11 of Barnabas and Paul bringing gifts from the Christians in Antioch to the elders (presbuteroi) of the church in Jerusalem. A few chapters on we find the same Barnabas and Paul appointing presbyters in each of the churches in Lystra, Derbe and Antioch. In his book Called to Serve, (revised and republished as Freed to Serve) Michael Green suggests that we should also understand the “leader” of Hebrews 13, “those who are over you in the Lord” in 1 Thessalonians 5, those who exercise leadership in Romans 12 and the “pastor-teachers” of Ephesians 4 as exercising the ministry of the presbyterate. With reference to these presbyters, the apostle Paul writes to Timothy:

The elders who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor, especially those whose work is preaching and teaching. For the Scripture says, “Do not muzzle the ox while it is treading out the grain,” and “The worker deserves his wages.”

Clearly Paul saw this as an important function within the church, especially when we remember that he was unwilling to accept compensation for his own work as an apostle. To this Peter adds:

To the elders among you, I appeal as a fellow elder, a witness of Christ’s sufferings and one who also will share in the glory to be revealed: Be shepherds of God’s flock that is under your care, serving as overseers—not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not greedy for money, but eager to serve; not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock. And when the Chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the crown of glory that will never fade away.

This high view of the office of elder is reflected in the service of ordination of priests in the 1662 Prayer Book, where the bishop says to the ordinands,

And now again we exhort you, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you have in remembrance, into how high a dignity, and to how weighty an office and charge ye are called: that is to say, to be messengers, watchmen, and stewards of the Lord; to teach and to premonish, to feed and to provide for the Lord’s family; to seek for Christ’s sheep that are dispersed abroad, and for his children who are in the midst of this sinful world, that they may be saved through Christ for ever.

The role of the presbyter, then, is to give pastoral leadership to the congregation. This means not only to teach and to preside at the Lord’s table, but also spearhead the outreach of the parish. Underlying this concept are the pictures which Jesus gives of the shepherd, who not only faithfully tends his flock, but also goes out to bring lost sheep into the fold.

Our Anglican Heritage: (20) Deacons

Unlike the majority of the churches on the European continent and the Church of Scotland, the Reformation in England to a great degree left the hierarchy of the church intact. It is true that the monasteries and convents were disbanded and a number of minor orders of ministry (such as doorkeepers and subdeacons) were let go. However, the ancient orders of bishops, priests and deacons were retained. In the preface to the Ordinal in the Book of Common Prayer we read:

It is evident unto all men diligently reading holy Scripture and ancient authors, that from the apostles’ time there have been these orders of ministry in Christ’s church: bishops, priests, and deacons.

The statement is interesting as much for what it does not say as much as for what it does. For one thing, it does not limit ministry to these three orders. It simply argues for their legitimacy. No doubt the reformers were aware that the Bible speaks of apostles, prophets, evangelists, teachers, workers of miracles and administrators, to name a few. I suspect that they would have argued for bishops, priests and deacons as part of the bene esse, rather than the esse, of the church—useful and important, but not absolutely necessary.

We begin our study with the term deacon, the office which I believe is the essence of all ministry. Indeed, the Greek word from which it is derived (diakonos) is consistently translated “minister” in the King James Version of the Bible. Jesus used the word in the gospels when he said that “whoever would be great among you must be your deacon”. Not only that, but after the apostles themselves, deacons are the first form of ministry which we find in the New Testament. In Acts 6, the apostles called upon the church in Jerusalem to “choose seven men from among you who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom” to look after the distribution of aid to the widows in the congregation. While the word “deacon” is not used here, it would seem that the passage is pointing to the same function. Later in the New Testament period we find deacons in the church at Philippi and at Ephesus. In his instructions to his young protégé Timothy, Paul writes,

Deacons … are to be men worthy of respect, sincere, not indulging in much wine, and not pursuing dishonest gain. They must keep hold of the deep truths of the faith with a clear conscience. They must first be tested; and then if there is nothing against them, let them serve as deacons.

In the Prayer Book service of ordination, deacons are instructed that not only are they to assist the pastor in leading worship and teaching, they are also “to search for the sick, poor and impotent people of the parish … that they may be relieved with the alms of the parishioners …” That the diaconate, the ministry of service, is basic to all ministry, can be seen in the fact that both priests and bishops are first ordained as deacons.

Our Anglican Heritage: (19) Liturgical Revision

The variety of liturgical resources now available is enormous and ranges from some very fine prayers to others that are paltry and trite. One liturgiologist has described the task of the modern clergy or worship team as having moved from being supplied with a complete TV dinner to being given a package of frozen peas and told to go ahead and make a meal. As a result, a great deal more creativity and thought is being demanded in the preparation of worship from local churches, their worship committees and the clergy than might have been the case a generation ago.

