A discussion starter
Members of the Prayer Book Society of the USA have often said that the removal of the classic Book of Common Prayer (edition of 1928) and its replacement by a new type of Prayer Book (approved by General Convention in 1976/79) is the root cause of the ills, errors and contraction of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the USA. This is a broad and general claim and it has to be understood against the background of (a) the use of experimental liturgies from the mid 1960s through to mid 1970s; (b) the fact that the Prayer Book of 1976/79, though called "The Book of Common Prayer", is in fact a new type of prayer book, with new shape, new content, new style and new doctrine, and (c) a large decline in membership of the Episcopal Church from its high point in 1965.
As a popular kind of claim it has much to commend it but as a serious, historical claim it cannot be sustained.
What is absolutely clear to all is that the arrival of the new Prayer Book on the scene was a major part of great changes in the Episcopal Church as it responded to the ethos generated by the revolutionary 1960s. It was to be both a liberal Catholic and liberal Protestant kind of Anglican Church where there was room for all who were prepared to tolerate others of different mind and churchmanship (except "fundamentalists" and hard-core traditionalists). Conservative types would be tolerated but not encouraged so that they would "die out" eventually.
It is abundantly clear, to the trained observer, that much of the content of the new Prayer Book of 1976/79 is related to the changed attitude towards the Bible and the Christian Tradition that was being widely taught in seminaries & universities of the Church after World War II. If there is one primary cause of the demise of the PECUSA as a traditional Church, it is its absorption, primarily through the education of its clergy, of what may be termed low views of the authority of Holy Scripture in Faith and Morals, and thus also its acceptance of critical views of those traditional doctrines/dogmas that were based on a high view of the authority of Holy Scripture. A primary example of this change, which quickly was accepted, was the tremendous increase from the 1950s of weddings in churches for the divorced. The Episcopal Church gave a significant push to the spreading of the divorce culture because of its influential membership from the 1950s to the 1970s.
There is also no doubt but that the revolutionary decade of the 1960s had the effect of bringing the application of these low views of the authority of Scripture into general church life. At the same time the authority of "Experience" increased rapidly to fill the void or vacuum - that is Experience of what we learn from our own individual lives, especially what we feel, from the experience of people in general, and from the sciences that study experience. God became for many the God of peace and justice, the God who is to be served through working for human & civil rights, the God with whom I am in a personal relationship via my feelings. Thus at the point where "liturgical renewal" seriously began - the mid 1960s - the ethos of the Church was rapidly changing, even though many of the older membership, laity and clergy, had not yet grasped or realised the nature and extent of it.
The actual final content of the new Prayer Book (1976/79) would have been impossible without these massive theological, moral and cultural changes. However, and very significantly, these changes were set in what may be termed a conservative structure, skeleton or shape. Models or structures of services from the third and fourth century were used to provide the shape into which to place the new content. And so it was possible to make claims that this new Liturgy and certain recovered ceremonies were a return to the early Church. This greatly helped to make the content acceptable to both "Catholics" and "Protestants", the former impressed by its "ancient catholic character" and the latter by its "accessibility and intelligibility."
As the new Prayer Book took shape (1967-1976) the Episcopal Church also felt the full force of the civil rights and then human rights movements, and in response to this powerful cultural force, there came the ordination of women, the attempts to create a new form of "God-language" which was not sexist, and the increasing calls from the growing Lesbigay movement for full recognition in the Church. We need to be clear that there would have been the pressures from the Liberationist, Feminist and Lesbigay movements even if no liturgical changes were in process.
If we switch to other parts of the Anglican Communion to see what was going on there, we see that even where the classic Book of Common Prayer is preserved as the chief Formulary, there have been innovations introduced because of pressure from below - that is because of modern cultural forces. The Church of England and the Anglican Church of Canada bowed to the feminist movement and voted for the ordination of women. In fact, an argument was made from the nature of the language of the classic Prayer Book that since "he" can mean "she and he" and since "man" includes "woman" the Ordinal in the 1662 Prayer Book can be used to ordain women. And both these churches have now accepted that divorced persons can be married in church, and also are now in the painful process of accepting slowly but surely the rights of those who call themselves "gay". Further, through their production of alternative Service Books to exist alongside the Prayer Book, they have through these introduced most of the doctrinal and moral changes found in the 1979 USA Book.
I do not write the above to claim that the introduction of the 1976/79 Prayer Book was a good thing. It was for many reasons a bad thing. It made nearly impossible the existence and future of Biblical & Patristic Christianity in the Anglican Way in the USA. However, it was not itself and alone the primary cause of the great changes in the Episcopal Church in the latter part of the twentieth century.
The Revd Dr Peter Toon July 16th 2003
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