{"id":4977,"date":"2014-01-30T09:15:54","date_gmt":"2014-01-30T14:15:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/fareforward\/?p=4977"},"modified":"2014-01-30T09:18:27","modified_gmt":"2014-01-30T14:18:27","slug":"the-book-of-common-prayer-a-biography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/fareforward\/2014\/01\/the-book-of-common-prayer-a-biography\/","title":{"rendered":"The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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For those who enjoy biographies and love books, what could be better than a good biography\u2026 of a great book? The Lives of Great Religious Books<\/em> series promises many happy hours learning more about old friends and making new acquaintances, from Augustine\u2019s Confessions to Bonhoeffer\u2019s Letters and Papers from Prison, from the book of Genesis, to the Tibetan Book of the Dead.<\/p>\n

One of the latest books in this series, Alan Jacobs\u2019s biography of the Book of Common Prayer (BCP), provides a stimulating introduction to a fascinating life. In seven highly readable chapters, Jacobs takes us from the BCP\u2019s conception and birth in the mid-sixteenth century to its dotage in the early twenty-first. Throughout, he demonstrates enviable skill in simplifying complex material\u2014covering several centuries and half the globe, while integrating multiple disciplines\u2014without being simplistic.<\/p>\n

Chapter one sketches the background of late-medieval English Christianity and the theological, ecclesiastical, and political roots of the English Reformation during Henry VIII\u2019s reign. It introduces the BCP\u2019s ancestors (the multiple Latin rites of the medieval English Church), its conception (in Archbishop Thomas Cranmer\u2019s English Litany), and its birth.<\/p>\n

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Chapter two describes the BCP\u2019s baptism. The brief reign of Henry\u2019s young son, Edward VI, enabled the publication of the f irst Prayer Book in 1549 and the second in 1552. It was de-authorized by his Catholic sister, Queen Mary, in 1553 (Cranmer was himself martyred under Mary in 1556), and then restored, with light revisions, by Elizabeth I in 1559.<\/p>\n

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Chapters three and four cover the suppression of the BCP under Oliver Cromwell; its restoration, with the monarchy, in 1660-62; and the tragedy of the 1662 Great Ejection, when 2,000 nonconforming ministers who could not in conscience subscribe to the BCP were ejected from the Church of England and forced underground. In these chapters, we see the Prayer Book \u201cbecoming venerable.\u201d But we also see it increasingly sidelined by evangelicals, many of whom by the end of the eighteenth century tended to push it to the background of Christian piety.<\/p>\n

As the Prayer Book passed through late-middle and into old age in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (chapters five and six), its dress and demeanor began to seem old-fashioned and out of touch with contemporary developments. In the nineteenth century, the rise of the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement reintroduced much medieval ritual and symbolism, ornament and architecture into Anglicanism, while the latitudinarianism of F. D. Maurice sidelined the BCP\u2019s doctrinal signif icance. In the twentieth century, the discovery of a rich variety of historic liturgical practices made the Prayer Book\u2019s unabashed Protestantism seem positively dowdy, whilst its archaic language was increasingly that of another age. In the same period, the spread of Anglicanism around the world, and the desire for liturgies to ref lect the Anglican Communion\u2019s theological diversity, led to the birth of many younger siblings in the Prayer Book family. Some of them share much DNA with Cranmer\u2019s book; others have markedly different genomes.<\/p>\n

