The Anglican Way magazine is published by the Prayer Book Society and usually comes out four times a year. It studies the formative periods of the Church’s history and promotes knowledge of the riches of our Anglican heritage in order to encourage orthodox renewal.
The Anglican Prayer Book heritage is firmly rooted in Holy Scripture and the received Apostolic Tradition and, as such, it is central to our identity and a bulwark against the passing fancies of any given era. Authentic renewal must be grounded in this foundational theological logic which draws upon the common mind expressed within the historical, Mystical Body of Christ to which all Christians can be held accountable, regardless of our institutional divisions. This expresses the faith once delivered to the Fathers and calls all Christian people to the central Gospel teachings that are binding upon us all for sanctification and salvation.
Anglicans are conscious too of our heritage from the English Reformation when the Reformers recovered anew the sense of humble submission to the doctrine and discipline of the early Church. The English Reformers eschewed errors of innovation and urged a recovery of the authentic in a perspective that calls to mind the humbling words of John of Salisbury in his Metalogicon of 1159, that: “We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants. We see more, and things that are more distant, than they did, not because our sight is superior or because we are taller than they, but because they raise us up, and by their great stature add to ours.”
Contemporary renewal demands a comprehensive confrontation with the crisis of faith in post-modernity and a renewed focus on the perennial questions about our relation to Christ. It requires a recovery of Christian foundations and a renewed emphasis with the Reformers, upon the Cross and centrality of Christ’s salvific life. It will need also a new awareness of how we are enabled through grace and the agency of the Holy Spirit to participate in this new life and salvation in Christ.
The Prayer Book seeks one goal above all others: the salvation of the soul through membership in the Body of Christ. Left to our own devices and desires, we fall short of the life in him that is Christ’s will for us. We remain divided, separated and alienated, not only from one another, but also from membership in that Mystical Body which is the blessed company of all faithful people, heirs through hope of His everlasting Kingdom.
It is our conviction that the Book of Common Prayer summarizes, expresses, and applies the doctrines necessary for salvation. It thus escapes the twin errors of either adding to or subtracting from what we should believe, so it fulfills that ancient rule of faith, attributed to Vincent of Lérins in the fifth century, whereby we should believe quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus –what has been held always, everywhere, and by everyone [in the Church] to be true: no more and no less.
The very latest edition can be read here: (Winter 2017)
