The Canterbury Trail: worship and reformation

Robert Webber

Modern Reformation recently published an article by Gillis Harp with a very long title: Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail: Reflections on the Pilgrimage to Anglicanism Nearly 40 Years After Webber’s Classic. Although I am not an Anglican, I read Robert Webber's book, Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail: Why Evangelicals Are Attracted to the Liturgical Church, and I found myself deeply sympathetic to his concerns. In fact, I have worshipped in Anglican and Episcopal churches at various times throughout my life, most recently between 2003 and 2008 when our family attended regularly the Church of St. John the Evangelist here in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

I did not know Webber very well personally, although I grew up in Wheaton, Illinois, home of Wheaton College, where he taught for many years. But he was a colleague of my wife, who was a faculty member in the same department for six years, and he was a guest at our wedding. I also contributed at least two articles to his Complete Library of Christian Worship. What drew many Christians to his project to recover the ancient glories of Christian worship was a recognition of the superficiality of their own traditions. As Harp observes,

Initial pilgrims to Anglicanism were not from confessional Protestant traditions but from revivalist and fundamentalist churches—communities that are typically independent/non-denominational, dispensational, or charismatic/Pentecostal. Webber himself was a graduate of the uber-fundamentalist Bob Jones University in 1956. Fundamentalist churches tend to see their tribe as the pure descendants of the early church, and they view other traditions with deep suspicion. As a movement, fundamentalism is deeply sectarian; it confuses major doctrinal issues with minor ones and makes minor disagreements into reasons to break fellowship. For understandable reasons, these tendencies have tended to rub many Canterbury pilgrims the wrong way.

 But might Webber have captured only a narrow slice of Anglicanism? Harp thinks so.

Many will not find these critiques of American evangelicalism to be surprising. What’s surprising are the features that are missing from typical Anglican pilgrimage accounts: any reference to the English Reformation or to evangelical Anglicans.

A Wheaton colleague once remarked to the Canterbury Trail author: “Webber, you act like there never was a Reformation.” Though they’ve rightly bewailed their churches’ lack of historical understanding, Canterbury pilgrims have shown little interest in the leading lights of the English Reformation, except for Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. Even those who speak of Cranmer rarely explore his theology in any depth. Curiously, Anglican pilgrims also rarely referenced prominent Anglican evangelicals like John Stott, J.I. Packer, and the lesser-known Michael Green.

Though these three evangelicals were all renowned Church of England clergy, they seldom spoke at Episcopal gatherings in the United States. Their low-church Protestantism stands in stark contrast to the Episcopal clergy discussed in the first edition of Webber’s Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail. Webber mentioned a handful of Anglo-Catholic clergy, including the Bishop of Chicago, James Montgomery, a strong proponent of liturgical revision. This neglect of Anglican evangelicals, the Protestant Reformers generally, and of the Anglican church’s Reformation formularies (the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, Ordinal, 39 Articles of Religion, and two Books of Homilies) is telling.

Although it's been decades since I read Webber's book, I did not pick up an hostility to the Reformation in its pages. True, I cannot recall him mentioning Cranmer or King Edward VI, Henry VIII's short-lived male heir. Webber did not make much of the specifics of English history without which Anglicanism in its current form cannot be adequately understood. Yet I assumed that he accepted the truth of the Reformation and its doctrines of grace, coming as they did in response to the corruptions of the late mediæval church. Seeking a form of worship with deep historical roots need not entail a neglect, much less repudiation, of the Reformation.

Speaking for myself, as I became acquainted with the Book of Common Prayer in its various editions, I was struck by the evidently Reformed character of the 39 Articles, which I was later disappointed to learn were regarded by many Episcopalians as merely an historical document with no apparent binding status on clergy and laity. Moreover, it seemed obvious that the BCP's eucharistic theology was congruent with Calvin's, and possibly even Zwingli's, as seen in its Communion liturgy's focus on remembrance:

Take and eat in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy hearts with faith and thanksgiving. . . . Drink this in remembrance that Christ's blood was shed for thee, and be thankful.

Webber did not lead me to Anglicanism per se, much less to an Anglican communion, a mid-19th-century invention. But reading his books did help me to understand the extent to which some of the Reformers of the 16th century had got things wrong, especially with respect to the church's historic liturgies. In any effort to reform the church, would-be reformers must differentiate between what legitimately belongs to the tradition to which they are heir and what are unbiblical accretions. This requires knowledge of what the ancient church was like and how it worshipped the triune God.

Hippolytus of Rome

Unfortunately, the Reformers did not have access to the most ancient sources which we know today. For example, the Apostolic Tradition of Hyppolytus was rediscovered only in the 19th century and was thus unavailable to Luther, Calvin, Bucer, and others. This 3rd-century church order and liturgy clearly shows the origins of the western and eastern liturgies as they would develop over the next eighteen centuries. A close examination of the Apostolic Tradition and similar early documents indicates that many of the Reformers unduly disposed of much that should have been retained, rejecting some of the substance of the tradition along with the accretions.

Here is the Apostolic Tradition's eucharistic prayer:

When he has been made bishop, everyone shall give him the kiss of peace, and salute him respectfully, for he has been made worthy of this. Then the deacons shall present the oblation to him, and he shall lay his hand upon it, and give thanks, with the entire council of elders, saying:

The Lord be with you.
And all reply:
And with your spirit.
The bishop says:
Lift up your hearts.
The people respond:
We have them with the Lord.
The bishop says:
Let us give thanks to the Lord.
The people respond:
It is proper and just.
The bishop then continues:

We give thanks to you God,
through your beloved son Jesus Christ . . . .

If the Apostolic Tradition was lost to the Reformers, its liturgical rubrics and texts survived in both the western and eastern rites of the historic church and were thus available to the Reformers of the 16th century in that form. Indeed, Cranmer and Luther retained much of the ordinary of the mass, removing its accretions, translating it into their respective vernacular languages, and prescribing it for use in the churches for which they were responsible.

Zwingli and Calvin took a different approach, rejecting much of the ordinary of the mass even if they retained the basic shape of the liturgy. In his 1542 liturgy of the Lord's Supper, Calvin replaced the simple dialogue at the beginning of the eucharistic prayer with a lengthy didactic monologue which he averred to be "selon la coustume de l'église ancienne"—"according to the custom of the ancient church"—yet neglecting the evidence of ancient usage in the existing rites. Although I believe Calvin to be closer to the mark than Luther on a variety of issues, I think Luther's, as well as Cranmer's, approach to the liturgy was more faithful to the biblically-shaped ancient tradition.

Did Webber neglect the English Reformation in his writings? Perhaps he made too little of it. I do not recall him mentioning metrical psalmody, which was integral to the Church of England's worship until the end of the 18th century. Yet I do believe that his emphasis on recovering the common roots of the churches' liturgies was a needed one, especially for those in the free churches whose liturgies were shaped by revivalism and congregational independence.