In a homily preached as dean of Corpus Christi College Cambridge, Sir Edwyn Clement Hoskyns (1884–1937) described the movement of the classical Prayer Book tradition as one founded upon ‘the ancient structure of the Church’s worship’ yet ‘broken again and again to make room for the deep-seated cry of forgiveness.’1E. C. Hoskyns (DD) in Noel Davey and Gordon S. Wakefield (eds), Crucifixion-Resurrection: The Pattern of the Theology and Ethics of the New Testament (SPCK, 1981), p. 67. While Hoskyns may not be expressing anything particularly novel in this description of the Cranmerian order of worship that brings coherence to the Prayer Book tradition, the journey by which he reached this insight, and the connection between this insight and the way that Hoskyns understands the presence of similar patterns in scripture, is worth further consideration for those who place importance in the biblical and theological structures of historic Anglican prayer.
Though not a household name today, even among Anglicans or scholars in his field, Hoskyns ranks among the most influential Biblical scholars of the 20th century. Canon Charles Smyth perhaps runs the risk of overstatement in describing Hoskyns as one of ‘two outstanding names in history of Christian thought in England’ during the first half of the 20th century, alongside G. K. Chesterton.2E. C. Hoskyns, Cambridge Sermons with an appreciation by Charles Smyth (SPCK, 1970), p. vii. A leading figure in the emergent field now called Biblical Theology, Hoskyns counted among his pupils the Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey and prominent New Testament scholar C. K. Barrett. Hoskyns published only one work of note during his lifetime, a critical summary of historical-critical scholarship of the New Testament called The Riddle of the New Testament (1931). A mere six years later, at 52, he died suddenly, which explains why he published relatively little and is not well-known today. Along with The Riddle of the New Testament, Hoskyns left behind a much-acclaimed commentary on John (1940), and a biblical theology in which he develops an insightful pattern for reading the scriptures in unity, a pattern which he calls ‘crucifixion-resurrection.’ Appropriately entitled Crucifixion-Resurrection, this work was not completed until 1981 when his biblical theology was drawn together posthumously from his notes by two former students. Given that the work was rather dated by the time it was finally published, there has not been any serious scholarly engagement with it, its themes, or its implications. These implications include how Hoskyns’s understanding of biblical unity affects his appreciation for the Book of Common Prayer.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Hoskyns’s legacy is his work as a bridge between English and German scholarship at a time when English distrust of German Protestant theology was at its zenith. Those familiar with the name Hoskyns today likely know him as the English translator of Karl Barth’s groundbreaking commentary, The Epistle to the Romans, a task which occupied Hoskyns from 1931–1933. Hoskyns embraced Barth’s paradoxical ways of explicating scripture. A former pupil of Hoskyns recalled that ‘when Barth broke like a bombshell over the sleeping tents of Anglicanism, only those who had attended Hoskyns’ lectures in the old lecture-room at Corpus found little of novelty either in the idiom or in the theme.’3Hoskyns, Cambridge Sermons, ix. Before this momentous translation, Hoskyns had a long-standing relationship with the German theological scene, having studied with Adolf von Harnack, Albert Schweitzer, and Adolf Schlatter at the recommendation of a professor at Cambridge in 1907. Hoskyns later developed a close friendship and partnership with the Tübingen Theologian Gerhard Kittel, who championed an influential word-study method for reading scripture. The great legacy of that method was a dictionary of biblical words organized by Kittel with contributions from leading German scholars at the time, a work introduced to English readers by Hoskyns. Bishop George Bell picked him to represent English theology at a series of Anglo-German theological conferences held between 1927 and 1931 to deepen connections between English and German theologians following the war.
Hoskyns’s collaboration with the German theologians should not be overlooked. As the son of the Anglo-Catholic Bishop of Southwell for 21 years, Hoskyns was formed – intellectually and spiritually – by the Anglo-Catholicism of the turn of the century. He was educated at Corpus Christi, the same Cambridge college of which he was later made dean, then a major center of liberal Catholicism. Hoskyns served with distinction during the Great War as a chaplain in the Middle East and Europe and was afterward awarded for ‘gallant and distinguished service in the fi eld’ for providing pastoral care for wounded soldiers during some of the fi ercest combat in Europe.
Neither his upbringing nor experiences as a young scholar and cleric serving in the Great War would suggest a future building bridges between the English and German theological worlds. Anglo-Catholicism was ever suspicious of German Protestant theology, stemming from E. B. Pusey’s time at the University of Göttingen. During the time of the Great Wars, England generally was busily rejecting all things German, especially German Protestant theology, as many in England linked it with aggressive Prussian militarism. Mark Chapman points to the Great War as playing ‘a significant part in distancing the Church of England from its Protestant inheritance’, so that Anglo-Catholicism, once viewed by patriotic Brits as suspiciously Roman, came to be more widely embraced as patriotic.4M. Chapman, ‘English Theology in the First World War and its Aftermath’ in M. W. Brierley & G. A. Byrne (eds), Life after Tragedy: Essays on Faith and the First World War Evoked by Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy (The Lutterworth Press), p. 194.
