which we are told in all four Gospels and in 1 Corinthians 11 to drink, for example, faith in His precious Body, which we are told in all four Gospels and 1 Corinthians 11 to eat , but we must be baptized and not be in a state of grave sin; those who are of the age of accountability and have the mental capacity to analyze sin are warned by the Holy Apostle Paul to examine their conscience, lest in partaking they not discern the body and blood of our Lodd and are killed by it rather than receiving the medicine of immortality.
And this applies whether one believes Christ is bodily present, as do Roman Catholics, Old Catholics, at least half of Anglicans, probably most Anglicans in the US, where except in parts of Virginia and occasional parishes elsewhere the Episcopal Church has tended to be very high church, especially the Continuing Anglican Churches (although a few low church Continuing Anglican churches exist), the Lutherans, the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, and the Assyrians church that was once the largest in the world before Tamerlane killed most of them, along with their Syriac Orthodox brethren (evidence suggests where one church existed, the other also frequently existed, and this is the case now in much of the Middle East except, notably, Jerusalem, perhaps because Assyrians, who largely live in Persia and Iraq, can’t get visas and are the only ancient church that lacks a presence at the Holy Sepulchre, and of those Assyrians and Syriac Orthodox who survived, the Turks killed even more in 1915, and then ISIS in 2014-2016, or whether you believe He is spiritually present, as did Calvin, as well as most Reformed Christians and the low church and evangelical Anglicans, or if you believe that when you partake the bread and wine, it becomes for you His body and blood (receptionism), or I suppose if you believe they are signs (Zwinglianism) or mere memorials (Memorialism), which is a view which seems to contradict the idea of Faith in the Blood and the repeated stress in the Synoptics and the Epistle of John on the sacrament (and how would a memorial or symbol be dangerous if you partook unworthily, as in 1 Corinthians 11:27-34?). Indeed the presence of the Prayer of Humble Access in the Book of Common Prayer is why most theologians regard the great Anglican monastic Dom Gregory Dix, OHC, in his groundbreaking work
The Shape of the Liturgy, of being in error when suggesting Thomas Cranmer was a Zwinglian; his views on the Eucharist and even those of the low church Elizabethan Richard Hooker come across as in line with those of Calvin, whereas those of John Jewell and Archbishop Laud strike me being in line with those of Martin Luther, and indeed a Lutheran view was promoted by the deletion of the infamous Black Rubric from the Elizabethan and Jacobean editions of the BCP, but it was restored in 1662 probably to avoid civil unrest with the former Roundheads following the Restoration of the Monarchy, where it remained until the ascendancy of the Anglo Catholics, who did as much good for the poor of South London as the Salvation Army, and are indeed men like Rev. Percy Dearmer, and before him, Anglo Catholics who spent the time in between helping people in prison for the crime of being Anglican and wearing a chasuble (despite this being legal under the Ornaments Rubric, but the danger of messing Church and State is that even the best and fairest judge knows less about religion than the average clergyman), the forgotten heroes of pre-war Britain.
However, the Anglo Catholic revision of the BCP, the 1928 Deposited Book, was shot down by an alliance consisting chiefly of non-Anglicans, another problem with state churches, since most Anglican MPs voted to remove it. Fortunately, the C of E was granted liturgical autonomy, although the new Eucharistic texts, for example, in Common Worship, which I love, although once to my chagrin I confused it with either the 2004 Irish BCP, or the new Scottish prayerbook, or the Canadian Book of Alternative Services, when conversing with
@Paidiske about my enthusiasm for it; my only regret is that I don’t think it has a rubric like the 1979 BCP allowing for it to be rewritten into traditional language and used as such in the Episcopal Church, and it is also not in the Public Domain, but is rather under Crown Copyright and is new enough to be protected in the US (unlike the Book of Common Prayer, or the King James Bible, where every Episcopal version of the former and every traditional language international version except for the ponderous 1984 Welsh version, and the 1962 Canadian version, which I have fallen out of love with after realizing that aside from a Eucharist that was the product of compromise following fierce debate, and an edited Psalter, it also has a watered-down Compline compared to the 1915 American and 1928 English versions, and the KJV’s Crown Copyright is so not in effect that the Gideons, who I was preparing to join as a full member before resuming my ministry, which limits me to associate membership, prints free hardcover copies, and puts them in hotels, where they are replaced after one or two years and then rebound as paperbacks for use in prisons. The Gideons actually encourage people who need a Bible to take them from hotels, within reason, and distribute books with the New Testament, Psalms and Proverbs, and I myself place these in hotel rooms where they are absent.
One hotel which I like, a Quality Inn, like many hotels, is owned by Hindus and puts the Advaita Vedanta in its rooms (a huge number of hotel and motel owner-operators in the US are members of the Patels, who are either an informal caste or a massive endogamous family with two branches; I would call them a tribe at a minimum; the joke is if you are a Patel you can travel across the country without paying for accommodation, but I myself really like them), while even in Utah, the Book of Mormon tends only to show up in Marriott properties. By the way, hotel casinos in Las Vegas, my home town, usually have Gideons Bibles, while the W luxury hotels made a big deal about not having them (because publicity is more important than God, right?) and an atheist who bought a luxury resort in the English countryside decided it would be a good idea to replace the Gideons Bibles with copies of a bestselling novel most of us would regard as inappropriate contentography, of which most of us have probably heard, and which along with its sequels has been made into a major motion picture; I am not going to name it as I don’t want our younger readers looking it up (and I would ask other members to kindly refrain from asking me what it is or posting “Oh, you mean such and such” for the same reason). However I would encourage everyone to join the Gideons or the American Bible Society or the equivalent in your country.