While there is no longer a set of common words, there is agreement across the Anglican Communion in what the shape of the liturgy should be and in what it should contain. At the Anglican Consultative Council meetings in 1973 it was agreed that any celebration of Holy Communion should contain eight basic elements: (1) The Preparation (including a greeting, a prayer for the Holy Spirit’s help, an act of praise and an act of penitence); (2) the Ministry of the Word (one or two Scripture readings, with the Gospel, a sermon and the creed); (3) the Prayers (intercession and thanksgiving, followed by a confession of sin if not already said, and the Peace); (4) the Offertory; (5) the Thanksgiving over bread and wine; (6) the Breaking of the Bread; (7) the Communion, with a post-communion prayer or canticle of thanksgiving and dedication; and (8) the Dismissal.

The outcome of all this is that, while you may not be able to walk into any Anglican service and follow it blindfolded, you should be able to perceive a pattern that is recognizably Anglican.

In his posthumously published Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, C.S. Lewis urged that the task of liturgical revision be carried out slowly and imperceptibly—“one obsolete word replaced in a century”. The intervening forty-three years have taken us too far for that. However, Lewis states an important principle if revision is to be successful:

Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. And it enables us to do these things best—if you like, it “works” best—when, through long familiarity, we don’t have to think about it. As long as you notice, and have to count, the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you don’t notice…. The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.

Our Anglican Heritage: (18) Moving on from 1662

There was a day (not very long ago) when you could walk into any Anglican church anywhere in the world and join in the service blind-folded, as it would be practically word-for-word the same as what you were accustomed to. Over the past twenty years that has become less and less the case.

The main reason for this was that, although there have always been moves to revise the Book of Common Prayer historical and political circumstances have made this impractical (if not impossible). What began to happen in the mid-nineteenth century, however, was that while the words of the services may not have changed, the way in which the services were conducted began to vary widely. Candles, colored vestments and hangings, genuflections, processions, incense and a host of other practices began to be introduced in various combinations from parish to parish. At first there was trenchant opposition, but gradually, by the early years of the twentieth century this had given way to acceptance of a breadth of expression in worship within Anglicanism.

The first attempt to make any major changes to the Prayer Book itself and to gain popular support within the church came in England in 1928. In that year the church convocations gave permission for a revised Prayer Book (rather like the 1929 book or Rite I of the Episcopal Church) to be authorized. The attempt was thwarted in parliament, however, and the revised Prayer Book became the “deposited” Prayer Book of 1928. At the same time, elements of the new book came into popular usage in many of the parishes and college chapels in England. While the revision of the Prayer Book had been quashed for the moment, the need for revision along a number of lines became increasingly apparent.

For one thing, the Book of Common Prayer had been devised to suit the needs of a single national church. It did not take into account the fact that that church had begun to spread to almost every corner of the world, to cultural and political milieux quite different from England in the sixteenth century. In many of these places Christianity (much less the Anglican form of it) was not the national religion or even the dominant one. Yet that seems to be assumed at many points in the Prayer Book.

In addition there were local customs and traditions that needed to find their way into the worship of the church. One Canadian contribution in this respect is the service of Thanksgiving for the Blessings of Harvest, which was added to our Prayer Book in the revision of 1918. Besides this, one of the underlying principles of Anglicanism has always been that within each country the church has authority to develop its own forms of service (always, of course, in conformity with Scripture).

A second factor was that liturgical scholars were becoming familiar with documents such as the Apostolic Traditions of Hippolytus and the Apostolic Constitutions, which had been unknown before the nineteenth century. A new awareness of the worship of the primitive church brought with it new debates about the propriety of some of the practices contained in the Prayer Book. With regard to the Holy Communion, for example, a new understanding of Jesus’ words, “Do this in memory of me,” had arisen out of recent studies of the Jewish concept of anamnesis.

Thirdly, the language of the Prayer Book, which had once helped the English language to soar to new heights of eloquence, was becoming less and less the language of the common people. The Anglican Church was in danger of becoming like the Coptic Church or the Russian Church, both of which use classical forms of the language frozen in time and no longer understood by the vast majority of the laity.

This fact came into sharp relief when the Roman Catholic Church began translating its liturgies into the vernacular and contemporary texts of English liturgical materials common to most denominations (e.g., the creeds and the canticles) began to be produced. One of the principles of Anglican worship has always been that it be “in a tongue … understanded of the people” (Article 24).

What this has meant is that, since the 1960s a host of liturgies has burst onto the scene. While in many cases the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (or one of its near relatives) remains the lawful pattern, almost every branch of the Anglican Communion has now produced its own service book.

Initially the pattern was to merely revise the original Book of Common Prayer. The church in New Zealand was the first to move into “you” language in addressing God in the late 1960s. Since then liturgical committees have been increasingly innovative in what they have produced, to the point where in many places it is possible to conduct a service without the appearance of a single word or phrase from the Book of Common Prayer.

Our Anglican Heritage: (17) Humble Access

One of the jewels of the Prayer Book communion service is a prayer that has become known as the Prayer of Humble Access. I regard its removal from many contemporary liturgies as a retrograde step, as I believe it is the quintessential expression of Anglican piety.

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:
Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord,
so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ,
and to drink his blood,
that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body,
and our souls washed through his most precious blood,
and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.

