The purpose of translating the Bible into the vernacular was so that everyone who could read would have access to its contents. The purpose of putting the Church’s common prayer into the vernacular was so that everyone could follow and participate in divine worship. The purpose of translating the Creeds into the vernacular was so that everyone would be able to learn them off by heart and thus have the faith in their souls.
The original impulse to bring the Faith to the people did not include the notion that all who read the Bible would become biblical scholars, that all who used the common prayer would become liturgiologists, and that all who knew the creeds would become dogmatic theologians. The Faith was meant to save them for eternity and instruct and comfort them through space and time.
After some competition between the King James Bible [KJV] and the Geneva Bible, the KJV became THE English Bible and was used in public worship by all English-speaking Protestants around the world until the 1960s. People learned parts of it off by heart and many of its phrases became part of the general usage of Standard English.
The Book of Common Prayer [BCP] was used in the Church of England at home and in the Colonies from 1549 to the 1960s (with a couple of brief lapses in the 16th & 17th centuries) without any competition and its contents created what we may call the English language of prayer. Ministers in other Churches prayed publicly in language that ran parallel to that of the BCP.
Since the 1960s there has been an explosion of Versions of the Bible and of forms of public prayer (alternative services). There is no sign that this explosion has ceased or even that it is near to ceasing. More and more groups and sub-cultures demand their own version of the Bible and their own form of public prayer for their “comunity.” Further, publishing companies are constantly looking for new ideas for new versions from which they can make money.
The result is confusion because there is no standard text by which every new production can be tested.
With respect to Bibles, the Hebrew and Greek original texts cannot be the standards for 99 per cent of the users of Bible since they do not know these languages; and the KJV cannot be the standard English text because it has been “rubbished” so much by those who wanted to sell their versions in the 1970s that people have forgotten how to trust it.
With respect to Prayer Books, Booklets, and Services to be downloaded from a Web Site, the situation is the same. The Book of Common Prayer has been “rubbished” by scholars pushing their revisions, and its name has been used for books other than the true BCP (cf. the USA & West Indian official Prayer Books) with the result that people have forgotten how to trust it as the standard (although in the Canon Law of the Church of England it [BCP 1662] remains so).
Going to “a worship service” today one does not know what to expect in terms of the version of the Bible, the structure/form/shape of the service, and the content of the hymns, songs and choruses (let alone the way people dress and how they conduct themselves in this activity). As long as people tend to thrive on choice, variety, personal opinion, individualism, pragmatism and egalitarianism this situation is unlikely to change.
A friend who has reflected upon this situation, which is so evident in the West and in the USA particularly, recently sent me a note in which he said the following, which I include as part of this general reflection. His last paragraph is most poignant.
“There is, I think, a curiously scholastic quality about the new liturgies and bible translations. By constantly tweaking the liturgy and repeatedly replacing one bible translation with another (supposedly on the basis of advanced studies), the clergy have taken both liturgy and Bible out of the hands of the laity at least as much as any medieval priest or prelate. Once again, only the seminary or university trained scholar is considered really fit to have either a knowledge of, or an opinion about, liturgy and Bible.
The loss of common, general texts that anyone of even moderate intelligence in the congregations can read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest has re-clericalized religion. Of course there is a place for scholarly editions and papers, but that place is not the congregation or the pious home. Those who work in most other fields of knowledge have cheerfully provided introductory texts to students that lay out the general concerns of their fields in a fairly simple way, without feeling obligated to involve
non-specialists in the more complex considerations, debates, or vexed questions of their professions. In fact, those fields of knowledge that have over-complicated the introductory textbooks have been accused of something like "clericalization."
We seem, too, to have lost the willingness to provide self-identified commentaries on text, whether liturgical or scriptural. The student who picks up a commentary has voluntarily decided to probe more deeply into a subject, which act of volition is good both for student and teacher. On the other hand, the desire for self-interpreting texts and for commentaries masquerading as texts, when it is indulged, leaves the people without a common text or a common prayer. Thus, the line between text and opinion
becomes blurred, and at some point a great number of people will tend to decide that their opinions are just as good as anyone else's. This tendency towards equality of opinion goes a long way, I think, to illuminating today's trend towards liturgical and doctrinal relativism.
The evangelical consequences are significant. The unbeliever does not encounter a common text and general agreement (plus the advanced considerations and ponderings of scholars), but only a Babel of opinion. The unbeliever who has been moved by the Holy Ghost to approach true faith is delivered by the Church, not a Rock of Ages, but what amounts to a bundle of school reports.
The ecclesiological consequences are equally severe. Comprehensiveness is not possible without a shared basis for mutual toleration. The lack of a general text undercuts the meaning of all texts--which sounds rather like the irritant to which the post-modernists are reacting.
There is, in the final analysis, a vast difference between the toleration of a variety of opinions about a general text and the substitution of private opinions (however learned) for a general text. Such an observation, it ought to be said, does not preclude the refinement of the text or of the general understanding of the text over time, but it does make the wholesale replacement of the text by fiat suicidal.”
The doctrine of private judgement is out of control! And getting worse I think.
What I am now going to state will seem completely stupid to some of my readers but I shall state it all the same as a suggestion.
There is a case to be made for the restoration of the KJV and the BCP to their position as THE English language Bible and THE English language Prayer Book so that they are the standards against which others are judged. This would not make them the strict equivalents of the Vulgate Bible and the Latin Originals of Services for the R C Church or of the similar standards of the Orthodox Churches; but, it would help to bring over time some order to the scene and preserve some standards of excellence for the public worship of Almighty God our heavenly Father in the Anglican and related families of Churches.
September 11, 2002
The Rev'd Dr. Peter Toon
Minister of Christ Church, Biddulph Moor,
England & Vice-President and Emissary-at-Large
of The Prayer Book Society of America
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