13
July 2012 A.D. Mr.
(Rev.Dr.) J.I. Packer—Prayer Book Churchmanship
Packer,
James I. “Rooted and Built Up in Christ
(Col. 2.6-7): The Prayer Book
Path.” The Prayer Book Society of Canada.
N.d. http://prayerbook.ca/resources/onlinelibrary/prayer-book-yesterday-today-tomorrow/#rootedandbuiltupinchrist. Accessed 12 Jul 2014.
ROOTED AND BUILT UP IN CHRIST (Col.
2:6-7):
THE PRAYER BOOK PATH
THE PRAYER BOOK PATH
The Revd. Dr. J.I. Packer
Dr. James I. Packer was born in England and educated at Oxford
where he earned degrees in Classics and Theology. He served as a priest and
seminary tutor for nine years before becoming warden of Latimer House, an
Anglican evangelical study centre in Oxford, in 1961. In 1970 he became
Principal of Tyndale Hall, an Anglican seminary in Bristol, and in 1979 he was
appointed Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology at Regent College,
Vancouver. Dr. Packer has written many best-selling books, and is one of the
most widely read Anglican authors in the world.
My task is to celebrate the
Prayer Book, not to talk about myself, and I intend to keep to my agenda. But I
think I need to start by telling you straight out that I am speaking to you as
one of those rare birds who over the years has found the historic Anglican
Prayer Book to be a source of increasing delight and excitement (I choose my
words; I mean them), so that now in my eighth decade I find myself valuing it
more than at any earlier time in my life. I was brought up on the Prayer Book,
in the sense that I was baptized and confirmed in the Church of England and
attended church regularly with my parents till I went up to Oxford at age
eighteen. Throughout those years, however, the Prayer Book bored me stiff,
simply because Christianity bored me stiff. I was an intelligent, introverted,
isolated boy who lived, I suppose, respectably but conventionally. I knew God
was real, and that Christianity was no doubt true, but I had no interest in
knowing God relationally, and I hated the pilgrim perspective of the Prayer
Book and the hymns, which told me that the supreme significance of this present
life is as preparation and training for a more important, endless life that
Christians will live in God’s immediate presence. After Jesus Christ made
himself known to me and claimed me, however, and once I had got beyond my
resentment of the Church of England for never having clearly explained the
gospel to me, I began to value the Prayer Book as what others have often called
it, namely the Bible arranged for worship, and to see its two-world,
grace-oriented, Christ-centred outlook as the highest wisdom. I began to
discover how as you use it pulls you into its own world (which is, of course,
what Karl Barth once called the strange new world of the Bible). I began to
find out how it expands you emotionally and relationally as a person, and how
at every turn of the road it highlights and honours our Lord and Saviour Jesus.
I came to see that the root problem with the Prayer Book (if “problem” is the
right word) is not that its language is ceremonial in an old-fashioned way, but
that it is a spiritual book for spiritually alive people, and you cannot expect
anyone to be other than bored with it until Jesus Christ renews their hearts
and the Bible itself begins to open up to them. So. now, in my eighth decade, I
am more of an enthusiast for the Prayer Book than ever, I am increasingly
grateful for what it gives me, I find that during the past ten years I have
spoken and written more on its behalf than ever before, and it is as an
enthusiast that I move at this moment into my announced subject.
As good Christians, and
Anglicans among them, should always do when matters of spiritual significance
arise, let us begin with the Bible. In Colossians 2:6-7 Paul focusses the
message of the entire letter by writing as follows. “As you therefore have
received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and
built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught,
abounding in thanksgiving.” I want to make three observations regarding these
words.