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Good biographies enrich our understanding of their subjects by setting them against the wider canvas of their time. In a work that covers more than five centuries, Jacobs portrays, at times vividly, the various social worlds the Prayer Book has occupied. For example, the lovely Collect for Aid Against all Perils in the service of Evening Prayer is edifying in 2013. But how much more comfort it must have given in a world with limited artificial light, \u201cmarked by extreme anxiety about the dangers of the nighttime,\u201d when \u201cfriend could not be distinguished from foe, nor animate objects from inanimate ones,\u201d when night air was considered dangerous, and evil spirits were thought to haunt the dark: \u201cLighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The best biographies also give insight into the personality of the subject, and as an English professor Jacobs is well placed to examine the BCP\u2019s literary beauty and significance. The Prayer Book is one of the great masterpieces of early modern English. Cranmer stands alongside Shakespeare and Tyndale (medi- ated through the Authorized Version of the Bible) as foundational to later English style. Jacobs clearly relishes the Prayer Book\u2019s \u201chighly rhythmical\u201d and \u201csomberly magnificent\u201d prose and offers moments of insight into them. Nevertheless, I could have wished for more time spent exploring his claim that \u201cAlmost every page of the Book of Common Prayer contains\u2026 a miniature textbook of rhetorical effects, typically executed with virtuosity.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the strengths of Jacobs\u2019s interpretation is the way he explores BCP\u2019s character and achievements. Jacobs understands that good liturgy is designed to shape a life of Christian discipleship. Taken as a whole, the Prayer Book provides a way of organizing time on three axes. First, the Kalendar (the lectionary, the table of daily Scripture readings) leads worshippers through the events of salvation history each year. Second, the occasional offices\u2014rites for baptism, marriage, the visitation of the sick, and the burial of the dead\u2014give a gospel shape to the major events of each human life. Third, the daily rhythms of Morning and Evening Prayer bracket each day in corporate prayer.<\/p>\n

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Jacobs also, rightly, presses the point that Cranmer\u2019s goal for the BCP was to steep the English people in Scripture. A common liturgy in the vernacular, \u201cone use\u201d for the whole English Church, was important to him. But, as the preface to the 1549 Prayer Book makes clear, this was primarily so that the Bible, so long a closed book, might become thoroughly known. It is through the Bible that ministers and their congregations are \u201cstirred up to godliness,\u201d exhort one another in the truth, refute error, grow in knowledge of God and become \u201cinflamed with love for his true religion.\u201d To saturate people in Scripture, Cranmer saturated his liturgy with Scripture. Over the course of a year, virtually the whole Bible is read in Morning and Evening Prayer, and the psalms once a month; Scriptural phrases also form the warp and woof of the liturgical language. For many centuries in the Church of England, whether the priest believed the gospel or not, whether the preaching was powerful or weak, congregants heard the Reformation gospel and the teaching of the whole counsel of God in the words of Cranmer\u2019s liturgy itself.<\/p>\n

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By the present day (chapter seven), Cranmer\u2019s \u201cone use for the whole church,\u201d has given way to great diversity of forms, and to a modular approach to worship; those conducting Anglican worship now have great freedom in a game of \u201cliturgical Legos.\u201d Within this diversity, Cranmer\u2019s liturgies have been retired to the old folks home, where they smile benignly from their wingback chair as other, younger, rites now run the family business.<\/p>\n

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Still, for many Anglicans, especially those in the growing, vibrant churches of the global south, the BCP retains its authority as Anglicanism\u2019s chief doctrinal standard alongside the 39 Articles. For this reason alone, those wishing to understand global Christianity in the twenty-first century would benefit from reading this book. Among younger evangelicals, there is growing interest in, and re-appropriation of, liturgical worship. This biography would be a welcome aid in that recovery, giving an entry point into one of the foundational, and greatest, evangelical liturgical texts. But the growing rejection of the Prayer Book\u2019s doctrine in the west, and the archaism of its language, mean that it is possible that Jacobs\u2019s fascinating book is not just a biography but also an obituary and a eulogy for Cranmer\u2019s BCP. For as he notes, \u201cCranmer\u2019s book, and its direct successors, will always be acknowledged as historical documents of the f irst order, and masterpieces of English prose, but this is not what they want or mean to be. Their goal\u2014now as in 1549\u2014 is to be living words in the mouths of those who have a living faith.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u00a0 For those who enjoy biographies and love books, what could be better than a good biography\u2026 of a great book? The Lives of Great Religious Books series promises many happy hours learning more about old friends and making new acquaintances, from Augustine\u2019s Confessions to Bonhoeffer\u2019s Letters and Papers from Prison, from the book of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1707,"featured_media":4978,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Book of Common Prayer: A Biography<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"  For those who enjoy biographies and love books, what could be better than a good biography... of a great book? 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