Last month I acquired two fascinating books which I strongly recommend to Christians from a variety of traditions interested in the church's liturgy: Alan Jacobs, The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography, and Zac Hicks, Worship by Faith Alone: Thomas Cranmer, The Book of Common Prayer, and the Reformation of Liturgy. Although both writers take on the same subject, they approach it in quite different ways. Both volumes made for pleasurable reading over the Christmas holidays, and they prompted me to reflect further on the relationship between how we worship and how we live our lives before the face of God.
Cranmer began with the ancient Sarum rite, associated with the city of Salisbury, but he didn't just translate that rite into English. He heavily edited it in accordance with the principles of the Reformation, leaving out, among other things, invocations of the saints and any hint of transubstantiation.
For Cranmer there was no transubstantiation, hence no Lord to be seen in the bread; instead, the traditional Mass offered at best a series of distractions from the real business of understanding and giving thanks for the grace offered to the faithful believer in Christ; at worst—and he was inclined to believe the worst—it was the sheerest idolatry (21).
For centuries, daily prayer in the monasteries had revolved around the several hours of prayer set at regular intervals throughout the day and night: "Matins (midnight); Lauds (2 a.m., or, more commonly, dawn); Prime (6 a.m.); Terce (9 a.m.); Sext (noon); Nones (3 p.m.); Vespers (6 p.m.); [and] Compline (9 p.m.)" (29). Cranmer pared these down to the two offices of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, combining Lauds and Matins in the former and Vespers and Compline in the latter. Morning and Evening Prayer were to order the lives of ordinary English believers for centuries until the 20th-century Liturgical Movement restored the Lord's Supper to a central place in an increasing number of parishes.
There are so many Bible-in-a-year plans offered to Christians both in print and online. But Cranmer's was perhaps one of the first:
In addition to having the congregation get through the whole Bible ("or the greatest part thereof") in a year, Cranmer wanted particular attention given to the Psalms, so often referred to as "the prayer book of the Bible" itself; his Kalendar outlined a schedule by which all 150 Psalms would be read each month . . . . Indeed, one could argue that Cranmer's chief reason for implementing standard liturgies was to provide a venue in which the Bible could be more widely and more thoroughly known (17).
In other words, Cranmer had a thoroughly evangelical interest in disseminating far and wide knowledge of the word of God.
For centuries the BCP was the defining constitution of the Church of England and its daughter churches planted around the world. As such, it bears a similar status to the Three Forms of Unity in the Continental Reformed churches, the Augsburg Confession in the Lutheran churches, and the Westminster standards in the Presbyterian churches. Nevertheless, Jacobs points out that the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral of 1886-88, which claimed to identify four characteristics of Anglicanism, conspicuously fails to mention it (121-122).
By this time, of course, Anglicanism was divided amongst Anglo-Catholics, low-church evangelicals, and the latitudinarian broad-church party. In the 20th century Anglican efforts at updating their liturgy were profoundly influenced by the Liturgical Movement, the Second Vatican Council, and Dom Gregory Dix's The Shape of the Liturgy (1945), the last of which gave priority to liturgical actions over the actual words of the rites. Gradually, the various branches of the Communion adopted new liturgies providing alternatives for each of the church's major worship services. In England this yielded The Alternative Service Book (1980) and Common Worship (2000), in Canada The Book of Alternative Services (1985), and in Australia A Prayer Book for Australia (1995), each of which was ostensibly to supplement but not replace the BCP. Only in the United States were the new alternative services labelled Book of Common Prayer (1979), a radical departure from the 1928 Prayer Book and a model subsequently followed by the 2019 Prayer Book of the Anglican Church in North America.
These revisions were based on the assumption that Cranmer had inaccurately understood the traditions underpinning liturgical life in England. For example, in his Holy Communion service, he curiously moved the Gloria in Excelsis from the beginning to the end, where it functioned as a post-Communion thanksgiving hymn, much as Psalm 103 functioned in Geneva and Psalm 113 in Zürich. But was there some purpose behind Cranmer's work which escaped the liturgical reformers of the last century? This takes us to Hicks's book, a fascinating analysis of the theological grammar that conditioned the Archbishop's work.
Hicks's book is an exhaustive theological study of the BCP, probing the intentions of Cranmer as he put together a collection of liturgical texts that would reinforce the principles of the Reformation and plant them in the hearts of ordinary parishioners. To do so required going through the ancient liturgies and prayers traditionally used by the English church, rendering them in a language understood by the people, and making subtle changes according to the grammar of sola fide, or faith alone.
What does Hicks mean by grammar? And how does a liturgy operate within this grammar? As Hicks puts it, "Liturgy does not explain theology. It does theology" (29). If theology is a theoretical articulation of the faith, grammar operates as a mostly tacit interpretive framework conditioning that articulation as well as the concrete ways we worship and live out our relationship with God. It is a grammar, because it operates like the rules of language, which, in ordinary conversation, we don't really think about but use all the time. As Hicks sees it, for Cranmer this grammar consists of the central message of the gospel, namely, justification by grace through faith, as opposed to anything that smacks of works righteousness. As he made his way through the liturgical texts he would put into the BCP, Cranmer was careful to distinguish between the gospel and the many not-gospels threatening to obscure the truth that we are saved by God's grace. The end result was a condensation of the multiple volumes governing mediaeval worship into a single volume clearly proclaiming "Not I, But Christ." Hicks analyzes the worship prescribed in the BCP, focussing on the structural, theological, ceremonial, devotional, and homiletic implications of "Not I, But Christ."
