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Common Authority in the Midst of Uncommon Prayer

1662 is the Standard for ACNA

Discussion in 'Liturgy, and Book of Common Prayer' started by Magistos, Aug 11, 2019.

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  1. Magistos Active Member Anglican

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    Not sure if this should go here or in Theology and Doctrine, but I thought that this was an interesting article that clears up some questions about the 2019 BCP and what the standard is.

    Common Authority in the Midst of Uncommon Prayer
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  2. Stalwart Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Yup the 1662 is authoritative for the entire Gafcon, worldwide, as it's in its 2008 founding charter. We should do better in studying and rediscovering the beauties of the 1662 rather than trying to come up with new liturgies.
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  3. Fr. Brench Well-Known Member Anglican

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    I just read that article today, too; I thought it was great!

    The unfortunate reality though is that very few of us Americans have really looked at the 1662 prayer book very closely, so a lot of our reverence for it is only just lip service. A lot of us have a lot of learning to do if we're going to live up to what Deacon Brashier described in his article.
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  4. Shane R Well-Known Member

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    A few days ago, I learned that a jurisdiction on the fringes of the continuing movement has standardized on the 1662 and RSV-Catholic Edition. Now there's a dichotomy one does not see every day.
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  5. Magistos Active Member Anglican

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    Fr. Brench said: ↑
    I just read that article today, too; I thought it was great!

    The unfortunate reality though is that very few of us Americans have really looked at the 1662 prayer book very closely, so a lot of our reverence for it is only just lip service. A lot of us have a lot of learning to do if we're going to live up to what Deacon Brashier described in his article.
    Very true, unfortunately. I've read through the 1662, but I'll have to pull out my copy and keep it handier than I have. I'm not an ordinand in any way (though when I retire, who knows), but I do like to be informed in my faith - something that I love about Anglicanism - it encourages informed faith.
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  6. Magistos Active Member Anglican

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    Shane R said: ↑
    A few days ago, I learned that a jurisdiction on the fringes of the continuing movement has standardized on the 1662 and RSV-Catholic Edition. Now there's a dichotomy one does not see every day.
    That is definitely something.
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  7. Stalwart Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Shane R said: ↑
    A few days ago, I learned that a jurisdiction on the fringes of the continuing movement has standardized on the 1662 and RSV-Catholic Edition. Now there's a dichotomy one does not see every day.
    I mean, the criticism we saw from the Anglo-Catholics of the 1662 is really a figment of the 19th and 20th centuries. It's dying down (as we see), and it certainly didn't exist prior to the Ritualist movement of the 1850s. Nor can it be born out by the close reading of the text itself. All of their complaints about the black rubric (etc), are no closer to the truth than was the evangelical criticism of the same book as 'too catholic'. Both of those criticisms are coming from the two movements which themselves are essentially disappearing. The 1662 is still here with us, and all of a sudden more doctrinally binding now than it's been in our lifetimes.

    The fact of the matter is, the 1662 is one of the most successful liturgies in the history of Christendom, on par with the 1589 Latin rite, and the 1500s Slavonic Orthodox rite. (Luther's German Mass would've been a 4th one, if they managed to preserve it.) You simply cannot buy or manufacture centuries. If you make a liturgy now, you'll need to wait 400 more years to see if it will be as effective (in creating and nurturing faith across millions of people), as the 1662 was. This makes 1662 the gold standard. And yes I can address unfounded criticisms of the black rubric or this or that. It was all rubbish, from the pens of self-important nabobs who had left little that was eternal during their lifetimes.
    Last edited: Aug 12, 2019
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  8. PDL Active Member Anglican

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    Stalwart said: ↑
    And yes I can address unfounded criticisms of the black rubric or this or that.
    I think that would be a desperate criticism of it. If that is all one has to criticise it one does not have much criticism of it. I would hope criticisms of the BCP would go deeper than that.

    However, on a practical level I would offer that criticism not only of the BCP but any liturgical book. They are far easier to use if headings, sub-headings, etc. are in a different colour than the text. With the text itself it really does help if the rubrics (whether you make them red or not) and what is to be actually said are in different colours. As for the words to be spoken, again, a distinction between what a single priest or other minster says and all say is very helpful. I, for one, would have no issue at all if an edition of the BCP was published in this way.
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  9. Rexlion Well-Known Member

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    I'm in the Diocese of the Living Word which the article mentions. The '79 books were pulled out and replaced with the 2019 BCPs as soon as the rector got back from the conference.
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  10. Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Stalwart said: ↑
    Yup the 1662 is authoritative for the entire Gafcon, worldwide, as it's in its 2008 founding charter. We should do better in studying and rediscovering the beauties of the 1662 rather than trying to come up with new liturgies.
    Or better yet the 1549. I maintain the original still wins over the sequels.

    But seriously, there is a lot of beauty in the 1928 American BCP, there is a lot of beauty in the 1928 Deposited Book, and in the 1928 Scottish Book, and there is a lot of beauty in the 1962 Canadian Book (also the Melanesian and South African BCP editions from the early 20th century, and the Mozarabic Rite-based bilingual BCP prototype for the Anglican church in Mexico, are worth a look). These superb 20th century BCP editions were composed due to shortcomings in the liturgical services of the 1662 book which were frustrating people profoundly in the early 20th century. For that matter, the 1979 BCP can be fixed, as the Anglican Service Book demonstrates. I have to confess I don’t really care for the 2019 book that much; while it is superior to other contemporary language service books, it is still a contemporary language service book, and what is most desirable, in my opinion, is the 1662 BCP with the various enrichments which were applied in the 20th century.

    It should be stressed that of the prayer books I mentioned, the best of them, the 1928 Deposited Book, and the 1928 Scottish Book, contain everything that is in the 1662 Book; the changes are merely the addition of services like Compline, a Scottish style communion liturgy alongside the 1662 liturgy, and an office of Prime, for purposes of the recitation of Quincunque Vult.

    The Paschal services outlined in the 1979 BCP are also I would propose a great improvement; having a formally defined liturgy for certain holy days represents an enhancement.

    Meanwhile, there are a few services in the 1552 BCP which alas persisted into the 1662 edition, which do not make much sense, considering both the ancient liturgical usages of the Church, Eastern and Western, and the current considerations of pastoral care, those being the Commination and most especially the Visitation of the Sick. The improved version of the latter in the 1928 book closely resembles what one finds in ancient Euchologia, such as old Russian Orthodox Sluzhbeniks (the Book of Needs). Also, I can find no example of anything like the Commination before 1552; the closest thing would be the Anathemas sung in the Byzantine Rite on the Sunday of Orthodoxy (the first Sunday of Lent). So these two 1552 services, while certainly not contrary to correct doctrine, strike me as being both superfluous and out of touch with the realities of pastoral care, in the case of the old form of the Visitation of the Sick (the Visitation of Prisoners, which was included in a supplement to the 1662 book IIRC, but was commonly included in BCPs printed for use in Ireland, and which is included formally in the 1926 Irish BCP, is even worse).

    The 1662 book also contains a great deal of UK-specific material which is not optimal for Anglicans living elsewhere in the commonwealth, and entirely inapplicable for Anglicans living outside of it.

    ~

    On a personal note, I greatly value the 1928 Scottish BCP, and also the Scottish-style communion service which has always been used in American editions of the BCP due to Bishop Seabury and through him, the subsequent bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church, receiving ordination from the Scottish Non-Juring Episcopalians. The Scottish Episcopal liturgical tradition, in my opinion, represents a unique and valuable part of Anglican heritage, and I am particularly fond of prayer books which include both a 1662 style communion service and one that follows the Scottish school, either literally or contextually, namely, the 1928 Deposited Book and the 1928 Scottish Book. I love the Scottish Holy Communion Service, with its Epiclesis taken from the Divine Liturgy of St. James.

    There are a number of other riches outside of the 1662 BCP which are worth exploring. For example, the service of Compline as arranged by the different Provinces in the early 20th century; there are slight differences between them, but they are still centered around a common set of four psalms, and the Nunc Dimitis, following the classic patterns of the Roman family of liturgical rites. The 1938 Melanesian Prayer Book, in response to the specific needs of the mission, features an unusual arrangement of the Daily Office which is quite exquisite; few people would expect a Book of Common Prayer printed on Guadalcanal before and during the Second World War by a small missionary community operating in some of the most miserable conditions anywhere in the Anglican Communiom to be one of the most exquisite of the 20th century, but it seems like in Christianity, great adversity can lead to great beauty.

    Finally, even the 1979 BCP has some hidden gems; the incorporation of the ancient hymn Phos Hilarion, which is used to open Vespers in the Byzantine Rite churches of Eastern Orthodoxy and Eastern Catholicism, and I believe also in the Armenian and Syriac Rites (but I need to check this) into Evening Prayer as a third canticle was brilliant. Except, alas, IIRC, they only put it in Rite Two. But having Phos Hilarion along with the Magnificat and Nunc Dimitus (except where Evensong is to be followed by Compline, in which case the latter canticle should be replaced by Deus Miseratur following the ancient rubrics - except on the twelfth day of the month, in which case one would use one of the optional psalms available for Compline), has the effect of balancing this office relative to Mattins, which has three Canticles: the Venite (Psalm 95), and two others, usually Te Deum Laudamus followed by either Jubilate Deo or Benedictus.

    So, while relying on the 1662 BCP, and the 1549 BCP, as doctrinal and liturgical guideposts (and at that, perhaps relying on the 1662 BCP largely because the Elizabethan Prayer Book was composed prior to the existence of the King James Bible and is not available, as far as I am aware, with modern, standardized spelling), I feel that we all know these works sufficiently well, and our focus should therefore be on finding the beautiful services that were developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and in a few cases, more recently than that (the good bits in the 1979 BCP, which are gloriously cleaned up and presented in the spectacular traditional language Anglican Servive Book of 1994; by the way if anyone knows of any Episcopal or other parishes using that book, please let me know that I might have a chance to see it in use before the dreaded new Episcopal BCP arrives, which might well prohibit the continued use of the 1979 BCP and any derivatives, and lack those clauses which made the Anglican Service Book a canonically legal alternative to the BCP for traditional Episcopal parishes); these services are of considerable beauty and are a precious part of the Anglican liturgical patrimony.
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  11. Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    By the way, given my interest in getting the best bits out of various old BCP editions, several of which are sadly entirely disused (although thankfully the 1928 American Book and the 1962 Canadian book survive, for the moment), it might amuse my Anglican friends to note that in the context of Orthodox liturgical discussions I am an outspoken advocate of increasing the use of disused or under-utilized services, for example, the Divine Liturgy of St. Mark, and its Coptic variant, the Divine Liturgy of St. Cyril, this liturgy being the oldest attested liturgical text and the oldest liturgy in continual use (or at least semi-continual). A lot of people, including the Vatican and the Episcopal Church made the mistake of thinking that the oldest attested liturgy is that in the Apostolic Tradition, which had been attributed to the third century St. Hippolytus, but the Strasbourg Papyrus dates from the second century, and the anaphora in question, a mutilated form of which appears in the 1979 BCP’s rather disagreeable Eucharistic Prayer B, whose sole advantage is brevity, actually appears on further analysis to simply be a Latin translation of the fourth century Anaphora of the Apostles, an adaptation of the standard Antiochene anaphora for use in Ethiopia by the legendary "Seven Syrian Saints" credited with organizing the worship services of Abyssinia in the fourth century, and an anaphora which the Ethiopians still use at present. So that is something you might find moderately amusing the next time you have to endure Eucharistic Prayer B, or its equivalent in Common Worship, to think that same text has been used, albeit with much more interesting ritual, for sixteen centuries, in Ethiopia. There are a number of other ancient liturgical usages in Orthodoxy, some of which have sadly fallen into complete disuse, for example, the old Cathedral Use, which I also would like to see revived (and indeed one monastery, New Skete in the Eastern US, famed for its breeding of German Shepherds, has partially revived it). It is particularly thrilling when one comes across a bit of this material that was introduced into Anglican usage, for example, the Prayer of St. John Chrysostom in Mattins, the Litany and Evensong, and the aforementioned Epiclesis from the Divine Liturgy of St. James in the Scottish Holy Communion.

    There is so much beauty in these old prayer books and indeed in old hymnals like the lovely 1940 Protestant Episcopal hymnal, or the 1906-1911 English Hymnal, with which we might fill our churches, especially including the 1662 BCP. I simply do not wish to limit myself to the latter.
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  12. Stalwart Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Liturgyworks said: ↑
    Or better yet the 1549. I maintain the original still wins over the sequels
    It depends on how we measure historic liturgies.

    In the Orthodox (and some Roman) camps, liturgy is considered as itself somehow divinely revealed, even though they won't state it that clearly. But they really believe, for example, that God had a hand in writing the Roman Mass in Latin, for instance, or the Byzantine liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.

    But we know that's not the case. That's why the Anglican answer is the best: a liturgy is not a product of God, but the product of the Church. The liturgies are products of the Church, for the use of the faithful.

    Then the question becomes, okay what is a liturgy supposed to do, for the faithful? And the answer is: 1.) direct the faithful to worship the one true God, 2.) cause them to repent, 3.) nourish them spiritually and physically.

    By that standard, any product of the Church which does that, is a valid liturgy. And by that same standard, the 1549 is a non-starter, while the 1662 has nourished the faithful, and produced the most holiness, being among the top 3-4 most successful liturgies in the world. Not that the 1549 and the 1662 are different. I am just talking about the impact.

    It would be thinking in an Orthodox mindset, to prefer the 1549, because you are looking for certain 'God-written' elements: having the gloria in the right place, having the epiclesis. But none of these and other famous liturgical 'elements' were written by our Lord at all. Many famous historic liturgies, eastern and western, have not had them.

    Looking at it in the Anglican mindset, which liturgy produced the most holiness and led more people into heaven, the obvious answer is that the 1549 was only in operation for, say, 3 years, while the 1662 which is based on it, was in operation for now approaching 400 years. They are in the same tradition, and we are only measuring practical impact: preferring the 1549 makes no sense, because nothing in it is any 'holier' than the 1662. The mark of a liturgy's holiness is the people which it made holy; and the 1549 didn't made many people holy, while the 1662 did. When you pour over the words of the 1662 liturgy, you are poring over 400 years of people becoming holy from it.
    Last edited: Aug 19, 2019
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  13. Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Stalwart said: ↑
    It depends on how we measure historic liturgies.

    In the Orthodox (and some Roman) camps, liturgy is considered as itself somehow divinely revealed, even though they won't state it that clearly. But they really believe, for example, that God had a hand in writing the Roman Mass in Latin, for instance, or the Byzantine liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.
    This is true.