This prayer has been described as being like an onion, for you can peel off layer after layer of profound biblical imagery as you make your way to the heart of it. We hear echoes of the Old Testament prayer of Daniel, who pleaded with God on behalf of himself and his people, “We do not make requests of you because we are righteous, but because of your great mercy” (Daniel 9:18b). We hear the centurion who came to Jesus on behalf of his servant who was at the point of death and confessed, “Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof” (Matthew 8:8). We hear the Canaanite woman who desperately wanted her daughter healed and was not satisfied with Jesus’ apparent rejection of her because she was a Gentile. “Yes, Lord,” she said to him, “but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table” (Matthew 15:27). We hear a prayer of David in the Psalms, “Turn to me and have mercy on me, as you always do to those who love your name” (Psalm 119:132). And lastly we hear the words of our Lord himself following the miraculous feeding of the five thousand: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood dwells in me, and I in him” (John 6:56).

If it does nothing else, perhaps this prayer can serve to remind us of the profound mystery that lies at the heart of Holy Communion: that people such as you and I should be called to dine at the table of God; that Christ the pure and spotless Lamb of God, who suffered and died for us on the cross, holds out his grace and his very self for us today; and that at the last we shall stand in the company of angels and archangels in blood-washed robes of spotless white as guests at the Supper of the Lamb.

Our Anglican Heritage: (16) Sacramental theology

If it was Thomas Cranmer’s intention to have Morning and Evening Prayer said daily in every parish, it was the intention of all the Reformers that Holy Communion should be the primary act of worship each Sunday. Unfortunately, medieval superstition made this impossible and what occurred most Sundays was “ante-communion”, that is, Morning Prayer, the Litany and then the Holy Communion up to the end of the “Prayer for the Church Militant” (Prayers of the People), followed by one of the “table prayers” which are printed after the communion service in our Prayer Book.

Debate over the nature of the Lord’s Supper was one of the central issues of the Reformation. The mediæval church had come to see it as a re-enactment of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, in which the elements of bread and wine were transformed into his own physical body and blood. Some of the more radical leaders in the Reformation viewed it as a bare memorial, with the bread and wine as symbols representing Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice on the cross. However, most of the Reformers, including Martin Luther, John Calvin and Thomas Cranmer, stood somewhere in between.

An Anglican understanding of Holy Communion is clearly expressed in the Exhortation printed after the communion service in our Prayer Book. While some may balk at its length and its dire warning of God’s judgment, the Exhortation is in reality unsurpassed as a meditation on the meaning of the sacrament. It bids us come to the Lord’s Table “with a true penitent heart and living faith”—

for then we spiritually eat the flesh of Christ, and drink his blood; then we dwell in Christ, and Christ in us; we are one with Christ, and Christ with us…

Here we see the sacrament of Holy Communion as a spiritual act involving the heart and will of every worshiper, and not merely a priestly ritual. The words of the service are important, but equally important is that every worshiper should come to the Lord’s Table in the right frame of heart and mind. The reading and proclamation of God’s word, the affirmation of our own faith in Christ in the creed, prayer for the church and the world, and the confession of our sinfulness are not merely preludes to the eucharistic prayer, but vital and essential aspects of that abiding in Christ of which the partaking of the bread and wine of Holy Communion are the expression. As we receive the bread into our hands and take the cup to our lips, it is an opportunity to open our hearts ever wider to Christ and to his love, who gave himself for us on the cross.

Before we leave the service, we offer ourselves to him, as he has offered himself for us, to serve him in his power in the world.

Our Anglican Heritage: (15) Morning & Evening Prayer

Following the Exhortation, in logical sequence, the services of Morning and Evening Prayer set out to do what it proposes. It is suitable that worship should begin with a public confession of sin. Like Isaiah in the temple, as soon as we enter God’s presence we become conscious of our unworthiness and of the sin that pollutes our being: “Woe is me, for I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell among a people of unclean lips.” Following the imagery of Isaiah 53:6, we confess that we have strayed from God’s ways and that we stand in need of his mercy and restoration. The words of absolution are from Ezekiel 33:11, “As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live.”

Having confessed our sin and been assured of God’s forgiveness, we are ready to sing God’s praise in canticle and psalm. In the course of a short series of versicles and responses we move from our knees in penitence to our feet in worship and adoration. From the beginning, Cranmer allowed for a variety of canticles to be said or sung at Morning and Evening Prayer. For the most part they are biblical material, taken from the Psalms (Venite, Jubilate Deo) and the Gospels (Benedictus, Magnificat, Nunc Dimittis).

The Te Deum Laudamus (“We praise thee, O God…”) is an ancient song of the church, traditionally ascribed to St Ambrose and St Augustine on the occasion of the latter’s baptism. The Benedicite, Omnia Opera (Song of the Three Children) is the apocryphal account of the song of praise uttered by Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery flames of Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace.

It was Cranmer’s original intention that the entire Psalter be recited once a month and the whole Bible be read in the course of a year at Morning and Evening Prayer. This meant that a considerable proportion of the services was taken up with the reading of Scripture. Successive revisions of the lectionary have reduced the amount of Scripture that is read at each service. It may have been that Cranmer was asking for too much from the beginning. Yet I cannot help but fear that in our world of sensory overstimulation we have lost the art of listening to, meditating upon and taking in longer passages of the Bible.

