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Having offered my own criticisms of the 1979 and 1985 books, I think it is now appropriate to notice what others have said of each of the books.  So we look first at two essays by two Americans offering very different estimates of their 1979 BCP; and then we look at a book by a Canadian, written to commend the 1985 BAS to the laity of the Canadian Anglican Church.

In 1981 a book entitled Worship Points the Way was published by Seabury Press, and edited by Malcolm C. Burson.  It was a collection of essays in "Celebration of the Life and Work of Massey H. Shepherd, Jr." and a sketch of his career by Sherman E. Johnson.  One of the essays was "Education for Liturgy," written by the late Urban T. Holmes (called "Terry" by his friends), who had been a professor of pastoral theology at Nashotah House and then Dean at the University of the South at Sewanee.  In this essay Dr. Holmes sketched the background of liturgical revision before the appearance of the 1979 BCP and also sought to supply a theological appraisal of the new liturgy.  I urge all my readers to acquaint themselves with this essay and make their own judgment concerning what Dr. Holmes claims.

Dr. Holmes made an important observation and admission.  He made it clear that the Standing Liturgical Commission knowingly violated its man-

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date from the General Convention to revise the 1928 BCP. As the classical theology contained in the Common Prayer Tradition was "bankrupt," revision of the old BCP was impossible, and a whole new Book was needed.  Thus, he says, the SLC ignored General Convention and went off to do its own thing.  Further, its members were never called to account for not keeping to their mandate!

Perhaps it is true to say that Holmes makes the strongest possible yet reasonable case for evaluating the new liturgy as being a wholly new lex orandi and lex credendi for the Episcopal Church.  Our task is to note what he claims and to evaluate it.  Here is one large and comprehensive claim:

The new prayer book has, consciously or unconsciously, come to emphasize that understanding of the Christian experience which one might describe as a postcritical apprehension of symbolic reality and life in the community.  It is consonant with Ricoeur’s "second naïveté" and is more expressive of Husserl, Heidegger, Otto, and Rahner than of Barth or Brunner.  It embraces a Logos Christology. This viewpoint was shaped liturgically at Maria Laach, transmitted to Anglicanism by Hebert, Ladd, and Shepherd, and reenforced by Vatican II and a cluster of theologians and teachers who are, directly or indirectly, part of the theological movement reflected in that most significant gathering of the church in the twentieth century (p. 137).

Perhaps it is best to take the second half of this statement first.

Maria Laach is the Benedictine center for liturgical renewal and reform made famous by Abbot Ildefons Herwegen (1874–1946).  A.G. Hebert was an English monk who, as we noted, translated Aulen’s

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Christus Victor.  He also published Liturgy and Society in 1935: this book had a major influence on Anglican attempts to renew the received BCP liturgy by emphasis on the centrality of the Eucharist and on congregational participation.  William Palmer Ladd was the Dean of the Berkeley Divinity School in New Haven in the late 1930s.  He was a theological liberal who also wanted to see the centrality of the Eucharist in Anglican worship.  Yet he was, notes Holmes, "the principal catalyst for the liturgical awakening in the Episcopal Church."  Massey H. Shepherd was close to Ladd, and after the latter’s death he became a central figure in the movement for the supposed renewal of the received liturgy and then the introduction of new liturgy in the ECUSA.  We can see his changing views by comparing his books, from his Commentary of 1950 on the 1928 BCP, through his The Reform of Liturgical Worship (1961) and Liturgy and Education (1965) to his inclusive language rendering of the Psalter published in 1976.  It was, of course, the influence of Roman Catholic writers, given space and freedom by Vatican II to release their ideas on and proposals for liturgy in the l960s, which caused Shepherd and so many other Anglicans to move from merely seeking the renewal of the existing liturgy to the call for an entirely new liturgy, based supposedly on patterns taken from the early Church. (In the looking to the early Church, the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus was of course of great importance for this reforming agenda.)

It would seem that Holmes was correct to suggest that those responsible for the new liturgy produced in the late 1960s and 1970s for the ECUSA belonged to a new world of thought and experience of which they were not always wholly conscious.  They breathed in an ethos and lived in an atmos-

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phere which they did not fully comprehend.  They worked within a theological framework which perhaps they had never really thought through.  What Holmes sought to do was to identify that world and thus his positive reference to Paul Ricoeur, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Rudolph Otto and Karl Rahner, and his negative reference to Karl Barth and Emil Brunner.

Barth and Brunner were Swiss Protestant theologians of the Word, leaders of neo-orthodoxy within the Reformed (Calvinist) tradition.  Their influence was great within European and American Protestantism and on some evangelical Anglicans.  In fact, Barth’s faithful translator of his massive Dogmatics, Dr. Geoffrey Bromiley, is an evangelical Anglican clergyman.  Yet these scholars had little or no influence within the seminaries of the ECUSA.  Perhaps these Swiss giants and their followers reminded revisionist Anglicans like Holmes too much of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and of his "Tudor deity," his Augustinian theology of sin and grace, and his supposed excessively penitential relic of a bygone age, the 1549 and 1552 Books of Common Prayer!  (I am reminded of what H. Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962), who learned much from Barth and Brunner, said about the theological liberalism he knew and which left its legacy within the seminaries of the Episcopal Church.  In his The Kingdom of God in America [1937], he claimed that theological liberalism "established continuity between God and man by adjusting God to man" [p. 192].  Also he observed that its message was that of a "God without wrath who brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross" [p. 193].)

