Anglican liturgy
Anglican liturgy is the public worship of the Church of England and of the churches of the Anglican Communion, ordered principally by the Book of Common Prayer and the family of prayer books descended from it. Its characteristic mark is common prayer: one authorised book gives the words of the services, so that clergy and people together pray in the same tongue. Anglican worship is conducted in the language of the congregation, is saturated with the text of Scripture, and follows a stable daily and yearly round of psalms, readings and sacraments.
Origins and principles
Before the English Reformation, public worship in England was conducted in Latin according to several regional uses, of which the Sarum Use, the use of Salisbury Cathedral, was the most widely followed. Parish worship centred on the Mass, while monks and nuns prayed the daily round of canonical hours. In the 1540s Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his associates replaced this variety with a single book in English, first published as the book of 1549.
In its preface, "Concerning the Service of the Church", retained in later editions, Cranmer set out the principles of the new worship. Services were to be in a language the people understood, rather than in Latin, which most worshippers could not follow. The whole of Scripture was to be read through in course, so that clergy and people heard the Bible entire, with the lessons little interrupted by legends and other non-biblical material. And there was to be uniformity: one use for the whole realm, replacing the differing local uses. To embody these principles the many monastic hours were compressed into two daily services, Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer — the Daily Office — while the Latin Mass was replaced by an English order for Holy Communion.
The classical Prayer Book
The book of 1549 was revised in a more reformed direction in 1552, suppressed under Mary, and restored with small changes in 1559 under Elizabeth I. After the Restoration of the monarchy, a further revision produced the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which remains the authorised standard of the Church of England.
The classical book contains the Daily Office, the Litany, the Communion office, the Psalter, services for Baptism, Confirmation, marriage and burial, the Church Catechism, and the Ordinal, the forms for ordaining bishops, priests and deacons. It also prints the Thirty-nine Articles of religion. Within the Communion office stand some of the best-known texts of Anglican worship, including the Prayer of Humble Access, said before the reception of the sacrament. Baptism and the Eucharist are treated as the two sacraments ordained by Christ and generally necessary to salvation.
In the twentieth century, study of the liturgy's history reshaped Anglican worship. Dom Gregory Dix argued, in The Shape of the Liturgy (1945), that the eucharistic action of the historic rites follows a fourfold pattern: the taking of bread and cup, the giving of thanks over them, the breaking of the bread, and the giving of the elements to the people. His thesis, though later scholars have questioned parts of it, influenced prayer book revision across the Communion.
Later developments
The Oxford Movement of the nineteenth century renewed interest in the ceremonial, music and sacramental life of the pre-Reformation Church, and much of its influence passed into ordinary parish practice. When the American church became independent, it issued the first American Prayer Book in 1789, adapting the English book to a republic. The Episcopal Church revised its book again in 1928 (Book of Common Prayer (1928)) and again in 1979, the latter providing services in contemporary as well as traditional language. In England, a revised prayer book proposed in 1928 was rejected by Parliament and never authorised, although its texts were widely used; since 2000 the Church of England's principal authorised services have been provided by Common Worship, used alongside the 1662 book, which remains in regular use. Churches outside the Anglican Communion, such as the Reformed Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church in North America, likewise worship from prayer books in this tradition.
A worldwide family of Prayer Books
As Anglican churches were planted around the world, each province of the Communion came to publish or adapt its own prayer book, in English and in translation into local languages. The resulting family of books — surveyed in The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer (2006) — differs in language, calendar and detail, but the members of the family recognisably share the same skeleton: a daily office, a communion office, baptism, and the ordinal. Louis Tarsitano's An Outline of an Anglican Life (Tarsitano, 1994) presents this round of common prayer, ordered by the Prayer Book, as the ordinary school of the Christian life in the Anglican tradition.
See also
References
- Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, Dacre Press, 1945.
- Francis Procter and W. H. Frere, A New History of the Book of Common Prayer, Macmillan, 1901.
- Charles Hefling and Cynthia Shattuck (eds.), The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer: A Worldwide Survey, Oxford University Press, 2006.