Anglican Formularies – Are Evangelicals really missing out?

Let me begin by an exaggeration in order to make a point.

When an evangelical and/or charismatic Episcopalian congregation is told: “the Formularies are necessary, and, while you can be ECUSA members without them, you cannot be genuine Anglicans without them,” it responds by making it clear that such talk is irrelevant, untrue and unhelpful.

However, for the few who pay a little attention to this message, questions arise like: What are the Formularies? Which of our leaders has said anything about them? We have the Scriptures which are our authority for faith and conduct; we are submitted to the Lordship of Christ, and we are obeying the great commission to evangelize, what more is there?

And thus even the few, who are busy with good works, deem the pursuit of this matter not urgent and thus suitable perhaps for another day.

But a few of the few go past this point and are ready to learn that the Formularies are those forms of doctrine which stand under the authority of Scripture to indicate the nature and character of the Anglican Way as a jurisdiction in the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. And so the questions that this minority raise are: Are not the old Book of Common Prayer, Ordination Services, and Thirty-Nine Articles from the sixteenth century and do they not speak to their own place and time? Why do we need Formularies when we have good translations of the Bible, the Creeds, and commentaries on the Bible to unlock its meaning to us?

And so most in this minority stop here. There are many things to do and to pursue and this matter is not first on the agenda but may could be looked at later – maybe in a Lenten course.

Finally, the very tiny minority who get past these questions, and who accept the necessity of Formularies to be the means of providing both the standards of, and the direction for, a national Church (e.g., C of E) and then for each of the member churches of a Communion of Churches (Anglican), ask such questions as: How can we convince our brethren that the Anglican Way is actually by nature and in character Reformed Catholicism and that as such it has its basic, foundational Formularies, without which it is as a boat without a rudder on the ocean, i.e., that it is merely a liturgical form of modern generic evangelicalism sailing in circles on the same ocean? How can we arrange our own worship, life and witness so that they are true to the Scriptures and to the form of Christianity, Reformed Catholicism, which we have embraced?

And this very tiny minority, though feeling satisfied in their own souls that they are where they ought to be, are very conscious that the majority around them claims the name of “Anglican” for what seem to be only experiential, practical and administrative reasons – not for genuine, historic and classical doctrinal ones.

Perhaps here is the right place to reflect for a moment on the word “Formulary”, which is not a word in common usage, but an important word, nevertheless, as it has been used in serious Anglican discourse consistently since the sixteenth century. The Latin word, formularius (liber) [=a book of formulae], on which it is based, pointed to a collection of set forms or instructions for the performance or direction of a ceremony or an official duty. Thus a “formulary’ within a national Church is a book which contains the set forms and rules of what the Church believes, teaches and confesses, the liturgy it uses, and the way it creates the ordained Ministry. In reforming itself in the sixteenth century, the Ecclesia Anglicana reformed its Formularies (those which had been in force in the medieval period) to create three new ones – The Book of Common Prayer, The Book of Ordination Services [Ordinal] and The Thirty-Nine Articles, along with a new edition of Canon Law. Under the authority of Scripture, these summed up and presented the standards, norms and means by which the reformed Church of England sought to be the national jurisdiction of the Catholic Church of God. These Formularies not only provided the way to worship and serve God daily but they also distinguished the Church of England from other jurisdictions in Scotland and Europe. Take away the Formularies and leave only the Bible and what you have is a Church without shape, form and substance for there are no common standards or guidelines to govern all the many parts and keep them together as one.

Until the 1960s Anglicans were usually well aware of the Formularies, for they used the Book of Common Prayer for worship daily, the Ordinal for all services of ordination to the diaconate, priesthood and episcopate, and the Thirty-Nine Articles for learning the doctrine of the Anglican Way (clergy used excellent, learned commentaries on the Articles as their text-books in doctrine – see the CD of twelve such texts from the Prayer Book Society, www.anglicanmarketplace.com ). Then with the advent of new translations of the Bible, new liturgies, the addressing God as “You” not “Thou” and the near obsession with relevance, credibility, and simplicity, Episcopalians and Anglicans in the West began to lose touch with their roots.

The Episcopal Church put much energy, money and propaganda into creating new services and then published them under the old name of that which was being rejected! The book of varied, modern services was called The Book of Common Prayer (1979) and this became (with its own services for ordination and its own new Catechism) the one and only Formulary of the Episcopal Church. The Formularies which had been in place until then were set aside and known as historical documents.

This being so evangelical Episcopalians (as also progressive liberal Episcopalians and anglo-catholic Episcopalians) in the ECUSA are committed by their ordination vows (unless they repudiate it) to the Formulary which is the 1979 Prayer Book, and there by are committed to the revised form, greatly changed form, of the Anglican Way that it represents. (In Canada, the new Book of Services was deliberately called, The Book of Alternative Services (1985) to distinguish it from the classic BCP which remains the Formulary of that Church.)

The presence of this new Formulary it must be said has been a major factor in allowing the General Convention to continue its revision of received doctrine, morality and discipline, for most of its innovations are in harmony with the form of doctrine in the 1979 Prayer Book.

Happily the Anglican Mission in America has restored the classic Formularies of the Anglican Way to its foundation, and is now involved in asking what this means for its present forms of worship, witness and mission. (Regrettably, in my view this is occurring too slowly but it is occurring!)

Unhappily, the Anglican Communion Network has not yet gone very far on the way to the adoption of the historic Formularies (as received by the Protestant Episcopal Church from 1789-1979), partly because the ECUSA affiliation of virtually all its membership makes this seemingly impossible, and partly that it is not yet convinced of the need for it in order to be truly Anglican (even though the Anglican Church of Nigeria has made a very clear statement of commitment to the classic BCP, Ordinal & Articles).

The fact remains that the Anglican Way is Reformed Catholicism and that as such it has its Formularies, and that without these as foundation and guide, it ceases to be a viable Jurisdiction of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. Precisely how this works out in the twenty-first century is a task which requires great knowledge, wisdom, discernment and sensitivity and, regrettably, it is a task from which Episcopalians and Anglicans have been diverted for too long!

petertoon@msn.com December 11, 2005