Holmes referred to Ricoeur, the French philosopher, because of his important writings in the field

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of hermeneutics – in particular his influence upon theories concerning symbols and the interpretation of the Bible and liturgy.  In what sense, then, is the new prayer book consonant with Ricoeur’s "second naïveté?"  To answer this question is to see how Holmes understood liturgy.  The "first naïveté" is that of having faith in a simple message – e.g., that Mary truly conceived Jesus by the Holy Spirit.  The "second naïveté" is reached in two stages.  First, there is critical and rational reflection upon the simple faith to come to the conclusion that in fact Mary must have conceived Jesus through intercourse with a man.  Then, there is the second stage, which states that, since I truly accepted the virginal conception of Jesus by Mary, then there must be truth here.  What is the truth of this symbol?  So I tell myself that this truth is real in so far as it is my projection (projected, as it were, onto a screen outside myself) from within myself.  In this line of thinking, liturgy is the projection by me (and others involved with me in the "work of the people") through symbols and into ritual of that which is deep within me (us).  Such an approach easily fits into a Jungian approach to religion of which Holmes was an advocate, and it opens the door wide for pantheism or panentheism.

Husserl (1859–1938), a German philosopher, was the central figure in the phenomenological movement.  For him phenomenology was reflection upon and description of the coherence of different sorts of experiences and of their adequacy.  The article "Phenomenology" in the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1929 (the 14th edition) is by Husserl. Heidegger (1889–1976), a central figure in modern existentialism, dedicated his book Being and Time (1927) to Husserl, his teacher.  This wide-ranging study of "being" influenced not a few theologians

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including two who were studied in Episcopal seminaries – the German biblical scholar, Rudolph Bultmann, and the German-American systematic theologian, Paul Tillich.  One of the translators of Being and Time was John MacQuarrie, the Anglican theologian, who converted the doctrine of "Being" in Heidegger into the doctrine of God in his Principles of Christian Theology, also a much-used text in Episcopal seminaries in the 1970s.

Likewise, Karl Rahner (1904–1984), the German Jesuit and voluminous writer, was influenced by Heidegger.  He modified the teaching of the great Thomas Aquinas with insights from German existentialism.  Rahner’s work may be called a theological anthropology in which there is a correlation of human experience and God’s self-communication.  His method is usually called transcendental, since he both sought to discover the conditions possible for divine, saving action and to understand such action when the humanity addressed by God’s word is always situated in a temporal world.  There is no doubt that Rahner’s influence was deeply felt by many Roman Catholics involved in theological and liturgical reform in the 1960s and 1970s, and it was perhaps through them more than through the direct reading of Rahner’s difficult texts that Anglicans felt his influence in liturgy.  For example, the translation of the Nicene Creed which appears in the 1979 and 1985 books and which uses "Being" as a translation of ousia instead of the traditional "substance" or "essence" may be attributed to the influence of Rahner via his disciples on the International Consultation on English Texts (ICET).

Only Rudolph Otto (1869–1927) remains for comment. He is famous for his analysis of religious feeling and religious knowledge and for his exposition of the expression "the numinous" to refer to the

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unique religious feeling of awe, dread, and fascination.  His The Idea of the Holy (25th ed. in German, 1936; English, 1958) has been much read and has influenced many in assessing the relation of liturgical texts and actions to the evoking of a sense of worship and awe.  In other words, Otto has been useful in working out how liturgy is "the work of the people."

Reflecting upon this list of names, we could claim that we do not encounter one genuinely orthodox Christian thinker.  Rahner comes nearest to being so, and yet his doctrine of the Trinity is certainly modalistic!  Rather, we meet a group of influential thinkers whose influence is likely to have been towards seeing the need for new liturgical texts for a new era; towards emphasizing the immanence of God (in contrast to the transcendence of God); towards a resymbolizing of traditional dogmas, doctrines, and ceremonial; and towards the evaluation of the importance of modern experience as a source of encounter with and revelation from God (in contrast to looking for revelation in the Scriptures and holy Tradition).  Further, the claim of Holmes that in the 1979 book we have a "logos Christology" makes sense in this context, for one can understand "logos" in such a way as to see Christ as the One in whom all knowledge and insight is contained and fulfilled.  That is, all knowledge and experience, historical and contemporary, leads to and points to Him.

