The Comprehensiveness of the BCP

I am currently undergoing training to officially become a lay reader. The other night, our training consisted of learning/talking about the two main service books of the Anglican Church of Canada, The Book of Common Prayer (1962), and The Book of Alternative Services.

While my priest was discussing the BCP, the idea came to me that the BCP is thorough and comprehensive, showing us what to do, in large part because of its early modern, Reformational origin. I’m the sort of guy who likes to emphasise the continuity of the BCP with the past — from Hippolytus to the Use of Sarum and laterally to Luther’s Mass — but I realised that some of what I like about it arises in part (but not in whole) from its emergence as the first English liturgy at a time of great religious upheaval.

Consider the task before Cranmer. The Prayer Book is not simply a rendering into English of the Use of Sarum. It is, to a large extent. But there are also some shifts — some new prayers here and there, some old prayers cut, greater Scripture reading in the daily office, some rephrasing and rewording in traditional collects, and so forth.

These shifts and changes are sometimes doubtless targeting the Roman Church of the sixteenth century, at least in terms of how people worshipped and believed if not the formal teaching of said church. But the fact that the absolution, for example, comes with an explanation of how this is something Christ commanded, clearly signals that the uneducated or those infected with enthousiasmos are also targeted. That is, the Prayer Book doesn’t just correct late medieval/Renaissance errors, it seeks to instruct the whole People of God.

This makes sense, for the people of God will be hearing the liturgy in a language such as they understandeth for the first time in centuries (in English, the first time ever for those not learned in Latin). The Prayer Book, then, is on the leading edge of instructing the people in the faith alongside things like The Book of Homilies (regardless of how one feels about the latter). The Prayer Book is a manifestation of lex orandi, lex credendi — the law of prayer is the law of belief.

Therefore, the people of God are taught wonderful things as they go to church week in and week out, or even day in and day out:

• Humans “are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under [God’s] table”
• But it is a divine “property … always to have mercy”
• Humans have committed “manifold sins and wickness”
• But God has “manifold and great mercies”
• Indeed, God “of thy tender mercy didst give thine only Son Jesus Christ to take our nature upon him, and to suffer death upon the Cross for our redemption; who made there, by his one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world”
• As a result, “by the merits and death of thy Son Jesus Christ, and through faith in his blood, … all [God’s] whole Church may obtain remission of our sins, and all other benefits of his passion”

Alongside these truths, one could go through the Collects of Thomas Cranmer and put together the attributes of God as well as a rich theological anthropology.

And at Eucharist on Sundays and Black Letter Days, they will hear the drama of Scripture year after year. Such as go to Morning and Evening Prayer will encounter the entire Book of Psalms every month and the entire Bible every year. Suddenly, from being banned in England, the English Bible becomes the most precious thing this world affords.

It is truly a wonderful book, teaching the theology of the catholic faith to the people of England through the life of prayer, assembled together, that it may get into their lifeblood and thus become truly common.

And it is meditations such as this that have led me to turn back to the ancient liturgies and now to offer a course on them. Sign up while you still can!