The Standard of Prayer Book Worship (Jerusalem Declaration 6)
Editor’s Note: This is the tenth in a series of articles by Dr. Stephen Noll, titled “The Jerusalem Declaration: A Personal Commentary.” Dr. Noll draws on decades of experience in the GAFCON movement, especially his role as Secretary of the Statement group that drafted the Jerusalem Declaration and its accompanying Statement.
The first five clauses of the Jerusalem Declaration describe a Gospel-centered, biblically based church that upholds the catholic creeds and states a recognizably Protestant faith. But membership in a church that worships with the Book of Common Prayer and is led by bishops in apostolic succession offers something distinctively Anglican. Other churches have prayer books and bishops; yet the Prayer Book in Anglican worship and bishops in Anglican polity set us apart.
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In the next two essays, I shall examine the two clauses in the Jerusalem Declaration that distinguish Anglicans from other Christian bodies: Prayer Book worship (clause 6) and historic episcopate (clause 7).
Clause 6 states:
We rejoice in our Anglican sacramental and liturgical heritage as an expression of the gospel, and we uphold the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as a true and authoritative standard of worship and prayer, to be translated and locally adapted for each culture.
Article 6, Jerusalem Declaration
The Sacramental Heritage
Most Anglicans rejoice in their heritage of worship and sacraments. George Herbert writes of “The British Church”: “I joy, dear mother, when I view thy perfect lineaments, and hue both sweet and bright.” I rejoiced when, at the closing Eucharist in Abuja, the long procession of global bishops entered singing Herbert’s “Let All the World in Every Corner Sing, ‘My God and King.’”
Not to be carried away by aesthetics: Thomas Cranmer’s reformational project integrated Scripture, doctrine, discipline, and worship into a national church order. In his first version of the Articles of Religion, Cranmer prefaced his teaching on the sacraments this way:
Our Lord Jesus Christ has knit together a company of new people with Sacraments, most few in number, most easy to be kept, most excellent in signification, as is Baptism, and the Lord’s Supper.
Article 26, The Forty-two Articles of 1553
This sentence complements Cranmer’s doctrine of the visible church as
a congregation of faithful men, in which the pure word of God is preached, and the sacraments are duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance.
Article 19
Sacraments are effectual signs of God’s grace to individuals and corporate signs of a living church. Cranmer’s national church of local parishes has faded, but renewed Anglican congregations now mark themselves by public baptism and weekly Communion.
Clause 6, as I read it, does not advance a particular position on the spectrum of theological views among Anglicans as to baptismal regeneration and the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. For this reason, I hesitate to go beyond the language of Article 25, “Of the Sacraments”:
Sacraments ordained by Christ are not only badges and tokens of Christian men’s profession, but rather they are certain sure witnesses and effectual signs of grace and God’s good will towards us, by which he works invisibly in us, and not only quickens but also strengthens and confirms our faith in him.
I understand “sure witnesses and effectual signs” as promissory and declaratory. As the proclamation of justification—“by grace you have been saved”—calls forth faith, so the baptismal and eucharistic rites call forth faithful reception. The baptismal declaration, “seeing now that this child is regenerate and grafted into the body of Christ’s church,” is followed by prayer, “that this child may lead the rest of his life according to this beginning.”
Likewise, the words of administration at Holy Communion conjoin the objective presentation of “the body and blood of Christ given and shed for you” with each believer’s subjective act of “taking, eating, and drinking in remembrance” of Christ’s sacrifice. As for those who come to the Lord’s Table apart from this dynamic of grace and faith, “they are in no wise partakers of Christ” (Article 29).
The Prayer Book: Cranmer’s Immortal Bequest
Of the elements of Cranmer’s reform of the Church of England, the Book of Common Prayer stands out as his lasting and beloved legacy. Samuel Leuenberger, a Swiss Reformed scholar, called it (as he titled his book) Archbishop Cranmer’s Immortal Bequest. Amen! Anglicans may have varied tastes in poetry, music, art, cuisine, haberdashery—you name it—yet only one favorite when it comes to liturgy. As with Tyndale’s English Bible, Cranmer’s eloquence and reverence shine through page after page.
How do global Anglicans today uphold the 1662 Prayer Book? Though Cranmer devised two Prayer Books, 1662 proved decisive: the restored Church of England adopted a revision that remains the official text. Anglican missionaries carried it throughout the world and translated it into local languages. Many provinces built its authority into their constitutions. According to “praying shapes believing” (lex orandi lex credendi), the Prayer Book has carried the doctrine of the English Reformation into diverse settings. Clause 6, therefore, calls it “a true and authoritative standard of worship and prayer.”
Clause 6 qualifies this standard: the Prayer Book is “to be translated and locally adapted for each culture.” More than a hundred more-or-less literal translations of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer have served Anglicanism well. Such literalism, however, may impede cultural translation, as Lesslie Newbigin noted in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. One recent attempt at fuller cultural adaptation is “Our Modern Services” of the Anglican Church of Kenya. In the West, many Anglican churches, including the Church of England itself, have produced alternative liturgies of uneven quality.
The Winds of Liturgical Change
How should one regard the “canonical” status of the 1662 BCP? I must confess: in more than half a century of ministry in the USA, England, and Uganda, I have never led, nor maybe even participated in, a Communion service from the 1662 Prayer Book!
For an American Episcopalian, this is not surprising: we derived a portion of our first Prayer Book in 1789 from the Non-jurors in Scotland, as well as our first bishop. The 1928 American Prayer Book adopted portions of a proposed Church of England revision that Parliament later voted down. Even so, the Episcopal Prayer Book bore a clear family resemblance to the 1662 standard until the 1970s.