Looking back to the 1960s and 1970s, we can see that there were very few bishops or seminary teachers of stature who were also consciously orthodox in a traditional sense.  Anglo-Catholics in the main were more interested in getting their ritual and ceremonial right than in ensuring that the liturgy conformed in its teaching to the historic Catholic

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Faith. Then they were all blown over by the winds of change from Vatican II.  To say a word on behalf of traditional liturgy, Anglican or Roman, seemed so out of date and silly in those days.  The mood was for change and for supposedly getting behind the western liturgies to a purer source in the third century.  So when the new rites came along and seemed to be "catholic" in structure and content, the bishops in the old Evangelical and Catholic Mission commended them, and they were also enthusiastically commended at Nashotah House, the "Catholic" seminary.

Likewise, Virginia Seminary, from where a solid Protestant or evangelical examination of the theology of the new rites and liturgy ought to have come, began to approve the new ways, especially through the commendation of Charles Price and Albert Mollegan.  It was Price, a liberal Protestant, who eventually wrote the theological exposition of the 1979 book in what is known as Prayer Book Studies 29.  However, he preferred not to say that there was a new theology in the new book but that (in more diplomatic terms!) "certain aspects of Christian doctrine receive a stress somewhat different from that in the BCP."  Of course!  There is a different emphasis upon the doctrine of God, of Jesus Christ, of the Atonement, of sin and salvation, and of divine revelation!

By 1971 a few vigilant, orthodox Episcopalians recognized that the call for a new lex orandi meant a new lex credendi was entering the ECUSA (by the back door, as it were). The Society for the Preservation of the Book of Common Prayer was founded in the spring of that year. Holmes had this revealing comment to make about the SPBCP.

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Often the SPBCP is caricatured as a group of dilettantes with an inordinate fondness for sixteenth-century English...  The caricature is unfair.  Their interest was in the rhetoric of the trial services, true; but even more they were concerned for the theology.  They were correct when they said, as they did repeatedly and sometimes abrasively, that the theologies of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and the Services for Trial Use [to become the 1979 Book] were different. The Standing Liturgical Commission probably was strategically wise in not affirming this too loudly, but its members knew that the SPBCP was correct.  There is a clear theological change. (p. 134)

Holmes described the theology of the leaders of the SPBCP as "classical" but "precritical." That is, it had not been molded and broadened by the forces of the European Enlightenment!  Further, its members had not attained that new stage of religious consciousness of which Dietrich Bonhoeffer and John Robinson had spoken.  For them man had not changed "from a mirror (the cosmocentric view as found in Aquinas) to a window (the anthropocentric view as exemplified in Rahner)."

Holmes was right.  Those who defended the Common Prayer Tradition believed in the authority of Scripture as God’s Word written, and of the Creeds as faithful summaries of the essential content of Scripture.  They saw God, not the autonomous individual human being, as the focus and at the center of the cosmos.  They could trace their doctrines back through the classical Anglican divines of the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries to Augustine and St. Paul.  Their sincerity and learning may be seen, for example, in An Open Letter to the Standing Liturgical Commission written for the General Convention

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of 1976.  Its author was Harold Weatherby, a professor of English at Vanderbilt.  He raised a series of questions and asked for reasoned answers, but they were not forthcoming.  In fact serious questions about the new Rites were ignored or passed quickly over.  The mood was to get them approved and into the new BCP. Weatherby later left the Episcopal Church for Orthodoxy (likewise two other founding members of the SPBCP who were also professors of English left the Episcopal Church when they saw that the Common Prayer Tradition had been effectively ditched through the refusal to confirm the BCP of 1928 as a definite alternative to the new rites).

A paper entitled, "The Pastoral Implication of Prayer Book Revision," was read at the Charlottetown Theological Conference in Prince Edward Island, Canada, in the summer of 1985 and printed in the Report of the Conference soon afterwards.  Its author was Dr. Ousley, a young, traditional, and dynamic Anglo-Catholic, and the rector of St. James the Less in Philadelphia.  After providing a brief history of Prayer Book revision in the USA from 1967 to 1979, and noting what Dr. Holmes had said about the process and content of this revision, he proceeded to offer five observations concerning the 1979 book and its use (over the six years from 1979 to 1985).

His first observation was that "the most obvious characteristic of the new liturgy is its man-centeredness.  Worship is now focused on the group rather than on God."  One obvious example of this (especially to a Catholic Anglican) is that the altar is moved away from the wall and the priest now faces

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the people rather than joining with them in facing God. Further, he notes, God is addressed not in the most exalted of language but in the most pedestrian.  Then, also, with the shift to man-centeredness has come a move away in worship from a balance of an essential inwardness, with appropriate outward manifestation, to an emphasis primarily upon outwardness (well illustrated by the replacement of kneeling with standing).

The second observation was that there is a "rejection of a stable standard of perfection" in the new liturgy.  The BCP, be it of 1549 or 1928, was intended to be as far as possible a perfect liturgy.  So the oft-repeated claim concerning "the excellence of the liturgy."  The 1979 book, however, has no such aim and is dedicated to change and variety.  He notes that the loss of a stable standard of perfection has profound moral, spiritual, and doctrinal effects upon congregations (which, we may add, have become apparent in the last seven years since he wrote his paper).  For example, the modern liturgy encourages such claims as "I have grown wonderfully by the experience" (where the experience is often something as questionable as a divorce or a homosexual relationship or the practice of Buddhist yoga).