The proper response to God’s word is faith, and this is expressed liturgically in the recitation of the Apostles’ Creed following the lessons. Hammered out of the early controversies of Christian history, the creeds provide a useful summary of the content of Christian faith. While the creeds are formulaic at best, they do afford us the opportunity, within the context of worship, to give testimony to the faith that is within us and to confess with our lips that Jesus is Lord.

The word of God not only shapes our faith. It also leads us into prayer. In the Book of Common Prayer, our intercessions and thanksgivings begin with the Lord’s Prayer; in the Book of Alternative Services they conclude with it. Either way, by reciting that prayer we are acknowledging our dependence on Christ and our desire to be led by him and to pray as he would have us pray. Usually the prayers are in the form either of a litany (a series of biddings and responses) or of collects.

The collect could be said to be a classic Anglican form of prayer. The general pattern of a collect is to begin by addressing God, then acknowledging some aspect of his being or character (e.g., “Almighty God, from whom all holy desires, all good thoughts, and all just works do proceed…). The address is leads into a petition (“Give unto thy servants that peace which the world cannot give…”), followed by an aim or object (“that our hearts may be set to obey thy commandments…”). Finally there is a concluding phrase (most often “through Jesus Christ our Lord”) and sometimes a doxology (e.g., “to whom be glory for ever and ever”).

Not all collects follow this pattern slavishly. Some begin with a petition; others contain a number of petitions; still others are mainly praise. However, their brevity makes them memorable. It also enables the congregation to follow them easily and therefore to join heartily in the “Amen” at the conclusion.

Dyson Hague summarized the service of Morning Prayer under four p’s, which reveal the logic of the service and make it easy to remember: penitence, praise, proclamation and prayer.

Our Anglican Heritage: (14) Common Prayer

When Thomas Cranmer set about preparing the Book of Common Prayer, one of his goals was that prayer and the regular reading of Scripture should be exercises in which the whole people of England were engaged. This he sought to accomplish by five means: the rendering of the services into plain English; the reduction of the number of daily services from seven to two; the streamlining of the lectionary; the simplification of the services themselves; and the placing of the straightforward reading of the Bible as the centerpiece of each.

Much of the rationale for this is explained in a document that can be found in the back of our Prayer Book and deserves a full reading: the Preface to the First Book of Common Prayer (1549). Another statement worthy of study, no longer in the Episcopal Prayer Book but still found in the Canadian book of 1962, is “Of Ceremonies: why some be abolished and some retained”.

Here Cranmer explains the abuses which had gradually been allowed to encrust the ancient services, to the point where they had become filled with legendary and virtually impossible to follow. In place of these Cranmer offered services which gave pride of place to the clear and straightforward reading of Scripture and which were themselves biblically based.

So here you have an order for prayer, and for the reading of the holy Scripture, much agreeable to the mind and purpose of the old Fathers, and a great deal more profitable and commodious, than that which of late was used … and nothing is ordained to be read, but the very pure word of God, the holy Scriptures, or that which is agreeable to the same; and that in such a language and order as is most easy and plain for the understanding both of the readers and hearers.

Not only did Cranmer give central place to the reading of Scripture, he made certain that the services themselves were scriptural. The result is that our services of Morning and Evening Prayer are a carefully arranged catena of direct quotations from the Bible and of material based directly upon biblical imagery and teaching. For this reason the Book of Common Prayer has more than once been described (not inaccurately) as “the Bible arranged for public worship”.

The services of Morning and Evening Prayer begin with the reading of one of more sentences of Scripture. Originally these focused on the topic of repentance and forgiveness and were intended to lead directly to confession. Nowadays there is a broader range, and the opening sentences, if carefully used, can help to set forth the theme of the service from its outset. The sentences are followed by the Exhortation, which offers at its center a marvelous picture of what Christian worship involves: penitence, thanksgiving, praise, the reading of Scripture and prayer—

… humbly to acknowledge our sins before God; … to render thanks for the great benefits that we have received at his hands, to set forth his most worthy praise, to hear his most holy word, and to ask those things which are requisite and necessary, as well for the body as the soul.

Our Anglican Heritage: (13) The Anglo-Catholics

The evangelical movement brought a unique vigor to the Church of England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, literally transforming both church and nation. All this was accomplished, not through any overall political program, but largely through the endeavors of individual men and women working together in a grass-roots level. This strength proved also to be its greatest weakness. The lack of internal cohesion meant that in many places the movement lost its original animus within a generation or two. At its worst, lack of cohesion led to suspicion, divisiveness and party spirit.

The evangelicals also failed to respond to two other movements which were gaining in popularity: Romanticism and the challenges being posed to the biblical record by scientific discovery. By the late nineteenth century evangelicals had moved almost entirely into a defensive posture. No longer leaders and innovators, they were perceived as reactionary and old-fashioned—a state of affairs that was to continue for the better part of a century.

At the same time, new winds were beginning to blow through the church. The voices of young Oxford men like John Henry Newman (1801-1890), Frederick William Faber (1814-1863) and Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-1882) were beginning to be heard. These men and their cohorts were all scholars of great ability. They had been deeply affected by the Romantic movement in art and literature. And they sensed the loss of vitality in the church with the wane of the evangelical movement.