But the times they were a-changing. I began my ministry in 1971 using several “services for trial use”—the Green Book, the Zebra Book, and, finally, the 1976 Proposed Book, which was approved in 1979. The 1979 Book of Common Prayer was ratified to replace the 1928 Prayer Book, although it offered a sop to traditionalists with “Rite One.”
The main eucharistic prayer was the 1979 liturgy’s most substantive innovation, fruit of the modern recovery of the Liturgy of St. Hippolytus (possibly from the 3rd century). Massey Hamilton Shepherd, my seminary professor and, to some, the father of the 1979 Prayer Book, shuttled to Rome in the service of the ecumenical movement’s common texts. Many charismatic-renewal clergy and churches saw this rite as an expression of Christ’s triumph (Christus Victor), fuller congregational participation, and freedom in the Spirit for prayer and praise.
There was, however, a worm in the apple. Liturgical revision entered the Episcopal Church as part of a wider theological revision that accommodated secularism, especially the sexual revolution. The progressive rainbow ended a few years later with the development of Inclusive Language for God rites.
Coming Home to the 1662 Prayer Book
This brings me to the Book of Common Prayer 2019 of the Anglican Church in North America. The bookends of the Prayer Book show why. The final section includes, among its “Fundamental Declarations,” this statement:
We receive The Book of Common Prayer as set forth by the Church of England in 1662, together with the Ordinal attached to the same, as a standard for Anglican doctrine and discipline, and, with the Books which preceded it, as the standard for the Anglican tradition of worship.
Book of Common Prayer (2019), pg. 767
In this same section, following the Athanasian Creed and the Thirty-Nine Articles, comes the Jerusalem Declaration (pages 791-793), including, of course, clause 6.
Returning to the front end, the Preface sketches the divergent paths of Anglican liturgy from the early church to the Reformation and post-Reformation periods down to the present.
The liturgical movement of the 20th century and the ecumenical rapprochement in the second half of that century had an immense impact on the Prayer Book tradition. The Book of Common Prayer (1979) in the United States and various Prayer Books that appeared in Anglican Provinces from South America to Kenya to South East Asia to New Zealand were often more revolutionary than evolutionary in character. Eucharistic prayers in particular were influenced by the re-discovery of patristic texts unknown at the Reformation, and often bore little resemblance to what had for centuries been the Anglican norm. Baptismal theology, especially in North America, was affected by radical revisions to the received Christian understanding, and came perilously close to proclaiming a gospel of individual affirmation rather than of personal transformation and sanctification.
The Book of Common Prayer (2019) is the product of the new era of reform and restoration that has created the Anglican Church in North America. The Jerusalem Declaration of 2008 located itself within the historic confines of what is authentically the Christian Faith and the Anglican patrimony, and sought to restore their fullness and beauty. The Book of Common Prayer (2019) is offered to the same end.
Preface, The Book of Common Prayer (2019)
I quote this at length because it argues that this new Prayer Book, the first fruit of GAFCON 2008, returns to the font of Cranmer’s vision of worship, enriched but not poisoned by ecumenical and missionary developments, and looks toward a truly global Anglican future.
The 2019 Prayer Book: A Banquet, Not a Smorgasbord
Archbishop Robert Duncan, who chaired the Liturgy Task Force, expands the Preface’s argument in his address, “When the Lord Overturned the Captivity of Zion: Contextualizing the Book of Common Prayer (1662) for the 21st Century.” He argues that the Book of Common Prayer 2019 fulfills clause 6 and adapts the fullness of Cranmer’s reform for the contemporary church in North America. The following are some resulting implications and applications.
First, the new Prayer Book presents a banquet of services for the church, not a smorgasbord. Unlike the 1979 Prayer Book, which offered many options—likely hoping that one set would die out with its aging users—the new book rests on a single liturgical foundation; the traditional-language version tracks page for page with the contemporary-language version. Its options allow a more “puritan” and a more “catholic” presentation of the same Gospel.
This unified aim especially matters for the Eucharist. By using the titles “Anglican Standard Text” and “Renewed Ancient Text”—in that order—the Prayer Book encourages Anglican worship to return to its Reformation roots even as Cranmer and the Reformers resourced and pruned the Church’s prior rites into a common liturgy. The North American reformers say, in effect: “Let’s not divide the church into Paul and Apollos factions: ‘I am of Cranmer, I am of Hippolytus’” but use both pastorally in season.
Music and Media
Let me extend this comprehensive principle to congregational music. St. Paul commended “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” (Col 3:16). One glory of the English musical tradition is that it incorporated these strands: boy choirs and Anglican chant, evangelical and catholic hymnody (Watts and Wesley, Heber and Neale, Cecil Frances Alexander and Fanny Crosby, Stuart Townend and the Gettys), and free charismatic and vernacular prayer and praise. Many churches combine these traditions in “blended worship.”
Finally, I encourage balanced use of electronic media for Prayer Book liturgy. Anglican liturgy rests on a book, the Prayer Book, and the Prayer Book rests on a book, the holy Bible. I have described myself elsewhere as a digital dinosaur and app-horrent; maybe someday I’ll be app-solved. Many may find a Bible app, a catechesis app, and a Prayer Book app useful. But let there be a physical Bible and Prayer Book in every home, and in the pew, as a token of our Anglican heritage.
Global Liturgies
The ACNA Prayer Book 2019 is one template for a reformed and reordered Global Anglican Communion. It will soon appear in other languages. Other churches in the Communion may have their own adaptations of the classic liturgy, and I hope we can access them in this age of electronic publishing. I hope the day will come when Global Anglicans sit down at the marriage feast of the Lamb and share Archbishop Cranmer’s Immortal Bequest.
Image: St George’s Anglican Cathedral, Jerusalem. Photo by Seasunandsky from Getty Images, courtesy of Canva. Digitally edited by Jacob Davis.
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