Thomas Cranmer, the seventy-first Archbishop of Canterbury,
suffered martyrdom under Mary Tudor on March 21, 1556. It
is to him, more than to any other single individual, that
we owe the Book of Common Prayer. The liturgical reformation
which was carried out under Edward VI should be seen in relation
to two important events which took place during the previous
reign of Henry VIII. In 1538, by official injunction, a copy
of the English Bible was to be set up in every parish church
in England. Five years later, the order was given that on
every Sunday and major feast day two chapters of scripture--one
from the Old Testament and one from the New Testament--were
to be publicly read in English.
We Anglicans
are sometimes asked: "Why do you need a Book of
Common Prayer? Don’t you accept the Reformation principle
of scriptura sola, "the Bible alone"? To
this question, my answer would be: "Yes, but...."
Yes, we do affirm, in the Sixth Article of Religion,
that "holy scripture containeth all things necessary
to salvation," but we are also open to those traditions
and practices of the pre-Reformation church which are not
contrary to scripture. Indeed, it was this very openness which
provoked the sustained attack on the Prayer Book by the Puritans
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Now of
all the practices of the "undivided church," that
of liturgical worship is surely the most venerable. So Cranmer’s
task was to turn scripture into liturgy, or, to put it another
way, to devise a liturgy of which scripture would be the inspiration
and raison d’être.
No one,
I think, would deny that Cranmer accomplished this task brilliantly.
But there are people today who believe that what Cranmer did
in the sixteenth century has been done for the contemporary
church by our own liturgical experts, so that Cranmer’s
work is now superseded. Here I must beg to differ. The Swiss
psychologist C.G. Jung has agued that during the second millennium
of the Christian era, a myth of rationality has taken hold,
that excludes the perception of the divine. Modern men and
women have lost the vision of transcendence and have traded
the soul’s values for the rational intellect’s instrumental
powers.
This movement
towards rationalism was already well under way by the sixteenth
century, and it finds expression, for example, in the penitential
introduction to Morning Prayer and Evening prayer, including
the General Confession and Absolution. These spendid specimens
of liturgical English manifest one of the less attractive
features of our liturgy, namely, its tendency to bring in
homily and exhortation at every possible point.
Nevertheless,
Cranmer and his associates had one advantage which few of
us today can be said to enjoy: they were perfectly bilingual.
They thought and prayed and wrote not only in Tudor English
but also in the language of the English Bible. No modern liturgy
of which I am aware manifests this connatural affinity with
the Biblical world, upon which Christian faith and spirituality
depend.
The day
may come when liturgists become poets, or poets become liturgists,
and, if that day should ever arrive, we may be graced with
forms of worship which surpass any of the liturgical options
presently available. But until that day comes, Cranmer’s
Prayer Book will not only be the distinguishing mark of our
Anglican identity, but it will also provide liturgical access
to the imaginal world of the Bible, in which we live and move
and have our being.
In the
Western Church, prior to Cranmer, the recitation of the Divine
Office, as it was called, was the special obligation of priests,
monks, and nuns. Cranmer simplified the office by reducing
the eight services to two, and he translated it into the vernacular.
But beyond this, Cranmer made Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer
a form of congregational
worship, in which the psalms, the canticles, and the scriptural
lessons have the central place.
Cranmer
believed that the Bible was the living word of God to every
man and woman, and that it comes with the greatest power when
unaccompanied by any human gloss, comment, or exposition.
Consequently, in the Anglican tradition, the minister of the
word is primarily the person who is authorized to read
the word of God in the congregation. Morning Prayer and Evening
Prayer are Anglicanism’s most distinctive contribution
to Christian liturgy, and these offices must not be allowed
to disappear from the public worship of the Church.
Cranmer
rendered an immense service to his Church and, indeed, to
the whole of Christendom. But the greatest service of all
was rendered in his death. It would be a sad day for our Church
if these things should ever be forgotten.
