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<\/a><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
King\u2019s Chapel and its Prayer Book<\/strong><\/em><\/h3>\nJohn Harcourt<\/p>\n
Members of Saint John\u2019s visiting Boston may have discovered King\u2019s Chapel on Tremont Street at the foot of Beacon Hill. Those who have ventured inside for a service may have been vaguely disconcerted. The text in their hands was entitled The Book of Common Prayer; its format and much of the language would have seemed familiar enough. But something seemed odd about it all. And indeed it might King\u2019s Chapel uses a revision of the traditional Prayer Book\u2014a revision that reflects its status as a Unitarian congregation. \u201cHigh Church Unitarian,\u201d we might be tempted to say.<\/p>\n
Anglican worship was forbidden during much of the seventeenth century, when Puritans dominated the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But in the confusion of the early 1680s when James II, the last of the Stuart monarchs, occupied the throne and issued new royal charters, the Calvinist hegemony began to crumble. The new royal governor may have preferred to commandeer part of the Old South Church for his Anglican services to the annoyance of those who had founded King\u2019s Chapel in 1688, the first church of our communion in Boston, under the jurisdiction of the bishop of London.<\/p>\n
Much later, after the American Revolution, more changes occurred. The American Episcopal Church came into existence, drew up its own polity, and issued the first American Prayer Book. But things were a bit more complicated at King\u2019s Chapel, where the gentle winds of Unitarianism were beginning to stir. James Freeman was officiating there as lay reader, and it was hoped that he could be ordained by the new bishops of the Episcopal Church. But in 1785, King\u2019s Chapel had already revised the 1662 Book of Common Prayer into a mildly Unitarian document, and this revision proved unacceptable to the new American bishops. King\u2019s Chapel countered by itself ordaining Freeman as \u201cRector, Minister, public Teacher, Priest, Pastor, and teaching Elder.\u201d This purely local \u201clay ordination\u201d established the essential character of King\u2019s Chapel to this day. It is not officially a member of any other grouping not even of the Unitarians. It defines itself in its Prayer Book as \u201cUnitarian Christian in theology, anglican in worship, and congregational in government\u201d (p. 120).<\/p>\n
The King\u2019s Chapel Book of Common Prayer is now in its ninth edition (1986); its development has paralleled in many ways the evolution of our own Prayer Book\u2014and those of other mainline Protestant denominations. Its language is mostly (though not entirely) traditional; its contents have expanded to include Midday Prayer, three orders of Holy Communion, special services for Christmas, for tenebrae, for Easter Vigil, a two year daily lectionary, a three year lectionary for Sundays and Holy Days. A detailed Kalendar (in the back end pages) will seem familiar enough to us, although a close scrutiny will disclose the omission of Trinity Sunday (the long stretch of Sundays between Pentecost and advent are numbered as Sundays \u201cafter Whitsunday\u201d).<\/p>\n
The careful reader will also note the absence of creeds; the authors of our own American Prayer book at first rejected even the Apostles\u2019 and the Nicene creeds. The festivals of saints, even New Testament saints, are not explicitly mentioned. Within the liturgies, the Gloria Patri is replaced by a scriptural doxology:<\/p>\n
Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only Wise God; Be honor and glory, through Jesus Christ, for ever and ever. Amen (cf. I Timothy 10:17)<\/p>\n
What to make of all this? We Episcopalians know very little about Unitarianism, especially in its earlier Christian forms. We are surprised to earn how vigorous it was during the period of the Reformation, especially in Poland and Hungary. The Arian impulse has never been wholly absent from Christian thought, despite the efforts of Athanasius and his followers. Many, perhaps most, of the New Testament writers were, to some degree. Adoptionists in their Christologies (that is, for them the many Jesus was adopted by God as His Son at some point in His early life at His Baptism or perhaps at the Transfiguration. Most New Testament passages are susceptible of an Adoptionist reading: 2 Corinthians 13:14 is typical:<\/p>\n
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy spirit be with you all.<\/p>\n
The word Trinity does not occur in the New Testament nor for several centuries after its completion. Trinity Sunday was a late and unmemorable addition to the church year\u2014think back on the sermons you have heard on that date! The most explicit formulation of Trinitarian doctrine, the so called Athanasian Creed (composed centuries after the death of its namesake) has never appeared in any American Prayer Book before 1979, where it is relegated to an appendix discreetly called Historical Documents of the Church pp. 864\u2013865). In the past hundred years or so, we have come to accept more and more the fact that Jesus was an observant Jew throughout His life. However He may have conceptualized His relationship to God, it was not in the theological terminology of the early Middle Ages.<\/p>\n
Or consider church polity. Episcopalians sometimes seem to think that the orders of bishops, priests, and deacons<\/p>\n
(like gothic church buildings) stretch back to their institution by Jesus. Yet today\u2019s Biblical scholars are hardly in agreement to what New Testament terms such as bishop (overseer, teacher, presiding officer?) or deacon (servant) may have meant originally. Few main line interpreters would maintain today that Jesus intended to found a church: did the very word exist in His first century Jewish vocabulary? Even Matthew presents \u201cGo reach ye all nations\u201d (28:19 20) as a post Resurrection utterance.<\/p>\n
Congregational organization, in a wide variety of shapes rather than that of a modem diocese and its \u201cmonarchical\u201d bishop? Secret rather than public services, held in homes before sun up, with great variety in what was said and done? Something like this would appear to have been the norm in the first Christian centuries.<\/p>\n
King\u2019s Chapel is thus no late eighteenth century aberration. It draws largely through an Anglican filter upon ancient traditions that go back to the time when Christianity was an underground movement. It bears living witness to a troubled past, complex and multiform, that we are only beginning to recover.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn an age of liturgical change and experiment, we at King\u2019s Chapel are sometimes asked why we keep the prayer book In fact, it is the prayer book that has kept us.\u201d (xii)<\/p>\n
Can not as much be said of Saint John\u2019s, Ithaca?<\/p>\n
**<\/p>\n
A note to the reader from Professor Harcourt: I am not a \u201ccloset Unitarian,\u201d a crypto Arian, or a \u201cbehind barred doors first century Palestinian Adoptionist.\u201d My own views on the subject have been set forth in \u201cExperiencing the Trinity\u201d (which I regard as the central Christian metaphor) in The Eagle of June, 1993.<\/em><\/p>\nDr John Bertram Harcourt was the Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Ithaca College. He was a member of St John\u2019s Episcopal Church in Ithaca, and served in several positions including on the Vestry, until his death in 2005. This article was first published in the church\u2019s newsletter, St John\u2019s Eagle, in May, 2002.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u00a0 King\u2019s Chapel and its Prayer Book John Harcourt Members of Saint John\u2019s visiting Boston may have discovered King\u2019s Chapel on Tremont Street at the foot of Beacon Hill. Those who have ventured inside for a service may have been vaguely disconcerted. The text in their hands was entitled The Book of Common Prayer; its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":120,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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Dr John Bertram Harcourt was the Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Ithaca College. He was a member of St John\u2019s Episcopal Church in Ithaca, and served in several positions including on the Vestry, until his death in 2005. This article was first published in the church\u2019s newsletter, St John\u2019s Eagle, in May, 2002.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 King\u2019s Chapel and its Prayer Book John Harcourt Members of Saint John\u2019s visiting Boston may have discovered King\u2019s Chapel on Tremont Street at the foot of Beacon Hill. Those who have ventured inside for a service may have been vaguely disconcerted. The text in their hands was entitled The Book of Common Prayer; its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":120,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n