Elegant Simpicity, with Variations: A Review of Lance Davis’ “The Anglican Office Book.”

Note:  This is long. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

The classical Anglican tradition of Common Prayer has been lauded, for more than four centuries, for its elegant simplicity – and rightfully so. That is indeed, and for centuries has been, one of its chief appeals, along with the euphonious quality of its language, and its fidelity to the core of the Christian faith. John Wesley, the Anglican priest who (not entirely by intention) ended up founding the Methodist Church, famously commented,

“I believe there is no liturgy in the World, either in ancient or modern language, which breathes more of a solid, scriptural, rational Piety, than the Common Prayer of the Church of England.”

All of which is abundantly true! And one of the elements which led me to the Anglican tradition in the first place. But there is, if truth be told, a fine and easily-crossed line between simplicity and monotony; and this is particularly relevant with respect to the Daily Office of Morning and Evening Prayer, which by its nature is intended to be said daily – 365 days a year, ideally – and is addressed, since its 16th century origins, to both the clergy and laity.

If that line be crossed, and the Office become a source of tedium instead of inspiration, many may choose simply to omit it entirely, or except on rare occasions, or to mumble through it in a pro-forma way, without deep engagement: thus robbing themselves of its spiritual, theological, and devotional riches, and the Church of members well-formed in our Common Prayer tradition and nourished by the Rule of Life it embodies.

One way to help ensure that this does not become a threat is to maintain what is known as the Ordinary of the Office – those invariable elements which are key to its very nature – while moderately increasing the optional Propers, sometimes known as “elaborations”: those variable elements which help to key the Office to days and times, and to the liturgical Kalendar. These include both the great themes of the Christian year – the Nativity and Passion cycles of our Lord, and the Trinitytide season of instruction in the Christian life – and the commemorations of those Christian worthies we know as saints.

This Lance Davis has done, in his newly-released volume, The Anglican Office Book, which he describes as “a complete resource for the recitation of the Daily Offices of the traditional 1928 Book of Common Prayer, supplemented with anthems, hymns, responses, and collects from the Sarum Breviary. This work is a revision and updating of Fr. Paul Hartzell’s Prayer Book Office of 1944, together with elements from The English Office Book of 1955. In addition to the Prayer Book orders of Mattins [Morning Prayer] and Evensong [Evening Prayer]” – the core of the volume – “it contains a complete cursus of the Little Hours, derived from the Sarum and Benedictine uses,” along with additional resources.

Church and Culture: the true Covid Crisis of 2020 | Anglican Way Magazine

Source: Church & Culture: the true Covid Crisis of 2020 | Anglican Way Magazine

While this essay could perhaps be formatted a bit better and concluded a bit more decisively, the points that it raises are nonetheless ones that Christians, and Anglican Christians in particular, need to “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest“: our temporal future depends upon it – and so, it may well be, does the eternal well-being of many souls.

The role of Christianity in shaping the culture, laws and ultimate identity of both the United States and United Kingdom specifically, and more widely of western civilization, has been central to the emergent intellectual and cultural crisis that may well prove for history the most enduring legacy of the COVID virus…

The seeming zeal… with which bishops closed churches and the State shut down public worship and access to the sacraments has exposed a fundamental crisis about what the fullness of life and its support requires. Is human life really just about mere physical well-being and comfort in the end?

The cooperation of the churches in their own marginalisation is striking and threatens deep change for their influence, unless firmly turned around and challenged. While on a more mundane level, hard questions will soon have to be faced too about the long term consequences of promoting “live streaming” of worship with the express intent that congregations can therefore stay at home!

Indeed.

January 1st: The Feast of the Circumcision of Christ (a.k.a. “Holy Name”)

In addition to being the secular New Year’s Day (since 1752, for the Anglosphere), today is also the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ. So, what is the significance of this oddly-named (to our modern ears) feast?

Here is a classic explanation:

“As Christ wished to fulfil the law and to show His descent according to the flesh from Abraham, He, though not bound by the law, was circumcised on the eighth day (Luke 2:21), and received the sublime name expressive of His office, Jesus, i.e. Saviour.

He was, as St. Paul says, ‘made under the law,’ i.e. He submitted to the Mosaic Dispensation, ‘that he might redeem them who were under the law: that we might receive the adoption of sons’ (Galatians 4:4, 5). ‘The Christ, in order to fulfill all justice, was required to endure this humiliation, and bear in His body the stigma of the sins which He had taken upon Himself’…

“As Christ voluntarily took upon Himself our death, which is the effect of sin, whereas He had no sin Himself, in order to deliver us from death, and to make us to die spiritually unto sin, so also He took upon Himself circumcision, which was a remedy against original sin, whereas He contracted no original sin, in order to deliver us from the yoke of the Law, and to accomplish a spiritual circumcision in us—in order, that is to say, that, by taking upon Himself the shadow, He might accomplish the reality.”

