Formation & Education · Study

Forms, Not Confessions

What Anglicans have instead of a confession of faith

The Question Behind the Services

The usual telling of our liturgical history is a story of derivation. The Sarum Missal and Breviary stand behind the Prayer Book; the Gelasian and Gregorian sacramentaries stand behind Sarum; Cranmer compressed eight service books into one and rendered the Latin into an English that has not been bettered. All of this is true, and a good deal of this site is given to tracing it.

But derivation is not authority. To say where a service came from is not to say what standing it now has, nor what a man is bound to when he is bound to it. A church may treasure a book for its beauty and still owe it nothing. The question worth asking is narrower and harder: when an Anglican church names the Book of Common Prayer in its constitution, what is it naming — a preference, a custom, or a standard?

The answer is contained in a word that has largely fallen out of use among us, though it is still there in the constitutions and books of canons where our churches say what they are. The word is formulary.

What a Formulary Is

A formulary is a document that fixes the form a thing must take. It is not a description of practice; it is the pattern against which practice is measured.

Anglicans have three, and the division of labour among them is clean. The Book of Common Prayer sets the form of our worship — Word, Sacrament, and the daily Offices. The Ordinal sets the form of our ministry — the making of deacons, the ordering of priests, the consecration of bishops. The Articles of Religion set the form of our doctrine, both the great dogma held in common with the whole Church and the particular judgments the English Church rendered on the controversies of its own century. Some provinces add the canons as a fourth.

Together these describe how a church prays, whom it ordains, and what it holds. They are subordinate to Holy Scripture and were never advanced as rivals to it; their office is to govern how Scripture is read, preached, and prayed in the assembly. But within that office they are not advisory. They are the standard.

How the Three Came to Stand Together

The English Church did not set out to produce a set of formularies. It produced them one at a time, under pressure, and only afterwards discovered what it had made.

The first attempts came before the Reformation proper had touched England. Having broken with Rome in the 1530s, Henry's church still needed to say what it now believed, and it issued the Ten Articles (1536) and the Bishops' Book (1537), revised as the King's Book (1543). These were not Protestant documents. They were an attempt at a medieval Catholicism without the Pope — the Latin Mass still standing, the Sarum Use still in place, the doctrine only lightly adjusted.

The decisive change came under Edward. In 1549 the first Book of Common Prayer replaced the whole shelf of medieval service books at a stroke. The Ordinal followed separately in 1550, was revised in 1552, and was bound with the second Prayer Book of that year, though it kept its own title page — a small detail worth noticing, because it means the Ordinal was understood from the beginning as a distinct instrument rather than a chapter of the Prayer Book. Not until 1662 was it formally incorporated. With the Latin books withdrawn and no alternative authorised, these two texts became, by simple necessity, the standards of English worship and English ministry.

The doctrinal formulary came last and took longest. The Forty-Two Articles of 1553 died with Edward; the Thirty-Nine were settled under Elizabeth in 1563 and given final form in 1571. From the seventeenth century all three were commonly printed within one set of boards, under the single title of the Book of Common Prayer — which is why so many now think of the Articles as an appendix to the Prayer Book rather than as a formulary in its own right.

The American Church inherited the arrangement whole. Our Constitution of 1789 named all three together — a Book of Common Prayer, Articles of Religion, and a form of making and ordaining ministers — even though the Articles themselves were not actually set forth until the Convention of 1801. The structure was written into the American Church's foundation before its contents were finished. That is as clear a statement as one could ask for that these are not three books which happen to be bound together, but three instruments a church requires in order to be one.

The Confessional Alternative

Set beside this the Lutheran and Reformed churches, and the difference is sharper than family resemblance suggests. Our services look Protestant to a Roman eye and Catholic to a Baptist one; a Lutheran Divine Service is recognisably a cousin of our own Holy Communion, with the same shape, much of the same shrift, and a comparable seriousness about the Sacrament. And yet these churches are constituted on a wholly different principle.

They are confessional. A confessional church settles what it holds by adopting a text that says so, in the declarative mood: we believe, teach, and confess. The Lutheran churches gathered theirs into the Book of Concord in 1580 — the Augsburg Confession, its Apology, the Smalcald Articles, Luther's two Catechisms, the Formula of Concord. The Reformed have the Westminster Confession, or the Three Forms of Unity. In each case the doctrinal standard is a document written for the express purpose of stating doctrine, and the church's identity rests upon it.

The Anglican Way has nothing of the kind, and this is not an oversight. We have never said we believe, teach, and confess. We have handed a man a book and told him to pray it.

Two Ways of Binding a Minister

The clearest place to see the difference is at ordination.