First
observation: this text speaks about Jesus
Christ, calling him the Lord and declaring him to be in the
most literal sense central to Christian existence. Our lives are only
Christian, Paul implies, as we live them “in him,” “rooted and built up in him”
– the word “in” evidently carries a great weight of relational meaning. But
now, who is this Jesus Christ? When Paul wrote to the Colossians he needed to
spell out the answer to that question, for some after being taught it were
losing their grip on it, and with the current prevalence among us of liberal
theology, which always starts by diminishing the stature of Jesus Christ, we
today need to pay specially close attention to what Paul says. Just as Paul’s
understanding of justification by faith permeates all his writings but is most
fully set out in Romans, so Paul’s understanding of who and what Jesus is
permeates all his writings but is most fully set out in Colossians. What Paul
has to tell us about him may be stated thus:
First, Jesus is the man
of Calvary. Paul speaks explicitly of his cross in 2:15-16, that is, of
Jesus’ execution as a condemned criminal. The cross, so we find, is the place
where Paul’s thinking and teaching about Jesus regularly starts.
Second, Jesus is the
Son of God, “his beloved Son” (1:13), “the image of the invisible God”
(1:15). The one whom Paul calls “God” is “the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”
(1:3). Jesus is the human name for the Son of God incarnate, and Paul uses the
word “fullness,” which had evidently become a code-word among the unorthodox
Colossians to express the fact of incarnation – “in him all the fullness of God
was pleased to dwell” (1:19); “in him the whole fullness of deity dwells
bodily” (2:9). That present tense, “dwells”, points to the fact that the
incarnate life of the Son continues for ever – continues, therefore, now, as at
this very moment we contemplate his reality and his role. He, says Paul, is
“the first-born from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in
everything” (1:18). That is the Jesus with whom we have to do today.
Third, Jesus is the Lord
of creation: such was the Father’s will for the Son who was his co-creating
agent. “All things have been created through him and for him. He himself is
before all things, and in him all things hold together” (1:16-17). As he
brought everything into being, so he sustains it, or it would cease to be:
that, of course, includes you and me. Paul calls Jesus “the Lord Jesus” (3:17),
“the Lord Christ” (3:24), and “the Lord” simply (3:18, 20, 22, 23, 24, 4:7, 17),
in addition to saying that Christians receive “Christ Jesus the Lord” in the
verse from which we started (2:6). Lordship signifies ownership, dominion, and
authority. Scholars agree that “Jesus is Lord” was in effect the first
Christian confession of faith. Paul insists that Christians must relate to
Jesus Christ as their Lord, by obeying his commands, acknowledging
his control of their circumstances, relying on his power to enable them to
serve him loyally, and seeking to please him in all that they do.
Fourth, Jesus is the
Christ of Scripture, that is, the predicted Messianic king whose coming
into the world would mean peace and well-being - shalom, to use the Hebrew word for all in his universal
kingdom. A whole philosophy of history is wrapped up in the title “Christ”
(which means, “the anointed one”). Jesus, the Davidic descendent to whose reign
the prophets looked forward, is now on the throne of the universe, and will in
due course reappear for the final glory of his own people and the final judgment
(“wrath”) that is in store for our unbelieving and disobedient world (3:1-6).
Fifth, Jesus is the
sacrifice for sinners, the one through whose blood-shedding on the cross
reconciliation and peace with God became realities for Christian people (1:20).
Six verses on from our passage Paul explains this as follows: “God … forgave us
all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal
demands” – that is, cancelling the death-warrant that his law had become to us
through our failure to fulfill it. “He set this aside,” Paul continues,
“nailing it to the cross” (2:13-14). Do you see what that means? If you and I
had been among the spectators at Calvary, we could have read on the notice
nailed to the cross declaring the crime for which Jesus was being put to death
the words Pilate wrote to identify him as a political subversive – “The King of
the Jews”. But had we looked at the notice then, or if with our mind’s eye we
look at it now, with spiritual understanding, what each of us would see written
there is the ghastly computation of all our own sins. “He was wounded for our
transgressions, crushed for our iniquities, upon him was the punishment that
made us whole … the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Is. 53:5-6).
Or, as Paul puts it in Galatians 3:13, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of
the law by becoming a curse for us”. Or, as Jesus himself stated
it, “The Son of man came … to give his life a ransom for many” (Mk. 10:45).
Paul’s picture of the record of our sins nailed to Christ’s cross says it all,
in an unforgettably vivid and poignant way.
