What is the major challenge posed by the ECUSA in 2003 that the Prayer Book Society and all orthodox Episcopalians who want to preserve sound doctrine and an excellent form/idiom of language should address?
It is not any longer the 1979 prayer book, even though this has had a major impact upon the worship, doctrine and discipline of the ECUSA and changed its spiritual, moral and doctrinal character enormously - and perhaps for ever.
I believe the challenge is found in embryo in the 1979 prayer book and will be very evident when the proposals for the new plans for provisions for public worship in the ECUSA are released in a month's time and then voted on in July at the General Convention. That is plans to produce the new multi-volume, multi-CD of structures/shapes and contents/ingredients for public worship in the ECUSA for the next decade to replace the 1979
(already) book of alternative services.
The embryo in the 1979 book is to reduce a service to a shape or structure into which the local church can place its own ingredients or those recommended in national provisions (see page 400).
What we find now to be the case is that the whole idea of common prayer has been reduced by modern liturgists (and the ECUSA pioneered this practically) to a basic shape or structure for the Daily Office, for Holy Communion and for Baptism etc. This shape is so brief that it can be put down on one side of a small sheet of paper ( see pages 400-401 in 1979 prayer book) and one then can go to numerous places to find satisfactory things to put into the structure or shape. At the local level the worship committee does the pasting up of the liturgy weekly, or as they are moved. ELCA folks are most happy about this arrangement for it fits in with their liturgical history.
This procedure can be seen or claimed as satisfying for everyone; at one end you can have worship of Sophia with an apparent ORTHODOX SHAPE and definitely heretical ingredients, and at the other you can fill the SHAPE with ingredients from the classic Book of Common Prayer 1662 or 1928.
What this new approach to liturgy means in practice is (a) the total abandonment of Common Prayer as that has been known in the English speaking world since the middle of the 16th century, and (b) a claim of unity around a common structure, and (c) an open door to heresy of all kinds, and (d) to chaos in the long term, and (e) to easier ecumenical agreements with churches that have not had a fixed liturgy.
I hope I am wrong in my prediction; but this is the mood and mind of liturgists and bishops at this time; and the English have produced a first run of this type of thing in COMMON WORSHIP (five or more volumes already in it), although here the conservatism of the C of E (with its relation to Queen in Parliament) has made the offered ingredients for the required structure/shape to be moderate not radical, even if often banal and dumbed down.
Such inhibitions will be less obvious in the USA (even though for Rowan Williams's sake there will be some restraints) and the elevation of structure/shape to the equivalency of commonality will be a very major open door to every kind of recent innovation and immorality.
Whether we actually use the classic Book of Common Prayer or one of the sober alternatives from the 1979 prayer book, orthodox Anglicans truly need now to provide an apologetic for the CONCEPT of Common Prayer as historically understood and we also need to provide an apologetic for the classic IDIOM of public prayer that is part of the whole concept of Common Prayer.
We cannot surely allow the notion that common refers only to a vague shape or structure to triumph; and we surely cannot allow (even if we do not use it) the traditional idiom of public worship to be pushed out completely.
I believe that in the book, "NEITHER ARCHAIC NOR OBSOLETE, The Language of Common Prayer and Public Worship", by Dr Tarsitano and myself (available from the Prayer Book Society - website sales address below) a start has been made on the second of these two aims; and I believe that in my (not yet published) COMMON WORSHIP EXAMINED (due in the summer from a British publisher) I have indicated clearly where the new divide in terms of what is "Common" lies, and what is involved in this divide. This book takes apart the COMMON WORSHIP (5 vols) in order to see what is involved in the new era of liturgy. There is much work to be done and we have only just begun. Others more able than I am need to join the campaign.
The Rev'd Dr. Peter Toon
No comments:
Post a Comment