The Canterbury Trail: Liturgy and Reformation

Modern Reformation recently published an article by Gillis Harp with a very long title: Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail: Reflections on the Pilgrimage to Anglicanism Nearly 40 Years After Webber’s Classic. Although I am not an Anglican, I read Robert Webber’s book, Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail: Why Evangelicals Are Attracted to the Liturgical Church, and I found myself deeply sympathetic to his concerns. In fact, I have worshipped in Anglican and Episcopal churches at various times throughout my life, most recently between 2003 and 2008 when our family attended regularly the Church of St. John the Evangelist here in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

I did not know Webber very well personally, although I grew up in Wheaton, Illinois, home of Wheaton College, where he taught for many years. But he was a colleague of my wife, who was a faculty member in the same department for six years, and he was a guest at our wedding. I also contributed at least two articles to his Complete Library of Christian Worship. What drew many Christians to his project to recover the ancient glories of Christian worship was a recognition of the superficiality of their own traditions. As Harp observes,

But might Webber have captured only a narrow slice of Anglicanism? Harp thinks so.

Although it’s been decades since I read Webber’s book, I did not pick up an hostility to the Reformation in its pages. True, I cannot recall him mentioning Cranmer or King Edward VI, Henry VIII’s short-lived male heir. Webber did not make much of the specifics of English history without which Anglicanism in its current form cannot be adequately understood. Yet I assumed that he accepted the truth of the Reformation and its doctrines of grace, coming as they did in response to the corruptions of the late mediæval church. Seeking a form of worship with deep historical roots need not entail a neglect, much less repudiation, of the Reformation.

Speaking for myself, as I became acquainted with the Book of Common Prayer in its various editions, I was struck by the evidently Reformed character of the 39 Articles, which I was later disappointed to learn were regarded by many Episcopalians as merely an historical document with no apparent binding status on clergy and laity. Moreover, it seemed obvious that the BCP’s eucharistic theology was congruent with Calvin’s, and possibly even Zwingli’s, as seen in its Communion liturgy’s focus on remembrance:

Webber did not lead me to Anglicanism per se, much less to an Anglican communion, a mid-19th-century invention. But reading his books did help me to understand the extent to which some of the Reformers of the 16th century had got things wrong, especially with respect to the church’s historic liturgies. In any effort to reform the church, would-be reformers must differentiate between what legitimately belongs to the tradition to which they are heir and what are unbiblical accretions. This requires knowledge of what the ancient church was like and how it worshipped the triune God.

Unfortunately, the Reformers did not have access to the most ancient sources which we know today. For example, the Apostolic Tradition of Hyppolytus was rediscovered only in the 19th century and was thus unavailable to Luther, Calvin, Bucer, and others. This 3rd-century church order and liturgy clearly shows the origins of the western and eastern liturgies as they would develop over the next eighteen centuries. A close examination of the Apostolic Tradition and similar early documents indicates that many of the Reformers unduly disposed of much that should have been retained, rejecting some of the substance of the tradition along with the accretions.

Here is the Apostolic Tradition’s eucharistic prayer:

If the Apostolic Tradition was lost to the Reformers, its liturgical rubrics and texts survived in both the western and eastern rites of the historic church and were thus available to the Reformers of the 16th century in that form. Indeed, Cranmer and Luther retained much of the ordinary of the mass, removing its accretions, translating it into their respective vernacular languages, and prescribing it for use in the churches for which they were responsible.

Zwingli and Calvin took a different approach, rejecting much of the ordinary of the mass even if they retained the basic shape of the liturgy. In his 1542 liturgy of the Lord’s Supper, Calvin replaced the simple dialogue at the beginning of the eucharistic prayer with a lengthy didactic monologue which he averred to be “selon la coustume de l’église ancienne“—”according to the custom of the ancient church”—yet neglecting the evidence of ancient usage in the existing rites. Although I believe Calvin to be closer to the mark than Luther on a variety of issues, I think Luther’s, as well as Cranmer’s, approach to the liturgy was more faithful to the biblically-shaped ancient tradition.

Did Webber neglect the English Reformation in his writings? Perhaps he made too little of it. I do not recall him mentioning metrical psalmody, which was integral to the Church of England’s worship until the end of the 18th century. Yet I do believe that his emphasis on recovering the common roots of the churches’ liturgies was a needed one, especially for those in the free churches whose liturgies were shaped by revivalism and congregational independence.