In the third place, he observed that the new liturgy encourages "cheap grace and easy religion."  And he writes:

If we are creating our own worship, if we are creating our own Christian community, and if it is basically our action and not God’s, then we cannot admit in any real sense our total inadequacy to accomplish anything.  We will avoid facing the depth of our sin. Typical, then, of the liturgical reforms is the replacement of the suffering Christus with a Christus Rex.  The concern, contrary to the clear witness of

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the Gospels, is now to have the resurrection without the crucifixion.  It is an attempt to destroy the unity and balance of the two in the Christian doctrine of redemption.

We have substituted celebration for redemption.  Penitence is removed so far as possible, and where it remains it is looked on as a necessary evil to be gotten over as quickly as possible so that the real work of worship (i.e. celebration) can begin.

In other words, penitence is taken to be a Reformation (and indeed a medieval) accretion, which in our enlightened age we have outgrown.

Fourthly, he observed, since Anglicans probably learn more from the Prayer Book than from the Bible, any substantial changes in the lex orandi "are likely to have profound effects on our understanding of the Faith."  He notices such substantial changes in the content of the Catechism and in the Eucharistic Rites before noticing a changed doctrine for private penance.  In the form traditionally used in Anglo-Catholic parishes the rite ends with the request for penance, counsel, and absolution, but in that of 1979 the request is for "counsel, advice, and absolution."  He notes that the act of penance was very important in the patristic and medieval practice and has been so within Anglicanism where such a rite has been used.  Further, he points out that the rite in the 1979 book "is therefore the first instance of a rite of penance in the history of the church to omit any act of penance, substantive or symbolic."  And no act of penance means a changed view of sin and grace, confirming the de-emphasis on sin in other parts of the 1979 book.

Finally, he notes that there is a change "in the understanding of the priesthood and the laity and of the relation between them."  While he is wholly in

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favor of lay ministry, it is his judgement that what it is claimed supposedly enhances the participation of the laity in the work of the liturgy actually makes it more difficult for them to pray.  To make the laity a fourth order of proto-priests or proto-deacons (as many rubrics seem to do) and to define their ministry in terms of what can be taken away from the ordained clergy is hardly what the Scriptures tell us is the work of the laos of God.  Far better to let the priests be priests to preach, to teach, to give spiritual direction, and to decide the spiritual and practical details of public worship.

Dr. Ousley does see some benefits in the new Book.  That the Eucharist is the principal service of the Lord’s Day, that there is provision for a fuller Rite for Holy Week, and that there is a rite (though defective!) for private penance are for him advantages.  He sees the main gains as of a liturgical sort and the defects of a doctrinal, moral, and spiritual nature.  Therefore, he is not surprised to have heard often this call from bishops and priests: "Since the 1979 Book teaches such and such we must now do this and that," meaning that a change in the "law of believing" should cause a change in how and what is done in church worship.  Since 1985 there have been many such changes!

In 1986 there appeared Rites for a New Age: Understanding the Book of Alternative Services, published by the Anglican Book Center in Toronto and written by Michael Ingham of Vancouver.  The title indicates one of his themes – that our times, the last years of the twentieth century, are so different from those of the sixteenth century or even the 1950s (when the last revision of the Common Prayer

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Tradition was done in Canada) that we need new rites for this new age.  So, like Holmes he believes that such a new consciousness has developed from the 1960s that Christian worship has to be updated to meet it and service it.

At the end of his second chapter, "How the world has changed," Ingham summarizes his thoughts in this way:

The Prayer Book was a product of its time, just as the new rites are a product of ours.  It assumes and reflects a Christendom perspective within its pages just as the Book of Alternative Services points us to a new post-Christendom world.  This new age, similar in many ways to the context of the early church, requires Christians to live with a vigorous and renewed missionary spirit, with a stronger spirit of belonging to an historic religious community, and with a joyful and sustaining spirituality.  Nostalgia for the past is understandable but inappropriate.  When nostalgia becomes schizophrenia – entrenched commitment to living in the twentieth century as sixteenth-century people – then it is positively destructive.  Our living tradition needs to remain alive. (p. 52)

Reflecting on these assertions makes various questions come to mind.  If the BAS points us to a post-Christendom world, does it also point us to the one and true Lord Jesus Christ who is "the same yesterday, today and forever" (Heb. 13:8) and to the living LORD, who is the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit?  Can the present age be compared to the Mediterranean world and culture of the third century?  Does the content and theology of the BAS genuinely produce an evangelistic and missionary zeal, or does it encourage dialogue and acceptance of other "ways to God" than through Jesus?  Is the

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one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church of God a community or a communion?  Why is it wrong to look to the past if one also looks to the present and the future – and, more importantly, looks up to the exalted Lord Jesus Christ?  If the Greek Orthodox Church keeps alive and grows in North America while using a fourth-century liturgy, why cannot Anglicans stay alive and grow while using an updated sixteenth-century liturgy?

