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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
The uniformity of worship which we accept as part of the Anglican tradition was an entirely new idea when it was introduced in the sixteenth century. Few had asked for a single book of worship, but it was enforced by top-down, often draconian measures. This article traces the changing circumstances which have led to the loss of such uniformity not only in England, but in the worldwide Anglican Communion. In this process the equation of Anglican identity with a particular liturgical ethos may have disappeared. That process can be illustrated from the experience of the last Lambeth Conference.
1. This is the secondary Preface, entitled ‘Concerning the Service of the Church’, which comes at the front of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, though, being substantially unchanged from 1549, it reads exclusively as a document introducing such a Book for the first time.
2. I use here and in later quotes from Cranmer's Prayer Books the spelling in the Everyman edition of The First and Second Prayer Books of Edward VI (London: J.M. Dent, 1910).Google Scholar
3. This whole sentence is, of course, mendacious – it is always cheaper to keep the books you already have than to destroy them and buy a replacement. It is one of the very few sentences which, although it is there in 1552, does not recur in 1662.
4. The evidence that it was not wanted became very strong in the demands of the Cornish and Devon rebels in 1549.
5. The text of the Royal Proclamation is available in Buchanan, Colin (ed.), Background Documents to Liturgical Revision 1547–1549 (Grove Liturgical Study, 35; Bramcote: Grove Books, 1983).Google Scholar
6. It will be recalled that the Directory of Worship in the Three Kingdoms (the Westminster directory) in 1645 had a kind of outline structure for worship, but no texts.
7. See Buchanan, C., The Savoy Conference Revisited (Cambridge: Alcuin/GROW Joint Liturgical Study No. 54, 2002).Google Scholar
8. Rubrics in 1662 specifically restored the option of singing the psalms, creeds and litany, though the provision that Bible passages could be intoned was now dropped.
9. This is somewhat different from Luther's provision of a hymn for each Sunday of the year, composed by authority and authorized with the liturgy.
10. Of course, in home after home, the Bible was being taken aboard, often by verbatim learning by heart. But rhythm, metre and music combine to plant the word very deeply into people's lives.
11. Archdeacon Dennison (for his quasi-Roman doctrine of the eucharist), Gorham (for his evangelical doctrine of baptism), and H.B. Wilson (of Essays and Reviews, for his modernism). Each escaped condemnation, though by differing means, when the final verdict came in.
12. Most of the arguments surrounded the question of the permanent reservation of consecrated sacramental elements. The evangelicals opposed it altogether, while the Anglo-Catholics sought liberty for every priest to reserve at will, and for a number of extra-liturgical devotions to be associated with the reserved elements.
13. It was this blind eye which enabled clergy to use a marriage rite which spoke of ‘natural instincts and affections implanted by God’ rather than not behaving ourselves ‘like brute beasts which have no understanding’ in which sexual relationships are ‘a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication’.
14. Coleman, R. (ed.), Resolutions of the Twelve Lambeth Conferences, 1867–1988 (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1992), p. 31.Google Scholar
15. The actual occasion of this was the drafting of a modern funeral service. I was calling for a rubric which said ‘Suitable prayers may here be said’, and arguing for it on two wholly different grounds—first, that all funeral services differ according to both the circumstances of the death and the pastoral needs of the mourners, and there was no way we could anticipate all those needs with accurately targeted prayers to be authorized by General Synod; and, secondly, that this was the best way to handle issues of petitions for the departed, which we did not then have to agree by majority voting or something of that sort, but could leave the text without any official endorsement of controversial and divisive texts.