Their esthetic sense led them to want to return to the church some of the beauty and grandeur of the medieval period, which they equated with the current practices of the Church of Rome. To disseminate their views, they began publishing a series of Tracts for the Times in 1833. The tracts came to an abrupt end in 1841 with Tract 90, in which Newman sought to reinterpret the Thirty-Nine Articles in such a way that they did not conflict with Roman Catholicism. The publication of this tract led to a storm of controversy, and Newman left the Church of England for the Roman Catholic Church in 1845.

Gradually, over the course of the next century what had been seen as the dangerous eccentricities of the early Anglo-Catholics became accepted practice within the Church of England. Neo-gothic church buildings, coloured vestments, candles on the holy table, weekly communion services and even holy water and incense became incorporated into the Anglican ethos.

These changes did not occur, however, without a great deal of controversy, and the battles continued throughout the Anglican Communion to well into the twentieth century. In the intervening years the church has generally come to recognize the contribution made by Anglo-Catholicism. Ironically, many evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics have found common cause in taking a stand against the wave of theological liberalism which began sweeping through the church for nearly a generation.

Our Anglican Heritage: (12) The Evangelicals

While Wesley remained a loyal Anglican, he recognized that Church of England polity (not to mention the outright hostility with which many in the church looked upon him) was hampering the progress of his work, particularly in the American colonies. This, coupled with his awareness that the New Testament does not distinguish between bishops (overseers) and priests (elders), led him to ordain preachers to forward the ministry. With this came the founding of Methodism as a denomination separate from the Anglican Church—and very much to the loss of both.

Concurrent with the Wesleys’ ministry, there was a growing evangelical presence in the mainstream of the Church of England. The gospel was being preached with a new conviction and fervency and church members were beginning to come to a new awareness of their call to be salt and light in society.

One example of early evangelicalism is Charles Simeon (1759-1836), vicar of Holy Trinity Church in Cambridge for more than fifty years. Initially his ministry met with great opposition, particularly from the moneyed classes. He was not permitted to preach there on Sunday mornings for the first twelve years of his incumbency. When he did preach on Sunday afternoons, the pews were locked and empty, leaving only the aisles for his congregation, who very soon were so numerous that they could not find room. Gradually Simeon won over his parish through his humble, generous and patient manner. Not only that, but through the presence of the university his influence spread throughout England and eventually as far as India.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries evangelicals in the Church of England took up the causes of the poor, of slaves, of child laborers and of parliamentary reform. They began to send out missionaries to bring the message of Christ to people in India, Africa and the Americas. To accomplish these tasks, they became inveterate founders of voluntary societies: the Church Society, the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor (1796), the Church Missionary Society (1799), the Religious Tract Society (1799), the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804) and the Church Pastoral-Aid Society (1836), to name just a few.

Referring to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century evangelicals, Stephen Neill quotes historians G.M. Young and W.D. Hancock:

To them, more than to any other group or party in the Church of England it was due that, in the words of two secular historians, in the middle of the nineteenth century, ‘England became, perhaps, more nearly a Christian country than she had ever been before …’

Our Anglican Heritage: (11) The Rise of Methodism

If the debate in the seventeenth century had largely been between Puritans and “high churchmen”, that of the opening years of the eighteenth century was between Trinitarians and Deists. The writings of men such as Isaac Newton and John Locke had opened up the possibility of a universe not so much governed by a personal God as much as set in motion by a kind of absent watchmaker. Such beliefs were gaining in popularity among the upper class of England, who saw them as fashionable, and also among many of the clergy of the church. A central figure in this debate was Bishop Joseph Butler (1692-1752), whose Analogy of Religion used all the powers of his great theological mind to discredit the claims of Deism. Butler’s work was significant in that he sought to use the scientific method of observation and analogy to advance Christian presuppositions.

At the same time as Butler was addressing the theological issues of Deism, William Law (1686-1761) was addressing the shallowness of much of the church’s spiritual life which had led to it in the first place. Law was a non-juror, but his Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life was picked up, read and absorbed by many within the church. He advocated self-denial, personal holiness, humility and self-control in a life lived wholly to the glory of God.

One of those who read Law and took his message to heart was George Whitefield (1714-1770). Whitefield was a fervent and eloquent preacher, the like of whom England had not known in a very long time. His sermons brought such heartfelt reactions from their hearers that crowds that gathered were too large for most church buildings. This led Whitefield to begin preaching in the open air, a practice he continued with great success in both England and the American colonies for thirty years.

Today George Whitefield’s name is little known, eclipsed by his considerably more famous contemporaries, John (1703-1791) and Charles (1707-1788) Wesley. The Wesleys were Church of England clergymen who, like many of their day, longed for an experiential faith, one which touched the heart and not merely the mind. After a disastrous ministry in Georgia with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, they returned to England in 1738. In his journal John Wesley wrote, “I went to America to convert the Indians; but oh! who shall convert me? … I have a fair summer religion. I can talk well; nay, and believe myself, while no danger is near; but let death look me in the face, and my spirit is troubled…” Wesley’s sought-after conversion occurred in the spring of that year when he attended a lecture on Romans given by a Moravian preacher. He wrote,

… while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.