    But we know that's not the case. That's why the Anglican answer is the best: a liturgy is not a product of God, but the product of the Church. The liturgies are products of the Church, for the use of the faithful.
    I would disagree on three points: firstly, since the liturgy primarily quotes scripture, if we say that scripture is divinely inspired, as long as the liturgy is scriptural (and 93% of the words in the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom are direct scriptural quotations; the old Roman mass also quotes scripture very heavily, as does the BCP liturgy, so that very nearly everything in the Orthodox, or the ancient Catholic* or traditional Anglican liturgy either is a direct quote from Scripture or a paraphrase of Scripture, or a Scriptural verse adopted into a prayer (for example, the Prayer of St. Chrysostom).

    Thus, since Scripture is divinely inspired, the sacred liturgy, if it is scriptural, is also divinely inspired in the same way the lectionary is divinely inspired: because it contains the written word of God, which the conclusion to the Gospel According to Luke shows us is an icon of the Incarnate Word of God, the Only Begotten Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

    My second point is that since the Church Catholic, as shown by St. Paul, is the Body of Christ, with our Lord as its head, to which we are grafted on in baptism, we can trust that the Holy Spirit is continually active in the Church, and that while local churches are usually either slow to do His bidding, or are outright intransigent in the case of the ECUSA, over time, in large measure due to the impact of those of great piety who are commemorated in the liturgical calendars of the Anglican, Orthodox and Catholic churches, the church will eventually conform to God’s desire’s for it, just as Israel tended to conform, after much protestation and needless hardship.

    For my part I consider the BCP to be obviously divinely inspired both by virtue of its contents and its impact: the BCP cultivated a new sense of piety among English speakers; it revived the Divine Office, something no other Western church has been able to do since the Roman clergy turned that office into a private devotion centuries before the English Reformation; it also provided the linguistic forms used subsequently by all other Christians in the English language for purposes of worship, so that, for example, in the US, the Lutheran hymnals and service books, the Presbyterian hymnals and service books, and the prevailing traditional language Orthodox service books are all either directly derived from the BCP or use it as a reference for purposes of literary style. This was also historically the case for English translations of the old Roman Missal, before the disaster of the Novus Ordo, the even worse translation, and the intentionally misleading "translations" peddled by ICEL. Things were much better when the BCP was the stylistic reference for English-language liturgical texts, and I consider that all English language liturgical texts, as far as style is concerned, should be evaluated in comparison to the 1662 BCP.

    Finally, for my third point, with regards to the services for baptism and the Eucharist, insofar as the Anglican catechism in the 1662 BCP and the words of the services themselves teach us these are divinely instituted sacraments, it would therefore follow that, given the especially holy nature of these services, a divine inspiration, from the Holy Spirit, is present any time these sacraments are validly celebrated. And the validity that defines whether or not they have been celebrated (for example, I believe we can all agree that the Mormon custom of water and bread in their psuedo-Eucharist, which was also practiced by an ancient cult, is imvalid). The specific premises by which the Church of England, or the Roman Catholics, or the Orthodox, would ascertain the valid celebration of a sacrament, it follows, are also sacred and of an inspired nature, dating back to the Apostles.

    We must not forget the strength of traditional Anglicanism, and its general excellence, comes from the idea of scripture, reason and tradition, as opposed to the nuda scriptura approach we find among fundamentalist Calvinist and evangelical sects, which lack stability and produce all manner of strange doctrines.

    And the traditions of Anglicanism are not some arbitrary construct created by Archbishop Cranmer, but rather represent the traditions of the ancient church, many of which the early Anglicans realized had been neglected by the decadent and degenerate Roman church of that era.

    Then the question becomes, okay what is a liturgy supposed to do, for the faithful? And the answer is: 1.) direct the faithful to worship the one true God, 2.) cause them to repent, 3.) nourish them spiritually and physically.
    I would add that the liturgy should, in the sacramental services, unite us with God and the church, through the regeneration of baptism and the very nature of Holy Communion, which, even if we believe God is "only" spiritually present, is still something that is quite miraculous and that does represent a Communion between God and man. Thus, I greatly respect the Church of England for calling it Holy Communion, whereas the Baptists and other radical reformers who believed in memorialism insist on calling it the Lord’s Supper, which fails to do this sacrament justice. And indeed, they would have us deny that it is a divinely instituted sacrament and call it an ordinance.

    By that standard, any product of the Church which does that, is a valid liturgy.
    Then such a standard is frankly aiming too low, because one could argue that a large number of deeply flawed liturgies and ex tempore worship services, such as the worship of the Church of Scotland, did nonetheless nourish the faithful, call the people to repentance and focus their worship on the One True God. But from an Anglican perspective these Scottish worship services were entirely inadequete.

    And by that same standard, the 1549 is a non-starter, while the 1662 has nourished the faithful, and produced the most holiness, being among the top 3-4 most successful liturgies in the world. Not that the 1549 and the 1662 are different. I am just talking about the impact.
    I should clarify my earlier remark concerning the 1549 book was partially made in jest, and was a bit of an in-joke relating to Anglo Catholicism. From a serious liturgical perspective, I am not going to, for one moment, pit the 1549 book against the 1662 book or deprecate the 1662 book as a doctrinal standard, and if you thought that was my point, that was my fault for failing to make clear the ironic aspect of my comment.

    Rather, my opinion is that as opposed to narrowly focusing on the 1662 book (which is basically the 1552 book with minor changes, by the way, as far as the services are concerned), the essential portions of which we should all have committed to memory, anyway, we would be neglecting the rich liturgical treasure that exists in the older 1549 book, the parallel Scottish Episcopal tradition, and the later prayer books, culminating in the 1962 Canadian BCP and Series 2 of the Church of England trial liturgies (the last liturgy to be released entirely in traditional language and with entirely traditional theology, as far as I am aware, in the Provinces of York and Canterbury), which, having been developed in response to shortcomings in the liturgical services, as opposed to the doctrine, of the 1662 book, with regards to pastoral care, the impact of the Oxford Movement, and other changes. And indeed, the Church of England voted to adopt the Deposited Book, but was thwarted by non-Anglican members of the House of Commons, which is a great tragedy, because the Deposited Book has everything we love about the 1662 book and several other equally lovable features, most of which were introduced anyway.

    It would be thinking in an Orthodox mindset, to prefer the 1549, because you are looking for certain 'God-written' elements: having the gloria in the right place, having the epiclesis. But none of these and other famous liturgical 'elements' were written by our Lord at all. Many famous historic liturgies, eastern and western, have not had them.
    I disagree on this point, and furthermore, from my Orthodox perspective I don’t think the 1549 BCP is even the ideal work. I would note that the position of the gloria does vary widely from liturgy to liturgy, and I don’t care; within the Orthodox church we have one very important liturgy, the Presanctified, which has no gloria, no institution narrative and no epiclesis. Regarding the Epiclesis, the only liturgies I have found without a prayer which could be considered as serving this function are the Lutheran liturgies, where Martin Luther insisted on discarding the entire Roman Canon, leaving only the Institution Narrative, and to this day, some Lutheran churches like the LCMS are adamantly opposed to having any kind of "Eucharistic Prayer" in their Mass. In the 1662 BCP, I see the function of the Epiclesis and several other prayers elegantly consolidated in the Prayer of Humble Access. It is very similiar to the Roman Canon, another liturgy I love and find entirely acceptable. And the second oldest liturgy in continual use, and of the two, certainly the most heavily used, by a substantial margin, next to the Alexandrian liturgies attested to by the Strasbourg Papyrus and the Euchologion of St. Serapion, which we know as the Divine Liturgy of St. Mark, or the Coptic Anaphora of St Cyril, is the Liturgy of Sts. Addai and Mari, which famously lacks a discrete Institution Narrative, and I have no problem with this.

    ~

    The Holy Communion service furthermore is not my main interest when it comes to the Book of Common Prayer; I am much more interested in the Divine Office. That said, I do particularly like the Scottish communion office, which did feature the Epiclesis of St. James in its entirety, but not because of some hypothetical Orthodox ideal about what part of a liturgy should go where. And indeed, of the BCP editions I find most interesting, only the 1928 American and Scottish prayer books contain liturgies descended from that. And the 1952 service book of the Church of South India, which was heavily based on the Divine Liturgy of St. James (since this is the main liturgy in the West Syriac Rite, used by the St. Thomas Christians of India who did not join the Roman Catholic Church), I have strong objections to; in many respects it was a harbinger of liturgical disaster, being the first mainstream liturgy to embrace horrors like celebration versus populum.

    And with regards to the Divine Office, some of the best material can be found in books which might be considered extremely Low Church. For example, I greatly admire the Litany featured in the 1689 Liturgy of Comprehension.

    Looking at it in the Anglican mindset, which liturgy produced the most holiness and led more people into heaven, the obvious answer is that the 1549 was only in operation for, say, 3 years, while the 1662 which is based on it, was in operation for now approaching 400 years. They are in the same tradition, and we are only measuring practical impact: preferring the 1549 makes no sense, because nothing in it is any 'holier' than the 1662. The mark of a liturgy's holiness is the people which it made holy; and the 1549 didn't made many people holy, while the 1662 did. When you pour over the words of the 1662 liturgy, you are poring over 400 years of people becoming holy from it.
    Firstly, I think my mindset when it comes to liturgics is closer to high church Anglo Catholicism than anything else, in that like the Anglo Catholic liturgists, I am interested in a liturgical synthesis.

    Secondly, with regards to the holiness of the 1662 BCP, I recognize that, although not in exclusion or separation from the 1549 BCP. But rather, I should stress that when it comes to the later BCP editions that I think we should take a look at, these editions in almost all cases contain the same liturgical texts as the 1662 BCP, with only very slight differences which are not spiritually significant. For example, an American will not be edified by the Collect for the Royal Family in the 1662 book, and I doubt very many people at all bother to read the Ordinal. However, the essential prayers of Matins, Evensong, the Litany, Holy Communion, and the occasional services such as Baptism, Matrimony, and the Burial service, are what makes the BCP the BCP, and of the material I propose we take a look at, in all but one case these services are featured, usually verbatim but in some cases with interesting variations (for example, in the 1938 Melanesian book). The sole exception is of course the bilingual proposed prayer book, in English and Spanish, as one might well expect, for use by Anglicans in Mexico, which is worth our attention because it is translated from the ancient, obscure, but historically very important Mozarabic Rite, which by your own standards is a liturgy we ought to respect in the extreme, because during the Islamic occupation of Spain this was the liturgy used by the oppressed Christians, and is a pure form of the Gallican Rite, an ancient liturgical tradition from the fourth or fifth century that the Roman Catholic Church during its decadent years, when its malfeasance prompted the formation of the Church of England, repeatedly tried to suppress.

    But in all other cases, we are talking about derivatives of the 1662 BCP, with various improvements and adaptations; the 1662 remains the standard against which these are evaluated and with which compatibility must be preserved, and indeed, the 1662 BCP is simply a slightly modified 1552 BCP, so with all of these prayer books, which all trace back to the 1549 BCP and before that to the Sarum Rite liturgy, and in turn to the Gallico-Roman liturgy that emerged around 900, and the Gallican and Old Roman rites before that, and also the Byzantine Rite by virtue of the Prayer of St. Chrysostom, when we read a 1928 American BCP, we are reading a text which contains prayers that people have been becoming holy from since the very dawn of Christendom. I should especially like to cite the outstanding translations of Roman Rite Collects and also the original Collects composed by the compilers of the 1549 and 1552 BCP, which contain a sublime literary elegance that has made these beautiful and edifying prayers so pervasive as to still carry weight even in our secular society.

    Indeed, even today, no man can hope to understand the nuances of the English language without immersing himself in the two great literary achievements of the Church of England: the Authorized Version of the Bible, and the Book of Common Prayer.

    *Setting aside post-schism aberrations like the Novenas and the endless bloat of the Roman Breviary, in particular with ever more dubious feasts of saints of doubtful saintliness, which by the time the Church of England came into being resulted in the Divine Office being disused outside of monasteries and cathedral churches.
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  14. Stalwart Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Liturgyworks said: ↑
    Thus, since Scripture is divinely inspired, the sacred liturgy, if it is scriptural, is also divinely inspired in the same way the lectionary is divinely inspired:
    I don't disagree, but that argument would fail to make the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom superior to some hyper-modern, ripped jeans non-liturgical concoction if the latter were to cite Scripture. In other words, the two chief elements you'd prize in the former liturgy, its form, and its antiquity, you leave as defenseless.

    A similar comparison could be made to the TEC 1979 liturgy, or (ugh) Common Worship. A liturgy can cite Scripture and yet be heretical. So again, the orthodoxy of a liturgy you leave as defenseless.


    Liturgyworks said: ↑
    we can trust that the Holy Spirit is continually active in the Church, ... the church will eventually conform to God’s desire’s for it
    The Church Universal throughout the world, yes. That does not mean that the Russian Orthodox Church, or the Church of Rome, or the Church of England, will be protected from downfall, and even apostasy. Just because a local church uses a liturgy does not mean that that church is not in the process of falling away, and indeed its liturgy is the vehicle by which it is falling away.

    Liturgyworks said: ↑
    For my part I consider the BCP to be obviously divinely inspired both by virtue of its contents and its impact:
    Listen you don't have to prove that to me, I agree entirely. All I'm trying to do is to push back against the quasi-mystical approach that some people have to the liturgy. I literally have heard people say that putting the Gloria in the beginning of the liturgy makes it valid, and putting it near the end next to the Eucharistic canon makes it invalid.

    Or, an argument sometimes made by the Romans and the Orthodox against Anglicans, that the presence or the absence of the Epiclesis somehow makes the liturgy valid or invalid. If you agree with me that these points are superstitious, then we are 100% on the same page.
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  15. Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Stalwart said: ↑
    I don't disagree, but that argument would fail to make the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom superior to some hyper-modern, ripped jeans non-liturgical concoction if the latter were to cite Scripture. In other words, the two chief elements you'd prize in the former liturgy, its form, and its antiquity, you leave as defenseless.

    A similar comparison could be made to the TEC 1979 liturgy, or (ugh) Common Worship. A liturgy can cite Scripture and yet be heretical. So again, the orthodoxy of a liturgy you leave as defenseless.
    No, I defend the ancient forms against modern blasphemous alterations or replacements of those forms by citing sacred Tradition, one of the three principles, along with Scripture and Reason, that guide Anglican thought (and I would argue Orthodox thought as well; the only difference being that the Orthodox view Holy Scripture as the central part of Tradition as opposed to seeing a dichotomy between the two).

    That said this tradition does not require blind adherence to liturgical forms; in the Byzantine Rite for example there are variations in the use and monasteries have always had huge discretion when it comes to their own individual typikon (rule of worship), and there are four varieties of the typikon presently in use, the ancient Studite-Sabaite Typikon used by Russian Old Believers, the Sabaite-Studite synthesis used on Mount Athos and in the Russian, Ukrainian. Serbian and Georgian churches on the Old Calendar, a variant of that using the disagreeable Revised Julian, or New Calendar, used by the Bulgarians and the OCA, and then the Violakis Typikon, used by the Greeks and Antiochians, together with the New Calendar (usually). Also there is a Latinized form of worship used by some of the Ruthenian Catholics, although most have de-Latinized since Vatican II, or de-Latinized in the decades before in protest at Catholic bishops in the US denying them the ancient right to have married priests.

