Abstract
For readers in a hurry who want the essentials, this book is excellent – if you are interested in the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) you should buy it. At under 200 pages it is not a stretching read, and it is very well written, with a good balance between authorial analysis and generous quotation from primary sources. Indeed, the latter is one of the book’s principal attractions: it makes available to the non-specialist some important but hard to access material, and provides a welcome alternative to the usual battle lines where BCP is concerned (poeticism and antiquity versus archaism and dated theology). One minor criticism: the occasional appearance of untranslated ancient languages.
The book consists of five chapters, covering the origins of BCP, its revisions – major and minor – the many attempts to improve it along wildly differing theological lines, from Anglo-Catholic to Presbyterian, and its uses and adaptations in Scotland and the USA. The story ends at the start of the twentieth century, in which a manifold dissatisfaction finally led to the implementation of full-scale revision (or rather, in the event, augmentation) of BCP, a revision in which the author played his part. An appendix provides a facsimile of ‘A supply of prayer for the ships of this kingdom that want ministers to pray with them: agreeable to the directory established by parliament’ (1645).
Spinks is right to lay a heavy emphasis on performative aspects of BCP, instead of focusing too much on the text. He shows how much, or how little, attention was paid to rubrics and rules: evidently clergy then as now were more than willing to interpret both as it suited them, and a degree of latitude in interpreting such rubrics and rules contributed to the longevity of BCP in the life of the national Church. When he comes to BCP’s eventual ousting from the central place in the worshipping life of the Church of England, he explains it in terms of the unendurable strains imposed by expansion of national boundaries; the intellectual Enlightenment; and the nineteenth-century ‘rediscovery’ of the Church’s patristic roots. The account of revisions and proposals for holy baptism in particular make clear how difficult it is to achieve improvements in any liturgy without creating an opening of flood gates in which all opinions become defensible. There is a legitimate sense in which tradition is still the steadiest bulwark against both fissiparity and fashion. When experts (in this case mostly clergy) have different views not only about what constitutes an appropriate text or rite, but also about the criteria for judging such appropriateness, consensus becomes harder and harder to bring about. Epicleses and offertories are a case in point, appearing and vanishing with confusing frequency according to the revisionists’ guiding principles.
I will take from this book a deeper understanding of BCP’s development; an attractive communion prayer on p. 94; and a better understanding of the word ‘gossip’. The appearance of that word in a seventeenth-century baptismal document (‘the Father & a Gossip standing by’, p. 95) drove me to the Oxford English Dictionary to find out that it was rooted in ‘god’ and ‘sib’ (or ‘relative’, as in ‘sibling’). The book proved to be rich both in such enjoyments and in authoritative information.