Wesley soon began to follow the pattern of Whitefield, not limiting his preaching to church pulpits, but going where the people were, to the open air, where they listened to him and responded to his message in the tens of thousands. Greater perhaps than his gift of preaching was Wesley’s organizational ability. He recognized that those who were turning to Christ needed ongoing encouragement (which in most cases they were unlikely to find in their parish churches). He organized his followers into classes, which met regularly for Bible study, prayer and growth in practical holiness. It was this disciplined “method” which gave rise to the nickname “Methodist”.

Our Anglican Heritage: (10) The Puritans and the Restoration of the Monarchy

Sadly, men like Donne, Herbert and Andrewes were not typical of the church at the time, which was rife with patronage, corruption and abuse. This did not go unnoticed by Puritans such as John Milton, who longed for a more godly church and railed against “swan-eating, canary-sucking bishops”. Nor did they escape the gaze of William Laud (1573-1645), Archbishop of Canterbury during the reign of Charles I. While Laud shared the Puritans’ disgust at these abuses, his vision of the church could not have been less like theirs. He dreamed of a holy church, a glorious church, a powerful church, and he set about to fashion it that way.

One element in this was ferocious persecution of the Puritans. Stephen Neill documents the punishment of Alexander Leighton, a Doctor of Divinity sixty years of age, who was not only fined $10,000 and sentenced to life imprisonment for his writings, but “for further punishment and example to others, to be brought to the pillory at Westminster and there whipped, and after his whipping to be set upon the pillory for some convenient space, and have one of his ears cut off, and his nose slit, and be branded on the face with a double S.S. for a sower of sedition … and at some other convenient time afterwards, shall be carried into the pillory at Cheapside upon a market day, and there be likewise whipped, and then be set upon a pillory and have his other ear cut off.” With this just ninety years after the burning of Ridley, Latimer , Hooper and Cranmer, one can only realize how little had been learned from history.

Laud further alienated the people by setting about the reclamation of church lands taken away during the reign of Henry VIII and now in the hands of laymen and the establishment of the Book of Common Prayer and episcopal government in the Church of Scotland. One curious aspect of this was the production of the Scottish Prayer Book in 1637—a book which was clearly a reversion to some of the practices of 1549. Reaction to it was so averse that it hardly saw use. In later years, however, it would become the basis of the official service book of the Episcopal Church of Scotland and form the basis of the Prayer Book of the Episcopal Church in the United States. In addition, Laud commanded that all churches in England should no longer place their communion tables the nave or chancel but place permanently them against the east wall, surrounded by a rail.

The repressive measures of Laud and Charles I led not to obedience on the part of the people but to revolution. Both men were toppled from power in 1641 and later tried and executed for treason. For the next nearly twenty years, during the Commonwealth period under Oliver Cromwell, the Prayer Book was banned, bishops were banished from their sees and the Church of England was presbyterian in its government.

Oliver Cromwell’s power was always fragile, however, and it was not long after his death that the monarchy was re-established under Charles II in 1660. The future of the church was negotiated at the Savoy Conference of the following year. To its discredit the church listened to the Puritans as little as it had at Hampton Court. The result was an Act of Uniformity in which the Church of England which looked substantially as it had before the Commonwealth period—only this time more than two thousand Puritan clergy were deprived of their parishes. This victory of the “high church” party not only deprived the church of some of its most gifted and committed clergy. It also meant the effective beginning of that tragedy of division in the church which we call denominationalism. One of those excluded from the Church of England was Richard Baxter (1615-1691), whose Saints’ Everlasting Rest and The Reformed Pastor are still in print and stand as classic works of Christian devotion.

The close of the seventeenth century saw yet another division in the church, and this time it was not Puritans, but “high churchmen” who were the victims. The issue was the deposition of James II, the Roman Catholic successor of Charles II, and the enthronement of William and Mary. A number of bishops and clergy refused to see them as rightfully occupying the throne and would not swear allegiance to them. These “non-jurors” (more than four hundred in all) were removed from their church benefices, but continued as a church of their own for more than a hundred years.

Our Anglican Heritage: (9) The Caroline Divines

We are going to race through two and a half centuries of history in a matter of a few short paragraphs. It will be a little like rushing quickly through a picture gallery, but perhaps we may have time to stop and look for a few moments at least at some of the more prominent portraits.

We begin in 1603 with the accession to the throne of James I. Within the church many of the competing forces which had been held in balance under Elizabeth were looking for power and James had hardly been crowned when he was presented with the Millenary Petition, a moderate request on the part of many of Puritan conviction for some changes to the church. Because he was Scottish and had lived all his life under Presbyterian influence, the Puritans may have expected the king to be sympathetic to their case. The reality was quite the opposite. In January 1604, a conference was held at Hampton Court, at which the king made his sympathies clear. “If this is all they have to say, I will make them conform themselves or I will harry them out of this land or else do worse.”