At any rate mentioning the Book of Common Prayer is not just a liturgical tangent, but rather, I would encourage
@Clare73 to read the 1662 English, 1929 Scottish, or 1892, 1928 American or 1979 American BCP editions, which can be found here along with many others:
The Book of Common Prayer for the Episcopal Church These books provide an explanation
I particularly like these PDF recreations of the beautifully typset Standard Editions of the 1892 and 1928 editions, which were issued to each Diocese and a limit number of subscribers and are sadly the rarest of rare books, exquisitely designed by the legendary typographer JB Updike. The 1979 BCP is also elegant; I can’t find a good looking BCP edition from elsewhere in the world in PDF format. Sadly, a planned Standard Edition of it, a Prospectus for which was prepared by the talented Arrion Press in San Francisco, was never made. At any rate, these books explain, in 1970s Contemporary Modern English in the case of the 1979 BCP, and with somewhat more simplicity in 1550-1660s Jacobean Ecclesiastical Modern English with modernized spelling, the importance of Baptism and Holy Communion to Christians, written by Protestants, for Protestants. John Wesley was a huge fan and intended that all Methodists should use the BCP, even preparing a special recension for the Methodists in North America, his famed Sunday Service Book of 1784, which he sent with Thomas Coke after ordaining him Superintendent (which is the English translation of Episkopos, which is Anglicized as Bishop, just as Elder is the literal meaning of Priest, the Anglicization of
Presbyter (so the majority of Bible editions that translate
Hierus,
Sacerdos or Kohanim as Priest are making an error that causes confusion around the doctrine of the Priesthood of All Believers; every Christian is a
Sacerdos, in that we can all pray to God directly and offer intercessory prayer on the part of others, but not every Christian is an Elder.
I want to stress in endorsing the BCP for learning about sacramental theology I am not endorsing Anglicanism or a Methodist or suggesting anyone become an Anglican or a Methodist; I myself am a Congregationalist minister and an admirer of Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy. Also, I am a member of an ecumenical traditional liturgical association that develops public domain liturgical texts; we are finishing a draft on a modular traditional language BCP we call
Editio MMXXII intended as an alternative to the 2019 BCP for the ACNA, which I was really disappointed by, an expansion of the 1928 American BCP for Continuing Anglican churches, which is good, but lacks useful content found in other BCP editions, and as a candidate for possible use by some Anglicans elsewhere in the Commonwealth, and that project stemmed from our longest in development project, which predates our founding, a traditional language Methodist service book based on the BCP.
After much discussion we finally agreed on a Lutheran project: a consolidation of the Common Service, the text, adapted from the 1789 American BCP that most traditional Lutheran hymnals are adapted from combined with Luther’s Shorter Catechism and other material, intended to reduce the number of Lutheran service books from three (the Hymnal, or Service Book, also called the Lutheran Book of Worship, Lutheran Worship, Christian Worship, the Evangelical Lutheran Hymnary, and several other names, one for each denomination, and two used by clergy, the Altar Book and Agenda) to two (The Common Service Book and a Hymnal), which is the pattern the Methodists and the Episcopalians have, despite having in the case of the Episcopalians a more complex liturgy than many Lutheran churches, but I expect Altar Books and Agendas will still be needed, and that’s fine; the main advantage will be to the laity. If we had the Lutheran book, I would link to it, because Luther’s Catechisms, the Books of Concord, and his liturgical texts, combined with the Cranmerian texts retained by the Lutherans in their Common Service, would provide an alternative to the Anglican work, but as it stands now you would have to get them from different sources (as far as any of us on the LiturgyWorks team can work out, perhaps
@ViaCrucis or
@MarkRohfrietsch knows of something like the BCP for Lutherans which combines both the liturgical texts, with the scripture lessons and collects, and the most important parts of the Formula of Concord, like the Longer and Shorter Catechism.
One of our other projects is fitting the Divine Office, the Eucharistic liturgy and the Propers (variable parts of the service) of the Assyrian Church of the East into one volume; presently there are like 17 but a lot of it is duplicated, and the overall liturgy is much simpler than say the Byzantine Rite, which if you include the whole thing with all possible services, would take 20 Folio-sized (very big) books to contain, although we have an Eaatern Orthodox priest who is trying to cram the essentials down into three (this has been done before, but never by one publisher in one set of books; in particular the Orthodox Prayer Book by Fr. Seraphim Nasser of 1947, nicknamed the “Nasser Five Pounder,” and the Prayers and Services of the Orthodox Church translated by Isabel Florence Hapgood in the late 19th century, have nearly everything except a Psalter and the Scripture Lessons.