Ingham’s third chapter is entitled "Community" and gives us a readable and interesting account of why the concept of community has entered modern liturgy in North America.  Those who gather for Christian liturgy, "the work of the people," need to be formed into a community, he asserts, because the church no longer expresses the religious life of a community (e.g. a village or small town in England or in Nova Scotia).  He writes:

The contemporary liturgies are designed to equip the post-Christendom church to strengthen its own sense of being a community, and to help us bring new members into the church in ways that help them experience a new identity in Christ.  They are an attempt to respond to the obvious need among many alienated people to find secure, caring relationships that will provide the stability and support necessary for purposeful living (p. 57).

And he adds that "the BAS engages the modern church in the intentional building up of its sense of identity and community life."

Certainly, I reply, the ekkiesia of God is to be a genuine fellowship and communion of Christians who build each other up in the faith, hope, and love of Jesus Christ – and such a calling is very important, as the existence of charismatic fellowships demonstrates.  Yet we must not put the cart before

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the horse.  In the words of Article XIX "the visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same."  True fellowship occurs when people come together to meet with the Lord Jesus Christ, for He is the only true center in which they all have a common allegiance.  Believers and their children are thus not a community but a fellowship of people who have come together from a variety of communities in order to glorify the name of their God and be blessed and fed by Him.  Fellowship flows from the common unity in Christ, and if it meets a deep sociological and psychological need in alienated modern individuals, then that is cause for thanks to God, our Father.

The fourth chapter, "Women and Men," gives the reader the modern, standard, liberal ecclesiastical line, learned from liberation theology and feminist or women’s theology, about our new understanding of the place of women in the world and church.  "Authentic biblical faith" is thus stated in these terms:

In the scriptures God is revealed as the One who constantly goes out to renew relationships and to build justice.  The outgoing God, whose nature is love, and who dwells in the inner relationship of Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, calls us to live in relationships free of oppression and the misuse of power.  But as Christians we are unable to do this until we gain a radically new understanding of our own history and the class and gender biases which distort its perspectives. (p. 81)

In the desire for inclusive language there is always a tendency to a modalist doctrine of God, and

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we find that here – "Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer" instead of "the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit."

Believing that "women theologians are beginning the task ... of reconstructing Christian belief into a more inclusive and holistic world-view," Ingham announces that the BAS "expresses a fundamentally different doctrine of marriage" from that of the 1662 BCP and a doctrine much improved over that of the 1962 BCP.  The changes and improvements were made, he claims, on the basis of the rejection of the attitude towards sexuality and the patriarchal understanding of society and the family held within the Western Church from the days of Augustine to modern times. In response, it may be said that in rejecting the particular western traditions of sexual relations and of patriarchy, Ingham has set aside the biblical doctrines of ordered relations in the human race and of equality with hierarchy in the family.  Thus Ingham confirms that the use of inclusive language and the rejection of the biblical doctrine of the family and of relations between the sexes are inextricably united in modern thinking.

The chapter on spirituality, states the Bishop of Edmonton in the Foreword, "is essential reading for all Anglicans who seek to understand better their relationship with God and the benefit accrued to us by the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth."  Let us discover what is so important as to make it "essential reading."  First of all, we are told that the new services in BAS are more joyful and more positive and more optimistic than those of the BCP.  In fact, in total contrast, "the Prayer Book is thoroughly penitential in tone and content.  It reflects the penitential nature of much of the prevailing spirituality of the late Middle Ages" (p. 113). Ingham then

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cites the influence of the Black Death in the fourteenth century in creating a penitential mindset, the influence of the Passion Mysticism which focused upon the passion of Christ and mystical absorption into His redemptive sufferings, and the doctrine of the Atonement set forth by Anselm of Canterbury in his Cur Deus Homo? which emphasized the need to satisfy the honor and justice of God because of man’s sin.  (This information is given in such a way as to suggest that it is proven and cannot be questioned! Space does not allow me to challenge it.)

The effect of this inheritance mediated via the BCP has been, he claims "to create in Anglicans a penitential spirituality, a withdrawal into self, a preoccupation with personal guilt and personal salvation" (p. 119).  Here he is repeating what liturgists, inspired by Dix and who dislike Cranmer, the Reformation, and the BCP have been saying for several decades.  These are assertions which have never been proven but yet they are made often.  The spirituality of the BCP has nourished millions of joyful souls who have gone to the ends of the earth to proclaim the Gospel, and it has kept in a humble and peaceful frame of mind millions who have gone through trial and tribulation.  Ingham writes as though the essential ingredient in the BCP of Cranmer was not the Bible, especially the Gospels and Letters of Paul, but late medieval spirituality!

So it is not unexpected that the reader is told that the standing posture, not kneeling, is correct.  "The BAS, consistent with its different spiritual emphasis, suggests standing as the appropriate posture in the presence of God for those who have been called into his kingdom" (p. 127).  Symbolically, we are told, this portrays celebration and gives physical dramatization to the Easter event. But what about repentance and confession of sin and what about

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humility in the presence of His Glorious Majesty?  Has not the Anglican tradition been to kneel to pray, to stand to hear the Gospel and to say the Creed, and to sit to hear the lessons from the Word of God?  Why has all this changed so quickly, and have we all been wrong for so long?  (See further Appendix 2.)

