Previously, I reviewed Alan Jacobs' How To Think, which I rather enjoyed. So imagine how much my heartbeat increased when I discovered that Jacobs, an evangelical Anglican, had written The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography, an entry in the Lives of Great Religious Books series. It is not only people that should be portrayed in biographies, but great books also have their unique life stories. Jacobs gives a vivid look at the BCP as a living, breathing wonder of religious literature.
Jacobs briskly sketches the historical drama that brought on the composition of the BCP, putting the cookies of the past on the accessible bottom shelf for the average layperson. The central figure in this sequence is, of course, Thomas Cranmer. The initial passion of the Archbishop of Canterbury was that the English people be able to read Scripture and access its truth. To that end, he needed to create tools for that. The Book of Homilies was a collection of sermons (some unmistakably by Cranmer) that explained the Bible, but the BCP was to be the venue by which Englishmen could hear the Bible read and experience it. This would be a launching pad to common prayers together, all of which would mark the approach to the altar for Holy Communion.
Jacobs also adeptly shows how the BCP, a product of its time, also marked time for the common English parishioner. Cranmer utilized the church calendar to mark God's lordship over the patterns of time, using the rhythms of Advent to Epiphany to Lent to Easter to Whitsunday to Trinity Sunday through Ordinary Time on to Advent again. The BCP also demonstrates the rhythm of birth to life with its baptismal, marriage, and funeral rites. And the BCP also marks the pulses of each day through the emphasis on Morning and Evening Prayer services.
The sketch of the BCP's life continues with details of the "Black Rubric" from the arguments between Cranmer and John Knox. After Cranmer's martyrdom under Bloody Mary, the Elizabethan era with Richard Hooker's leadership gives way to the Cavalier and Roundhead rumblings that make a path for Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth. Incidentally, it is at this time the Puritan Cromwell roundly bullies Anglicans who desire to be faithful to the BCP. Cromwell certainly does not come out of this story smelling like a rose!
Jacobs traces the shape and specific wordings of the BCP from 1801 onward, from a time where the Church of England was marked by little fruit or church attendance at all, through a Victorian renaissance of the BCP, all the while giving due diligence to the influence of John Henry Newman and the Tractarians, for the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England pressed for key considerations in worship, as well.
The revisions of the BCP (particularly in 1928 in America and 1979 in Britain) are covered toward the end of the book as Anglicanism finds itself to be more of a global faith. Now the question is how to adapt the enduring weight of the BCP to particular cultural situations in Africa, India, and elsewhere. A final chapter mentions the various printers charged with producing the BCP down through history, which reveals that one printer was John Baskerville, from whom the Baskerville type font gets its name!
This is no dry, dusty monograph of literary evolution. The feel and fire of each person and historical element bursts into full flame. Jacobs has found a way for a religious text to come to life for the layperson, while exciting veteran clergy and scholars, as well.
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