    The Church Universal throughout the world, yes. That does not mean that the Russian Orthodox Church, or the Church of Rome, or the Church of England, will be protected from downfall, and even apostasy. Just because a local church uses a liturgy does not mean that that church is not in the process of falling away, and indeed its liturgy is the vehicle by which it is falling away.
    This is true, and this is why I am opposed to radical liturgical change like the Novus Ordo Missae. One rule of Christianity is that radical liturgical change always causes schisms. It happened in the Czech lands when the Catholic conquerors took away the vernacular liturgy and communion in both kinds, it happened in Russia when Patriarch Nikon became convinced the service books were corrupt because they differed from those used by the Greeks (they were in fact an older recension and not a corruption, as has been shown by later analysis, so the Old Believers were always in the right and the bloody persecution of them even more of a depraved act), it happened when the Revised Julian Calendar (which is horrible) was forcibly imposed on several Orthodox churches, it happened when the Tridentine mass was replaced by the risible Novus Ordo Missae, and it happened when the ECUSA replaced the 1928 BCP with the troublesome 1979 BCP, but the larger issue was the ordination of women (the 1979 book is salvageable, as the Anglican Service Book demonstrates, or indeed if you confine yourself to Rite I).

    Listen you don't have to prove that to me, I agree entirely. All I'm trying to do is to push back against the quasi-mystical approach that some people have to the liturgy. I literally have heard people say that putting the Gloria in the beginning of the liturgy makes it valid, and putting it near the end next to the Eucharistic canon makes it invalid.

    Or, an argument sometimes made by the Romans and the Orthodox against Anglicans, that the presence or the absence of the Epiclesis somehow makes the liturgy valid or invalid. If you agree with me that these points are superstitious, then we are 100% on the same page.
    While I do have a mystical approach to the sacraments in the sense that I view them as sacred mysteries, I do not regard them as ritual magic, and therefore reject the specific cases you cite as causing problems with validity. Actually I lean away from the Augustinian concept of liturgical validity, which I think was an overreaction to the Donastist error, and favor the model of St. Cyprian of Carthage, another North African whose views on the issue are I think more relevant. A lot of Roman Catholic problems I think are the result of reading too much Augustine and not enough of the other Fathers.

    So yes, I can agree the specific points you raise are superstitious and we would therefore be on the same page. Although I maintain that the 1662 Communion Service does have the equivalent of an Epiclesis in its Consecratory Prayers and especially the Prayer of Humble Access. Just like in the Roman liturgy there are a few different prayers which serve thie function.

    That being said I do prefer a strong Epiclesis because I consider them desirable to the liturgy, and for this reason I particularly like the Scottish Non-Juring communion office as found in the 18th century "Wee Bookies." For that matter, I also prefer newer communion services that allow the Decalogue to be replaced with a Summary of the Law and/or the Kyrie.

    As an aside, it might surprise you to note that the best BCP-derived communion service I have seen comes from the most Low Church source one could think of, having been compiled by a Congregational minister, Rev. John Hunter, in his incredibly good service book Devotional Liturgies. He was the minister of a prominent Congregational church in the City of London (in the Square Mile itself, I think) located in the old King’s Weigh House, which was if memory serves destroyed in the Blitz, merged with another Congregational parish, and there is now a Ukrainian Catholic church on that spot. Alas the tragedy of Congregationalism is that despite the excellence of Hunter’s service book I doubt any of them are using it.
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  16. Stalwart Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Liturgyworks said: ↑
    yes, I can agree the specific points you raise are superstitious and we would therefore be on the same page
    You're probably one of the most reasonable EO folks I've ever talked to. I really appreciate this conversation.

    Liturgyworks said: ↑
    I maintain that the 1662 Communion Service does have the equivalent of an Epiclesis in its Consecratory Prayers and especially the Prayer of Humble Access.
    It may, and I'll agree with you that it does. But it doesn't have to, which is my point. That's where you are so reasonable when many other liturgical adherents aren't: they make Epiclesis something which was God-written, rather than something which was Church-written. They worship at the altar of Epiclesis (almost) with a pious reverence, and filter whole liturgies and centuries of pious worship as valid or invalid. During the 'liturgical movement' of the 20th century, this was one of the main errors of Dom Gregory Dix used to marginalize the (saintly) Prayerbook tradition in order to usher in the (heterodox) 1979 Episcopalian liturgy.

    To state it bluntly, the Epiclesis doesn't have to be in a liturgy. Like, at all. We may argue that it's a benefit or not to the piety and the holiness of the resulting faithful who live by the rule of that liturgy. The a posteriori argument in favor of some liturgy elements we could have. But a priori, there is nothing that makes the Epiclesis or any other element of the liturgy mandatory or divinely mandated, or something to sort liturgies by.

    Furthermore, the 1979 'Prayerbook' does have the Epiclesis, and yet is heterodox and has produced spiritual wreckage on two generations of Anglicans in the United States, leading to the (hopefully transient) issues in today's generation of ACNA which aspires to be the de facto Anglican Province, but can only do that if the 1979 spiritual wreckage is purged from our spiritual tradition.

    Liturgyworks said: ↑
    As an aside, it might surprise you to note that the best BCP-derived communion service I have seen comes from the most Low Church source one could think of, having been compiled by a Congregational minister, Rev. John Hunter, in his incredibly good service book Devotional Liturgies. He was the minister of a prominent Congregational church in the City of London (in the Square Mile itself, I think) located in the old King’s Weigh House, which was if memory serves destroyed in the Blitz, merged with another Congregational parish, and there is now a Ukrainian Catholic church on that spot. Alas the tragedy of Congregationalism is that despite the excellence of Hunter’s service book I doubt any of them are using it.
    You know it's funny, I'll actually push back and castigate the Congregational liturgy. You really bring that EO mindset where you praise a liturgy for what it says. But I praise a liturgy for what it does.

    Does it produce holiness? That's the ultimate standard, for me, and I think classically for Anglicans. The Congregational liturgy, regardless of what it says/said, has absolutely produced no holiness to speak of.

    The only way to judge a liturgy (for me) is 100+ years after its writing: at the moment of its authorship, any liturgy is irrelevant, but then, if it produces holiness, we can say it is a holy liturgy; and we won't know that until at least some generations of people have gone through it, and we can start to judge the tree by its fruits. So let's judge the Congregational liturgy not by what what it said, but by what it has done: has it produced any holiness? None that I can see. Therefore it is irrelevant. By any practical standard.

    Additionally, it was a product of pride, dissent and schism, and therefore it was born in sin by definition (and if we take all Congregational theology into account, it was born in heresy). So this liturgy was born in sin and produced no holiness across any period of time, let alone centuries; that's how I'd see it.

    We can even ask why the Reformers had to revise the Sarum Mass. Shouldn't that have been retained? Only if we judge it through the EO/RCC mindset of containing 'divine elements'. In the Anglican mindset the Sarum Mass (and arguably all similar medieval Roman liturgies) simply do not, and have not, produced 1.) worship, 2.) repentance, 3.) spiritual nourishment. Even the longevity of a liturgy is no guarantee for its holiness. The Sarum Mass was there for centuries, but failed to attain to the objectives of a liturgy, and thus had to be revised. Thus I, like a true-blue Anglican, would reject both the Sarum Mass and the Congregational liturgy.

    Last edited: Aug 20, 2019
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  17. Rexlion Well-Known Member

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    Stalwart said: ↑
    ...To state it bluntly, the Epiclesis doesn't have to be in a liturgy. Like, at all. We may argue that it's a benefit or not to the piety and the holiness of the resulting faithful who live by the rule of that liturgy. The a posteriori argument in favor of some liturgy elements we could have. But a priori, there is nothing that makes the Epiclesis or any other element of the liturgy mandatory or divinely mandated, or something to sort liturgies by...
    Indeed. Jesus never established a specific liturgy. Yet there are some people in this world (no one on this forum, happily) who seem to regard some forms of liturgy with a level of reverence that one would expect to be reserved for the Sacraments. It almost takes on the appearance of a worship of liturgy for liturgy's sake.
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  18. Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Rexlion said: ↑
    Indeed. Jesus never established a specific liturgy. Yet there are some people in this world (no one on this forum, happily) who seem to regard some forms of liturgy with a level of reverence that one would expect to be reserved for the Sacraments. It almost takes on the appearance of a worship of liturgy for liturgy's sake.
    That’s not quite correct. The nuclei of the sacramental services established, as we all agree, by our Lord, Baptism and Holy Communion, are taken from his words. This is why we baptize in the name of the father, son and holy spirit, and have some form of institution narrative either paraphrasing or quoting our Lord in 1 Corinthians 11 and the corresponding Synoptics and in dome cases John 6. And I would also say, and I believe Anglican doctrine entirely backs me up on this point, that the "Jesus Name" baptisms performed by Oneness Pentecostals are invalid (which is why these baptisms are rejected by the apostolic churches, including traditional Lutherans and at least some traditional Anglicans).
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  19. Rexlion Well-Known Member

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    Liturgyworks said: ↑
    That’s not quite correct. The nuclei of the sacramental services established, as we all agree, by our Lord, Baptism and Holy Communion, are taken from his words. This is why we baptize in the name of the father, son and holy spirit, and have some form of institution narrative either paraphrasing or quoting our Lord in 1 Corinthians 11 and the corresponding Synoptics and in dome cases John 6. And I would also say, and I believe Anglican doctrine entirely backs me up on this point, that the "Jesus Name" baptisms performed by Oneness Pentecostals are invalid (which is why these baptisms are rejected by the apostolic churches, including traditional Lutherans and at least some traditional Anglicans).
    You're saying that the liturgies revolve around the Sacraments, and the Sacraments are established by Jesus' words, therefore the liturgies themselves are established by Him. This is a bit like saying that the artist who painted the Mona Lisa is the builder of the Louvre because the Mona Lisa is housed within the Louvre. I think men created the liturgies to contain the Sacraments, and the Sacraments are powerful enough to stand on their own even if there were no liturgies.
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  20. Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Stalwart said: ↑
    You're probably one of the most reasonable EO folks I've ever talked to. I really appreciate this conversation.


    It may, and I'll agree with you that it does. But it doesn't have to, which is my point.

    To state it bluntly, the Epiclesis doesn't have to be in a liturgy. Like, at all. We may argue that it's a benefit or not to the piety and the holiness of the resulting faithful who live by the rule of that liturgy. The a posteriori argument in favor of some liturgy elements we could have. But a priori, there is nothing that makes the Epiclesis or any other element of the liturgy mandatory or divinely mandated, or something to sort liturgies by.
    If the Anglican liturgy lacked something like the Prayer of Humble Access I would have concerns about it. As it stands, I have grave doubts about Lutheran masses in those Lutheran churches which followed blindly followed Luther into deleting everything from the Anaphora except the Words of Institution (I don’t much like Luther anyway; among the Reformers the only ones I deeply admire are Sts. Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague (the Czech-Slovak Orthodox Church has canonized them), William Coverdale, whoever the chaps were who actually translated and compiled the BCP under Cranmer, Archbishop Laud, and John Wesley.

    The Liturgy of Sts. Addai and Mari, the second oldest anaphora in continual use, which should be considered one of the very holiedt by your professed standards, having inspired holiness for 1800 years, particularly when you factor in the extreme martyrdoms (which are a crown for the faithful; the greatest thing for a Christian is surely to follow our Lord by willingly submitting to execution for our faith, as millions of Syriac Christians using this anaphora did, first under Tamerlane, and later in the Sayfo, the Turkish genocide of Syriac Christians in which 90% of them were killed (and the main homelands, for example, Tur-Abdin, depopulated), and which about ten million Christians still use, lacks the Words of Institution except in a distributed manner, but it has a rich and detailed anaphora with many prayers akin to the Prayer of Humble Access.

    During the 'liturgical movement' of the 20th century, this was one of the main errors of Dom Gregory Dix used to marginalize the (saintly) Prayerbook tradition in order to usher in the (heterodox) 1979 Episcopalian liturgy.
    Dom Gregory Dix had nothing to do with the 1979 BCP, having died in 1950, and while I would stop short of calling the 1979 BCP heterodox (indeed, the Anglican Service Book transforms it into something splendid), and the major faults with the 1979 BCP were not suggested by Dix. Specifically, the ICEL-influenced language, produced by the Catholic church, celebration versus populum, which was primarily also the result of Roman Catholic influence (although Bugnini may have gotten the idea from the service book of the Church of South India), and the risible Eucharistic prayers. You really should, in my opinion, on the traditional Anglican principle of Nil nisi bonum, reappraise one of the great Anglican monks of the 20th century:

    There are specifically two Anglican liturgies that were influenced by the Shape of the Liturgy, before this book fell out of favor with liturgiologists in the 1970s and so for Rite II, the Episcopalians just copied the basic pattern of the Novus Ordo Missae (Eucharistic Prayer A is basically the classic communion service in modern language, like Eucharistic Prayer I, Eucharistic Prayer B is almost word for word a copy of Eucharistic Prayer II, an adaptation of the Anaphora of the Apostolic Tradition, at the time incorrectly believed to be the oldest liturgy, in part due to its extreme brevity and the fallacy of less competent liturgical scholars that shorter services are older services due to "accretions", Eucharistic Prayer C, like the Novus Ordo Prayer III is an adaptation of the Byzantine version of the Divine Liturgy of St. Basil, with numerous liberties, and Eucharistic Prayer D is almost identical to Eucharistic Prayer IV, the two being derived from the Egyptian version of the Divine Liturgy of St. Basil, albeit with extreme abbreviations, intended for ecumenical use. These same prayers pop up in most modern service books, and Dom Gregory Dix is not to blame; rather, send the bill to Anton Cardinal Bugnini and Pope Paul VI. The Novus Ordo Missae is where these, along with what became the Revised Common Lectionary, the other major defect in the 1979 book (although the variant form the 1979 book included was not as bad as either the RCL proper or the Novus Ordo lectionary, so naturally TEC suppressed it).

    There are two liturgies in the Anglican Communion influenced by Dix to varying extents: the 1962 Canadian BCP, but here the battle between low church and Anglo Catholic elements shaped the liturgy more than Dix’s writing, and the sole liturgy influenced primarily by Dix; the Trial Communion Liturgy from Series Two of the Trial Liturgy series leading up to the Alternate Service Book. Series Two was promising; I believe the marriage liturgies used at the Royal Weddings of both Prince Charles and Princess Diana and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were introduced in either Series One or Series Two (which did not overlap), and special permission exists for these to still be used (or they were written into Common Worship; one or the other). At any rate, the Trial Communion Liturgy from Series Two is extremely beautiful and extremely Dixian. When Series Three was published, it was after the Novus Ordo Missae, so the distinctive "contemporary English" of the initial translation was copied (characterized by the inaccurate rendering of "and with Thy Spirit" as "and also with you", something else Dix did not endorse). And by that time, a new generation of liberal liturgical scholars had built their careers on tearing to shreds the work of Dom Gregory, a simple conservative Benedictine monk with the Order of the Holy Cross who represented everything they hated in terms of liturgical tradition.

