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Power and Principle: The Anglican Prayer Book Controversy, 1927-1930

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Robert Currie
Robert Currie
Affiliation:
Nuffield College, Oxford University
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Extract

By December, 1927, Church of England Prayer Book Revision was twenty-one years old. It had developed a mystique of its own. The hand of God was at once seen in its overthrow, and appeal to divine Providence does not seem far from some modern interpretations of the events of 1927-30. Anthony Howard thinks the episode reveals the Church of England “as the suffering servant of a secular state,” a curious view when the suffering Church's policy was so emphatically “‘not quite straight.’” The Liturgical Commission finds “the hand of Providence” in the failure of the bishops to carry their Book, or indeed to terminate the emergency created by this failure. Stephen Neill has another theory: that the compromises accepted in 1929-30 were, though illogical and irresolute, typical of the spirit of the nation—which had been engaged with consistency and tenacity in fierce controversy over the issue for several years before. The final proof of these appeals to national or divine wisdom is the assertion that the Book was a very poor Book anyway, though used very widely in the Church of England today.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , June 1964 , pp. 192 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1964

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125. Chr. C., 1929, no. 2, p. 39.

126. The main objections were: (i) How could a document rejected by Parliament be a doctrinal test in the Church of England? (ii) How could the Bishops, flouting the law of the land, impose law on the lawless? (iii) How could the Bishops accept practices falling within the scope of the 1928 Book, yet reject other practices no more and no less lawless? (iv) How could the Bishops appeal to the synodical authority of the 1928 Book when the 1927 Book received greater support in the Church courts? Even Sir Lewis Dibdin described the course eventually adopted by the Bishops as “wholly improper” (A Christian State, London, 1929, p. 5).Google Scholar

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