In chapters six and seven Ingham deals with Ministry and Mission and tells us that the BAS, in contrast to the BCP, is a book for a post-Christendom situation in ministry, mission, and evangelism.  He is honest in pointing out a series of differences of doctrine and emphasis between the BCP and the BAS in these areas.  The last chapter is entitled "Play," and he writes:

Liturgy is a kind of play.  It is a way of playing before God, a divine play.  By this I don’t mean that liturgy is just a game with no real meaning.  On the contrary, it is a symbolic drama which has a crucial meaning.  Liturgy shapes and forms us for eternal life.  It builds up in us a complex range of conscious and unconscious attitudes and behaviors...  It creates in our minds an imaginary world called the kingdom of God, and allows us to live vicariously in it for an hour or so, and then bids us go out into the actual world and make the kingdom world real within it.  The worship of the church is a fragile earthen vessel containing the symbols and stories of our faith which, when acted out, become our personal symbols and stories, transforming our minds and behaviour and shaping us to conform with the images they represent. (p. 194)

And he continues a little later:

Liturgy is work.  It is a form of action in which we open ourselves to the possibility of being remade and reformed into a new creation.  The content and style of the rites is therefore crucial to our identity and to

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an understanding of what we have become and are becoming.  A change in the rites means a change in our identity, a change in our spirituality, and that is why liturgical renewal is so painful.  (p. 195)

We recall what Dr. Holmes said about the power of symbolism, and we note that with the new rites we have both new verbal content and new or changed symbolism.

Anyone who thinks that the new rites belong to the same classical theological tradition as the old ones is clearly not in touch with what has happened and is happening now.  The aim of the new rites of the new liturgy is obviously to change the identity of the Anglican Way. We are grateful to Dr. Holmes, Dr. Ousley, and Dr. Ingham for making this intention so lucid.

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Two things are very clear to me.  First, the version of Anglican Christianity set forth in the 1979 and 1985 prayer books is different from that of the Common Prayer Tradition; and secondly, by highly selective and limited use of the new books of modern rites, it is possible to recover and express some but not all of the classical Anglican Faith.

The differences between the classical and the new are of two kinds – structural (particularly eucharistic) and doctrinal.  The Common Prayer Tradition uses a reformed catholic structure, created in the sixteenth century from the long experience of the Church in the West, whilst the modern Books attempt to use a structure which it is believed and asserted was common in the early Church of the second and third centuries.  We noted in chapter one that Massey H. Shepherd Jr. claimed that the unifying principle of most of the restoration or renewals of liturgy centered on the reconstruction by liturgists of the Paschal Mystery, relived by the faithful, liturgically and sacramentally, once a year on the anniversary of the Lord’s own Passover (in Greek, Pascha) in a unitary festival.  He recognized that this unitary festival did not remain after the fourth century, but he, with his fellow liturgists, did their best to conform their own liturgies to their reconstruction of the liturgies of the "ancient Church."  One worrisome aspect of this approach is that it is apparently possible to use it in the service of a Jungian interpretation of religion as the projection

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of human desires.  Thereby we are headed straight back into pantheism.

Structure and doctrinal content, while distinct, are related.  A structure is hardly neutral, for it attracts or requires a certain doctrinal content.  For example, if your model for what is a good rite is from the third century, then why should you believe you have to be committed to the dogma of the Church in the fourth or fifth centuries in your creation of new liturgical texts?  And, conversely, if you are committed to the developed dogma of the Church, why should you go back to a liturgical structure which was written centuries before the Church had clarified her mind on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity and the content of the liturgical year?  Further, we need to be aware that commitment to the somewhat fluid structure and doctrine of the third century rather than those of the fifth century makes it much easier to allow erroneous teaching into the new rites either by design or default.  Interestingly, there is apparently a greater commitment to the teaching of Scripture in adopting the later patristic structures and doctrines than in adopting those of the "ancient," pre-Nicene Church.

The best way I know of stating simply the basic differences in theological content between the old Common Prayer Tradition and the new Alternative Services Tradition is to use the image of the cross.  In the older tradition the Cross is upright; it unites heaven and earth (God and man) in its vertical beam, and through its horizontal beam it sends God’s redemption into all space and time.  Here the immanent is dependent upon, and flows from, the transcendent.  In the new tradition the Cross is laid down upon the ground and, though its beams point in different directions across the earth sending a message of justice and love, they do not point di-

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rectly to heaven.  Here the immanent is supreme, and whatever there is of the transcendent, it is known via transcendentals and is therefore only a dimension of the immanent.  So the tendency of the modern Rites is towards panentheism/pantheism and away from Trinitarian theism.