    And that’s all The Shape of the Liturgy really is; a study of liturgical traditions to identify the common patterns. It was not intended to be some kind of liturgical blueprint, but that said, the sole liturgy which used it as such was exquisite; had the Novus Ordo Missae never been published, and had the liberals not attained an ascendancy, I expect the Church of England would have published a very good BCP featuring it in the 1970s, along with the Divine Office from the 1662 book with the additions from the Deposited Book.

    I strongly suggest you read it and endeavour to enjoy doing so; it is very good book and Dom Gregory Dix simply is not a liturgical equivalent of Dr. Evil (Cardinal Bugnini, on the other hand, is just a monocle, a Persian cat, a miniaturized clone, and a risque spacecraft away from that role, according to the scholarship of Gregory DiPippo and his colleagues).

    You know it's funny, I'll actually push back and castigate the Congregational liturgy. You really bring that EO mindset where you praise a liturgy for what it says. But I praise a liturgy for what it does.

    Does it produce holiness? That's the ultimate standard, for me, and I think classically for Anglicans. The Congregational liturgy, regardless of what it says/said, has absolutely produced no holiness to speak of.

    The only way to judge a liturgy (for me) is 100+ years after its writing: at the moment of its authorship, any liturgy is irrelevant, but then, if it produces holiness, we can say it is a holy liturgy; and we won't know that until at least some generations of people have gone through it, and we can start to judge the tree by its fruits. So let's judge the Congregational liturgy not by what what it said, but by what it has done: has it produced any holiness? None that I can see. Therefore it is irrelevant. By any practical standard.
    Click to expand...
    Herein, you are missing the trees for the forest. If a liturgy incorporates prayers taken from another, or is a variant form of it, it inherits the spiritual success of the liturgy from which it is derived. To reject this simple point would be nonsensical, because we would have to say that, for example, the 1926 Irish BCP, or the 1918 Canadian BCP, which differ from the 1662 primarily in terms of their state prayers, lack its spiritual heritage, and for that matter that the 1662 book lacks the sanctity of the 1552 book from which it wad adapted, nearly verbatim.

    In like manner, it would be pointless to suggest that the 1928 American, Scottish or Deposited Books lack the holiness of the earlier BCP editions whose prayers and services they include.

    A BCP is nothing more than a particular collection of prayers and services, and it is these which, logically, following the Anglican principle of Reason, would acquire holiness under your model of liturgical sanctity. The compilation of these prayers is of reduced importance. I would argue, for example, that the Ordinal could well be omitted from the BCP, and moved to a separate volume (already the practice with consecrations of churches, Coronations and so on), and doing so might be a good idea if one could, for example, include the text of all of the lessons for morning and evening prayer in its place. In like manner, the specific national prayers for the UK in the 1662 book are inapplicable to American users, and require replacement, since an American should chiefly be concerned with praying for the President, the Congress and the State Government, and the national defense; prayers for the Royal Family are a decent but supererogatory act, and also the Accession Day service becomes wholly unwarranted.

    Lastly I should note Devotional Liturgies was a best seller among service books in the 19th century and was revised several times; I believe it was in print until the 1920s. I expect what killed it was the unfortunate merger of the Congregationalists and Presbyterians in England.

    Additionally, it was a product of pride, dissent and schism, and therefore it was born in sin by definition (and if we take all Congregational theology into account, it was born in heresy). So this liturgy was born in sin and produced no holiness across any period of time, let alone centuries; that's how I'd see it.
    Must we criticize congregationalists with such invective? I should prefer it if we reserve that level of polemics for the hierarchy of the Episcopal Church and other mainline churches, including, if you wish, the United Reformed Church in England or the British Methodists. But with regards to the Congregationalists, I have to say I rather like them, especially the remaining conservative Congregationalists in the US (this includes the Faithful and Welcoming Group - which is alas floundering -, in the otherwise ultra-liberal United Church of Christ, and the entirely traditionalist Conservative Congregational Christian Conference (or the CCCC, as they are commonly known). The latter has Park Street Church in Boston, which is the only Puritan-founded church in that city to not apostasize into Unitarian Universalism, or in the lesser number of cases, become part of the UCC. Also, a fun fact: Harvard was established by the Mathers and other early settlers and became the chief Divinity School for Puritans, but a mere 150 years later, Harvard officially embraced Unitarianism and this led to the formation of Yale, for the non-Unitarian congregationalists. I rather dislike Harvard.

    A disproportionate number of the great universities in the US were founded by the Methodist Episcopal Church, which took it on itself to try to realize George Washington’s dream of a "great national university." And that church I don’t think can be considered schismatic, unlike the British Methodists, who separated from the C of E only after Wesley had reposed, a loyal member of the Church of England. There was an extreme amount of confusion in the early days of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and there was even a Unitarian faction vying for power, centered at King’s Chapel in Cambridge, Massachussets (by Harvard), which has a famous version of the Book of Common Prayer edited to remove all references to the Trinity or the deity of our Lord. They have been using it since the 1780s, but I think you and I could both agree that its sacraments are quite invalid. And they tried to push that on all of the Anglicans in the US!

    I think we should also be careful when using the word Schismatic; Schismatics as a class of people should be considered those who, driven by heterodox beliefs, excommunicate themselves from the Church Catholic. An ancient example would be the Gnostics of the Second Century. On the other hand, charity compels me to not classify as schismatic any of the Protestant groups arising between the time of Jan Hus and roughly 1750, for various reasons relating to the multitude of complex failures in the RCC and the difficulty experienced by many Protestants in separating the wheat from the chaff in terms of Catholic doctrine.

    We can even ask why the Reformers had to revise the Sarum Mass. Shouldn't that have been retained? Only if we judge it through the EO/RCC mindset of containing 'divine elements'. In the Anglican mindset the Sarum Mass (and arguably all similar medieval Roman liturgies) simply do not, and have not, produced 1.) worship, 2.) repentance, 3.) spiritual nourishment. Even the longevity of a liturgy is no guarantee for its holiness. The Sarum Mass was there for centuries, but failed to attain to the objectives of a liturgy, and thus had to be revised. Thus I, like a true-blue Anglican, would reject both the Sarum Mass and the Congregational liturgy.
    The main problem which the BCP solved was never the Sarum Mass, which later Anglo Catholics revived and in some cases continue to use, with good results, but rather the hopelessly broken Breviary, which had degenerated into such a way as to make the Divine Office a private devotion for clergy, outside of monasteries and cathedrals. The restoration of a congregationally celebrated Divine Office in the Western Church remains an accomplishment limited to the Anglicans. The Lutherans tried but failed, and my understanding is that John Calvin for his part did not really care for Mattins and Evensong on a conceptual level.

    I do have to confess, I wish Henry VIII and his successors practiced the same religious tolerance that exists in England today. There were aspects of what happened when England broke sith Rome which I imagine many of us might be uncomfortable with. But, what we can say is that God works wonders with his church, and after the rocky divorce from the Roman church, Anglicanism really began to shine as people started routinely attending Mattins, Evensong and the Litany. This was huge. Everywhere else in the West, the vast majority or churchgoing people did not go to Church for these services.
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1662 is the Standard for ACNA

Discussion in 'Liturgy, and Book of Common Prayer' started by Magistos, Aug 11, 2019.

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Page 2 of 4
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  1. Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Rexlion said: ↑
    You're saying that the liturgies revolve around the Sacraments, and the Sacraments are established by Jesus' words, therefore the liturgies themselves are established by Him. .
    Nope. Reread my post, specifically the bit about nuclei.
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  2. Stalwart Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Liturgyworks said: ↑
    Dom Gregory Dix had nothing to do with the 1979 BCP, having died in 1950, and while I would stop short of calling the 1979 BCP heterodox (indeed, the Anglican Service Book transforms it into something splendid), and the major faults with the 1979 BCP were not suggested by Dix. Specifically, the ICEL-influenced language, produced by the Catholic church, celebration versus populum, which was primarily also the result of Roman Catholic influence (although Bugnini may have gotten the idea from the service book of the Church of South India), and the risible Eucharistic prayers.
    Dom Gregory Dix, while having died in 1950, played a foundational role in the 1979 BCP. The other major influence was the 1969 Roman 'novus ordo' I agree, but the influence of Dix cannot be discounted. Here are the two podcast episodes I've cited before for reference:
    Stalwart said: ↑
    His 'works' (if we want to call them that) wormed their way into the 1950s liturgical commissions of the Episcopal Church, and directly flowed out into the 1979 'Book of Common Prayer' (if we want to call it that). His research was based almost entirely on fictional assumptions, presuppositions, and his own biases.

    For example see this for reference:
    https://anglican.audio/2019/03/18/fh30-the-1979-corruption-of-us-prayerbook/
    https://anglican.audio/2019/05/06/fh33-the-liturgical-destruction-in-the-1960s/

    Liturgyworks said: ↑
    And that’s all The Shape of the Liturgy really is; a study of liturgical traditions to identify the common patterns. It was not intended to be some kind of liturgical blueprint
    As mentioned in the first podcast above, we have to look at more than just "The Shape of the Liturgy" in isolation, but rather to Dix's contribution to the Episcopalian 20th century liturgics as a whole. In particular we have to look at the Liturgical Commission which started operating in the 1940s and 1950s under the principles Dix established. They took Dix's principles, combined them with the 1969 Roman novus ordo, and out came the 1979 Episcopalian 'prayerbook' which effectively destroyed today's Episcopal Church.


    Liturgyworks said: ↑
    I do have to confess, I wish Henry VIII and his successors practiced the same religious tolerance that exists in England today.
    I don't think that the England of today is a success story in any sense of the term. A collapsing economy, a nearly-lost sovereignty they're barely now recovering with Brexit, the biggest Empire in history vanished without a sight, Mohammed being the #1 boy's name nationwide, and 89% of young Britons having no purpose:
    "Nine in ten young Brits believe their life lacks purpose, according to shocking new study"
    https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/9637619/young-brits-life-lacks-purpose/

    Ultimately we can agree to disagree on the nature of the liturgy. I am just trying to speak for the classical Anglican perspective, to my best understanding of it.

    My heartfelt adherence is to the Act of Uniformity, which established a single Anglican liturgy, with the best of our divines believing in a single body of the church, oriented towards God in one direction, that it was even supported by the civil arm of the government. That's how much classical Anglicans believed that we must pray with one common breath. Other churches may have a different liturgy, but for Anglicans it mandates a single liturgy of common prayer.

    But even if you believed in common prayer with such intensity as our forebearers, here's the issue: how can you impose a single liturgy when people have all kinds of divergent loyalties and dis-loyalties, even back then? You had people who were loyal to Rome, people loyal to some sort of pre-Reformation Sarum observance, you had the nascent puritan movement with their no-less grievous errors. How can you make one people, one Church of England, out of such a chaotic assembly? The only way was (and is), by having absolutely unshakeable grounds for why the liturgy is in fact the best. That you're not imposing the BCP by legal fiat, by tyranny, but that you are in fact in possession of the best liturgy which should command the happy obedience of all the faithful. If you have enough of that conviction, you will begin to ask, okay, well what are the reasons why the Sarum was insufficient? What are the reasons why we don't let the Puritans run off to their conventicles? And I've given some of those reasons here. Puritanism was born in sin, and led to heresy. The Sarum did not produce holiness in the people. That is why the Prayerbook tradition, the one unified Prayerbook tradition, is the right course of action.



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    Liturgyworks said: ↑
    The nuclei of the sacramental services established, as we all agree, by our Lord, Baptism and Holy Communion, are taken from his words.
    I actually agree with this. The nucleus of the liturgy is indeed from the Scriptures, but that's not the argument that Rexlion and I are making (not that I want to speak for him). Yes, without the trinitarian formula, the liturgy of baptism is invalid, and those (such as the Unitarians or the Mormons) who baptize without it, we can consider as having made no baptism at all. Similarly with the Eucharistic canon, the Words of Institution, you could make a similar argument (although you yourself raise the example of historic liturgies which didn't contain the words of institution). And the last example I suppose you could cite is the Lord's Prayer which is an emphatically liturgical prayer. Our Lord certainly only conceived worship in the context of the liturgy, which is why he left us those 2-3 liturgical elements.

    However we look at the Anaphora:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphora_(liturgy)

    That list was not mentioned in the Scriptures. It was composed by the Church, for the work of holiness among the people. And this is just the communion rite, without covering everything else in the liturgy. Just the Anaphoras undergone many revisions, as churches adapted them to their own uses: "Many ancient texts of anaphoras have survived, and even if no more in use," In other words, there is no one "Anaphora" but rather a list of various elements, out of the 10 of which elements, only one (the words of institution) you could consider to be of divine origin. The other 9 elements were written by the Church; added, subtracted, etc.

    All we are trying to say is that it is impossible to argue that the liturgy as a whole (apart from the 3 elements I mentioned above) is divinely-inspired. But that doesn't mean it is arbitrary either. People always jump from one to the other. Earlier I write on the importance of the Act of Uniformity, and the grand unification of the Church in a single prayer, a prayer composed by the Church herself, for the holiness of the people.

    Since the Church doesn't compose the liturgy from scratch, she studies historically what has produced holiness over the centuries. If we have a historical liturgy which can still produce holiness better than something new written, let us cleave unto that. If (like the Sarum Mass) it was around for a while but stopped producing holiness, then it is fit for it to be amended. If like the 1662 BCP it is capable of producing holiness even 400 years later, better than a modern liturgy, then it should be retained.
    Last edited: Aug 21, 2019
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  3. Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Stalwart said: ↑
    Dom Gregory Dix, while having died in 1950, played a foundational role in the 1979 BCP. The other major influence was the 1969 Roman 'novus ordo' I agree, but the influence of Dix cannot be discounted. Here are the two podcast episodes I've cited before for reference:




    As mentioned in the first podcast above, we have to look at more than just "The Shape of the Liturgy" in isolation, but rather to Dix's contribution to the Episcopalian 20th century liturgics as a whole. In particular we have to look at the Liturgical Commission which started operating in the 1940s and 1950s under the principles Dix established. They took Dix's principles, combined them with the 1969 Roman novus ordo, and out came the 1979 Episcopalian 'prayerbook' which effectively destroyed today's Episcopal Church.



    I don't think that the England of today is a success story in any sense of the term. A collapsing economy, a nearly-lost sovereignty they're barely now recovering with Brexit, the biggest Empire in history vanished without a sight, Mohammed being the #1 boy's name nationwide, and 89% of young Britons having no purpose:
    "Nine in ten young Brits believe their life lacks purpose, according to shocking new study"
    https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/9637619/young-brits-life-lacks-purpose/

    Ultimately we can agree to disagree on the nature of the liturgy. I am just trying to speak for the classical Anglican perspective, to my best understanding of it.

