The Anglican Patrimony is and was a strange thing ...
Most of the Reformation ecclesial bodies took as normative the Bible, the Early Church, and, to provide a 'hermeneutic' (after all, both Bible and Early Church can be differently interpreted by different people) a normative theological interpreter: it might be Luther; or there is always Calvin; or whoever. But the Church of England never had a hermeneutic; we have no Reformation guru (like Luther for Lutherans) who, if you can find evidence in his werke , trumps all arguments. So we were left with just Bible and Early Church and, if you will forgive me for saying so, the Grace of God..
When poor Dr Cranmer composed his Liturgy there was not a lot of evidence about how the Early Church actually did worship. Despite his threefold appeal to 'the auncient fathers' in the preface to the 1549 book, we now know that in that and subsequent books a lot of primitive baby got thrown out and a lot of medieval bathwater got retained. This became clear over the next 200 years. And, as early liturgical texts gradually emerged from the presses, those who kept their reading up-to-date became aware that Cranmer's Liturgy fell far short of what could be shown to be the'godly order of the auncient fathers'.
This left two possibilities: the Protestant option: Cranmer's Liturgy may not be primitive but it is scriptural and that rules, OK; the Catholic option; his Rite must be reformed in accordance with what is now known about the worship of the Early Church, if we are to be faithful to what he himself set as his gold-standard. So, in the 1630s, Laud's Scottish colleagues gave Scotland a Prayer book revised in accordance with 'primitive' precedent; and in the 1660s some bishops did the same in England by restoring the'Prayer of Oblation' to immediately after the 'Prayer of Consecration'. Edward Stephens went much further. Arguing that the Cranmerian Liturgy was imposed by Parliament and had never had approval from the Church [just as the twentieth century papalists like Fr Alban Baverstock were to argue], he asked 'Whether .. one having knowledge ... ought or may use this imperfect and disordered Form, or comply with it, by reason of any Humane Law, or of his own Subscripton .. '. To his own question he gave a decidedly negative answer: 'all, who have any regard to their Baptismal Covenant and Renunciation therein of the Devil and all his works [he had come to regard Cranmer's texts as an opus Diaboli].... if they be Priests , must celebrate this Holy Sacrifice ... in the compleatest form they can procure ...'. And in his own liturgical forms he did just that: using Eastern material to supplement Cranmer's texts.
The later eighteenth century Anglican Catholic ritualists, such as the Non-Jurors (those ejected from the C of E for refusing to swear allegiance to the Orange Usurper after the Dutch Invasion of 1688) did the same; during that century there was an assumption that the newly discovered early Eastern liturgical forms were 'more primitive' than Western forms such as the Canon of the Roman Mass. The Victorian Ritualists knew better, and a succession of Altar Books increasingly supplemented Cranmer with Roman material (sometimes diplomatically described as 'Sarum'). This tradition of Altar Books culminated in the English Missal, which dominated Anglo-Catholicism until, after the Council, it lost its nerve and aped the progressive liturgical corruptions adopted by 'Rome'. Our Ordinariate Missal is, of course, the final and splendid product of the English Missal tradition.
Is there any other of the 'Reformation' ecclesial bodies which has had such a succession of theologians and liturgists, since the 1630s, who assented to papal primacy, discarded Reformation texts or supplemented them with ancient liturgical texts, believed in the full reality of the Lord's presence in the Eucharist, believed in the Eucharistic Sacrifice, offered it daily or weekly?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
There is an example that comes close: Sweden, under King John III, who (a generation after the break with Rome) introduced a Catholicizing liturgy in a volume called the Red Book. Louis Bouyer (who was originally a Lutheran pastor) has a chapter on this in his book "Eucharist: Theology & Spirituality of the Eucharistic Prayer."
Like England, Sweden's break with Rome did not immediately mean signing on to a confessional Protestant identity. The Augsburg Confession was not accepted officially in Sweden till 1593. As in England, the royally-imposed schism predated the theological disagreements. The Augsburg Confession itself claims to be Catholic and even to wish to avoid discord or disagreement with the Roman Church. There is even a willingness to accept some form of papal office, understood as "de iure ecclesiastico" rather than "de jure divino." The Augsburg Confession even denies having abolished the "Mass" (a rather disingenuous claim, given Luther's attacks on the sacrificial and propitiatory nature of the Mass). Still, there is space for a High Church, Catholicizing trend in Swedish Lutheranism. Some of them never forgot the Lutheran claim to be a reforming and evangelical reform movement within, and for, the one Catholic Church of the ages. They realized that it would be problematic to be a completely new creation.
The Scandinavians and northern German Lutherans even retained Eucharistic vestments and the crucifix and auricular confession, well into the eighteenth century, when rationalism and Pietism led to their abandonment. At Loccum, there was even a monastery that accepted the Augsburg Confession and continued for a couple of centuries as a functioning monastery. The Swedish Church has a claim on apostolic succession of bishops that is similar to that of the Church of England. Anglo-Catholics like A.G. Hebert took an interest in Swedish Lutheranism, and Lutherans like Yngve Brilioth were influenced by Anglo-Catholicism.
I have been told by others that the orthodox Lutheran scholasticism of the 17th century drew deeply on Catholic sources. So it could be seen as parallel to the Caroline divines. I think many mainstream Anglicans in the 17th century would actually have thought that Sweden and northern Germany were semi-papist in their practices.
The Church of Sweden did, however, finally accepted officially a Lutheran confession of faith. The Church of England was not willing to go beyond the 39 Articles as articles of peace.
Here's a link summarizing the struggle over the Red Book:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liturgical_struggle
What Anglicanism is, and Anglicans have had to deal with, is the effect of state domination of religion as a tool of state power.
Oddly, the American "Revolution" was a rejection of both the Whig polity, and the CofE as an instrument of state power. Few people know that the Revolution started by the raising of the Royal Standard on Cambridge Common (Massachusetts) by the Militia, and a denunciation of the "Redcoats" as rebels against the King, whose health was toasted in every continental army mess, until the Hanoverian usurper turned on the American patriots. George III had a choice between the oligarchs in parliament, and the people, and chose badly.
That old saw about God writing straight with crooked lines is an apt description of what happened in America. Radicals like Tom Paine, anti-Catholic bigots like John Jay, and a huge cast of non-conformists, anti-monarchists, and countless ordinary folks, fought and won a war that vindicated the Roman position the Church was supreme in its own affairs, and which restored the monarchy as the sole executive power in the land, on a four-year elected basis. A double rejection of the English "Reformation" and the English Civil War.
Truly, a marvel.
As an elderly Benjamin Franklin said, in his old age he had come to see that God rules the affairs of men.
These links are from an Irish Anglican who considers himself an old High Churchman, not Anglo-Catholic, and certainly not Romanizing or even pro-Tractarian. His observations on Lutheranism are interesting, as are Archbishop Laud's overtures to the Nordic churches.
http://laudablepractice.blogspot.com/2021/02/mass-in-masquerade-notes-for-old-high.html
http://laudablepractice.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-union-of-churches-of-northern.html
Sitting under our best crucifix (and acting as a sort of plinth) on the sofa table which passes for our domestic altar, we have a copy of the 1910 fifth edition of The Priest to the Altar: Or Aids to the Devout Celebration of Holy Communion Chiefly After the Ancient English Use of Sarum.
It was given to me by my clerical godfather (cuius animae propitietur Deus) who himself appears to have acquired it in 1955, but according to the stamp on the flyleaf it originally belonged the church of St Thomas Ye Vale, near Kingston, Jamaica. A curious nest of narratives there. Patrimony!
Post a Comment