The Book of Common Prayer: A Guide by Charles Hefling (review)

"The Book of Common Prayer" (BCP) refers, despite the name, to a number of different and distinct texts. In Charles Hefling's Guide, produced for Oxford University Press's Guides to Sacred Texts, the focus is primarily on the 1662 version. The other "sacred texts" in the series are the Daode jing, the Yijing, and the Rig Veda, with Guides to the Analects and the New Testament forthcoming. As an early modern Western European text, composed at a particular time and intended for a particular use, the 1662 BCP is an outlier amongst its fellows. I look forward to OUP's development of this series: imagine a Guide to the Divine Office (or Liturgy of the Hours), or other "sacred texts" of the Roman Catholic Church.

Hefling frames his guide in three parts: Contents, Continuities, and Contexts. The first gives a clear and concise account of what makes up the BCP, why it is there, and how it is used. Looking at the usual Sunday morning services, with their "distinct and varied components" (12) serves as an introduction to the rest of the "specialized vocabulary" needed to get to grips with how the BCP functions (13). Attention is given to the different linguistic forms, and the context that "selects, moderates, organizes, orients, and interprets" particularly the scriptures, but also the other elements of liturgy (21). The second part is much the longest: a history of the development of BCP liturgy from its pre-Reformation antecedents, via the various ideas of the earlier Reformation era and its aftermath, to 1662. It continues beyond this to the Scottish and American liturgies, and into the so-called Remedial Prayer Books of the nineteenth century (239). Little is said about developments beyond the mid-twentieth century (246–250). Hefling suggests that since the BCP "was never intended to be an end in itself, perhaps the sacred ends it could and did serve are now being served by other means" (250). He also turns here to language, contrasting the "aspects of what had made the classical BCP a sacred text" with "the pedestrian style of everyday discourse" (239). There might have been more on the relationship between certain BCP texts such as the Gloria in excelsis and the Latin of which they were renditions (whence the extra "that takest away the sins of the world" which appears there in 1552?) Language is important: as the Prayer Book Society's website says, the BCP "has been and continues to be loved for its wonderful language, dignified and memorable but always speaking to our human condition." Perhaps not universally, though: in Dorothy L. Sayers's 1937 novel, Busman's Honeymoon, her hero Lord Peter Wimsey and his wife Harriet Vane, are referred to as having been "married in the old, coarse Prayer-book form" (the contrast being made is between 1662 and the 1928 revision). Sayers makes it clear that the reader's sympathies are not expected to align with this aesthetic judgement, but discussion of the BCP today concentrates, arguably, more on language than theology. From 2000 onwards, the Church of England's continuing liturgical revision came under the banner of Common Worship. Nevertheless, while 1662 was thought, in various places and for various reasons, to be inadequate, and so to need supplementing, revising, or rewriting, it remains, at least in the Church of England, in use. From a Roman Catholic perspective, it is important and instructive to note that, despite superficial similarities, the 1662 BCP is not to Common Worship as the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite is to the Ordinary Form. That this is not the case may be attributed to theological conviction; respect for tradition; ecclesiological self-identity; the idea that a common standard allows for variation to satisfy widely differing concerns; or even to inertia. Thus, Canon A3 states that it "may be used by all members of the Church of England with a good conscience." In the Declaration of Assent, 1662...