    My heartfelt adherence is to the Act of Uniformity, which established a single Anglican liturgy, with the best of our divines believing in a single body of the church, oriented towards God in one direction, that it was even supported by the civil arm of the government. That's how much classical Anglicans believed that we must pray with one common breath. Other churches may have a different liturgy, but for Anglicans it mandates a single liturgy of common prayer.

    But even if you believed in common prayer with such intensity as our forebearers, here's the issue: how can you impose a single liturgy when people have all kinds of divergent loyalties and dis-loyalties, even back then? You had people who were loyal to Rome, people loyal to some sort of pre-Reformation Sarum observance, you had the nascent puritan movement with their no-less grievous errors. How can you make one people, one Church of England, out of such a chaotic assembly? The only way was (and is), by having absolutely unshakeable grounds for why the liturgy is in fact the best. That you're not imposing the BCP by legal fiat, by tyranny, but that you are in fact in possession of the best liturgy which should command the happy obedience of all the faithful. If you have enough of that conviction, you will begin to ask, okay, well what are the reasons why the Sarum was insufficient? What are the reasons why we don't let the Puritans run off to their conventicles? And I've given some of those reasons here. Puritanism was born in sin, and led to heresy. The Sarum did not produce holiness in the people. That is why the Prayerbook tradition, the one unified Prayerbook tradition, is the right course of action.



    --



    I actually agree with this. The nucleus of the liturgy is indeed from the Scriptures, but that's not the argument that Rexlion and I are making (not that I want to speak for him). Yes, without the trinitarian formula, the liturgy of baptism is invalid, and those (such as the Unitarians or the Mormons) who baptize without it, we can consider as having made no baptism at all. Similarly with the Eucharistic canon, the Words of Institution, you could make a similar argument (although you yourself raise the example of historic liturgies which didn't contain the words of institution). And the last example I suppose you could cite is the Lord's Prayer which is an emphatically liturgical prayer. Our Lord certainly only conceived worship in the context of the liturgy, which is why he left us those 2-3 liturgical elements.

    However we look at the Anaphora:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphora_(liturgy)

    That list was not mentioned in the Scriptures. It was composed by the Church, for the work of holiness among the people. And this is just the communion rite, without covering everything else in the liturgy. Just the Anaphoras undergone many revisions, as churches adapted them to their own uses: "Many ancient texts of anaphoras have survived, and even if no more in use," In other words, there is no one "Anaphora" but rather a list of various elements, out of the 10 of which elements, only one (the words of institution) you could consider to be of divine origin. The other 9 elements were written by the Church; added, subtracted, etc.

    All we are trying to say is that it is impossible to argue that the liturgy as a whole (apart from the 3 elements I mentioned above) is divinely-inspired. But that doesn't mean it is arbitrary either. People always jump from one to the other. Earlier I write on the importance of the Act of Uniformity, and the grand unification of the Church in a single prayer, a prayer composed by the Church herself, for the holiness of the people.

    Since the Church doesn't compose the liturgy from scratch, she studies historically what has produced holiness over the centuries. If we have a historical liturgy which can still produce holiness better than something new written, let us cleave unto that. If (like the Sarum Mass) it was around for a while but stopped producing holiness, then it is fit for it to be amended. If like the 1662 BCP it is capable of producing holiness even 400 years later, better than a modern liturgy, then it should be retained.
    Click to expand...
    There has been positively too much bloodshed for me to be able to agree with any approach in which one religion alone becomes lawful. This was the error of Theodosius II, and it lead to needless deaths over minor misinterpretations of wording after Chalcedon, as well at the utter subjugation of the non-Christian population, and this in turn led to the successful Islamic conquest of much of the Byzantine Empire, because you had a large population of Oriental Orthodox, Jews, Samaritans, and Sabians with no loyalty to Constantinople.

    ~

    Regarding Dom Gregory Dix, I have reviewed those podcasts, and as Michael Gove is once reported to have said, "they suffer from the very considerable disadvantage of being wrong." The conclusions about the 1979 BCP are wrong and the conclusions regarding the influence of Dix are wrong.

    Indeed, if Dix alone influenced the 1979 BCP, it would be much better. There would be a well structured communion office with no versus populum or contemporary language, and a single rite for daily prayer, but that rite would certainly feature Compline from the 1928 book and Prime and Midday Prayer taken from the usages of the Order of the Holy Cross.

    My present view however is that the problems with the 1979 book were not that severe, and furthermore many congregations just continued using the 1928 book; the real issue which caused the Continuing Anglican Movement was the culture of theological liberalism (of which Dix was not remotely a part) which began ordaining women in 1979. This was the sine qua non, and correctly so; it also, from that moment, reduced the ecumenical dialogue which had previously been productive between the Anglican Communion and the Eastern Orthodox to a purely academic exercise (and since then it has changed into an exercise, to be frank, of the less financially well off Orthodox churches like Antioch or Albania perduading the Anglican Communion to give them money). This is of course because the Orthodox cannot countenance the idea of being in communion with someone who ordains women; "you are what you are in communion with" is a common axiom in our ecclesiology.

    But to me, Dix represents one of the great figures of Anglicanism; he was a monastic, in an order I personally admire (and might even join); he was a charitable man, he rejected worldly pleasure, and his study of the liturgy has always struck me as dispassionate and generally accurate. Indeed I think he made only one historical error, which was his assesment of the eucharistic theology of Cranmer. Actually if I were to enumerate my three favorite Anglican thinkers from the 20th century I could do so very easily; it would consist of Dom Gregory, Fr. Percy Dearmer , and C.S. Lewis. A monastic (I think of the rank we would in Orthodocy call an Archimandrite), a secular priest, and a layman. And if I were to enumerate my three least favorite Anglicans of the 20th century they would be Bishop James Pike, Bishop James Pike and Bishop James Pike. It is impossible to overstate the damage he did to the Episcopal Church with his neo-Gnostic heresy and his dreadful, oft repeated catchphrase "We need fewer beliefs and more belief." If you want to single out a man responsible for setting into motion the doctrinal ruination of the Episcopal church (as opposed to its mere liturgical mediocrity, which is more Bugnini’s fault than anyone’s), there is your man.

    You might even be able to arrest him, because according to his best friend Philip K. Dick, who received information on Gnostic Christianity from what he believed was a pink laser beam transmitted from an orbiting satellite connected to VALIS (this being after his abuse of LSD in the 1960s), his soul transmigrated into a girl on the occasion of his accidental death while looking through the Palestinian desert for traces of the "historical Jesus", a favored topic of my least favorite Anglican of the 21st century, John Shelby Spong. With regards to James Pike and Philip K. Dick, you can’t make this stuff up. And it gets even more shocking than that, but I just ate breakfast, and my stomach hurts.

    @Stalwart, upon reading that I would of course sympathize with any urge you had to present a bill before Parliament to order the suppression of such Gnostic conventicles and the arrest of anyone reporting contact from a pink laser beam following an acid trip, but I propose that such people owing to the absurdity of their beliefs, provided this absurdity is fully exposed, as St. irenaues and Epiphanius exposed the Gnostics of that era, will only be able to attract very likeminded people, Just as Scientology’s growth was halted and then reversed after the curtain was pulled back on their secret doctrines.

    I suppose one law I could support would be one prohibitng religions from worshipping in secret.
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  4. Rexlion Well-Known Member

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    Liturgyworks said: ↑
    Nope. Reread my post, specifically the bit about nuclei.
    I had to re-read that sentence 10 times as it was. The sentence structure lacks clarity. Maybe you'd care to "unpack it" and reveal the hidden meaning that is in your mind but not evident to me? Because all I can see is, a nucleus is at the center of a thing but the nucleus is not 'the whole thing,' it's just the nucleus. In this instance, the liturgy was created by men to surround and encompass the Sacrament. The liturgy is good and useful, I'm not saying it isn't. Yet Christ did not institute liturgies, He instituted Sacraments. Christian liturgies were developed over time since the Ascension.
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  5. Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Rexlion said: ↑
    I had to re-read that sentence 10 times as it was. The sentence structure lacks clarity. Maybe you'd care to "unpack it" and reveal the hidden meaning that is in your mind but not evident to me? Because all I can see is, a nucleus is at the center of a thing but the nucleus is not 'the whole thing,' it's just the nucleus. In this instance, the liturgy was created by men to surround and encompass the Sacrament. The liturgy is good and useful, I'm not saying it isn't. Yet Christ did not institute liturgies, He instituted Sacraments. Christian liturgies were developed over time since the Ascension.
    No, the nucleus is the center of something but also integrally part of it. Thus, the most important and solemn moments in Baptism and Holy Communion are usually direct quotations from our Lord, and what is more, the Baptism on the Jordan and the Last Supper should be understood as liturgical events (in that St. John the Baptist was performing a liturgical rite with his baptisms related to Jewish ritual purification by immersion in a mikvah, but in a more pure form, which is why Jews were lining up to be baptized by him (modern Judaism is fairly radically different from Second Temple Judaism, which was divided into sects, with the Sadducees, who did not believe in The World to Come, dominating the Temple, and the Pharisees, who had the most influence on later Rabinnical Judaism but were still not quite the same, dominating the synagogues, and you had iconography in those synagogues, and then you had the ascetic, apocalyptic Essenes and related ascetic apocalyptic figures like St. John the Baptist, who had a mass appeal the Essenes lacked, and then you had Naziri, or temporary ascetics, who did not cut their hair or engage in sexual intercourse or eat meat during the term of their ascetisism, and in the courtyards of the Temple there were barbers whose duty was to cut the hair of these men after they completed their self-defined ascetic period).

    In like manner, the Last Supper looks to have been a Passover Seder, a liturgical event, in which our Lord departed from the traditional rubrics to declare himself the sacrifice.

    (Judaism has changed a lot, but the essence of much Jewish ritual is unchanged, which is why Karaite and Samaritan prayer books resemble Orthodox Jewish prayer books; the main difference is that in the latter, various hymns were added of a Kabbalistic nature, like Adon Olam, and in the Karaite and Rabinnical liturgies the litany known as the Eighteen Blessings was modified to add a curse against heretics in the late first century, with Jewish Christians being one of the groups that curse had in mind)
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  6. Anglo-cracker Member Anglican

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    Puritanism was born in sin, and led to heresy. [/QUOTE]
    This has been a very interesting and informative thread. Could you please expand on this statement quoted above?
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  7. Stalwart Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Anglo-cracker said: ↑
    Puritanism was born in sin, and led to heresy. [/QUOTE.]
    This has been a very interesting and informative thread. Could you please expand on this statement quoted above?
    Some say I’ve been too strident, so I won’t say very much. The fact of the Puritan schism is pretty well established if you’re familiar with the history of the Reformation in England. And furthermore schism is a sin. So that’s the first half.

    And as to the second half, did you know that Harvard, established as an early Puritan seminary, went heretical by the 1700s? That’s why they had to establish Yale nearby. But that went heretical by the end of the 1700s as well. At the end of the 18th century, almost all Puritans in New England became unitarian, and cast off our Lord and Savior. John Adams, a famous American Founding Father and. Puritan, had some bad words to say about our Lord.

    And they did all this centuries ago, before any of today’s pressures of secular society, technological trauma and social/family breakdown which trouble us today. They just went heretical under their own weight, once Puritan theology was formulated. If anything they helped contribute to today’s atheistical society, because they permitted divorce, abolished the episcopacy, banished the liturgy, etc.

    Just imagine if they actually had won in England, as they were trying to.
    Last edited: Aug 25, 2019
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  8. Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Stalwart said: ↑
    Some say I’ve been too strident, so I won’t say very much. The fact of the Puritan schism is pretty well established if you’re familiar with the history of the Reformation in England. And furthermore schism is a sin. So that’s the first half.

    And as to the second half, did you know that Harvard, established as an early Puritan seminary, went heretical by the 1700s? That’s why they had to establish Yale nearby. But that went heretical by the end of the 1700s as well. At the end of the 18th century, almost all Puritans in New England became unitarian, and cast off our Lord and Savior. John Adams, a famous American Founding Father and. Puritan, had some bad words to say about our Lord.

    And they did all this centuries ago, before any of today’s pressures of secular society, technological trauma and social/family breakdown which trouble us today. They just went heretical under their own weight, once Puritan theology was formulated. If anything they helped contribute to today’s atheistical society, because they permitted divorce, abolished the episcopacy, banished the liturgy, etc.

    Just imagine if they actually had won in England, as they were trying to.
    Click to expand...
    Indeed so, the fact it took just 150 years for the Puritans in New England to largely become Unitarians, including the majority in Boston, amuses me.

    But you are forgetting the other half of the story: the majority of the Congregational churches rejected Unitarianism. And Yale is not "nearby" Harvard; MIT is, indeed one could walk from Harvard to MIT, but Yale is in New Haven, Conneticut, which is halfway to New York. Closer than Oxford to Cambridge, but still in the regional vernacular, a "schlep," (somewhat mitigated since the New Haven-Boston railway was electrified for the Acela high speed train, where it gets its fasted speeds).

    The other aspect is that the congregationalists have since remained theologically parallel to the Episcopalians, with conservative groups emerging inside the UCC and also as separate alignment.

    I also have to confess I cannot pronounce a congregational church as being heretical owing to its polities, because in essence they have merely localized the bishop and made each parish a diocese. But most denominations which use this polity, like the Baptists, the Unitarian Universalist Association, and the SDA, are heretical, but for other reasons. Park Street Church, the only ancient church in Boston that is still conservative, I can find no fault with.
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  9. Fr. Brench Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Yale and Harvard are "near" one another in the sense that both are in New England, a distinct region of the US, and the general hotbed of Puritan establishment... once upon a time. It's true about the unitarianism, you drive around here and see a lovely historic white church building in the center of practically every town and village, and nearly every single one has the rainbow flag out front. When you put the words "congregationalist" and "New England" in the same sentence, the default assumption is always going to be the UCC or other such heretical sect. Park Street Church in Boston is a (very) noteworthy exception, as are a handful of lesser-known churches, such as the one I grew up attending.

    Puritanism as an entity clearly failed. But, theologically, it's basically a particular expression of calvinism, which has survived most distinctly (here in the US) in the Presbyterian churches, which (like us) run the gamut of crazy liberal to crazy conservative. So we should be careful to say what we mean when making judgments about puritanism.
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  10. Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    @Fr. Bench, on a related question, do any ACNA congregations still use the 1979 BCP, will its use be retained, and since the 1662 BCP is the standard, will other editions of the Book of Common Prayer faithful to the 1662 BCP, such as the 1892 and 1928 American BCP, or services taken from the 1662 BCP, be allowed, or is the 2019 BCP going to be required, with the 1662 as the only alternative?

    For that matter @Stalwart, will the BCP editions of the Reformed Episcopal Church remain canonical for use in the ACNA, or will they be suppressed?

