Formation & Education · Study

The Making of the Ordinal

How the English rites of ordination were framed, stripped, and defined

A Book Bound In, but Never Merged

Open the 1928 Book at the Ordinal and you will find, between the Articles and what precedes them, a title page of its own. That is not a printer's flourish. It is the residue of a fact: the Ordinal has never quite been part of the Prayer Book.

It began separately, in 1550, a year after the first Book of Common Prayer and under its own Act of Parliament. It was revised in 1552 and bound up with the second Prayer Book of that year, but it kept its title page. Not until 1662 was it formally incorporated, and even then the Act of Uniformity of that year named it in its own right, being an act for the uniformity of public prayers and for establishing the form of making, ordaining, and consecrating bishops, priests, and deacons. The Prayer Book and the Ordinal are named as two things, in one sentence, by the statute that binds them together.

This matters for the argument set out elsewhere on this site. If the Ordinal were merely a chapter of the Prayer Book, there would be two formularies and not three. Its separate standing is the reason the Articles can certify it by name, as Article XXXVI does, and the reason a church may hold the Prayer Book and still be asked what it does about ordination.

What Came Before: the Diocesan Pontificals

Before 1550 there was no English Ordinal, because there was no single English anything. The ordination rites lived in the Pontifical, the bishop's own book, and each diocese had its own: Salisbury, Winchester, Exeter, Bangor, and the far older Pontifical associated with Egbert of York in the eighth century. Since a diocese needed only one copy, these are among the rarest of all liturgical books, and much of what is known about them comes from a handful of surviving manuscripts printed in the nineteenth century.

What the reformers therefore faced was not one rite to be revised but a family of related rites, differing in detail, agreeing in substance. It was said afterwards by Archbishop Whitgift that the English Ordinal was taken word for word from the Roman Pontifical. It was not. It was framed against the whole known range of ordination forms then available: the Latin sacramentaries associated with Leo, Gelasius, and Gregory; the Gallican books; the Alemannic liturgy of the ninth century; the Greek Euchologium; and the English Pontificals themselves. The question the commission asked was not what Rome did but what everybody had always done.

The Ancient Core

That question has a clear answer, and it is the most useful thing in the whole history.

Set the ancient rites side by side and one element is in every one of them, in every century, in East and West alike: prayer for the gift of the Holy Ghost, with the laying on of hands. Everything else varies. The sacramentaries differ over which prayers, in what order, under what titles. The unction of a priest's hands is a Gallican practice of about the sixth century, unknown in the Greek rites and not used at Rome until comparatively late. The delivery of instruments - the chalice and paten to a priest, the Gospel book to a deacon, the staff and ring to a bishop - appears later still, and in the medieval West was mistaken by some theologians for the essential matter of ordination.

The reformers' judgment followed from this. What was universal they kept. What could be dated they felt free to drop. Whether one thinks the subtraction went too far, the principle on which it proceeded was a historical one, and it was not arbitrary.

1550: The Commission and What It Made

An Act of 1549 provided that a form for making and consecrating bishops, priests, and deacons should be devised by six prelates and six other men of the realm learned in God's law, appointed by the King, and set forth under the Great Seal. Cranmer had the chief hand in the work.

Three offices only were prepared - deacon, priest, bishop - although the Act had spoken more broadly of other ministers of the Church, which would have taken in the minor orders, subdeacons and readers and the rest. That silence was itself a decision: the minor orders simply ceased.

The first Ordinal kept a good deal. The candidates were vested according to their order. The delivery of the chalice with the bread was retained at the ordering of priests, as was the pastoral staff for a bishop. Psalms were appointed as introits. Five bishops were consecrated by it.

It is worth pausing on how much survived, because the later argument about Anglican orders has often proceeded as though 1550 were a rupture. The Marian reaction is the best evidence against that reading. When the Edwardine Ordinal was repealed in 1553 and the older forms restored, those who wished to reconcile clergy ordained under it did not treat them as unordained men; they required the supply of what they judged wanting - the unction, the vessels, the habits. That is a complaint about accretions, not about substance.