Sixth, Jesus is the
life of believers - “Christ who is your life” (3:4). To see what this
means., we must begin by noting that for Paul those who have not yet come to a
life-changing faith-fellowship with Jesus are, as he puts it, “dead in
trespasses”, that is, totally unresponsive to God in their hearts, just as the
physically dead are totally unresponsive to any form of stimulus that we might
apply to them. By contrast, however, those with faith, who are alive in Christ
and whose life Christ is, have been brought into a condition in which the
Christ who rose and reigns calls, draws, welcomes, pardons, corrects,
strengthens, upholds, and encourages them, so that they are able to testify that
Jesus is known to them as the friend who loves them and walks with them and as
the focus of their worship and service and as the fountain of patience,
persistence, and hope in their hearts whatever their outward situation. “To me,
living is Christ” said Paul elsewhere (Phil. 1:21), and all believers learn to
say the same as they realise what Christ’s entry into their personal existence
has involved.
Clearly, Christ who is our
life, will make us and keep us different from those around us, and that leads
on to our next major point.
Second
observation: this text speaks of persons
linked with Jesus Christ - citizens of Colossae in the first instance,
but by parity of reasoning all those who in our day or any other share the
faith of which Paul is speaking. These are they who have “received Jesus Christ
the Lord” – that is, received him as their personal Lord and Saviour and
committed themselves to follow him in personal repentance for past godlessness
and personal loyalty and obedience for the future. The key phrases pointing to
their link with Christ are “walk in him” (which is the literal rendering of
Paul’s main verb), and “rooted and built up in him”. “In him”, as I said
earlier, is a weighty phrase pointing to union, communion, and solidarity –
togetherness, we may say, in all thinkable ways. And truly, as every Anglican
needs to see (some, I fear, are not seeing it as yet), togetherness with
Christ, here and hereafter, is what Christianity in every age is all about.
The verbs Paul employs to
express this togetherness are pictures. Walking is the
Bible’s apt and vivid picture of the living of a life: the thought is of a
steady, purposeful, energetic, rhythmical, usually unspectacular exertion,
expressing itself in this instance in what Eugene Peterson, in one of his
memorable book titles, called “a long obedience in the same direction”. Rooted is the picture of a tree drawing all its
nourishment for growth and fruitage from a single source, namely the soil in
which its roots are anchored: the thought this picture expresses is of constant
dependence on Christ at a conscious level and constant forming and transforming
of us by Christ in ways of which we will not always ourselves be aware. Built up is Paul’s recurring picture of a new
building being erected, or of a broken-down and non-functional building being
renovated; this picture points to Christ’s ongoing work through the Holy Spirit
of conforming believers to himself in mind, heart, character, and conduct. The
pictures, as we see, overlap, but all point to the same reality – a
life in which, as the hymn puts it, Christ is our life, and our love, and our
path, and our prize.
Paul’s thought is amplified
and safeguarded by the next two phrases. “Established in the faith, just as you
were taught” is a warning against drifting away from the authentic apostolic
emphasis on the centrality, sufficiency and glory of Christ to notions which,
like the Colossian unorthodoxy of angel-worship, relativize him to
non-Christian forms of religious expression treated as absolutes – a warning
that is much needed in these days in which multifaith and syncretistic ways of
thinking are so widespread. “Abounding in thanksgiving” reminds us that in
Paul’s view mankind was made for thankfulness to a generous Creator as a
life-activity (see Rom. 1:21), and that one divinely intended effect of our
renovation in Christ is to return us to that activity, with more to be thankful
for now than was the case before the Fall. The thought of thanksgiving as a
basic and constant exercise of the Christian life often appears in Paul (see
1:12, 3:15-17; Phil. 4:6; Eph. 5:4, 20; 1 Thes. 5:18), and thanksgiving as a
way of life is modelled for us over and over again in the Psalms.
Here, then, is Paul’s outline
of the life of fellowship with Jesus Christ for each believing individual. That
is not quite all, however, that our text sets before us.
Third
observation, briefly – this text speaks
of a people linked with Jesus Christ. The frame of corporateness,
within which the plurals of our text should be set, was established in 1:18,
where the incarnate Son is declared to be “the head of the body, the church”.