    Personally I hope that the current range of liturgies in the ACNA and its member provinces remains available for use; I think the focus should be on improving the music of the ACNA by stamping out CCM and Praise and Worship music and restoring Anglican Chant and the traditional hymns, canticles and psalms one associates with Anglicanism, as well as preserving the beautiful selection of Protestant chorales one finds in the 1940 Hymnal and to a lesser extent the 1980 hymnal.
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  11. Stalwart Well-Known Member Anglican

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    The REC Prayer Book (basically the 1928 BCP) is canonical for all of REC, and permissable within ACNA, although they latter would probably just use the default 1928 (the same text just different editions).

    I hope that the range of liturgies shrinks down to just a handful, and eventually back down to one, as it was until the 1970s. Having multiple liturgies, like having breakaways and schisms, is just not the Anglican way.
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  12. Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Stalwart said: ↑
    The REC Prayer Book (basically the 1928 BCP) is canonical for all of REC, and permissable within ACNA, although they latter would probably just use the default 1928 (the same text just different editions).
    Splendid.

    I hope that the range of liturgies shrinks down to just a handful, and eventually back down to one, as it was until the 1970s. Having multiple liturgies, like having breakaways and schisms, is just not the Anglican way.
    My view is that what matters is that the prayers are common, but a diversity of liturgical uses is inevitable and not undesirable. For example, Americans cannot sing the same way the English can sing; the American accent has different properties, and when the language changes, which it does frequently in Anglicanism, you have even more of a shift (for example, compare the sound of the boys’ choir of Milan Cathedral in Italy with that of Westminster Abbey).
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  13. Stalwart Well-Known Member Anglican

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    In my experience, if there is a diversity of liturgical uses, then it would be practically impossible for the prayers to be common.

    But as importantly as that, the Prayerbooks are how, in the Anglican mindset, doctrine becomes taught, lex orandi lex credendi. With uniformity of liturgies, there will be a uniformity of doctrine. With a multiplicity of liturgies, you will inevitably result in differing doctrines.
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  14. Shane R Well-Known Member

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    Liturgyworks said: ↑
    @Fr. Bench, on a related question, do any ACNA congregations still use the 1979 BCP, will its use be retained,
    Yes and yes. The Diocese of the Carolinas and Great Lakes are still predominantly on that book (and I suspect at least 50% of ACNA). There are a few parishes here and there that have made a change, such as the one I consulted with a while back to assist them in transitioning to the '28. I've got a parish in NJ on my radar that wants me to supply that is '79. I've never served that rite: only '28, '62, or the Missal. Could I wing it? Yeah. Would my bishop approve? That remains to be known.
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  15. Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Stalwart said: ↑
    In my experience, if there is a diversity of liturgical uses, then it would be practically impossible for the prayers to be common.

    But as importantly as that, the Prayerbooks are how, in the Anglican mindset, doctrine becomes taught, lex orandi lex credendi. With uniformity of liturgies, there will be a uniformity of doctrine. With a multiplicity of liturgies, you will inevitably result in differing doctrines.
    I hear this a lot, mainly from Latin Mass enthusiasts, but the experience of the Eastern churches does not bear this out. The Eastern Orthodox churches have, in use at present, several subtly different forms of the Byzantine Rite, one radically different form (the Russian Old Rite), another highly divergent form at New Skete, and three or fourn versions of the Western Rite (St. Andrew’s Prayerbook, St. Coleman’s Prayerbook, both BCP derivatives, Orthodox Prayers of Old England, and now a new set of service books for the ROCOR Western Rite), but the faith is the same across all these churches. Of course, you might cite jurisdictional squabbling or the problems with the Ecumenical Patriarchate (which all involve Greek Orthodox jurisdictions using only one liturgy, the Greek parish use of the Byzantine Rite on the New Calendar), but I can then cite the Oriental Orthodox.

    There, you have four, previously twelve (there used to be a Western Rite in Ceylon, of disgruntled Roman Catholics, who sought out the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch rather than becoming Old Catholics, and there were also the Nubian Orthodox, the Albanian Orthodox (in what is now Azerbaijan, also known as Iberian Albania, rather than Albania adjacent to Greece, Macedonia and the former Yugoslavia on the Adriatic), and several other rites which became extinct due to Islamic persecution, and later, the Portuguese conquest of the Malabar Coast and the forced conversion of large numbers of Indian Orthodox to Roman Catholicism. Yet despite all this, there are still four liturgical rites, and of these, setting aside the Armenian Rite, which has problems due to Latinization (a failed attempt by the Roman Catholics to take it over around 700 years ago, which was thwarted, but the liturgy requires repair), you have in the three other rites three distinct anaphoras (like a Eucharistic Prayer), in the Coptic Rite (including the oldest documented Holy Communion service), fourteen in the Ethiopian Rite, and over eighty in the Syriac Orthodox, of which thirty are well known and fifeteen are readily available in English.

    Yet despite this incredible liturgical diversity, the faith is the same. Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi works when the semantics of the prayers are identical. All of the Eastern Orthodox, and the Oriental Orthodox, liturgies, and also those of the Church of the East (which has three anaphoras, or Eucharistic prayers, including the second oldest attested Holy Communion service), have similiar semantics, and within their specific communions the semantics are identical (among the EO, the OO and the Assyrian and Ancient Church of the East, respectively).

    So, all of the Oriental Orthodox believe the same faith, despite their highly divergent liturgies (an Armenian Soorp Badarak is structurally, musically and aesthetically highly divergent from an Ethiopian Kidase, but both are Holy Communion services with a similiar structure, and all of the common pieces one would expect in a divine liturgy), because the semantics are the same. The Oriental Orthodox churches, by the way, despite this remarkable liturgical diversity, managed to preserve this doctrinal unity, with virtually no contact with each other. The first meeting of all the Oriental Orthodox patriarchs in, probably, the past thousand years, was convened by Emperor Haile Selassie in Addis Ababba in the 1960s. But because the meaning of the liturgies was the same, and the semantics of the prayers, the same, the faith was the same.

    This is a very important point, it should also be noted, because as we all know, languages can experience semantic drift, and semantics vary between language, hence the phrase "Lost in translation." For example, if one translates the Cranmerian English of the Book of Common Prayer to contemporary English, the loss of the second person pronoun can create ambiguity, and this has to be addressed; simply saying "You" instead of "Thou" when "Thou" is semantically indicated, is inadequete. But the task is not insurmountable. However, when one considers the extreme bother of having to deal with the changing vernacular, the appeal of the liturgical language becomes evident (but I agree that services must be understood by the people; of late, and of neccessity, due to changing language knowledge between generations, the Coptic and Syriac Orthodox churches have done something rather brilliant and used screens to display the liturgical text in English, Arabic and Syriac or Coptic, or another combination of languages; the two churches are having considerable success teaching Syriac and Coptic to their youth, and separately, they want to phase out Arabic in the diaspora as they view it as a linguistic symbol of Islamic oppression.

    The reason why the 1979 BCP was controversial and still is, and why @Shane R may have trouble getting his bishop to let him serve from it (by the way Shane, I dare you to serve Eucharistic Prayer C, the Star Trek prayer, if you get it ), is because it has semantics which are incongruous with those of older editions of the Book of Common Prayer. The Alternative Service Book in Canada, Common Worship in the UK, and the horrific New Zealand prayerbook, and the horrid 2004 Irish book, are much much worse than the 1979 BCP because the semantics are radically divergent from their predecessors. They contain new and strange doctrine, grotesque modern language, often "gender neutral", politically motivated content, rather than religiously motivated content, and so on.

    Conversely, the 2019 BCP is getting good reviews from lots of people, including myself, because the semantics of its prayers align well with traditional BCP editions. It is not perfect, but it is the first major Anglican liturgical text in years which is not complete rubbish; indeed, the contemporary language portions of it are vastly superior to those in the 1979 BCP both in terms of doctrinal cohesion facilitated by semantic equivalence, and the stylistic elegance of the text itself. The new BCP could represent the starting point for new tradition-minded translations into modern English.

    ~

    So in a nutshell, my view is you can’t get common prayer from one single text, due to linguistic variations, and also, the evidence in the form of the experience of the Eastern churches says it is not neccessary. For that matter, I propose the Anglican experience also suggests it is needless; there is no substantial variation between the 1662, 1666, 1892, 1912, 1918, 1926, 1928, Deposited, 1929, 1938, 1954, 1960 and 1962 editions of the Book of Common Prayer of England, Ireland, America, Scotland, Canada, Melanesia, South Africa and Ghana, respectively. The first prayerbook that was disturbingly different was the 1979 BCP, but the Anglican Service Book heroically manages to correct it and turn it into something interoperable with the other BCP editions.

    Also, when we step back and consider the territory of the ACNA, there are three major languages (English, Spanish and French), and several widely spoken languages of immigrants, and of Native Americans, various BCP editions having been translated to several of them. In North America, north of the border between Mexico and Guatemala, you have five states: Mexico, Belize, the United States, Canada, and France (which controls St. Pierre and Miquelon off the coast of Newfoundland, and also the uninhabited Clipperton Island off the coast of Mexico). So depending on where the ACNA feels a need to minister, it could require a large array of languages and also collects for different governments, also given the semi-autonomous nature of the Native American tribes in the US and the First Nations in Canada.

    But this is not a problem to worry about, because the Oriental Orthodox preserved a common belief system, a common faith, with highly variable liturgies, stylistically, structurally, syntactically, visually, musically, ethnically and linguistically diverse, because the semantics are identical. If you read the Syriac Orthodox anaphoras, for example, the fourteen translated into English, you will see that although the wording varies in places, the meaning is always the same. This applies also to the Coptic liturgies, which have only three anaphoras, but a very large number of fraction prayers, some proper to particular occasions, and others selectable at the discretion of the priest, and to the Ethiopian liturgies, one of which by the way happens to be very similiar to the liturgy of St. Hippolytus in the Apostolic Tradition, from which the dreadful Eucharistic Prayer B originates. But in the context of the Ethiopian liturgy, this anaphora, called The Anaphora of the Apostles, works.

    Here are the Syriac Orthodox anaphoras, which are quite beautiful by the way, Stalwart, so you can see my point. Note that the Syriac Orthodox equivalent to the 1662 BCP is the Divine Liturgy of St. James; most of the other anaphoras are written to correspond with it, and its use is mandatory on certain occasions, but there are also other anaphoras of equivalent age which nonetheless convey a common faith (for example, the Anaphora of the Twelve Apostles, and its derivative, the Anaphora of St. John Chrysostom, which we also find in the Eastern Orthodox church, and the Anaphora of St. Cyril, which is the ancient Coptic liturgy translated into Syriac (probably from the original Greek), and structurally modified to fit the Antiochene liturgical structure, specifically that used by the Syriac Orthodox Church. http://sor.cua.edu/Liturgy/Anaphora/index.html

    Thus, one can even import prayers and services that predate the main liturgy while maintaining semantic equivalence. I think the greatest Anglican accomplishment in this respect was reviving the Mozarabic Rite, which under Roman Catholic Roman Rite chauvinism, dwindled to one chapel in the cathedral of Toledo, but before that happened, in Mexico, the local wedding service from the Spanish colonial period was partially Mozarabic, so the first Mexican Book of Common Prayer translated a much simplified Mozarabic Rite into English and Spanish, while, in my opinion, maintaining semantic equivalance with other BCP editions of the same era (and much more semantic equivalence than the Anglican Missal). That said, the Anglican Missal could have worked better had it been less Anglo Papalist and more Anglican.

    …

    By the way @Stalwart, I did not intend to have this conversation with you, but I want to thank you for it, because I love discussing the faith with you even where we do not agree. I love having you as a friend and admire your devotion and piety.
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  16. Rexlion Well-Known Member

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    As I understand it, the '79 is pretty much banished from use in the ACNA, such that none of the churches are allowed to use it in their services. Of course the individual members are still free to use whatever edition they wish. In our parish, the '79s were given away to anyone who wanted them for whatever reason (after the local used bookstore was consulted, and they declined to purchase even a single copy).
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  17. Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Rexlion said: ↑
    As I understand it, the '79 is pretty much banished from use in the ACNA, such that none of the churches are allowed to use it in their services. Of course the individual members are still free to use whatever edition they wish. In our parish, the '79s were given away to anyone who wanted them for whatever reason (after the local used bookstore was consulted, and they declined to purchase even a single copy).
    What BCP edition does your church use now?

    By the way, let the record state that I am interested if any church is disposing of hymnals or prayerbooks of any type or vintage.
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  18. Shane R Well-Known Member

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    Rexlion said: ↑
    As I understand it, the '79 is pretty much banished from use in the ACNA, such that none of the churches are allowed to use it in their services. Of course the individual members are still free to use whatever edition they wish. In our parish, the '79s were given away to anyone who wanted them for whatever reason (after the local used bookstore was consulted, and they declined to purchase even a single copy).
    Where did you hear that? The book is broadly used in several dioceses. It didn't just disappear overnight.
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  19. Stalwart Well-Known Member Anglican

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    The '79 was allowed to be used until the new ACNA Prayer book was officially promulgated, which it finally was a few months ago, after a labor of 10 years. I will be very surprised if there are any '79 holdouts left in the next 5 years.


    Liturgyworks said: ↑
    Yet despite this incredible liturgical diversity, the faith is the same.
    And yet on the other hand, look also at the current schism between the Russians and the Greeks, which has already rent the Eastern Orthodox world which you love, into two. The Greeks are very liberal, while the Russians are implacable; those differences may not be 100% caused by their differing liturgies, but that difference certainly magnifies their alienation from each other.

    Also, look at how the Latin church, and the Greek church, slowly drifted from each other leading to the lamentable schism in 1054. By that point they were simply two different understandings of Christianity, not entirely foreign to each other, but different enough to cause friction, each with its own 1000 years of venerable tradition. The pride went up, and the Church was rent in two.
    Last edited: Sep 27, 2019
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  20. Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Stalwart said: ↑
    And yet on the other hand, look also at the current schism between the Russians and the Greeks, which has already rent the Eastern Orthodox world which you love, into two. The Greeks are very liberal, while the Russians are implacable; those differences may not be 100% caused by their differing liturgies, but that difference certainly magnifies their alienation from each other.
    On this point, you would have one were it not for the fact the feud is between the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Moscow Patriarchate, not the Greek Orthodox in general. The Church of Greece, headed by the Archbishop of Athens, is autocephalous and accounts for most of the Greek population; only those areas added after the War of Independence as a result of the later collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the Greek diaspora outside of Africa, are under the EP. And the liturgy of the Church of Greece and a typical EP parish is entirely identical.

    Furthermore, the bone of contention in the schism involves Ukraine and the EP’s support of the schismatic Orthodox Church in the Ukraine. This church uses the same liturgy as the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, under the Moscow Patriarchate, in every respect, except they are commemorating Patriarch Bartholomew I rather than Patriarch Kyrill II in the Diptychs.