Nonetheless, Hoskyns’s interactions with German theology played a pivotal role in how he understood the Bible and, by extension, the Prayer Book. The Bible’s internal unity became his hermeneutical key. He viewed all scripture as bound together in one paradoxical theme: that humanity is weak, in desperate need of God’s deliverance, and that God graciously answers that need with his power. He epitomized this metanarrative as crucifi xion-resurrection. For Hoskyns, crucifi xion describes not only Jesus’ public execution but, by metonymy, the frailty and insuffi ciency of fallen humanity. Similarly, resurrection represents far more than the historical event of the vacated tomb – resurrection is a metonym for the gracious power of God in response to human insufficiency. This tension between the human need for God and God’s merciful response holds the entire Bible together and is equally present in both the Old and New Testaments. Preserving the unifying tension of the Bible required combining the two concepts representing human weakness and God’s power with a hyphen rather than conjunctions, lest the paradoxical power of the pattern be broken by the conventions of common speech. This pattern and Hoskyns’s unique way of developing biblical unity reflects the influence of both Kittel’s word-study method and Barth’s theology of paradox.
An example of the crucifixion-resurrection pattern in practice is found in a series of sermons that Hoskyns preached at Corpus while translating Barth’s Der Römerbrief. In these sermons, Hoskyns reads passages from both the Old and New Testaments in unity through another paradox closely connected to crucifixion-resurrection: tribulation-comfort. The tension of tribulation-comfort can be recognized in the Prophets (especially Isaiah and Jeremiah), the Psalter (where the Psalmist’s cry for deliverance is often followed by a song of praise), and in Job (who finds comfort in tribulation through the words God Himself speaks to him). The same theme of tribulation-comfort then becomes foundational for the New Testament authors, who make sense of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ – as well as their own lives of tribulation – through this tribulation-comfort paradox. In Hoskyns’s own words, ‘the Bible speaks of consolation in tribulation, and indeed it speaks of nothing else’.5Hoskyns, Cambridge Sermons, 122.
The same paradox of human frailty (tribulation/ crucifixion) requiring deliverance that only God’s power can provide (comfort/resurrection) is also a controlling theme of the Prayer Book. We might, once again, let Hoskyns speak for himself: ‘We must actually hear the Biblical juxtaposition as it is set forth by prophet, by wise man, by Apostle, by Evangelist and by the Lord Himself, and notice how this chorus of witness is taken up and repeated in our Prayer Book.’6Hoskyns, Cambridge Sermons, 122. To identify how and where this is so, Hoskyns looks directly to one of the most cherished, memorable moments in the Prayer Book – the Comfortable Words following the confession and absolution of sins in the Communion service. As Hoskyns explains, ‘Coming from all this Biblical language, we ought, I think, to be relieved that our English Prayer Book breaks the movement of our worship to remind us of its theme: Hear what comfortable words our Saviour Jesus Christ sayeth unto all that truly turn to him.’7Hoskyns, Cambridge Sermons, 128 In the same way that scripture is bound together by crucifixion-resurrection, so too is the Prayer Book bound together by this repeated paradoxical pattern of human need crying out for deliverance from sin met with divine power expressed in forgiveness, absolution, and comfort. The same unifying paradox that brings unity to the scriptures brings unity to the Prayer Book.
While Hoskyns’s insights into the rhythms of common prayer may not be particularly unique or as well-developed as we might wish, it is remarkable that he came to these insights as a result of the seemingly divergent influences that shaped his thought in the interwar years. Hoskyns’s throws light on what it means for common prayer to be ‘biblical.’ When Christians debate whether a particular expression of worship is ‘biblical’, we tend to think on the level of an immediate, direct, one-to-one correspondence between biblical words and the words used in worship. While this view is not necessarily incorrect, it exposes a narrow view of what biblical means. Much conflict among modern Anglicans may, in part, be traced back to a crude understanding of what it means for liturgy to be biblical. For example, recent liturgies may rightly incorporate language in keeping with themes of God’s grace, mercy, or love, and yet ignore the sin, unworthiness, or brokenness without which God’s grace, mercy, and deliverance do not make sense or align with the metanarrative of scripture. Biblical words used this way lose their biblical meaning and force. Put another way, simply using a biblical vocabulary does not make a liturgy biblical; the words must be arranged to reflect the unifying themes and patterns of the Bible.
An awareness of such patterns in scripture and the Prayer Book tradition is, in part, why Hoskyns and his crucifixion-resurrection pattern warrant further attention by Anglicans and non-Anglicans alike. For both Hoskyns and Cranmer, the grace, mercy, and love of God require that we recognize our need for God, our unworthiness before God, and God’s loving decision to encounter us with the promise of grace and divine power in spite of those prerequisites. Just as, for Cranmer, confession requires words of comfort, and words of comfort require confession, so for Hoskyns, crucifixion requires resurrection, and resurrection requires crucifixion.
The Rev’d Matthew Rucker, Rector of St. Peter’s Anglican Church in Loveland, Colorado, is a doctoral student in theology at Heidelberg University in Germany, researching Sir Edwyn Clement Hoskyns.