In Ephesians, which should, I judge, be read as a companion piece to
Colossians, Paul greatly enlarges this perspective, displaying the church as both
the body and bride of Christ and also as the new man and the temple of God, and
declaring: “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the
one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father
of all, who is above all and through all and in all” (Eph. 4:4-6). Our
individuality in Christ, as converted and born-again persons living consciously
in fellowship with him, must never become “lone ranger” individualism, which
devalues the congregation and its discipline out of spiritual self-indulgence
and turns our personal faith into what is sometimes called “a flight of the
alone to the Alone”. That sort of Christianity is badly out of shape. Instead,
we must recognize the unity and solidarity of all Christ’s people with him and
in him, and learn to see our separate congregations as so many local outcrops
and small-scale manifestations of Christ’s one church universal, and therefore
make it our habit to express our adoration of and communion with and commitment
to the Son and the Father through the Holy Spirit by doing things together.
That is the way we are to go.
And now I have reached the
point where I can say with clarity what I want to say about our Canadian Book
of Common Prayer, set against the background of its 450-year history: namely,
that it has been, still is, and will continue to be a marvellous means, under
God, for achieving the goal of personal and corporate fellowship with the holy
Trinity in the rootedness, faithfulness and thankfulness of what the General
Confession calls “a godly, righteous, and sober life, to the glory of (God’s)
holy name”. In other words, the Prayer Book comes to us as a stellar source of
help for fulfilling Paul’s summons to us in Colossians 2:6-7. Let me spell out
what I mean.
Put yourself for a moment in
the shoes of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, in the year 1547. Henry
VIII has just been succeeded by the boy-king Edward VI, and at last all systems
are “go” for the reformation of the Church of England. The first task has to be
the production of a God-honouring, life-enhancing set of services in English
that all congregations will use, and that will involve all the worshippers in a
way that advances their personal discipleship to Jesus Christ. The project is
ambitious and demanding, but Cranmer has resources for it. Over and above his
access to like-minded colleagues, he is himself a learned man, familiar with
the liturgical and theological legacy of all Christendom since it began; he
knows the writings of the Fathers, the Medievals, and the Reformers; he is a
brilliant producer of poignant prayers for public use, as he showed in his
Litany of 1544; and he is a Bible-man to his fingertips, totally committed to
the Reformation ideal of Bible truth irradiating every Christian’s head and
heart and shining forth in every Christian’s attitudes and actions. On what
principles, now, was he to proceed? The two versions of his Prayer Book, those
of 1549 and 1552 respectively, show him implementing the following five.
1. Services must be
congregational. Cranmer’s goal was a book of Common (that
is, communal) prayer. Before the Reformation the priest had
said Mass in Latin, and the congregation, not understanding, spent the time
saying private prayers, or else did nothing. Cranmer, however, drafted services
in the vernacular, writing into them set parts for the congregation to say
(prayers, psalms, responses), and he looked forward to the day when all
worshippers would be able to read and would have a copy of each service open before them, so that they could
follow with their eyes as well as their ears, and so be completely involved in
what was going on. In his preface to the 1544 Litany he had written: “And such
among the people as have books and can read may read them quietly and softly to
themselves; and such as cannot read, let them quietly and attentively give
audience in time of the said prayers, having their minds erect to Almighty God,
and devoutly praying in their hearts the same petitions which do enter in at
their ears, so that with one sound of the heart and one accord God may be
glorified in his church.”1 “One sound of the heart” – that was
Cranmer’s ideal of congregational worship, and surely there can be no argument
that in this he was right.
2. Services must be
simple. Cranmer’s Prayer Books reject the studied ornateness of thought and ritual in older worship forms in
favour of studied simplicity and, as we have just seen, “inwardness”, meaning
that involvement of heart to which complexity and elaboration are always
hostile. Cranmer sought to reduce ceremonial to the minimum consistent with
full reverence and decency, and to simplify the flow of his services as
drastically as the substance and thrust of the biblical truth being expressed
would allow. His sixteenth-century ceremonial language, to which Prayer Book
users have always had to adjust, masks for some today the essential simplicity
which marks all Cranmer’s services, but it is there, as I shall illustrate in a
moment, and Cranmer’s achieving of it has milestone status in Christian
liturgical history.
