Change and decay
C.H. Sisson
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ANGLICAN LITURGY, 1662-1980 by R.C. D. Jasper
SPCK, £19.95, pp. 384
Agood sermon morning and even- ing, and no bloody nonsense about Holy Communion': that was the prescription of a Wiltshire farmer I knew. It did not occur to him, a generation ago, that the form of service could be other than the one he had been familiar with since childhood. Mean- while, in other places, all kinds of funny things had long been going on. The clergy of the Church of England, like its laity, has never been famous for discipline. And if since 1980 there has been a pressure to conform which had almost disappeared from the Church, it has been a pressure to conform to alternatives, which has a pleas- ing smack of dissidence about it. The disarray of the last ten years is variously judged, and however pleasing it has been to some it has not stopped the decline of Church membership. With the prospect of a new mind in Canterbury, it is a good time to review what has been happening, and nothing could be more timely than this short history of The Development of the Anglican Liturgy by one who was a member of the Liturgical Commission from its appointment in 1955, and its chairman for the 15 years which ended with the production of the Alterna- tive Service Book.
Dr Jasper's history is divided into two parts: the first a summary history of the years to 1955, the second an account, at once fuller and, understandably, more personal, of later considerations. Both parts are, it goes without saying, backed by Dr Jasper's exemplary learning, and they are written with a lucidity which makes them readily accessible to laymen. The first part starts with the events of the Restora- tion, when the mood was for the recovery of unity, ecclesiastical as well as political, after the divisions of the Civil War. Pres- byterians and Laudians tried to reach an accommodation, and there was agreement on minimal alterations of the Prayer Book, which had been banned under the Com- monwealth and received with satisfaction on its re-appearance. The 18th century, produced an undergrowth of liturgical in- genuities from the Non-jurors with their Usages to Whiston who, though a scholar rummaging in the past was, as an Arian, significantly in sympathy with the Deism which was the fashionable aberration of the century. The innovator who was at once theologically orthodox and profound- ly concerned about pastoral matters was Charles Wesley, who did his best to keep his followers close to the Prayer Book.
The forms of ecclesiastical restlessness which took place in the 19th century did not seriously threaten the use of the Prayer Book in the Church of England, and The Book as Proposed in 1928 was an attempt to confine revision to what some held to be essential. The history of the Liturgical Commission from 1955 is different. An initial conservatism gave way to an academic radicalism of which Dr Jasper was one of the chief as well as one of the most persistent exponents. Every argu- ment was used to justify change and one might say that 'the point that there could be no spiritual benefit in repeating archaic words and phrases' was taken as suggesting that there might be great benefit in repeat- ing modern ones instead. The credulous 'with-it-ness' of the Sixties gave this a fashionable look. Another major influence was the revision of the Anglican liturgy to suit the tastes of former imperial countries and of the small group of English scholars who advised them. Alterations made in the light of the line of scholarship to which Gregory Dix had given currency were seized on to make the point that the BCP was no longer an adequate symbol of Anglican unity. Nobody seems to have asked whether it might not, with minimal alterations only, be the best hope for the unity of the Church of England.
Modern scholarship has indeed made some reconciliation possible between what were once mutually hostile doctrines of the Eucharist, but since the BCP has long been recognised as holding these different views in suspense, that does not in itself provide a sufficient argument for a new form of service to serve as a statement of doctrine. There is, anyhow, little to be said for changing the liturgy to keep up with the changing fortunes of scholarly brawls, at the expense of pastoral arguments, which must give great weight to the benefits of continuity. It took the Liturgical Commis- sion 25 years to undermine the BCP. A similar amount of effort, applied to pastor- al matters, would probably have suggested building on the familiar book, with little more than the simplifications which would have brought it nearer to the way it was actually used, and made it easier for beginners to handle — easier, too, than the current volume of many alternatives.
In the final paragraph of Dr Jasper's book it is suggested that the low-keyed' language of the ASB is fine if 'the clergy work imaginatively with it . . . . we have to create from ASB . . . what we have been accustomed to feel in our early literature.' This surely certifies the inadequacy and artificiality of the 1980 book.
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