I especially appreciated chapter 5 in which Hicks painstakingly goes through key texts to highlight the ways that Cranmer altered the language of his source material according to the grammar of sola fide. For example, Cranmer's Collect for Purity, familiar to generations of Anglicans, is drawn from the Sarum Missal:
God, unto whom every heart is open, and all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: cleanse the thoughts of our hearts, by the infusion of thy Holy Spirit: that we may perfectly love thee, and, meritoriously, worthily magnify thee . . . .
Here is Cranmer's edited version from the 1549 edition of the BCP:
Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the i̶n̶f̶u̶s̶i̶o̶n̶ inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and m̶e̶r̶i̶t̶o̶r̶i̶o̶u̶s̶l̶y̶ worthily magnify thy holy name: through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Small changes perhaps, but significant all the same. Here's Hicks: "we might notice that Cranmer transposes infusionem into the key of sola fide by translating it as 'inspiration,' in order to avoid the medieval notion of merit based on 'infused grace'" (115). Cranmer similarly omitted meritoriously to eliminate the suggestion that we can somehow merit God's grace through our own efforts. Although I was not born and raised in the Anglican tradition, I have worshipped in Anglican churches for periods of time and managed to miss these important clues to the Archbishop's agenda. I am grateful that Hicks saw fit to make such an exhaustive study of the BCP—one which shows the continuities between the Church of England and the Reformed churches of the European continent.
There is a notion prevalent in some circles that Anglicanism is a via media between Rome and Geneva—a sort of halfway house between Catholicism and the Reformation. But, if Hicks's portrait of Cranmer is correct, then the Church of England during the 16th century may better be viewed as a via media between Geneva and Wittenberg.
On the one hand, Cranmer denied the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation. The elements of the Lord's Supper do not become Christ; rather they point to Christ, who has ascended to the right hand of the Father until his return at the end of the age: "it is not the bread and wine that are transformed into the body of Christ, but believers" (168). In this he parts, not only with Rome, but also with Luther, who believed in a localized presence of Christ in the sacrament. Here he is close to Geneva.
On the other hand, Hicks's Cranmer shares with Luther the contrast between law and gospel: the law convicts us of our sin, while in the gospel Christ offers us grace. "In the interpretation of Paul by Luther and Melanchthon, the distinction between law and gospel becomes the key to separating the gospel from not-gospels" (61). This contrast is not as prevalent in the Genevan and other non-Lutheran churches, which have emphasized the so-called third use of the law, namely, that the law is a teacher of righteousness to those forgiven of their sins and incorporated into Christ's body.
We can now see why Cranmer begins the order for the Lord's Supper with the Ten Commandments, after each of which the congregation responds with: "Lord have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law." In fact, the entire order of worship begins with penitence and a recognition of our sinfulness, moving on to a declaration of pardon, followed by a proclamation of the word in Scripture and sermon, then God's feeding us in the sacrament, and finally our expressions of thanksgiving. Hence Cranmer was not in error in moving the Gloria in Excelsis to the end of the liturgy, as some scholars have thought. He was, rather, attempting not to mislead the congregation into thinking that their sacrifice of praise somehow merits the approval of God for their worship.
Hicks ends his book with several closing suggestions for applying Cranmer's insights to contemporary worship. I was especially struck by this pointed question:
Could our musicianship as vocal leaders be so superb, could our vocal flourishes or instrumental stylings be so beautiful and virtuosic, that they shut the mouths of the singing congregation which instead stands in awe of the spectacle of the great performers up front, who are doing the work on behalf of the people? Though this draws an admittedly ambiguous and culturally relative line, perhaps those of us who lead people with our countenance and emotional expression could be more aware of the boundary between helpful emotional shepherding through example and overly intensified expressions of personal worship (however authentic they may be) which cause people to marvel at us rather than the Christ we are all worshiping (206).I find this especially convicting because, in my youth, I developed a solo-quality baritone voice which I regularly offered as "special music" in the churches of which I was part. I stopped doing this many years ago, because I indeed felt that I was drawing attention to myself rather than to the God to whom I addressed my song. I rather imagine the same could be said of many worship bands which, rather than supporting the congregation's voices, tend to dominate them. Hicks's concern may also explain why the 18th-century musicians in the English parish churches—the west gallery quires of which I wrote some months ago—were located in the back of the church, rather than the front, where the line between accompaniment and performance might tend to be blurred.
I was surprised to find out that Hicks himself is the pastor of a Presbyterian church near Birmingham, Alabama, and is a graduate of Knox Theological Seminary in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Presbyterians, especially in Scotland, have a reputation for disliking the BCP, as evidenced in the legendary story about a certain 17th-century woman, Jenny Geddes, in St. Giles Cathedral. But the continental Reformed churches have never eschewed prayer books, even if they didn't label them such, so Hicks's affinity for the BCP is by no means unprecedented in the larger Reformed tradition. Whether or not they consider themselves explicitly Reformed, all Christians with an interest in the church's worship, especially those responsible for planning it week after week, should definitely read Hicks's book, along with Jacobs' to provide the necessary historical context.
Sources:
- Hicks, Zac. Worship by Faith Alone: Thoms Cranmer, The Book of Common Prayer, and the Reformation of Liturgy. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2023.
- Jacobs, Alan. The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013.
- The 1662 Book of Common Prayer: International Edition. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021.
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