Article
- Date:
- Sunday 30th June 2024
- Place:
- St Peter's, Woodmancote
- Service:
- BCP Evensong
In the latter years of the reign of the psychopath King Henry VIII, the more powerful you were, the less safe: the seductive Queen Anne Boleyn, in spite of bearing Henry his first son, had her head cut off; Thomas Cromwell, his Chief Minister, had his head cut off; and Archbishop Cranmer, with his clandestine marriage and his Lutheran tendencies, hardly knew where he was. When henry was on his deathbed the doctrine was Catholic, the worship was in Latin and he was re-negotiating England's reunion with Rome. This was no time for a theological council when Henry could change his mind at any time, so a Protestant confession of faith was out of the question. Under the reign of Edward VI's Regents the prospects were not much better and so the idea of a prayer book was born; The English Church would be what it prayed: slavishly Erastian, committed to atonement theology first developed by Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury, and equivocally Eucharistic. But the moderate First Prayer Book was soon replaced by a much more Puritan revision. Then followed Catholic Mary and the burning of Archbishop Cranmer and many martyrs, including our two of Woodmancote; and, finally, Queen Elizabeth I restored the Prayer Book as an instrument of theological encompassment. The BCP was, then, a political as well as a theological instrument whose main purpose was unifying compromise or, its critics would say, theological fudging. You only have to think of the prayer before Communion "Draw near with faith", for example, to see that it both refers to the Catholic tradition of the "real presence" and the Zwinglian formula of The Lord's supper as solely a memorial where the receiver's faith, not the action of the Holy Spirit (Epiklesis), through the Priest, makes the Sacrament effective. A critic might see this as shameless, but it kept most people in the new, broad Church.
For the record, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion were, and are, at best a random collection of cynical and garbled propositions, much less important than the BCP but, like the Creeds, too entrenched to be updated.
This Book also survived, with minor alterations in its Elizabethan form, for 400 years, which lent it a permanence and reliability in the face of increasingly rapid change: it mattered not that Charles Darwin as geologist and biologist had fractured the paradigm of the Garden of Eden, the worship never changed. Even the Eucharistic revival of the Oxford Movement did not alter the text. Thirdly, the fusion of Anglo Saxon and Norman French which showed its potential in Chaucer reached its zenith at this time, laying the ground for Shakespeare. The language was beautifully vivid yet poised, Cranmer's Collects, for instance, pivoting at the half-way point as beautifully as Shakespeare's pivot in his Sonnets after the eighth line. But even its most faithful adherents need to make a considerable effort to understand its language.
But these very virtues are the Book's potential vices. Taking the last factor first, people can be so seduced by the beautiful language that they hardly notice the theology. The Collects, for example, are much more concerned with an "almighty" than with a "Loving" god. Thus, the BCP and the Authorised Version can become yoked as objects of beauty and not instruments of worship.
Secondly, the very stability of the Book means that its 16th Century concerns predominate: the emphasis on the sanctity of civic power, the uncontested acceptance of atonement, and Eucharistic equivocation. Theology has moved on from Reformation pugilism, leaving room for fruitful discussions on the nature of ecclesiastical authority, the understanding of Eucharist, the nature of diverse faithfulness and the role of women. For a Church which claims that Eucharistic Consecration is not Priestly and that Reconciliation is not a Sacrament, it is remarkably clerical, inheriting the Medieval Catholic obsession with sin, identifying worshippers primarily as sinners as a means of emphasising clerical power.
On an ethical level, contemporary concerns with social justice, sexuality and gender, medical ethics and ecology must be dealt with, if at all, in improvised prayers.
Thus, we will continue to value the BCP for what it is but we must see it in a wider context of worship and mission. What we value should always be what we would most wish to share rather than that which we most wish to hoard. The proper solace we gain through the beauty of worship must be a means to an end and not an end in itself. Prayer should always send us out, not shut us in. Lamentation and joy are essentially social not private. We are not lowly supplicants in a hierarchically Christian closed shop, we are disciples in a bewilderingly pluralist society where every soul counts. The efficacy of any worship is judged by how it influences our mission.