In terms of the initial illustration of the two ships, I have to say that there is no secure future for the Anglican Way as an authentic part of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church on the new ships, with their multiple decks and plastic fittings.  The good ship, the 1928 or 1962 BCP, with its old design and gold and silver fittings is so much an essential part of the Anglican Way that Anglicanism without it is, in the long term, unthinkable and probably impossible.  This is not to say that a period in dry dock for refitting and some added features is not necessary, but it is to say that this good ship, BCP, must and will continue to sail the seas of life bringing the faithful to God’s harbor!

As we have noted, the differences between the old and the new liturgies are not merely at the level of a single versus a plurality of texts or of traditional versus a modern form of English.  As I have sought to make very clear, the differences are both in structure and in doctrinal content.  They consist in basic doctrines such as God; the Holy Trinity; Jesus Christ; the Atonement; man and his sin; salvation; the Sacraments; and inclusive language.  My point has been that the new doctrines are either modern forms of old heresies or secular religious teaching.

Therefore, for anyone to accept the new prayer books as a whole, he has to tell himself that the dogmas of the first four ecumenical councils and the

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classical reading and interpretation of the Holy Scriptures inherited and fine-tuned by our classical Anglican divines are either wholly or partly wrong and misguided.

I realize that there are not a few clergy and laity in North America who use all the new Rites because they have been persuaded of their orthodoxy and authenticity.  Thus they will find it difficult to receive the message I have put before my reader.  However, when we recall that in recent times there has not been an Anglican or Episcopal seminary in North America where the Common Prayer Tradition has been commended as superior, preferable or even equal to the new traditions, then this mindset amongst clergy is understandable, even if regrettable and perhaps inexcusable.  Further, when we bear in mind that good and kind bishops were very active in the USA, and are still so in Canada, commending the new rites as superior to the old ones, then we can be sympathetic towards those priests and laity who want to believe, against all the evidence, that all is well with the new books.

Further, we can understand those who say, "Stay with the new Rites, for if we reject these, then the next set from the liturgical commissions will be in the theology and spirit of PBS 30, and we shall not be able to use those at all!"  In part, this type of thinking led the parish of Rosemont in Philadelphia to produce its Anglican Service Book in 1991.  This is wholly in traditional language and seeks to make the best of the offerings within the 1979 BCP while adding other traditional features.

Let it be clear that I do not know precisely how the Common Prayer Tradition needs perfecting for use by orthodox, biblical Anglicans of both the catholic and evangelical persuasions (and all shades of

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churchmanship) in the days ahead.  It is not for me to decide the way forward in liturgical reform for Anglicanism in North America, even if I had the ability so to do.  Of course, I have suggestions, but such a holy task needs holy preparation and ought not to be rushed.  If it is done as merely the work of another ecclesiastical committee, then it will soon need doing again. It has to be done as a service to the Lord with fasting and prayer, in holiness and by grace, with learning and wisdom.  Meanwhile, we shall do well to use one or another form of the Common Prayer Tradition and intend to begin revision from it.  The kind of sound rules I would establish would include faithfulness to the teaching of the seven ecumenical councils and to the Reformation insight of salvation by grace through faith.  And I would probably be ready to include two or three Consecration Prayers (e.g. those of 1549, 1662 and 1928 in order to provide for the catholic and evangelical constituency of modern Anglicanism).

My task has been to make a theological case for reforming the liturgy and to call for that task to be done so that by the grace of God and the presence of the Holy Spirit amongst us, our worship and mission might be renewed in the service of the Lord Jesus Christ.  As I have indicated earlier, it is very possible that the Anglican Communion, now breaking apart from within, will soon divide on what, for want of better terms, may be described as traditionalist/revisionist (conservative/liberal lines).  Then the task of revising the Common Prayer Tradition will belong only to the conservatives/traditionalists if they manage to stay together in some ecclesial unity and do not let divisive, individualist tendencies pull and

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push them apart.  Another possibility – somewhat remote, I fear – is that an association of Anglican parishes using the Common Prayer Tradition will be accepted as an Anglican Rite Diocese and be protected and cared for by either the Western (Rome) or one of the Eastern Patriarchs (Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria – that of Antioch being the most probable).  In this case the Common Prayer Tradition would have to be modified to nestle safely in the embrace of the appropriate Patriarch.

Whatever direction is followed there will be an opportunity truly to show the genuine meaning of lex orandi: lex credendi; for the truth that the law of believing is the law of praying, and the law of praying is the law of believing is certainly the state of affairs to which we want to move.  In this connection, and at this juncture in history, we can certainly learn from the Orthodox Churches.  Theology, for them, is reflection upon that knowledge of God which He gives to us and the major place where we as the Body of Christ and Household of Faith know God is in our eucharistic worship of Him, through the ministry of the Word and the Sacrament.  Christian thought does not find its formative and proper place in the classroom or the library, as we in the West have often assumed, but in participating by grace in divine worship, the Daily Office, and the Holy Eucharist.  Here in the presence of God there is the sacramental and liturgical adoration of the Holy Trinity, the communal celebration of the sacred mysteries of our redemption and sanctification, the hearing and receiving of the Word of God, and the being formed by participation in the One Bread and One Cup.