James’ high-handed treatment of the Puritans succeeded only in alienating a large portion of the populace, who once had been loyal to both church and king. The Hampton Court Conference did make one major accomplishment, however. It set in motion a new translation of the Bible, the Bible which has left an imprint on the English language no less than that of Shakespeare and the Book of Common Prayer and which we now call the King James Version.

One who played a major part in the final editing of the King James Bible was Bishop Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626). Like Jewel and Hooker before him Andrewes developed a powerful apologetic for Anglicanism, this time based not on reason but on history and tradition. Like the work of Jewel and Hooker it was measured an irenic in tone and held a place for those who did not share his belief in the episcopate: “Even if our order be admitted to be of divine authority, it does not follow that without it there can be no salvation, or that without it a church cannot stand. Only a blind man could fail to see churches standing without it. Only a man of iron could deny that salvation is to be found within them.” Andrewes is perhaps best known for a work that appeared after his death, a collection of remarkable private devotions entitled Preces Privatæ, whose prayers have found a use in the church second only to the Book of Common Prayer.

Contemporary with Andrewes was John Donne (1573-1631), dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, whose sermons and poetry reveal a depth of passionate conviction that would be remarkable in any age, expressed in an eloquence that has never been surpassed. The dark themes of sin, judgement and death give a sombre background to the message of Christ’s redemption.

The reign of James I saw the flowering of another of brilliant poet in the person of George Herbert (1593-1633). A country parson who faithfully drew his parish together for prayers twice daily, Herbert’s poetry gives voice to a deep and abiding love for Christ and for his church.

Our Anglican Heritage: (8) The Elizabethan Settlement

When Elizabeth I was crowned, England, far from enjoying the strength and stability of her father Henry VIII, was a weak and divided nation. It is difficult to determine precisely where Elizabeth’s deepest sympathies lay. Certainly she oversaw the re-introduction of the Book of Common Prayer to the English Church. Yet she herself was known to persist in a number of practices decried as “Catholic” at the time. No doubt she recognized that Mary’s disastrous reign had succeeded only in making England irreversibly Protestant.

One issue that had to be dealt with early in Elizabeth’s reign was the Prayer Book. There were still many who were not satisfied with Cranmer’s work. On one side there were those who would have wished for something more “Catholic”, more in line with the traditional practice of the church as they knew it. On the other were those who would become known as Puritans, who longed for a book that gave full expression to the doctrines of the Continental Reformation as many of them had experienced it during their years of exile.

The result was a compromise, a book that differed in few (but significant) respects from Cranmer’s work of 1552. Once again we might look at the words of administration of holy communion to perceive the flavor of the new book. This time the words of 1549 (“The body of our Lord Jesus Christ which was given for you…”) were attached to those of 1552 (“Take and eat this in remembrance…”). The result was a set of words which, though cumbersome, gave expression to both God’s gracious initiative and our faithful response.

A measure of what had happened in Elizabeth’s reign can also be found in what we know as the “Thirty-Nine Articles” of Religion. During the reign of Edward VI Thomas Cranmer had formulated forty-two such articles, setting forth the position of the Church of England both as in continuity with the most ancient practices of the church and as a thoroughly Reformed body. These articles were edited and revised, seven of them removed entirely and four added. The result is a carefully worded document, showing the Church of England to have chosen a “middle way” between the perceived excesses of the mediæval Roman Church on the one hand and the “left wing” of the Reformation, or Anabaptists, on the other. While there is much in the Articles that relates to the debates of a former century, they emphasize Christ’s all-sufficient sacrifice on the cross, the centrality of faith and the supreme authority of holy Scripture in all matters of faith and life.

Neither the Prayer Book nor the Thirty-Nine Articles satisfied everyone in the Church of England. Yet, if only for the moment, a measure of stability had been achieved and the groundwork had been laid for its development. We could not close our discussion of Elizabeth’s reign without the mention of two significant figures. The first of these is John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury. It may have been he who first used the term “Anglican” in its modern sense, in the title of his publication Apologia pro Ecclesia Anglicana. Taking his cue from the Elizabethan settlement, Jewel used his extensive scholarship and careful reasoning to defend the Anglican Church against the attacks of Roman Catholics on the one side and Puritans on the other.

One of his students was Richard Hooker, who was one of the most able apologists in the history of Anglicanism. In his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity he blended measured argument and biblical reasoning to defend the Church of England against the attacks of both Puritans and the Roman Church. Both Hooker and Jewel before him lay the groundwork for that irenical faith which carefully and sympathetically seeks to see an argument from both sides, measures it against the standard of Scripture (properly understood) and seeks to arrive at a middle way, avoiding legalism on the one hand and antinomianism on the other—an approach which represents all that I believe is best in Anglicanism.

Our Anglican Heritage: (7) The Reign of Queen Mary

While events were moving apace on the liturgical front, all was not well in the political realm. Within months of the Accession of Edward VI to the throne, Protector Somerset’s position of power had been usurped by the rapacious Duke of Northumberland. Although a man of avowedly Protestant sympathies, Northumberland was far more interested in amassing power and wealth for himself, with the result that corruption and the abuse of power were rife throughout the land. This meant that as long as it did not affect public justice and morality, the Reformation was prevented from taking hold in any sweeping and all-inclusive sense.