    And these Diptychs are different for every Orthodox church in the same way that each Anglican Province has different bidding prayers for its leadership and national government. So the difference is insubstantial, except in this case where every Orthodox church other than the EP, including several which use the same liturgical Typikon as the EP, including the Church of Alexandria, Romania, Cyprus, and most especially Antioch, is condemning the EP over their course of action.

    The UOC-NA in North America is also under the EP and again follows the same typikon as the Russian Orthodox church. If you visited a UOC NA parish and a canonical UOC parish in Ukraine, you would not be able to perceive a difference except that in North America you might hear a mixture of English and Church Slavonic in the liturgy.

    Also, look at how the Latin church, and the Greek church, slowly drifted from each other leading to the lamentable schism in 1054. By that point they were simply two different understandings of Christianity, not entirely foreign to each other, but different enough to cause friction, each with its own 1000 years of venerable tradition. The pride went up, and the Church was rent in two.
    These were bona fide substantial differences in the semantics of the liturgy, introduced by Roman innovation. By 1054 Rome had suppressed the Gallican Rite, and was working on killing off the Mozarabic Rite; one Pope during that era actually burned all the Mozarabic service books, but his successor reversed the decision and the Mozarabic clergy rewrote them from memory. The related Ambrosian Rite, still used in Milan (which has Orthodox-style features in terms of a 6 week Advent, the vestment colors used during Lent, a chant style closer to Byzantine than to Gregorian, and so on) was also repeatedly targeted for elimination, and probably has survived only because of the popularity of St. Carlos Borromeo, an Archbishop of Milan admired for his piety, and also the fact that Pope Pius VI had previously been Archbishop of that city. The Gallican and Mozarabic Rites have even more similiarity to the Eastern liturgies, for example, very extensive use of the Trisagion, Anaphoras that are variable and change based on liturgical propers, and which sometimes include epikleses, and which sometimes are addressed to Jesus Christ rather than the Father (like the Coptic Liturgy of St. Gregory).

    But what caused the break was a series of actions by Rome, which were despised by the reformers, which caused the Roman Rite, which thanks to Charlemagne was being propagated as the standard throughout the Roman church, albeit in a very broad diversity of uses (compare the Rites of Braga, Lyons, Sarum, York, Cologne, the Dominican Order, the Norbertine Order, the Carmelite Order, the Carthusian Order, and the Tridentine standard liturgy in the "Missal of Paul V", or the vast difference between the Dominican and Benedictine breviaries and the Roman Breviary).

    These actions, which created semantic differences in the liturgy, included:

    - Refusal to serve the liturgy in the vernacular, instead using Latin for everything (ironic, because Latin was introduced to serve less well educated, and therefore generally poorer, Roman people who could not speak Greek by St. Victor).
    - Refusal to distribute the Blood of our Lord to the faithful, which Rome had historically engaged in.
    - Refusal to respect local liturgical traditions in areas already evangelized by Eastern churches (also known as Latinization).
    - The introduction of innovations such as Eucharistic Adoration and Purgatory.
    - The privatization of the Breviary into a personal devotion read by priests; as a rule, after about the year 1,000, the Divine Office was only celebrated publically in Cathedral Churches, Abbeys and some churches operated by the friars, which were generally using local rites such as that of Lyons or York, or the Norbertine Rite, or monastics using the Benedictine Rite, the Carmelite Rite, or Friars using the Dominican Rite. In contrast, in the East, the communal celebration of the Divine Office remained universal.

    All of these issues were corrected by the Anglican church.

    What I have been stressing is that even if you try, you cannot get the same liturgy; Rome, for example, after the Council of Trent, experienced an explosion of regional diversity in terms of liturgical music and nearly lost Gregorian Chant, and the chant that it does have is partially reconstructed. In like manner, a number of other regional customs immediately inserted themselves, for example, in France, the organ was traditionally played during a Low Mass, rather than it being done in silence as was the custom elsewhere (after Roman priests stopped chanting it in monotone).

    Thus, what one has to do is aim for semantic equivalence, and avoid doing what Rome did. Also, it is a fact that all recent schisms in the canonical Eastern and Oriental churches have not concerned the liturgy. Indeed, the only major ongoing schism is between the Jacobite Syrian Orthodox Church of Malankara, under the Patriarch of Antioch, and the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, under the Catholicos of India, a position originally created by the former, and the two churches use the exact same Syriac Orthodox liturgy. The same vestments, the same chants, the same 86 anaphoras, and so on. And then there is the Malankara Independent Syrian Church, which exists to some extent for the benefit of those who cannot stand the pointless schism between the two major Syriac Orthodox jurisdictions in India, which has a connection to the Anglican communion in that it is in communion with the Protestant Mar Thoma Syrian Church, which is in communion with the Church of South India and I believe also with Canterbury directly; the church was established by Anglican missionaries in the East India Company along with a local Indian bishop.*

    * I should clarify some terminology for the sake of clarity, in Orthodox terminology, an autocephalous jurisdiction is equivalent to an independent Anglican province in communion with, but not subordinate to, a Metropolitan of a larger area. For example, the Church in Wales would be autocephalous, whereas the Province of York, being subordinate to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is also Metropolitan of All England, is not. And some parts of ACNA under the Diocese of the Southern Cone, or of African countries, were, at that time, equivalent to what the Orthodox call an autonomous church, which is a church subordinate to an autocephalous church but otherwise independent. The canonical Ukrainian church is an autonomous church under the Moscow Patriarchate, for example, whereas the Church of Finland is an autonomous church under the Ecumenical Patriarchate.
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1662 is the Standard for ACNA

Discussion in 'Liturgy, and Book of Common Prayer' started by Magistos, Aug 11, 2019.

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  1. Shane R Well-Known Member

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    Well, if any of you want to send me a '79, PM me. There was a nice one in my house, given by the retired bishop of CT on the occasion of my late wife's confirmation, but I think my sister in law hauled it away after my wife died. She probably didn't realize what it was and with her limited grasp of English she probably can't make sense of it. But she's never offered to return it.
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  2. Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Shane R said: ↑
    Well, if any of you want to send me a '79, PM me. There was a nice one in my house, given by the retired bishop of CT on the occasion of my late wife's confirmation, but I think my sister in law hauled it away after my wife died. She probably didn't realize what it was and with her limited grasp of English she probably can't make sense of it. But she's never offered to return it.
    I have one, but would like to acquire more for utility purposes, but if you really need it, I could send it to you. It is not what our C of E members would call a "posh" edition however; it was a pew book, in average condition, given to me by the priest of the Episcopalian church I attended, before he retired.

    Right now my mother is using it as a reference along with a copy I made of the 1662 BCP texts, for composing a set of canticles for Choral Evensong. St. Sepulchre without Newgate accepts submissions of anthems and canticles for their weekly Evensong, and my mother is pursuing that.

    She also has an interest in setting the 2019 book to music. There is one huge problem with the 2019 BCP, in that, since it lacks a Rite I, it is incompatible with the existing corpus of Anglican music. I really wish the ACNA had released it into the public domain in the tradition of the Episcopal church, because this would allow for that to be corrected.
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  3. Rexlion Well-Known Member

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    Liturgyworks said: ↑
    What BCP edition does your church use now?

    By the way, let the record state that I am interested if any church is disposing of hymnals or prayerbooks of any type or vintage.
    We have the 2019 BCPs in the pews as of, I think, July.
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  4. Rexlion Well-Known Member

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    Shane R said: ↑
    Where did you hear that? The book is broadly used in several dioceses. It didn't just disappear overnight.
    My pastor (who is also archdeacon) said it.... unless I misunderstood what he said. Can't guarantee my memory or my ears, though. I have slept about 60 times since then, after all....
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  5. Rexlion Well-Known Member

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    Shane R said: ↑
    Well, if any of you want to send me a '79, PM me. There was a nice one in my house, given by the retired bishop of CT on the occasion of my late wife's confirmation, but I think my sister in law hauled it away after my wife died. She probably didn't realize what it was and with her limited grasp of English she probably can't make sense of it. But she's never offered to return it.
    PM sent.
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  6. Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Rexlion said: ↑
    PM sent.
    Would you have any spares for me?
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  7. Rexlion Well-Known Member

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    Liturgyworks said: ↑
    Would you have any spares for me?
    I will check to see whether any remaining '79s are stored at the church. Maybe I'll have an answer on Sunday. At some point, any unclaimed copies were going to be discarded. If there are some, how many are you thinking about?
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  8. Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Rexlion said: ↑
    I will check to see whether any remaining '79s are stored at the church. Maybe I'll have an answer on Sunday. At some point, any unclaimed copies were going to be discarded. If there are some, how many are you thinking about?
    As many as you can spare.
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  9. Fr. Brench Well-Known Member Anglican

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    There may be need of a reminder, for those who forget, that in the ACNA liturgical authority is found in the diocesan bishop. Whatever he permits or restricts or orders is the liturgical rule. If some say "you may keep using the 1979" then parishes will do so. My previous bishop tried to make a point of getting all of us onto the Texts for Common Prayer, which now is the 2019 book, and I suspect that every church in my diocese is now using it, or a previous draft of it. I am happy to see the '79 book gone from my sphere of activity, but that's apparently not the case everywhere in the ACNA.

    On the other hand, this "what-the-bishop-says" policy also ensures the survival of the 1928 and REC prayer books in their respective spheres of influence, which I see as a good thing... we need the more-classical books around to bring balance and witness to the modernist influences surviving in the 2019 use.
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  10. Rexlion Well-Known Member

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    Liturgyworks said: ↑
    As many as you can spare.
    I emailed to find out, and they are gone now. Sorry I can't help out.
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  11. Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Fr. Brench said: ↑
    There may be need of a reminder, for those who forget, that in the ACNA liturgical authority is found in the diocesan bishop. Whatever he permits or restricts or orders is the liturgical rule. If some say "you may keep using the 1979" then parishes will do so. My previous bishop tried to make a point of getting all of us onto the Texts for Common Prayer, which now is the 2019 book, and I suspect that every church in my diocese is now using it, or a previous draft of it. I am happy to see the '79 book gone from my sphere of activity, but that's apparently not the case everywhere in the ACNA.

    On the other hand, this "what-the-bishop-says" policy also ensures the survival of the 1928 and REC prayer books in their respective spheres of influence, which I see as a good thing... we need the more-classical books around to bring balance and witness to the modernist influences surviving in the 2019 use.
    I have realized that since the ACNA has not released the 2019 BCP into the public domain, and since the otherwise superb 1928 BCP has non-standard Preces, there is a need for something like the 2019 BCP, but with a traditional language "Rite I" taken directly from the 1662 BCP, and other material from the 1928 and other BCP editions (the Deposited Book, the 1929 Scottish BCP, the 1938 Melanesian BCP), and a modern language section, which would be smaller than the traditional language portion but still available, as well as some hybrid sections, in a modular format, so that people who desire a contemporary language prayerbook can still enjoy the beautiful Anglican canticles for Morning Prayer and Evensong by Byrd, Tallis, SS Wesley, Wood, Tomkins, Gibbons, Sumsion, Dyson, Bairstow, Francis Jackson, Healey Willam, Herbert Howells, CV Stanford, T. Tertius Noble, and many other excellent composers, whose work is incompatible with the revised texts in the 2019 BCP.

    Also, the 2019 BCP retains a three year lectionary, which I oppose to; I intend to implement the lectionary of the 1662 and 1928 American BCP editions in traditional language, but perhaps copy and paste collects from the 1979 BCP and quote selections from a suitable modern bible, if one exists, and otherwise make provision for people who want a three year lectionary to use the Revised Common Lectionary, but perhaps modify the table of lessons so as to correct the most severe faults, for example, the omission of 1 Corinthians 11:27-34 from the Maundy Thursday service.

    Indeed it would probably not be a bad idea to quote this verse in every contemporary language communion service.

    This task will be made easier because I have recently set up with a Russian Orthodox priest a venture to manufacture Gospel Books for Eastern Orthodox parishes using the King James Version, because the main manufacturer stopped making them, and also started selling marijuana on their homepage. Also, years ago I was working on a traditional service book for Methodists, which was basically adapted from the BCP, and that material is reusable, I have a non-profit with a Priest of the Assyrian Church of the East for the translation and dissemination of liturgical materials.

    I have in the past week after meditating on a conversation I had with @Phoenix and listening to Choral Evensong recordings from the BBC for the past several years, developed a new appreciation for the 1662 BCP, so a major objective of what we might call the 2020 BCP will be to actually put the 1662 BCP into the hands of people who would otherwise not use it.
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  12. Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Rexlion said: ↑
    I emailed to find out, and they are gone now. Sorry I can't help out.
    That’s OK my friend! I know there are more sitting around somewhere. Since the mass production of my 2020 book will be impossible, I want to attempt to acquire large quantities of 1662, 1928, 1962 Canadian and 1979 BCPs to give to people. The 1979 BCP is problematic of course, but there are worse things out there.

    The real tragedy with the 1979 BCP is that a group actually fixed it, producing the superb traditional language Anglican Service Book of 1994, but only a few high church Episcopalian parishes bought it.
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  13. Rexlion Well-Known Member

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    Liturgyworks said: ↑
    ...This task will be made easier because I have recently set up with a Russian Orthodox priest a venture to manufacture Gospel Books for Eastern Orthodox parishes using the King James Version, because the main manufacturer stopped making them, and also started selling marijuana on their homepage....
    It's a sad day when a good book maker lterally goes to pot...
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  14. Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Rexlion said: ↑
    It's a sad day when a good book maker lterally goes to pot...


    I don’t know what they are even thinking putting a marijuana leaf on the homepage of a website which sells the most sacred book and other supplies used in Orthodox churches. No sane priest will buy from them now. They must be doing a lot more than marijuana; LSD perhaps or some other potent hallucinogen.

    Orthodox Gospel Books are consecrated and placed on the altar. In the Syriac Orthodox church the faithful kiss them after the liturgy, whereas in the Eastern Orthodox church you kiss the Gospel Book after confession. However, only someone with the rank of Deacon or higher is allowed to read the Gospel Book during a Divine Liturgy.

    But at a Coptic monastery I myself was chosen to read the Gospel for one of the hours of the Agpeya (the Divine Office) once, and I am not in holy orders, whereas many boys were visiting the monastery who were tonsured Psaltis or Readers, and the service was being led by Fr. Pavli, a full Deacon.
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  15. Stalwart Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Fr. Brench said: ↑
    There may be need of a reminder, for those who forget, that in the ACNA liturgical authority is found in the diocesan bishop. Whatever he permits or restricts or orders is the liturgical rule. If some say "you may keep using the 1979" then parishes will do so. My previous bishop tried to make a point of getting all of us onto the Texts for Common Prayer, which now is the 2019 book, and I suspect that every church in my diocese is now using it, or a previous draft of it. I am happy to see the '79 book gone from my sphere of activity, but that's apparently not the case everywhere in the ACNA.

