Christianity and Formularies

 

Most active and concerned Christians think the form and formulary of Christianity is less relevant and certainly less exciting than evangelizing, protesting for justice, making converts, praying in the spirit, speaking in tongues, helping the needy, experiencing blessing, feeling the presence of God, and so on.  However, we should be interested in the rules, structure, and concepts of the worship of our Creator.  We live within this context of purpose and order and this context is what gives meaning to our acts of evangelism, charity, mission, teaching and so forth.  It is in the context and contours of our relation to God that we can intelligently examine the quality of our worship and of our Christian living.  We need a clear Rule of Faith, a Creed, a Confession of Faith or a Formulary to worship and serve the Lord, to read and expound the Scriptures, and to proclaim the Gospel.  Our purpose is to determine whether the 1979 Prayer Book provides a true formulary for the Anglican Way.

 

The sixth Article of Religion states, “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation:  so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.”  The twentieth Article of Religion states, “The Church hath power to decree Rites or Ceremonies, and authority in Controversies of Faith:  and yet it is not lawful for the Church to ordain anything that is contrary to God’s Word written.”  Still Holy Scripture does not exist alone in the world.  We read, “No prophecy of scripture is of any private interpretation” in 2 Peter 1:20.

 

The councils of the early church collected and authorized writings as the Canon of Scripture.  The creeds clearly show their understanding of the Trinity as is a critical part of the saving work of God.  To qualify for the Canon of Scripture, writings had to present the unchanged and unchanging truth that our Lord entrusted to the apostles that they should teach all nations.  The Bible was not to be understood or interpreted in a way that denied the truth of God’s Triune Being or the Truth of Jesus Christ’s Personhood as the Son of God made man.  There was never a time when the Bible was intended to be read outside of a structure of belief, understanding, and prayer.

 

The term “Sola Scriptura” describes a summary doctrine emphasized in the Protestant world since the sixteenth century.  In some circles, it has come to mean that anyone can interpret Holy Scriptures as they stand alone in the world.  That was not the original intent.  The reformers understood they needed help in the right reading and interpretation of the Bible.  Their intent was to state, “nothing, in this or any other age before the Lord’s return, should or can stand alongside the Canon of Scripture as the supreme and final authority for the Faith.”  The reformers demonstrated their true intent by producing an abundance of pamphlets, treatises, and books to aid catechumens and church members in reading the Bible with understanding.

 

A single earthly lifetime and the capacity of a single human intellect are insufficient on their own to take in the totality of the glory and grandeur of the Word of God.  The Creeds, Catechisms, and Confessions, then, represent a “communion of thought,” a common Christian mind that preserves in the Body of Christ, living on earth across the ages, a clear, accurate continuity of the most basic truths of the faith by which Christians live.

 

St. Paul summarized his instructions about the life and worship of the Church by saying, “Let all things be done decently and in order” (1 Corinthians  14:40).  For the term, “in order”, he used the Greek term “kata taxin” which also means “according to the accustomed or given form.”  The Greek work taxis is the first element in the English word “taxidermy,” which means the arrangement of an animal skin over a form.  St. Paul did not mean “according to some arbitrary form of individual choosing,” but “according to a particular, proper, given form.”  The Church is expected to arrange her life in the form that Christ provided through his Apostles.  Any other form would be, at best, a misunderstanding of the form and nature of the Church.  At worst, it would be a denial of Christ himself.

When St. Paul intervened in the Church of Corinth, he called on the Corinthians to maintain their Christian belief and practice according to the forms and formulas that the Church had received from Christ.  The Apostle did the duty of a formularius, but even Apostles are not immortal.  It was necessary to write down the Apostles’ teaching as “formularies,” just as it had been necessary earlier to write down the Apostolic preaching of the Gospel from which the formulas of the Christian Faith are derived.  The Epistles are the product of the apostolic ministers to whom Jesus Christ entrusted his Church and upon whom the Holy Ghost descended for their guidance in all truth.

 

The ecumenical Creeds are examples of formularies, since they maintain the formulas in words for summarizing and expressing the Truth revealed in the Holy Scriptures.  The codes of canon law are formularies, preserving the formulas that maintain the Christian forms of thought, word, and deed in the life of the Church.  The ancient liturgies are formularies, giving shape to the universal worship of the Christian Church and demonstrating the permissible limits of local embellishments and emphases within a single order of divine worship.

 

First are the foundational formularies, the two Testaments of the One Canon of Holy Scripture.  Based upon these primary authorities, and emerging from them, are the patristic formularies – the Creeds, the Liturgy, and the Canon Law.  No ecclesiastical body on earth has the authority to change the substance of these secondary or patristic formularies, as the undivided Church has received them, without first demonstrating to a similarly undivided Church that some error, demonstrable from Holy Scripture, has been made in them.

 

At the time of the Reformation in the 16th century, the Church of England produced certain formularies for its own use as a national jurisdiction of the one, holy catholic and apostolic Church.  They included the Book of Common Prayer (1928), the Ordinal, and the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion supplemented in 1603 by a revised code of canon law.  The formularies of the English Reformation were aimed precisely against innovation.  They were merely reassertions and reiterations, from within the Church of England, of the formulas and forms that had constituted the order of the undivided Church.

 

The Thirty-Nine Articles, are not a new creed, nor a new confession of faith.  They are merely an instrument for ending controversies about the changeless Faith of the Church in favor of the settled teaching of the Apostles and Fathers, to be found in the Church’s universal formularies.  The Book of Common Prayer is not a “new liturgy.”  It is simply the recovery of the ancient forms and formulas of worship and sacramental administration in vernacular English, making them available to every member of an English speaking Church.  The Ordinal provides for the lawful and sure transmission of apostolic authority to the bishops, priests, and deacons of the Anglican churches in accordance with the ancient formularies of the Church.

 

The traditional formularies of the Anglican Way, the historic Book of Common Prayer, the Ordinal, and the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, have stood four and a half centuries of scrutiny with minimal revision, most of which has had to do with the differences in the civil polity of the various nations in which the Anglican churches serve.  Generation after generation of people living the Anglican Way have agreed that these traditional formularies meet the Christian obligation of conformity to the faith once delivered to the saints, the very same faith that the Church of England received from the undivided Church and bestowed upon those churches that grew to maturity from her works of evangelism.

 

It is thus fair to ask whether the 1979 Prayer book is a true Formulary of the Anglican Way.  It is imperative that we ask whether this book is biblically orthodox.

 

 

 

For more details, read “Neither Orthodoxy Nor A Formulary” by The Rev. Dr. Peter Toon, M.A., D.Phil.and The Rev. Louis Tarsitano

(Preservation Press of the Prayer Book Society of the USA 2004