3. Services must edify. As
we saw from Colossians, Christians are to be “built up” in Christ; and
Cranmer’s 1549 preface “Of Ceremonies” states explicitly that edification is
the end “whereunto all things done in the Church (as the Apostle teacheth)
ought to be referred.” Recognizing that edification comes through the teaching
and applying of biblical truth, Cranmer gave a major place in his drafting to
Scripture readings and set exhortations, and prescribed a sermon at each Holy
Communion service. Already he had sponsored the writing of the Homilies, a set
of sermons to be read from pulpits to guarantee that Christian basics would be
properly presented to all congregations. (Thus, the first four were on personal
Bible reading, human sinfulness, justification through Christ’s death, and
saving faith.) And Cranmer’s Lectionary, used for daily worship, would take you
through the Old Testament once and the New Testament twice every year. Thus
Cranmer, Bible-man and gospel-man that he was, sought to advance Anglican
edification.
Involved here was a long-term
educational ideal. Facing a laity deeply ignorant of basic Christianity, it was
central to Cranmer’s plan to construct services of proper theological fullness
and depth and then teach people to use them. The Prayer Book as we have it
today still sets the same high standard. It has never been possible to enter
properly into Prayer Book worship without some prior acquaintance with the
essentials of the Christian message, plus some concentrated mental effort,
requiring some preparation of heart beforehand.2 The
payoff, however, if I may so express it, is that the profound simplicities of
Cranmer’s liturgical forms have infinite power to feed the soul, as Anglicans
for four and a half centuries have been discovering. One grows into the Prayer
Book, one never outgrows it.
The principle that services
should have a didactic quality, so that they may both instruct and edify, is
rarely stressed (you will agree) in modern liturgical discussion. The quest
today is for services that will express what people have in their hearts at the
moment, rather than put into their hearts what they need to grasp if they are
ever to grow in grace and please God – that is one reason why today’s
alternative service forms are so shallow and flat. The plea for reducing the
theological content of services so that they will never outstrip any
participant’s present understanding gets a hearing today that Cranmer would not
have given it. Train up the people, he would have said, rather than water down
the faith! Surely this is the true wisdom, which we need urgently to recover.
It is never right to buy simplicity at the cost of shallowness.
4. Services must unify.
One aim of Cranmer and his colleagues was to unite the local congregations of
England, some ten thousand of them as it seems there were, in a common faith, a
common worship, and hence a common sympathy of a kind that cannot exist where
patterns of belief and worship diverge. The 1549 Prayer Book was enacted as an
all-England liturgy, just as our 1962 book was intended to function as an
all-Canada liturgy. Uniformity historically, whatever its political
significance at different times, has always been valued by church leaders as a
means of realizing the ideal of unity, and it seems to me that this pastoral
argument for uniformity in the essentials of worship is as strong today as it
ever was. Agreement in the use of a liturgy that is biblical, evangelical, and
worthy of God (which is the only uniformity I argue for, as it is the only
uniformity that English and Canadian Anglicans have ever had) has three
beneficial effects. First, it keeps the church’s standards of worship at the
highest level. Second, it brings all worshippers face to face with the gospel
and keeps them there. Third, it maintains a sense of oneness and solidarity
within the church as a whole. In today’s discussions of the historic Anglican
ideal of uniformity, only two points are usually made: first, that uniformity
is not the same as unity, which can exist without it; second, that more
flexibility than the Prayer Book prescribes would sometimes be an advantage.
True, no doubt, yet the deeper truth lies in the balancing points: first, that
godly uniformity is a potent means of expressing and deepening unity in Christ,
and second, that in enlarging the area of allowed variation we should hold to
the principle that as there is one gospel, and only one, so the actual worship
of churches within the same diocesan and provincial networks should be seen and
felt as one, and only one. Too much variety makes this impossible.