Or, as the classical theological dictum puts it, “what is not assumed” – that is, taken unto Himself – “is not redeemed.” The theological and cosmic significance of this act is lost, or at least diminished, if this feast is thought of only as the more sanitized “Holy Name,” as it often is in this more squeamish age! That said, He did in fact receive His Name, Jesus, at this time: the Latinized form (Jesu) of Joshua (Yeshua), which means “one who rescues, or delivers,” so that Jesus Christ means “The Saviour, the Messiah.”

Here, at any rate, are the Propers of the day! Happy New Year, and Merry (8th day of) Christmas!

The Circumcision of Christ.The Book of Common Prayer 1928.The Collect.ALMIGHTY God, who madest thy blessed Son to be circumcised, and obedient to the law for man; Grant us the true circumcision of the Spirit; that, our hearts, and all our members, being mortified from all worldly and carnal lusts, we may in all things obey thy blessed will; through time same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.The Epistle. Philippians ii. 9.GOD also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.The Gospel. St. Luke ii. 15.AND it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us. And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child. And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds. But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard an seen, as it was told unto them. And when eight days were accomplished for the circumcising of the child, his name was called JESUS, which was so named of the angel before he was conceived in the womb.

A short quote on the Caroline Divines

Source: A Saint Study: Charles Stuart, King and Martyr | The North American Anglican

“The English School of Theology experienced a renaissance of sorts under the ‘Caroline Divines,’ the theologians who delineated the manner in which the Church of England did and did not agree with the Reformation as articulated on the Continent; these Divines number among them Blessed Lancelot Andrewes, Blessed George Herbert, Blessed John Cosin, Blessed Thomas Ken, Blessed William Laud, Blessed Jeremy Taylor, and Richard Hooker. These men were most emphatic on demonstrating their adherence to the Fathers of the Church rather than to their own reading of Scriptures.”

— from “A Saint Study: Charles Stuart, King and Martyr,” by Raymond Davidson, May 15, 2020

 

The Via Media—Between What and What? | The North American Anglican

John Whitgift (c. 1530-1604): Archbishop of Canterbury and a defender of the Elizabethan Settlement, the classic attempt to bridge the divide between Reformed Catholic Anglicans and what McDermott calls Calvinist (I would call them Reformed Protestant) Anglicans.

One could say that the argument over the Via Media is its own via media, cutting through two camps in the Anglican Communion.

Source: The Via Media—Between What and What? | The North American Anglican

Gerald McDermott – recently retired Chair of Anglican Divinity at Beeson Divinity School, the author or editor of 23 books, and teacher of courses in Anglicanism, history and doctrine, theology of world religions, and Jonathan Edwards – on the much-debated subject of the Anglican via media.

As quoted above, McDermott writes that “One could say that the argument over the Via Media is its own via media, cutting through two camps in the Anglican Communion,” and continues,

“Although there have been various ways of interpreting the term [via media], more recently its interpretation has divided two groups of Anglicans—those who insist on the Reformed character of Anglicanism and those who see Anglicanism as a way of being reformed and catholic but distinct from Rome.

The first group of Anglicans (let’s call them ‘Calvinist Anglicans’) says that the via media runs between Wittenberg and Geneva but finally ends in Geneva. The English Reformation, by its lights, was first inspired by Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone and grace alone. Then it turned to Calvin and his Institutes as its best expression of Christian faith purged of papist ceremonial. Cranmer and Jewell turned attention away from Catholic spectacle and back toward the preached Word. The Protestant center of Anglicanism is demonstrated by the Thirty-Nine Articles’ exaltation of biblical authority and rejection of Catholic sacramentalism.

“The other group of Anglicans (‘reformed catholic Anglicans’ might be apt) acknowledges Reformed influence on the early Anglican theologians and continued Reformation influence on Anglican soteriology and authority. For a few examples, Anglicans have always rejected Pelagianism, papism, and Mariolatry. But reformed catholic Anglicans point as well to the embrace of catholic worship—not Roman but patristic, and that of the undivided Church of the first millennium of Christianity—by its earliest reformers and continuing through the Elizabethan and Restoration eras.”

“For these and a hundred other reasons, historians such as the general editor of the Oxford History of Anglicanism have maintained that ‘[d]eveloping within Anglicanism over centuries was a creative but also divisive tension between Protestantism and Catholicism, between the Bible and tradition, between the Christian past and contemporary thought and society.'”

It will probably surprise few regular readers of this blog that The Anglophilic Anglican falls into the second of these two camps: seeing in the Anglican tradition an expression of Christianity which is both Reformed and Catholic, but not Romanist. So, it appears, does McDermott; and he spends the rest of this fairly long but interesting essay in defending that stance – or as he puts it, endeavoring to

“show in this space that the reformed catholic conception of the via media as running between Rome and Geneva more accurately depicts the Anglican story than the Calvinist one. The Reformed tradition has had an undoubted influence upon our faith and worship, but it is only part of the story” –

as well as providing some cautions for those who would behave in a manner too over-zealous, on either side. As he concludes,

“I would suggest that… we should accept our Calvinist Anglican brothers and sisters as good Anglicans whom we can invite to share more of our rich Anglican patrimony. Come not only to hear but also to taste and see.