    On the other hand, this "what-the-bishop-says" policy also ensures the survival of the 1928 and REC prayer books in their respective spheres of influence, which I see as a good thing... we need the more-classical books around to bring balance and witness to the modernist influences surviving in the 2019 use.
    A good reminder to all of us, myself included. The ACNA is adopting the less top-down approach, which is extremely healthy for lots of different reasons (subsidiarity, etc). Bit it's also extremely helpful to the classical Anglican party within ACNA. The modernist '79 influences are drastically diminished, while the classical 1662/1928 influences continue to exert their impact.
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  16. Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Stalwart said: ↑
    A good reminder to all of us, myself included. The ACNA is adopting the less top-down approach, which is extremely healthy for lots of different reasons (subsidiarity, etc). Bit it's also extremely helpful to the classical Anglican party within ACNA. The modernist '79 influences are drastically diminished, while the classical 1662/1928 influences continue to exert their impact.
    If only they had released the 2019 book into the public domain, because it is the best modern language translation, but traditional language material is still needed for compatibility with liturgical music.

    For my project I expect to use heavily edited text from the 1979 BCP, with all ICELisms like "and with Thy spirit" translated into "And also with you" removed, so it will be close in style, with the same approach also used by the new translation of the Novus Ordo Missae ordered by Pope Benedict XVI before he retired and this current vile heresiarch Papa Fransesca took his place.

    ~

    By the way, can any of you think of a way to express the semantics of the second personal pronoun in modern English without using it? In other words, to convey the distinct meaning of Thou, Thee, Thy and Thine, versus You, Ye and Your, without using Thou, Thee, Thy and Thine.
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  17. Brigid Active Member Anglican

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    Liturgyworks said: ↑
    If only they had released the 2019 book into the public domain, because it is the best modern language translation, but traditional language material is still needed for compatibility with liturgical music.

    For my project I expect to use heavily edited text from the 1979 BCP, with all ICELisms like "and with Thy spirit" translated into "And also with you" removed, so it will be close in style, with the same approach also used by the new translation of the Novus Ordo Missae ordered by Pope Benedict XVI before he retired and this current vile heresiarch Papa Fransesca took his place.

    ~

    By the way, can any of you think of a way to express the semantics of the second personal pronoun in modern English without using it? In other words, to convey the distinct meaning of Thou, Thee, Thy and Thine, versus You, Ye and Your, without using Thou, Thee, Thy and Thine.
    Click to expand...
    I lived in the South (US) for a few years and came to really like the usefulness of "y'all".
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  18. Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Brigid said: ↑
    I lived in the South (US) for a few years and came to really like the usefulness of "y'all".
    Indeed so but I dare say y’all or even you all is too vernacular for Scripture. However,
    old translations like the KJV have our Lord saying "Drink this All of you, This is my blood of the New Covenant, given for you and for many for the remittance of sins."

    So perhaps a solution might like with "All of you"? And in a pinch, even "You all" might work, or indeed "All" in a liturgical context where it is implied that "all" refers to all present. Or also "Each of you."

    How would each of those look with the response: "And with your spirit?"

    We have to replace the Bugnini, ICEL & Company P: "And also with you" , which is an inaccurate translation of the response even on the basis of Dynamic Equivalence*, but hoe we do the Priest’s statement is an open question. It is possible the classic "Peace be unto all" might still be sufficiently comprehensible, and given that, on the basis of Shakespeare, we know that Prayer Book English and Authorized Version English were in a very high, formal register even by the standards of the 16th century, a time when Thou was not universally employed and the replacement of Thou with You fairly common, probably a process initiated by Franco-Norman etiquette concerning the propriety of addressing someone as tu rather than voux, which spun out of control in English and wound up causing Thy/Thou/Thee/Thine to fall into disuse, and to generally require being used with what is almost a separate gramatical case, with alternate declensions of words "For thou willest that we should holpen him who asketh," and so on.

    But it seems to me a formal register for the modern vernacular would best conform with Anglican tradition and the Article of Religion requiring a language understanded of the people. To wit, perhaps I should simply rewrite the vernacular sections in my usual high-register idiosyncratic affectation.


    *Unless dynamic equivalence now means we can take something that has a specific and well understood meaning which is still supported by the semantics of modern Enflisj
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  19. Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    By the way, for my modular BCP project, which will include an optimized set of pre-configured variants I call the 2020 BCP, I intend to make the contemporary language portion smaller and less expansive than the traditional language portion, but still usable and containing all essential services, because my desire is that we incentivize people to retain the ability to use Ecclesiastical English, which was understood but not strictly speaking low vernacular even during the era of Cranmer. Actually I find the syntax in Shakespeare’s plays, which I expect form the Elizabethan equivalent of BBC English, to be more annoying and jarring than most of Ecclesiastical English, with a few easy to fix exceptions (the word "holpen", the semantics of the word "conversation", which have since changed, and the phrase "sitting at meat" instead of "eating," come to mind, but these few exceptions are exceedingly rare).

    Verily, I might vouchsafe to, for a time provided, address ye primarily in a tongue akin to the Ecclesiastical accent, which deserveth not the title of Dialect, for its manifold likenesses to the common speech of Englishmen and divers Colonists and several other Peoples who do speak aforesaid, that it might be proven that the Ecclesiastical accent be no harder to comprehend than the works of Shakespeare or the newer usages of the English tongue when used after the fashion of Learned men and Scholars.
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  20. Brigid Active Member Anglican

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    Liturgyworks said: ↑
    By the way, for my modular BCP project, which will include an optimized set of pre-configured variants I call the 2020 BCP, I intend to make the contemporary language portion smaller and less expansive than the traditional language portion, but still usable and containing all essential services, because my desire is that we incentivize people to retain the ability to use Ecclesiastical English, which was understood but not strictly speaking low vernacular even during the era of Cranmer. Actually I find the syntax in Shakespeare’s plays, which I expect form the Elizabethan equivalent of BBC English, to be more annoying and jarring than most of Ecclesiastical English, with a few easy to fix exceptions (the word "holpen", the semantics of the word "conversation", which have since changed, and the phrase "sitting at meat" instead of "eating," come to mind, but these few exceptions are exceedingly rare).

    Verily, I might vouchsafe to, for a time provided, address ye primarily in a tongue akin to the Ecclesiastical accent, which deserveth not the title of Dialect, for its manifold likenesses to the common speech of Englishmen and divers Colonists and several other Peoples who do speak aforesaid, that it might be proven that the Ecclesiastical accent be no harder to comprehend than the works of Shakespeare or the newer usages of the English tongue when used after the fashion of Learned men and Scholars.
    Click to expand...
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1662 is the Standard for ACNA

Discussion in 'Liturgy, and Book of Common Prayer' started by Magistos, Aug 11, 2019.

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Page 4 of 4
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  1. Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    I think it is also extremely important to ensure there is no set of options which leads to a "Lowest Common Denominator", like Eucharistic Prayer B in the 1979 BCP or Eucharistic Prayer 2 in the Novus Ordo Missae. The rubrics must be strict and severe, with omissions and abbreviations seldom permitted and explicit rubrics prohibiting women being ordained as priests or bishops or ministering the Eucharist (this is not a traditional function of the Deaconess), rubrics against Lay Eucharistic Ministers, rubrics against homosexual marriage and the ordination of clergy who are not in a heterosexual monogamous marriage* or celibate, or who have killed anyone after baptism** (this ancient staple of canon law would have prevented the ordination of Bishop Bruno in Los Angeles), rubrics forbidding celebration versus populum except in churches where the altar is positioned so as to render either ad orientem or north-side service according to the Anglican tradition impossible, and rubrics prohibiting CCM, praise and worship, praise band music, and so forth.

    At the same time the rubrics must be equally supportive of traditional Low Church, High Church and Anglo Catholic practices. I think, in addition to good rubrics, including a set of modules which would feature Ritual Notes, the Directorum Anglicanorum, the Parson’s Handbook, and a new latitudinarian manner for people of each level of churchmanship, with practical instructions and guidance on the service of the Eucharist, would be ideal.

    Also, for the module containing the enhanced divine office, I think this should be configured to start with Evensong, followed by Compline, Nocturns, Mattins, Prime, Terce, the Litany, the Synaxis (Ante-Communion or the Liturgy of the Word, which when served without the Eucharist is called a "Typika Service" in Eastern Orthodoxy or the rather unappetizing "Missa Sicca" in the Roman Rite), Midday Prayer, and the Ninth Hour, with rubrics on how to group Evensong, Compline, Mattins and Prime as a Saturday evening Vigil service in the Russian tradition (which has been extremely successful). This layout reflects the fact that the liturgical day traditionally begins with Vespers.

    …

    Regarding the dangers of the Lowest Common Denominator, this article on the Roman Catholic New Liturgical Movement blog explains how the Novus Ordo Missae fell into that trap: http://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2019/09/resisting-lowest-common-denominator.html#.XZORDMplCf0

    Now ostensibly the 1979 BCP is vastly superior to the Novus Ordo; it featured Rite I in traditional language, which parishes could use without fear of persecution, and what is more, after the devastating schism had subsided, I am told there are some Episcopalian churches in Virginia and elsewhere, in ECUSA, which manage to get away with using the 1928 BCP despite this not being officially allowed. Actually it would at this point be supreme hypocrisy for the Episcopal Church to disallow the 1928 BCP while allowing, for example, St. Gregory of Nyssa. But the 1979 BCP still has a Lowest Common Denominator trap in the form of Rite II, which tends to be shorter than Rite I, and more specifically, Eucharistic Prayer B, the most widespread. My friend Fr. Steven was one of a handful who served Eucharistic Prayer C in the autumn until Christmas, Eucharistic Prayer B in Lent, and Eucharistic Prayer A at other times (he shunned Eucharistic Prayer D because of the fixed preface). But like in the RCC, where the prevailing tendency is to use the shortest possible service, which is Eucharistic Prayer 2, the statistics I’ve seen on 1979 BCP usage indicate overuse of Eucharistic Prayer B and other abbreviations allowed in the rubrics.

    Give them an inch and they will take a mile.

    This has some people convinced that any choice or variability in the liturgy is bad, but the experience of the Orthodox churches indicates this is not the case, rather, the choices need to be evenly weighted as in the Oriental Orthodox tradition or else the variability must be controlled by Propers, or a combination thereof (for example, the Syriac Orthodox church mandates, by a rubric, the use of their most important anaphora, the Divine Liturgy of St. James, on certain occasions, but at all other times, the priests are free to select the anaphora and the Husoyo, or sequence of collects and bidding prayers, they desire, and of the 14 anaphoras on Syriac Orthodox Resources, 12 are of the same length (one, that of Mar Bar Salibi, is very slightly shorter, and the other, that of St. James, is slightly longer).
    Last edited: Oct 1, 2019
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  2. Brigid Active Member Anglican

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    Liturgyworks said: ↑
    I think it is also extremely important to ensure there is no set of options which leads to a "Lowest Common Denominator", like Eucharistic Prayer B in the 1979 BCP or Eucharistic Prayer 2 in the Novus Ordo Missae. The rubrics must be strict and severe, with omissions and abbreviations seldom permitted and explicit rubrics prohibiting women being ordained as priests or bishops or ministering the Eucharist (this is not a traditional function of the Deaconess), rubrics against Lay Eucharistic Ministers, rubrics against homosexual marriage and the ordination of clergy who are not in a heterosexual monogamous marriage* or celibate, or who have killed anyone after baptism** (this ancient staple of canon law would have prevented the ordination of Bishop Bruno in Los Angeles), rubrics forbidding celebration versus populum except in churches where the altar is positioned so as to render either ad orientem or north-side service according to the Anglican tradition impossible, and rubrics prohibiting CCM, praise and worship, praise band music, and so forth.

    At the same time the rubrics must be equally supportive of traditional Low Church, High Church and Anglo Catholic practices. I think, in addition to good rubrics, including a set of modules which would feature Ritual Notes, the Directorum Anglicanorum, the Parson’s Handbook, and a new latitudinarian manner for people of each level of churchmanship, with practical instructions and guidance on the service of the Eucharist, would be ideal.

    Also, for the module containing the enhanced divine office, I think this should be configured to start with Evensong, followed by Compline, Nocturns, Mattins, Prime, Terce, the Litany, the Synaxis (Ante-Communion or the Liturgy of the Word, which when served without the Eucharist is called a "Typika Service" in Eastern Orthodoxy or the rather unappetizing "Missa Sicca" in the Roman Rite), Midday Prayer, and the Ninth Hour, with rubrics on how to group Evensong, Compline, Mattins and Prime as a Saturday evening Vigil service in the Russian tradition (which has been extremely successful). This layout reflects the fact that the liturgical day traditionally begins with Vespers.

    …

    Regarding the dangers of the Lowest Common Denominator, this article on the Roman Catholic New Liturgical Movement blog explains how the Novus Ordo Missae fell into that trap: http://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2019/09/resisting-lowest-common-denominator.html#.XZORDMplCf0

    Now ostensibly the 1979 BCP is vastly superior to the Novus Ordo; it featured Rite I in traditional language, which parishes could use without fear of persecution, and what is more, after the devastating schism had subsided, I am told there are some Episcopalian churches in Virginia and elsewhere, in ECUSA, which manage to get away with using the 1928 BCP despite this not being officially allowed. Actually it would at this point be supreme hypocrisy for the Episcopal Church to disallow the 1928 BCP while allowing, for example, St. Gregory of Nyssa. But the 1979 BCP still has a Lowest Common Denominator trap in the form of Rite II, which tends to be shorter than Rite I, and more specifically, Eucharistic Prayer B, the most widespread. My friend Fr. Steven was one of a handful who served Eucharistic Prayer C in the autumn until Christmas, Eucharistic Prayer B in Lent, and Eucharistic Prayer A at other times (he shunned Eucharistic Prayer D because of the fixed preface). But like in the RCC, where the prevailing tendency is to use the shortest possible service, which is Eucharistic Prayer 2, the statistics I’ve seen on 1979 BCP usage indicate overuse of Eucharistic Prayer B and other abbreviations allowed in the rubrics.

    Give them an inch and they will take a mile.

    This has some people convinced that any choice or variability in the liturgy is bad, but the experience of the Orthodox churches indicates this is not the case, rather, the choices need to be evenly weighted as in the Oriental Orthodox tradition or else the variability must be controlled by Propers, or a combination thereof (for example, the Syriac Orthodox church mandates, by a rubric, the use of their most important anaphora, the Divine Liturgy of St. James, on certain occasions, but at all other times, the priests are free to select the anaphora and the Husoyo, or sequence of collects and bidding prayers, they desire, and of the 14 anaphoras on Syriac Orthodox Resources, 12 are of the same length (one, that of Mar Bar Salibi, is very slightly shorter, and the other, that of St. James, is slightly longer).
    Click to expand...
    I really like what you've suggested here and I also am very much in agreement with the article on the LCD! That's been my experience.
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