5. Services must
express the gospel. Cranmer saw that a good service is not a set of
unconnected bits and pieces, like a club concert – it is an integrated unit,
having an overall “shape” and a clear, planned “route” along which worshippers
are led. Cranmer “routed” Anglican public worship via the gospel, so that it
might have a fully evangelical “feel” and “shape”. How did he do this? By
giving his services an inner structure consisting of a sequence of three
themes: sin., detected and confessed; grace, proclaimed and celebrated – and
faith, focussed and expressed. In the proclaiming of grace Jesus Christ the
Mediator must be central, so we may formulate the sequence as, first, facing
our utter need of Christ; second, acknowledging God’s merciful provision of
Christ; third, expressing our trustful, thankful response to Christ. Thus
Cranmer’s services first make us face our present badness; then they tell us of
the new life of grace; finally they lead us into the right response, which is
multiple – prayer and praise for pardon; joyful trust in God’s promises of
mercy; learning of God from his Word; asking for help both for ourselves and
for others, professing our own faith, and giving ourselves directly to God out
of gratitude for all he has given to us. Since this point about the structure
of Cranmer’s services is not always appreciated, I propose now very briefly to
illustrate it, first from the “Bible” services of Morning and
Evening Prayer and then from the sacramental service of Holy Communion.
What “route,” now, do Morning
and Evening Prayer follow? In the Cranmerian form in which we are familiar with
them, the first step is a penitential sentence and declaration leading to a
confession of our sins. Then comes step two, the proclamation that God pardons
and absolves penitent believers, so that we pray with confidence for “true
repentance, and his Holy Spirit”. This prayer is the beginning of step three,
faith’s response to the gospel, and all that follows – the Lord’s Prayer, the
doxology, psalm-singing, listening to God’s voice in Scripture, confessing our
belief, making intercession – appears as the further action of those who by
faith have laid hold of God’s pardoning mercy in and through Jesus Christ our
Lord. Thus the sin-grace-faith sequence is basic to the whole service, just as
it is basic to the Christian experience that the service expresses and deepens.
Now we look at the service of
Holy Communion, the sacrament of continuance and strengthening through faith in
the living Christ and his atoning death. What is the “route” here? A detailed
answer to this question would be complicated by the fact that Cranmer produced
two versions of Holy Communion, that of 1549 and that of 1552, and complicated
also by the further fact that while England’s 1662 Prayer Book, to which the
Solemn Declaration of 1893 refers, follows 1552 very closely, Canada’s 1962
Communion service does not fully correspond to either of Cranmer’s forms.3But
a general answer to our question does not require discussion of these specific
differences, and it is a general answer that I offer now. The general answer is
that the ground-plan of the Communion service consists of the sin-grace-faith
sequence repeated three times, like successive turns of a screw – the first
time in an introductory way, in the Ante-Communion; the second time with
specific application to those who plan to communicate, and the third time by
administration of the sacrament itself, confirming the grace proclaimed in the
comfortable words.
To be more precise: the first
cycle consists of (1) recognition of sin, in the prayers “cleanse our hearts”
and “Lord, have mercy upon us”; (2) proclamation of grace in the New Testament
readings, epistle and gospel; and (3) four responsive exercises of faith –
testifying (“I believe”), learning (the sermon), giving (the collection), and
interceding for the church on earth.
The second cycle involves us
in (1) acknowledging personal sin in the confession, (2) being assured in the
comfortable words of the grace of Christ to sinners; and (3) actively embracing
that grace (by the Prayer of Humble Access in 1549,4 by
the Sursum Corda thanksgiving in 1552).
In the final cycle we come as
self-identified sinners to “God’s Board,” as 1549 calls it: we are given the
elements with words that assure (“the body … given for thee”, “the blood … shed
for thee”), we receive them with faith in the redemptive reality they signify,
and we express that faith in further gratitude for grace in our post-communion
praying.
Whether the consecration
prayer (the canon) is best made part of the second cycle, as in 1549, or the
third, as in 1552, England’s 1662, and Canada’s 1962, and whether 1962’s other
differences from 1549, 1552 and 1662 are defects or improvements, is of no
consequence or relevance in this analysis, and I mention these questions only
to dismiss them.
