Nathan A. Scott Jr. and His Prayer-Book Catholicism: A Reminiscence of my Doctorvater and a Prelude to Future Research

THE LEGACY OF REV. NATHAN A. SCOTT, JR. 115 Tanner, Tony. The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1965. Wood, Ralph C. "An Interview With Nathan A. Scott, [r" Christianity and Literature 43:2 (Winter 1994): 213-26. Nathan A. Scott Jr. and His Prayer-Book Catholicism: A Reminiscence of my Doctorvater and a Prelude to Future Research Clark Brittain Some years ago at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, which convened in Boston, I received a phone call from Professor Scott inviting me to join him at The Church of the Advent for the eleven o'clock celebration of the Solemn Eucharist. The Church of the Advent is an Anglo-Catholic parish that has long maintained a tradition of solid preaching and a commitment to Catholic Eucharistic worship. I gladly accepted his invitation. For the next two hours amid the smell of incense, the sounds of a magnificent choir and a great booming organ, we experienced what Holy Scripture calls "the beauty of Holiness;' I thoroughly enjoyed participating in this service, and so did Dr. Scott, especially as he boomed out the great Bach hymn "Sleepers Awake:' The service, concluding with a solemn Te Deum, seemed to transform everything around us in a way perhaps not as overpowering as that which Isaiah experienced in the Jerusalem Temple, but the service at Church of the Advent was at least of a similar kind. Walking back to the convention center, basking in something of an afterglow, I noticed that Scott was still humming the Bach hymn. At one point, he suddenly stopped. Referring to the service, he said, "Clark, what you've just participated in is Prayer-Book Catholicism-no missals, no lawlessness:' He meant by this, I believe, several things. First, should further seminary training become necessary for me in my bid for ordination to the Episcopal priesthood, he was urging me to seriously consider attending General Theological Seminary rather than, say, Nashotah House, for General Seminary had enthusiastically maintained a tradition of worship that fostered the Catholic faith as it had been received in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer and that its tradition was authentic and did not need to be augmented with other canonically "irregular': liturgical texts (or as Dr. Scott put it "lawless texts") such as the Anglican People's Missal. Second I think Dr. Scott was saying that although the Book of Common 116 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE Prayer contained much discontinuity with Catholicism, given the abundant Reformation polemic one finds in Thomas Cranmer's prose, much of the Eucharistic content of this Prayer Book, its tradition of maintaining the church's liturgical year, and its general comprehensiveness were all witness to its catholicity. The Book of Common Prayer sought to recover a radical sacramental theology of the early church. Finally, I think his championing of Prayer-Book worship was a way of expressing loyalty to the oath of conformity he Signed at his ordination. That Scott was an Episcopal priest and served as canon-theologian for the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago was generally acknowledged on the dust jackets of many of his books, but few people have commented about the effect this synergy of priest and scholar might have had on his scholarship. His indebtedness to the writings of Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, Rudolph Bultmann, and Martin Heidegger is well documented and perhaps exhaustively discussed. But not so well documented are the theological sources drawn from the Anglican tradition that shaped his thinking as well. This is not to say that one will find in the body of Scott'swritings any hint of being narrowly sectarian or having his work identified with anything that could be called strictly denominational, and he always strove to maintain a distinction between the ecclesiastical world and the world of academia. Following Thomas Jefferson's imperative of separation of church and state, Scott maintained that there must be a sort of "wall" between confessional and ecclesiastical communities. But he also told me once that it was inescapable that theologians had to write out of some particular tradition. That he often referred to himself as a "Catholic of an Anglican stripe" or...