Theology is therefore an attempt to give verbal expression to the great Mystery known in worshipful, meditative, and contemplative experience. It is

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a telling of the glory of the Father perceived in the face of Jesus Christ through the illumination of the Spirit.  Yet such a task calls for (and with the Orthodox has usually led to) sharp, critical thought which comes from the heart’s praise of the living and true God (Ps. 149:6 & Eph. 1:6).  Is not the Scripture itself as a two-edged sword (Eph. 6:17 & Heb. 4:12)?  Christian language and Christian thought come from authentic Christian prayer.  There ought to be precision and care in the language we call theology because true Christ-centered thought, based on vision, is sharp and clear.  What is clearly seen is to be exactly stated. And of course the producing of that statement will be done outside the holy liturgy, but will be promoted and energized by the encounter with the Lord in Word and Sacrament.

I believe that Mark Twain once commented that the difference between the "right" word and the "almost right" word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug!  We have become too careless about words in the West, and in defence of that carelessness we have invented excuses to cover it.  The Christian Faith is not a hazy, speculative sort of thing but a very precise and knowable thing: it is one thing and not another, and thus there is truth and error, orthodoxy and heresy.  In this connection we learn much by a careful study of the ecumenical councils and their presentation of orthodoxy over against error and heresy.

Believers are called to be of and to share one mind; they are not merely to be of one heart (Rom. 12:1–2; Acts 4:32).  Only a single letter in a single word (homoousios and homoiousios) divided the true from the erroneous Faith in the fourth century in the Arian controversy – and it (or an equivalent) often still does so today.

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There is a world of difference between the Son’s being of the same ousia as the Father and the Son’s being of a like ousia to the Father.  And, as I sought to show in chapter four, there can also be a world of difference between saying "the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit" and saying "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit."

Since Anglicans in North America are not agreed that they have a confession of faith (for the status of The Thirty-Nine Articles is debated), it is most important that the liturgy with its inbuilt lex orandi be truly a biblically orthodox lex credendi.  That is, even as in the Greek Liturgy (that of Chrysostom or of Basil) the lex credendi and the lex orandi (with its added teaching to the catechumens) are generally identical, since the liturgy incorporates the great dogmas of the ecumenical councils, so also the liturgy of the Common Prayer Tradition ought to contain and present both the great dogmas of the councils and the doctrinal insights of the Reformation of the sixteenth-century.  (Here I must make a minor digression and sound a warning concerning what is called "liturgical theology" by liturgists expounding the modern rites.  So much depends on what is the liturgy from which the theology is being taken!  Modern expressions of this new discipline from Europe and America are well described by Kevin W. Irwin in his brief but very useful book, Liturgical Theology. A Primer (1990).  It is the discipline which is erected on the claim that primary theology is expressed in the lex orandi.  In my judgment Geoffrey Wainwright of Duke University writes in the most sensible way on this topic – see his review of Aidan Kavanagh’s book, On Liturgical Theology (1984) in Worship, vol. 61., March 1987.)

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I end with a word of hope!  Reading the books by Thomas C. Oden of Drew University (especially his After Modernity... What?, 1990) causes me to think that some of the intelligent, honest, younger members of the Anglican Way in North America will soon begin to forsake their ship, BAS, and return to the traditional, BCP.  They will be joined in this voyage by other postmodern persons. I must allow Dr. Oden to explain:

The postmodern person is looking for something beyond modernity, some source of meaning and value that transcends the assumptions of modernity.  Neck deep in the quicksands of modernity, the postmodern mind is now struggling to set itself free.  Some of these postmoderns have happened onto classical Christianity and experienced themselves as having been suddenly lifted out of these quicksands onto firmer ground.  They have then sought to understand the incredible energy and delivering power of Christianity, and, in the process of returning to the classical texts of ancient Christian tradition and Scripture, have begun to discover that the orthodox core of classical Christianity constitutes a powerful, viable critique of modern consciousness.

These postmoderns have roamed widely through a variety of modern experiments and have been plunged into the depths of such pits as psychoanalysis, behavior modification, existential ethics, deconstructionism, and sexual liberation.  Their roaming and diving have not satisfied them; now they are discovering that the authentic Christian tradition is more humane and realistic than any of the offerings of modernity (pp. 60ff).  So they will recognize that the Common Prayer Tradition can and does speak to them in an authentically Chris-

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tian way, offering a center to their lives in this postmodern culture.

The Anglican Way must incorporate the stabilizing and authenticating dogma of both the Holy Trinity and Christology (the divine and human identity of Jesus, the Christ) on the one hand, and the liberating Pauline doctrine of justification by faith on the other.  I hope that the Lord preserves me to witness in my lifetime the revival of a scripturally based Anglicanism in the West. Better still, may He come in glory with His holy angels to judge the living and the dead and to inaugurate the Father’s kingdom – "even so, come quickly Lord Jesus" (Rev. 22:20).  Then there will be no need for any Anglican Way, for "we shall see Him as He is" and be filled with wonder, love, and praise.