1552: The Stripping

The second revision was not a continuation of the first but a reaction against it, and the reformers who pressed it were the more thorough sort. The influence of the continental divines was felt through Hooper, Poynet, and their circle, and the results are visible.

Out went the introits. Out went the vesture of the candidates and of the presenting bishops. Out went the delivery of the chalice and the elements, and the delivery of the pastoral staff. The consecration of hands with oil and chrism had already gone in 1550. What remained was very close to bare: presentation, examination, prayer, the laying on of hands, the delivery of the Bible.

One change was made for the better, and at the instance of Hooper, who is not usually the hero of these stories: in the oath of supremacy the words invoking all Saints and the holy Evangelists were replaced by "so help me God, through Jesus Christ." Only one bishop was consecrated under this Ordinal before Edward died.

1662: The Defining Clauses

The Restoration revision is where the Ordinal took the shape the 1928 Book prints, and its most important change was made to remove an ambiguity that a century of controversy had exposed.

Until 1662 the words spoken at the laying on of hands were, for a priest, simply "Receive the Holy Ghost," and for a bishop, "Take the Holy Ghost, and remember that thou stir up the grace of God." The same words, in substance, for two different orders. The revisers inserted into each the clause that specifies what is being conferred: "for the office and work of a Priest in the Church of God, now committed unto thee by the imposition of our hands," and correspondingly "for the office and work of a Bishop in the Church of God." The old forms were not bad, and they had ancient precedent; the additions were made so that no one could pretend to misunderstand which order was being given, and in particular so that it could not be said that a bishop received nothing a priest had not already received.

Other changes of the same revision run in the same direction. A new question was put to a bishop-elect - whether he will be faithful in ordaining, sending, or laying hands upon others - which fixes on the one power that distinguishes his order. The minimum age for a deacon was raised from twenty-one to twenty-three. A deacon's authority to baptize was qualified to the absence of the priest. Proper Epistles and Gospels were appointed rather than those of the day, and the Epistle from the third chapter of the First Epistle to Timothy was moved from the ordering of priests to the consecration of bishops, on the ground that its subject is the episcopate.

1792: The American Ordinal

The American Church inherited the 1662 rites and revised them for its own circumstances at the General Convention of 1792, the political references having been removed from the English forms already. Before that, the American bishops had used the English Ordinal with those passages omitted.

The 1792 Ordinal is the one the Articles certify. Article XXXVI, in its American form, does not vouch for the Edwardine books as the English Article does; it names the Book of Consecration of Bishops and Ordering of Priests and Deacons as set forth by the General Convention of this Church in 1792, and decrees all who are ordered by it rightly and lawfully ordered. This is the single clearest instance of the three formularies acting as one instrument: the doctrinal standard certifying the ministerial standard, by name and date.

What the Preface Asserts

The Preface to the Ordinal is short, and every clause of it is doing work. It makes five claims.

That the three orders of ministers - bishops, priests, and deacons - are evident from Scripture and ancient authors to have existed from the Apostles' time, and have been held in reverent estimation ever since. That there are proper ages below which orders are not to be given. That there are proper times and places for ordination. That candidates are to be examined as to learning and character before admission. And that no man is to be accounted a lawful bishop, priest, or deacon, or suffered to execute those functions, unless he has been admitted by the form that follows or has had formerly episcopal consecration or ordination.

The last of these is the one that carries the weight, and it is worth noticing what kind of claim it is. It is not an argument; it is a rule of recognition. It tells you what the Church will and will not treat as orders, and it does so in the same mood as the rest of the Prayer Book - not "we believe," but "no man shall be accounted."

Why This Matters for a Formulary

The Ordinal is the formulary most easily neglected, because most churchmen encounter it perhaps three times in a life and clergy not much oftener. But it is the one that determines who may use the other two.

A church may possess the Prayer Book and the Articles and lose them both in a generation if the men who are ordained are not ordained to the offices those books describe. That is why the Preface's rule of recognition sits where it does, and why the 1662 revisers troubled to say in so many words which order they were conferring. They had learned that a form which leaves the question open will, sooner or later, be read as leaving it open.