In any case, the reign of the sickly Edward was not to last for long. A scant eighteen months after the introduction of the Second Prayer Book, the king succumbed to his final illness, a lad of just sixteen. He was succeeded on the throne by his half-sister, Mary Tudor, daughter of Catherine of Aragon. Throughout the reign of Edward Mary had remained loyal to the Pope. Perhaps more significantly she had witnessed her mother being cruelly pushed from her throne and for twenty years had suffered the ignominy of being viewed as illegitimate. Now her hour of ascendancy had arrived, and the bloodiest chapter in the history of England was begun.

Mary lost no time in re-establishing ties with Rome. The Prayer Book of 1552 was rescinded. Cranmer and the other Protestant bishops were removed from their sees and more than a fifth of the clergy from their parishes as heretics, many of them fleeing for safety into exile on the European continent.

Soon Thomas Cranmer, along with fellow bishops John Hooper, Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, were brought to trial for promulgating their Protestant teachings, and sentenced to death by burning. The story of Archbishop Cranmer is particularly poignant. Under conditions of extreme deprivation and weakness, he was induced to sign a document recanting of his Protestant convictions. It did not take him long to recognize the enormity of what he had done and he revoked his recantation with the words,

And now I come to the great thing which so troubleth my conscience, more than any other thing that I said or did in my life: and that is my setting abroad of writings contrary to the truth, which things here now I renounce and refuse, as things written with my hand contrary to the truth which I thought in my heart… And forasmuch as my hand offended in writing contrary to my heart, it shall be first burned.

On 21 March 1556 in Oxford Thomas Cranmer was led to the stake. In his History of the Christian Martyrs John Foxe, a contemporary, reports,

And when the wood was kindled, and the fire began to burn near him, he stretched forth into the flames his right hand, which had signed his recantation, and there held it so steadfastly, that the people might see it burned to a coal before his body was touched…

Five months earlier, on the same site, on 16 October 1555, Bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley had also been burned at the stake. Bishop Latimer’s words to his colleague, reported again by John Foxe, deserve to be quoted: “Be of good comfort, Mr Ridley, and play the man! We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.”

In addition to these brave bishops, more than three hundred Protestants and Protestant sympathizers were put to death in Mary’s bloody reign. Mercifully that reign was short. What it achieved in its course of five years was not to retrieve England for Roman Catholicism but to seal the English Reformation with the blood of martyrs.

Our Anglican Heritage: (6) The Second Prayer Book (1552)

It may have been that Cranmer already had a second book in mind. In any case, a second Prayer Book did appear in 1552, incorporating a multitude of major revisions. The two daily services (now called simply “Morning Prayer” and “Evening Prayer”) were transformed into clearly congregational acts of worship (rather than private devotional offices) by the addition of an Exhortation, General Confession and Absolution at the beginning.

The changes to the Holy Communion service were considerably more extensive. Stone altars were to be removed from the “east” end of churches, to be replaced by a simple wooden table in the front of the Nave, around which the congregation could gather at communion time and with the celebrant in clear sight of the people and dressed in the simplest of robes.

The nine-fold “Kyrie” was replaced by the Ten Commandments, unquestionably influenced by the Continental Reformation. The Intercession or Prayer for the Church was now a Prayer for the Church Militant here in earth, with any prayer for the dead clearly expunged. It was removed from the Great Thanksgiving and placed in its now familiar position following the Offertory, which was no longer an offering of the elements of bread and wine, but an opportunity for members of the congregation to share their goods with the poor of the parish.

The Invitation, Confession, Absolution and Comfortable Words were shifted from their place immediately before the administration of communion to an earlier point in the service, immediately before the “Sursum Corda”. Interestingly, the Prayer of Humble Access now followed the Sanctus. This detached the reference to Christ’s body and blood from immediate reference to the bread and wine of Holy Communion, a reference which Cranmer had never intended in the first place.

Most significantly, Cranmer made the reception of the bread and wine by the people the climax of the service. He achieved this by abruptly chopping the Eucharistic Prayer in two, so that immediately following our Lord’s words of institution and without even so much as an “Amen” the people receive the bread and wine. Then they say the Lord’s Prayer together and the Eucharistic Prayer concludes with a prayer either of oblation (self-offering) or of thanksgiving.

Nobody knows precisely why Cranmer followed this with the “Gloria in Excelsis”, transferred from its traditional place at the outset of the service. However, many presume that it was because, just before they went out from the last supper, our Lord and his disciples “sang a hymn”. Whatever the motive, the Gloria helps to conclude the service on a note of praise, echoing as it does both the hymn of the angels at Jesus’ birth and John the Baptist’s proclamation of him as the incomparable Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. After this act of praise, the congregation departs with a blessing.

A graphic illustration of the difference between the Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552 can be observed in the words of administration at Holy Communion. In 1549 these had been, “The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life.” In 1552 they became, “Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving.” The worshipper had moved from being a passive recipient of the sacrament to an active participant, required to take the bread into his or her hands and, more significantly, to receive it with a heart of grateful faith in the Lord who gave up his life for him on the cross.