A Lutheran pastor is bound by subscription. He assents to a body of doctrine, and the long argument between quia and quatenus subscription — whether he holds the Confessions because they are scriptural, or only insofar as they are — is an argument about the strength of that binding, not its nature. Either way he has put his name to propositions.

An Anglican priest is bound by conformity. He promises to minister the doctrine, sacraments, and discipline of Christ as this Church has received them, and to use the forms in the book. He is not asked to certify a list of propositions; in the American Church, clerical subscription to the Articles was never required at all. He is asked to do a thing, in a particular way, for the rest of his life.

This is why the Anglican method is so easily misread as doctrinal indifference. It is nothing of the kind. It is doctrine deposited in the imperative mood rather than the indicative — a church which teaches the Communion of Saints by appointing a day for them, teaches the necessity of absolution by requiring a confession before it, and teaches the doctrine of the Trinity not by an article to be assented to but by an ascription to be said aloud at the end of every psalm, three times daily, until one dies. The old tag is exactly right: the law of praying is the law of believing.

What the Method Is Good At

Three things, chiefly.

It forms rather than informs. A man who has said Morning and Evening Prayer for thirty years has the Psalter by heart, has heard most of Scripture read through in course, and has confessed the Catholic faith in the Creeds some twenty thousand times. No amount of assent to a confession will do that work. The formulary teaches by repetition and posture, which is how most human beings actually learn anything.

It secures unity in practice rather than in opinion. Two priests may differ considerably in their theology of the Eucharist and still stand at the same altar saying the same words — as, in fact, Anglicans did for four centuries. A confession locates unity in agreement; a formulary locates it in common action, which is a good deal more achievable among sinners.

And it resists abstraction. Doctrine held in the form of prayer cannot drift very far from worship, from Scripture read aloud, or from the people in the pews who are saying it with you.

Where It Is Vulnerable

The corresponding weakness is severe, and it is the burden of Toon's argument.

A church whose doctrinal standard is its service book can have that standard altered by anyone with the authority to issue a new service book. And because the alteration presents itself as a liturgical improvement — better English, a recovered shape, pastoral flexibility — the doctrinal change need never be debated as doctrine at all. There is no confession to amend, and therefore no amendment to vote on. One simply prints a new book.

There is a second and subtler danger, which is that alternatives can be multiplied until the very idea of a standard dissolves. A book offering many forms for the same office is not a formulary; it is a collection. Whatever its merits, it cannot function as a pattern, because a pattern that admits of alternatives is not a pattern. Toon's charge against the 1979 book is precisely this — that it took the name of the Book of Common Prayer while abandoning the thing, and that the older book was displaced rather than supplemented. Others hold that supplementary rites can stand alongside a retained standard without displacing it, and where the older book has genuinely been retained, that is a fair reply. Where it has not, the objection stands.

Either way, the structural point survives the controversy: a church constituted on formularies has no second line of defence. Lose the book, and there is nothing else to appeal to.

Three Cautions

Toon presses three points which are easy to miss and worth setting down plainly.

The first is that the three formularies belong together, and that our parties have each been content with two. Evangelicals have made much of the Articles and comparatively little of the Prayer Book and Ordinal; Anglo-Catholics have loved the Prayer Book and Ordinal and quietly discounted the Articles. Each party has kept the formulary that suited it and let the others go slack — with the result that neither has the whole standard in hand.

The second concerns the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral of 1886 and 1888. It is not a formulary and was never meant to be. It states the minimum on which an Anglican church could contemplate reunion with a church that is not Anglican — Scripture, Creeds, the two Sacraments of the Gospel, the historic episcopate. It is an instrument for external relations. To treat it as an internal definition of the faith, as has become common, is to mistake the terms of a treaty for the constitution of a country.

The third is diagnostic. Anglicans have lately placed great weight on the instruments of communion — the See of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council, the Primates' Meeting. Toon's suggestion is that this weight has grown in proportion as the formularies have weakened: where a common standard no longer holds churches together, conferences and offices must be asked to do it instead. Whether or not one accepts the diagnosis, the correlation is difficult to dispute.

Why It Matters Here

This is the ground on which a continuing use of the 1928 Book stands, and it is worth stating without heat. The case does not rest on the beauty of the language, though the language is beautiful, nor on preferring the old to the new, which is a matter of taste and no argument at all. It rests on the claim that this book, with the Ordinal and the Articles printed alongside it, is a formulary — that it states a standard, and that a church which has one is better furnished than a church which has none.

To open it at Morning Prayer is therefore not only to say old words. It is to submit to a form: to let the Psalms be appointed rather than chosen, the Lessons be given rather than selected, the Creed be said whether or not one feels the want of it that morning. That submission is the whole of the method. It is what our fathers meant by common prayer, and it is why the loss of the formularies is not a matter of style.