Members only: Is There “No Health in Us”?

The prayer did not appear in the first Book of Common Prayer (1549), but it was composed for the second (1552), and these words have remained essentially unchanged in traditional Anglican prayerbooks.

For some modern revisers, however, the clause at the very center of the prayer has proved troublesome: “And there is no health in us.” The source of the trouble is not semantic drift or grammatical change. Peter Hitchens notes that the words of the General Confession are not “archaic or difficult,” but “are plain English words of one or two syllables.” The issue is not linguistic, but rather that “these are not easy words to say, if you mean them.”

In the current prayerbook of the Episcopal Church, BCP 1979, the General Confession remains largely intact in the traditional language service (Rite I). Nevertheless, the revisers chose to omit “And there is no health in us.” In the contemporary language service (Rite II), an entirely different confession is used, and Cranmer’s prayer disappears from view. Both revisions—the one that keeps Cranmer’s prayer but omits a clause, and the one that replaces Cranmer’s prayer entirely—seem to reflect a view that the old prayerbook was rather intense about this sin business and it Needed to Be Toned Down. There was also concern that the clause is “questionable theology, since it seems to imply that there is no goodness left in us as a result of our sins.”

Enter the Anglican Church in North America. It developed its own prayerbook, which was largely a touching up of the services from the Episcopal Church’s 1979 book. There were competing imperatives for this revision, which included taking some steps back toward the classic prayerbook tradition while also using more contemporary language. For the General Confession, the revisers had to decide what to do with “And there is no health in us.” Their decision was a revealing one—about how hard liturgical revision is, and about why there is no easy separation of liturgical form and liturgical content.