“We ask in turn that our Calvinist brethren would accept us as genuine Anglicans [as well]. Let us say to one another, Come let us reason together and learn from each other.

A very good and useful read, in my opinion!

 

Latest Numbers On Coronavirus: 100% Of World Still Under God’s Control | The Babylon Bee

“We’ve analyzed the numbers, and the one pattern that’s emerging here is that 100% of human beings are still in the loving hands of their Creator,” said a spokesperson for the CDC. “Christ created the world and holds the universe together by the power of His will. In Him all things hold together.”

Source: Latest Numbers On Coronavirus: 100% Of World Still Under God’s Control | The Babylon Bee

The Babylon Bee has a knack for concealing truth under the guise of humour (or satire). Here, the truth is a little closer to the surface, and not very satirical at all:

“Remarkably, this data is very similar to researchers’ findings during the Fall of Rome, Black Plague, Holocaust, Spanish flu, swine flu, bird flu, and every other time of turmoil humanity has faced. No matter what the specific plague or time of suffering, research has always pointed to the fact that God is sovereign and bends the thread of history to His will for His glory.”

Reminds me of my dear late mother, who, when I used to worry about things – from problems in school to the danger of nuclear armageddon (I grew up at the height of the Cold War) – would give me a comforting hug and remind me, “God is still in charge.”

Consider yourself hugged.

 

“Remember, O man, that thou art dust”: Matt Kennedy on the Ash Wednesday ashes

Abusus non tollit usum.

 

Ash Wednesday: Lent begins

Today, known as Ash Wednesday, marks the first day of Lent in the Western Christian tradition – including Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Old Catholics, Lutherans, and others. And Lent is, of course, the holy season of self-examination, penitence, and preparation as we who are Christians prepare for the Feast of the Resurrection on Easter Sunday. These two lovely images, from Enid Chadwick’s marvelous little volume, My Book of the Church’s Year, do an excellent job of presenting the key themes of Lent!

There are actually six Sundays in Lent; the others being Passion Sunday (Lent V) and Palm Sunday (Lent VI) – which, as the above notes, are found in a separate image – and are collectively known as “Passiontide.”

Wishing all my Christian viewers a holy, blessed, and fruitful Lenten observance!

Nota Bene: Chadwick’s book has recently be re-published by St. Augustine Academy Press. I’ve obtained a copy (not receiving any compensation for this “plug”), and I commend it to your attention!

 

It’s Shrove Tuesday – tomorrow, Lent begins!

Wishing all my Christian friends a holy and blessed Lenten season. May our time of self-examination, penitence, and preparation prepare us for a joyful and blessed celebration of the Feast of the Resurrection, come Easter!

(Image, from Enid Chadwick’s My Book of the Church’s Year, shared from a Facebook friend’s posting. This splendid little book has recently been republished by St. Augustine Academy Press.)

 

“Why I Don’t Celebrate The Reformation (And Neither Should You)” | René Albert

In order to discern the truth about an event as complex as the Protestant Reformation, one needs to be able to look at it objectively.

Source: Why I Don’t Celebrate The Reformation (And Neither Should You) | René Albert

Today is celebrated by some Protestant Christians as “Reformation Day,” in memory of the fact that Martin Luther nailed his “95 Theses” to the church door at Wittenberg on 31 October 1517, sparking the Protestant Reformation. But what of that Reformation? While the title of this essay is rather click-bait-y, it raises some excellent points:

“Whether someone sides with Catholic or Protestant theology, the Reformation is not something that ought to be celebrated, but much rather commemorated… I may not be an expert historian, but my learnings have led me to believe that neither Catholics nor Protestants have the higher moral ground in the outcome of such a travesty. I believe all Christians can benefit from refraining from boasting in a movement that was motivated by the thoughts and actions of mere men.”

And which has led to untold death, destruction, division, and polarization in the centuries since. I tend to view the Reformation as a (possibly, on the assumption that Rome was incapable of reforming itself, apart from the resulting revolution – an assumption which is neither provable nor disprovable at this juncture) necessary evil, in light of some very real late-medieval errors and abuses on the part of the Roman Church. That said, the idea that it was a triumph of faith, reason, and theological precision in direct contradistinction to “Popish superstition” and apostasy is a lot harder to defend, if one looks at the matter in more detail.

Particularly onerous to me is the implication – and, at times, outright assertion – on the part of some Protestants that the Holy Spirit had in effect abandoned the Church for a period of a thousand years, from the end of the 5th century to the beginning of the 16th. And of course, the Reformation enshrined the principle of individual interpretation, the dismantling of tradition, and the devaluation of the authority found in the consensus fidelium, which led – via a trajectory clearly traceable from the Reformation through the “Enlightenment” – to the contemporary marginalization of the Church(es) and the Christian faith itself, in our present era.

So, no, I do not “celebrate” the Reformation. I tip my hat to it; I recognize the value in some of its accomplishments, and in what some of its leaders said and did. But I don’t deify it, I don’t idolize it, and I don’t let myself be blinded to its shadow side.