An paper read to the Hull & District Theological Society, University of Hull, 24 January 2002, by the Most Revd Dr David Hope, Archbishop of York
Summary by David and Fiona Bagchi
In the Church of England of fifty years ago, there was one Prayer Book, one order of holy communion, and one prayer of consecration. There was one collect, one epistle, and one gospel for each Sunday of the year. The only alternative was the 1928 revision of the Prayer Book, never authorized by Parliament. Naturally, a Prayer Book holy communion could be celebrated in high or low style or somewhere in the middle; but the form of words remained the same. Nowadays, with the introduction of Common Worship and the Revised Common Lectionary, the variations seem infinite, and in recent correspondence in The Times, complaints could be read from those who travel frequently around the country that every Anglican communion service they attend is different!
Ironically, it was partly because of the many local variations in the celebration of the eucharist that had led Archbishop Thomas Cranmer to compose The Book of Common Prayer, as he explained in his prefatory article ‘Concerning the Service of the Church’:
‘And whereas heretofore there hath been great diversity in saying and singing in Churches within this Realm; some following Salisbury Use, some Hereford Use, and some the Use of Bangor, some of York, some of Lincoln; now from henceforth all the whole Realm shall have but one Use.’
This tension between flexibility and fixity has characterized Christian worship from the beginning. This can be seen from the earliest account of the eucharist outside the New Testament, in the Didache (‘The Teaching of the Twelve’), from about AD 90-100. Early descriptions of the eucharist can also be found in the mid 2nd-cent. Dialogue with Trypho the Jew by Justin Martyr (which prescribes readings from the Scriptures ‘for as long as time allows’, and in Hippolytus’s early 3rd-cent. Apostolic Tradition. Here the prayer of thanksgiving is clearly extempore (‘according to his [the president's] ability’), but there are signs that some elements are becoming fixed. By the mid-3rd cent., Origen is able to urge bishops to keep to the agreed forms of prayer in the liturgy.
So the early evidence of the eucharistic liturgy suggests a variety of different local forms, but also a definite and growing bias towards fixity. It also shows a gradual elaboration of the service. The collect (a preparatory prayer designed to draw the congregation into worship) did not emerge until quite late: Augustine, in the 5th cent., speaks of starting the communion service with a simple ‘Peace be with you’. At first, collects were variable and probably composed extempore by the celebrant. We can see them (and other prayers associated with the Mass) becoming more elaborate over time through the great collections, or ‘sacramentaries’, of the 7th-9th cents: the Leonine, the Gelasian, and the Gregorian. (The Leonine is the earliest but is not complete, and it was this sacramentary, which survives in a single manuscript in the Chapter Library at Verona, on which the Archbishop wrote his doctorate.) The sacramentaries demonstrate that there was a great deal of flexibility and fluidity, especially in the collects, and that they differed from place to place and in the mouths of different celebrants. But gradually words and phrases began to become crystallized into set forms (as we see today, when even the most spontaneous public prayers contain standard expressions).
An interesting result of this process of crystallization can by seen in the Prayer Book provision for Sexagesima Sunday (the second Sunday before Lent). Why is the Gospel for the day (the parable of the sower from Luke 8 ) accompanied by II Cor. 11 (Paul’s account of his sufferings)? The Archbishop suggested that this is because these are the readings from the Roman Missal, and on Sexagesima Sunday, as part of his pre-Lenten tour of the churches of Rome, Pope customarily visited the church where St Paul’s remains were said to lie. All Cranmer did was to change the wording of the collect from ‘by the intercession of the blessed Apostle Paul’ to ‘by thy power we may be defended from all adversity’.
There is much to be said for simplifying the prayer of thanksgiving and going back to the basic elements of it as outlined by Justin Martyr in his First Apology:
‘At the end of the prayers, we salute one another with a kiss. There is then brought to the president of the brethren bread and a cup of wine mixed with water; and he taking them offers up praise and glory to the Father of the universe, through the name of the Son and the Holy Ghost, and gives thanks at some length for our being counted worthy to receive these things at his hands. When he has concluded the prayers and thanksgivings, all the people present express their joyful assent by saying Amen.’
So there was no fixed prayer, but it would have focussed on themes which were common. The preliminary invitations and congregational responses (e.g. ‘Let us give thanks to the Lord our God’/ ‘It is meet and right so to do’, which exchange dates from AD 215) were also important in gathering the people around the great prayer of consecration. In the medieval period, all this developed in so many ways, with the prayers become more verbose and the rites more dramatic, and considerable local variations developing. Cranmer’s purpose in composing the BCP was therefore to return to the practice of the ancient fathers, to a simple and biblically-based liturgy. His purpose was well summed up in the later preface to the BCP, which commends both fixity and flexibility:
‘It hath been the wisdom of the Church of England, ever since the first compiling of her public liturgy, to keep the mean between the two extremes, of too much stiffness in refusing, and of too much easiness in admitting any variation from it.’
Cranmer was right. Flexibility has clearly been a feature of Christian worship from the beginning, and is essential. But too much flexibility is inimical to the common worship of the people of God. Methodists express their beliefs principally through their hymns – the great hymns of the Wesleys with their powerful, biblically-based theology. For Anglicans, beliefs are expressed principally through liturgy. In both cases, it is the existence of fixed forms of words which help this process. And public worship informs private prayer: how many of us privately use the words of hymns or of collects to express our own feelings? And how could we do this unless they had been part of our fixed worship repeated regularly? This is not ‘vain repetition’, but something that enters deep within us. The Archbishop recalled his own headmaster at Wakefield who daily recited the third collect from the service for Morning Prayer (‘O Lord our heavenly Father, almighty and everlasting God, who hast safely brought us to the beginning of this day, defend us in the same with thy mighty power …’), and doubted that even the most godless child could fail to be moved by it.
The Archbishop expressed his view that the opportunity provided by Common Worship was missed. He would have liked to see a more radical and austere framework provided by the liturgy, less wordy, and stripped down to the essentials described by the early fathers. Common Worship now provides for ‘the gathering’, which can increase the length of a communion service by half! Services should go straight into the reading of Scripture. There should be more use of silence to underline the fact that the believer is being drawn into the presence of the living God. In this way, we might once again re-capture the sense of the eucharistic liturgy as something, as Dom Gregory Dix reminded us, that is for all sorts of people in all places at all times in their lives. The poor and the wealthy, the young and the old, people of all races, the sancta plebs Dei (‘the holy common people of God’) have all carried out Christ’s command to ‘Do this in remembrance of me’. For this to have happened, and for this to happen, the liturgy must be both fixed and flexible.
David & Fiona Bagchi
17 February 2002