Time forbids further
exploration of the way Cranmer used his threefold sequence in constructing his
services, just as it forbids us to confirm our results so far by theological
analysis of the Collects, those profound prayers that Cranmer provided for each
week of the year. That will have to wait for another occasion. But I hope I
have said enough to indicate, at least in a preliminary way, how by observing
the five principles under review Cranmer was able to mastermind a
Christ-centred liturgy that marvellously matches and furthers God’s plan for
the church as Paul set its out in Colossians 2: 6-7. Now to my conclusion.
The conclusion can be
formulated as follows. As biblical Christians who are also, in the providence
of God, trustees for the Book of Common Prayer, this precious aid to biblical
godliness, we are under obligation to commend and defend it in the church, and
to give credibility to our advocacy of it by making full use of it ourselves.
The Prayer Book path of disciplined life in Christ is one that we must
ourselves learn to follow – which means, to start with, taking seriously the
paragraph with which the Canadian expansion of Cranmer’s
catechism closes:
Every
Christian man or woman should from time to time frame for himself a RULE OF
LIFE in accordance with the precepts of the Gospel and the faith and order of
the church where in he may consider the following:
The
regularity of his attendance at public worship and especially at the Holy
Communion.
The
practice of private prayer, Bible-reading, and self-discipline.
Bringing
the teaching and example of Christ into his everyday life.
The
boldness of his spoken witness to his faith in Christ.
His
personal service to the Church and the community.
The offering of money
according to his means for the support of the work of the church at home and
overseas.
This sets us on the road –
and, may I add, none of us will ever find a
better pattern for private prayer and Bible-reading anywhere than that offered
by the Prayer Book’s own daily offices. But this, again, is a tempting theme
that time does not allow me to develop.
One of the weightiest last-century authorities on
walking in Christ and being rooted and built up in him was the evangelical
patriarch and churchman Charles Simeon. I conclude my conclusion with a
quotation from him with which I, for one, resonate at a very deep level:
“I seek to be, not only
humbled and thankful but humbled in thankfulness before my God and Saviour
continually. This is the religion that pervades the whole Liturgy, and
particularly the Communion Service, and this makes the Liturgy inexpressibly
sweet to me. The repeated cries to each Person of the ever-adorable Trinity for
mercy, are not at all too frequent or too fervent for me; nor is the Confession
in the Communion service too strong for me: nor the Te Deum, nor the ascriptions of glory after the Lord’s
Supper, Glory to God on high, etc. too exalted for me … this
shows what men of God the framers of our Liturgy were, and what I pant, and
long, and strive to be. This makes the Liturgy as superior to all modern
compositions, as the work of a Philosopher on any deep subject is to that of a
schoolboy who understands scarcely anything about it.”5
Endnotes
From An Exhortation unto Prayer, and
a Litany with Suffrages – Private Prayers from the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (Cambridge:
Parker Society, 1851), p. 570.
As Bishop Colin Dunlop frankly declares: “Perhaps there is no system
of public Worship which makes such heavy demands upon the attention of the
humblest worshipper as does the Book of Common Prayer”, in Anglican Public Worship (London: SCM, 1961), p.40.
In 1549 Cranmer kept the traditional pattern of the Great Eucharistic
Prayer (the Canon), including intercession, thanksgiving, consecration of the
elements, commemoration of Christ before God, and self-oblation by the
worshippers, prior to the communion itself. In 1552 Cranmer broke up this
prayer, eliminating the Godward commemoration and postponing self-oblation till
after the communion. Canada 1962 restores some of the 1549 Canon to what since
1552 had been called the Prayer of Consecration, thus giving two acts of
congregational self-oblation, one before communion and one after; though it
remains clear that, as in Cranmer’s 1552 and England’s 1662, and indeed,
according to Cranmer’s own estimate, in 1549 as well, the essential act of the
Eucharist is not offering either Christ or ourselves to God, but thankfully
receiving the bread and wine that commemorate Christ’s sacrifice for us.
There is a rich meditation on the Prayer of Humble Access by Desmond
Scotchmer in The Lamp (bulletin of the
Ontario branches of the Prayer Book Society of Canada), no. 13, Lent 1999, pp.
2-3.
H.C.G. Moule, Charles Simeon (London:
Methuen, 1892), pp. 214f.
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