Uncommon Worship?

On the 20^th February, 1547, the nine-year old Edward VI was crowned in Westminster Abbey. His Archbishop, Thomas Cranmer, charged him with these words:

Your majesty is God's vicegerent, and Christ's vicar within your own dominions, and to see, with your predecessor Josiah, God truly worshipped, and idolatry destroyed; the tyranny of the bishops of Rome banished from your subjects, and images removed.[1]

Cranmer could not have uttered such strong words before King Henry VIII. But now he was free to speak, he revealed his hand. What he wanted to see in a reformed Church of England – and what Cranmer would proceed to institute over the next half-decade, with the King’s help - was nothing less than a revolution in worship. The evangelical gospel was a severe condemnation of the practices of medieval Catholicism and the theology of worship which it implied. The need for new forms of worship was urgent because the stakes were so high, in Cranmer’s mind: if the people are going to worship God rightly, then the unbiblical, distracting and frankly idolatrous practices of the previous era needed to be repudiated and replaced. Nothing less than salvation was at stake. 

What ensued was a complete renovation in the idea of worship along the lines of the Reformation gospel. First in 1549 and then again in 1552, Cranmer gave to the English people in words that they could understand a pattern of worship which enshrined the priority of God’s grace and gave words to the people’s response of gratitude. In these two editions of the Book of Common Prayer, Cranmer ensured that the Word of God would not be silent amongst the people of God. He presented to people the true character of God, the Almighty and everlasting God ‘whose property is always to have mercy’, that they might worship him as he truly is. And he ensured that the death of Christ for sin was at the centre of an Anglican spirituality. 

The forms of worship created by Cranmer have become for many Anglicans the distinctive mark of their church. For some people, to say ‘Anglican’ or ‘not Anglican’ means something about the form of worship that is being used in a particular congregation. And yet, some four and a half centuries after Cranmer, the reality is that the churches of the worldwide Anglican Communion are not as united in their habits of corporate worship as one might think. Happily, many provinces have authorized significant revisions of the Book of Common Prayer, updating and translating the language as necessary. There has been some liberty to experiment for the sake of reaching the lost, such that traditional forms of worship exist side by side with highly informal gatherings. As a matter of fact, Cranmer had already imagined a time when a diversity of forms of worship would be needed for cultural reasons. It is worth examining Article 34 at this point:

XXXIV. Of the Traditions of the Church.
It is not necessary that Traditions and Ceremonies be in all places one, or utterly like; for at all times they have been divers, and may be changed according to the diversity of countries, times, and men's manners, so that nothing be ordained against God's Word. Whosoever, through his private judgment, willingly and purposely, doth openly break the Traditions and Ceremonies of the Church, which be not repugnant to the Word of God, and be ordained and approved by common authority, ought to be rebuked openly, (that others may fear to do the like,) as he that offendeth against the common order of the Church, and hurteth the authority of the Magistrate, and woundeth the consciences of the weak brethren.

Every particular or national Church hath authority to ordain, change, and abolish, Ceremonies or Rites of the Church ordained only by man's authority, so that all things be done to edifying.

The principles for instituting ceremonies and rites for each new era and place take into account ‘the diversity of countries, times, and men's manners’, so long as what is ordained by each church is ‘done to edifying’ and is not simply a matter of the exercise of whim. The test is whether a particular form agrees with God’s Word or not, and that the principle of order not be upset by what is done as churches gather. In other words, there was to the reformer’s way of thinking about it a need for flexibility and even pragmatism about forms of worship – so long as the theological principles were not cast aside. 

And this is a matter of much greater concern in the churches of the Anglican Communion. The diversity of forms of worship represents not simply the practical needs of the gospel in each place, but frequently a different theology of worship altogether. Without knowledge of the theological principles of Anglican worship, we are simply not able to discriminate between forms of worship that in fact dishonor God, and forms of worship that please him. Instead, we simply do what is right in our own eyes. In their various ways, the Anglo-Catholic movement, the charismatic movement and reformed evangelicals have pursued their own theological convictions about Christian worship above and beyond the words on the pages of the Prayer Book and into territory highly disputed by the other groups within Anglicanism. What are we to make of this diversity, and how can we evaluate it?

If the stakes are as high as Cranmer set them in his charge to the young king, this cannot be a matter of simple indifference. That does not mean that intolerance and inflexibility ought to aim. But it does mean that we need to recollect what Cranmer and the other Reformers were trying to do when they wrote the BCP and commanded its use in the churches. Furthermore, it does mean that we need to seek out once more a proper Scriptural and theological account of worship so that nothing be ordained against God's Word.

 

That is the principle task of what follows in this book, Reformation Anglican Worship: The Gratitude that follows Grace. My objective is to uncover the roots of the Reformation theology and practice of worship. But I am doing this not because I think it is simply a matter of historical interest. Nor am I interested in playing that old Anglican game – namely, the search for the allegedly most authentic reset point for Anglicanism. While it is obviously my conviction that the theological convictions of Cranmer at the other English reformers had and still have a seminal significance for Anglicans ever since, and that the theology of this period has often been disregard in a more than cavalier fashion (historical pun intended!), I am more interested in whether these theological convictions are sound ones or not. That, it seems to me, is truest to the spirit of the reformers – that nothing be ‘repugnant to the word of God’.  

That was crucial for Cranmer as a liturgist. He was a genuinely theological liturgist, seeking to enshrine a particular gospel by means of his revision of English worship. He sought to If vagueness or ambiguity is a feature of the Book of Common Prayer, such that different parties have simultaneously claimed to find their own theological convictions expressed therein, then that is not Cranmer’s fault. Cranmer was clear about what he was repudiating, as his charge to King Edward demonstrates. He also clearly was intending the Book of Common Prayer, the Articles of Religion (in his time, 42), and the homilies to be a complementary set, mutually informing one another. The origins of the distinctive Anglican worship – for which it is best known – lie in a clear step away from the worship of the medieval Catholic Church and the theological convictions that it represented.

In relatively recent times, the Latin slogan lex orandi lex credendi (the law of prayer is the law of belief) has been used as a way of suggesting that doctrine is subordinate to liturgy. Hence, the Canadian Book of Alternative Services (1985) says:

It is precisely the intimate relationship of gospel, liturgy, and service that stands behind the theological principle lex orandi: lex credendi, i.e., the law of prayer is the law of belief. This principle, particularly treasured by Anglicans, means that theology as the statement of the church's belief is drawn from the liturgy, i.e. from the point at which the gospel and the challenge of Christian life meet in prayer. The development of theology is not a legislative process which is imposed on liturgy; liturgy is a reflective process in which theology may be discovered.[2]

A number of things ought to be said about this principle, not the least that its alleged origins in the ancient church are certainly questionable. It was introduced into Anglicanism in the twentieth century, having been coined the late nineteenth century by a French Roman Catholic monk by the name of Prosper Gueranger (1805-75). But even so: the principle is usually taken to mean (as it is in the Canadian Prayer Book) that doctrine is derived from worship, and not the other way around; and that, as a result, theology is a groping to describe the inexpressible experience of worship: it is a ‘reflective process in which theology may be discovered.’ That is both a mistranslation of the Latin, and not at all a good description of what is the case in the Reformation Anglicanism of Thomas Cranmer. The Latin phrase is of course reversible, such that ‘the law of belief is the law of prayer’. Cranmer was clearly in possession of a set of theological convictions that he hoped to express through his liturgy. He knew what he was – and wasn’t – inviting English church-goers to believe as they worshipped. 

Perhaps this might be thought as somewhat distastefully combative. Don’t we live a world away from those old controversies? Do we twenty-first century Anglicans not recoil from the violent outcomes of the disagreements of the sixteenth century? Certainly we do. But this does not excuse the theological fuzziness that besets contemporary Anglicanism. I would regard the liturgical confusion of our present time as a distinct echo of the controversies of the sixteenth century. Different styles of worship amount to nothing at all, as Cranmer knew. In which case: let as many liturgical flowers bloom as can be planted. But a different theology of worship is indicative of a different view of how people come to know God – how they get saved, in other words. That is something worth caring about, if we are to be authentically Christian.

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[1]

[2] I got this from Peter Toon.