The 'Decent and Godly Ordre of the Ancient Fathers' Cranmer's Daily Office, Scripture, and the Liturgical Movement

The 1549 Book of Common Prayer begins with what might seem to be a curiosity. Its preface, penned by Thomas Cranmer, does not deal with central Reformation questions of church order or sacraments or justification, but rather focuses on the reform of daily prayer. However, for Cranmer, this was no minor issue. Rather, for Cranmer, the daily prayer of the church and the core Protestant commitment to the reading of Scripture went together. The daily office, Cranmer thought, should be structured so that the psalms are read in course and ‘all the whole Bible (or the greatest parte thereof) should be read over once in the yeare’ – but, alas, late medieval daily prayer forms departed from this pattern.¹B. Cummings (ed), The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 4. Thus, in Cranmer’s revised services of morning and evening prayer, he made this relationship to Scripture once again central: with some variations, the psalter is read monthly and the rest of the Bible is read over the course of the year, the bulk of the Old Testament once and the New Testament (except Revelation) three times.²As explained in the prefatory material in the 1662 prayer book. See Cummings, Book, 217.

But the mode of engagement with Scripture that Thomas Cranmer saw as the crowning achievement of his reform of daily prayer – this regular recitation of the psalter and lectio continua reading of almost the entirety of Scripture – would come to be seen in the late twentieth century as one of its greatest failures. It was strongly criticized in liturgical scholarship and liturgists frequently argued for revisions to Anglican daily prayer that consciously rejected Cranmer’s approach to the place of Scripture in daily prayer. In this paper, I will explain why this came to pass, explore how this negative judgment has affected contemporary Anglican liturgy, and argue that this condemnation of Cranmer’s office is unwarranted. I will begin with a brief sketch of the last seventy years of the historiography of the daily office. I will then show how Cranmer’s daily office has been compared to dominant scholarly reconstructions of the earliest forms of Christian daily prayer, specifically the forms associated with cathedral worship, and found wanting. We will then see how this judgement has inspired revised daily prayer offices in the second half of the twentieth century that move away from Cranmer’s focus on psalmody and Scripture.

But is this negative judgment of Cranmer’s daily office correct? I will argue that it is not. Rather, it depends on overly confident and now outdated reconstructions of the Christian past and tends to assume either that the goal of Christian worship is the closest possible conformity to patristic precedent or that there is a basic opposition between prayer and spiritual edification. I will draw on Richard Hooker to argue that we ought not to grant either of these assumptions. Rather, we should see Cranmer’s combination of praise and Scriptural edification in morning and evening prayer as one of his liturgy’s greatest strengths.

‘Cathedral’ and ‘Monastic’ Offices in the Historiography of Christian Daily Prayer

To understand how 20th-century liturgical scholarship came to judge Cranmer’s approach to Scripture in the office as a problem to be solved, it is first necessary to understand the development of the modern study of Christian daily prayer. In short, beginning in the early 20th-century work of the comparative liturgist Anton Baumstark, liturgical historians have argued that Christian daily prayer originated in two very different types of prayer – the cathedral and the monastic office – and that its history is comprised of the regrettable blending of the two.³R. F. Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West: The Origins of the Divine Office and Its Meaning for Today (Liturgical Press, 1986), p. 32.

What are these two offices, cathedral and monastic? These terms in liturgical scholarship describe the putative earliest forms of public Christian daily prayer after Christianity’s legalization in the fourth century. Robert Taft, whose 1986 The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West remains an important work of daily prayer scholarship, provides a description of the cathedral office which is worth quoting at some length:

This office of the secular churches was a popular service characterized by symbol and ceremony … by chant … by diversity of ministries … and by psalmody that was limited and select rather than current and complete. That is, the psalms were not read continuously according to their numerical order in the Bible, but only certain psalms or sections of psalms were chosen for their suitability to the hour of service. Furthermore, the cathedral services were offices of praise and intercession, not a Liturgy of the Word. Contrary to another popular misconception, there were no Scripture lessons in the normal cathedral office except in Egypt and Cappadocia.⁴Ibid

That is to say, the term cathedral office refers to morning and evening prayer services for all Christians held primarily in urban cathedrals. And these services, Taft argues, were characterized by a focus on praise and intercession and used a few set psalms and, sometimes, Scripture readings. They did not involve the praying of the entire psalter or the reading of a great deal of Scripture. The service of evening lamp-lighting described in the pseudo-Hippolytan Apostolic Tradition was seen as a particularly important pre-Constantinian precursor of this type of office.⁵Taft, Liturgy of the Hours, 26-27.

The monastic office, then, was associated with – as the name suggests – monastic communities. Scholars working in the framework established by Baumstark argued that it was a distinct form of regular prayer emerging alongside early monasticism in Egypt. In their construal, it reflected a characteristically monastic spirituality that configured common prayer as meditation for the purpose of edification rather than praise and intercession for the world. In essence, as Taft puts it, ‘the “pure” monastic office of the Egyptians was less a liturgical ceremony or service than a meditation on common prayer.’⁶Ibid Rather than the dramatic ceremonies ordered towards praise and intercession of the cathedral offices, here the recitation of psalms was broken up by periods of silence. The goal was the recitation of the entire psalter in course, from beginning to end, rather than the praying of specific set psalms keyed to the time of day. In Egypt in particular, Scripture readings were also added at the end of services, and eventually a vigil office with lengthy Scripture readings also developed.⁷P. F. Bradshaw, Daily Prayer in the Early Church: A Study of the Origin and Early Development of the Divine Office (Wipf & Stock, 2008), p. 98. And all of this was aimed primarily at the ‘ascetical growth of the monk himself’; daily prayer was seen as a means of fostering individual spiritual growth.⁸Ibid The monastic office is often described in sharp distinction to the cathedral office. Thus liturgical scholar Paul Bradshaw notes in the monastic office, ‘there is no corporate expression of praise … no communal response to psalmody … no ceremonial lighting of the lamp or offering of incense, no selection of psalms appropriate to the hour … but simply the continuation in common of the individual meditation on the word of God.’⁹Bradshaw, Daily Prayer, 98. In this comparison to the cathedral office, the monastic office often does not fare so well. Bradshaw, for example, writes that the monastic emphasis on daily prayer as pedagogical ‘seriously distorted the nature of the activity and led to an impoverishment and narrowing of its focus’, moving daily prayer away from its ecclesial and cosmic dimensions and reducing it to a means of individual ascetic development.¹⁰P. F. Bradshaw, Reconstructing Early Christian Worship (London: SPCK, 2009), p. 110.

But even those like Robert Taft with a generally more favorable view of the monastic office as a service for monks tend to cast the history of the daily office as a declension narrative, in which the pristine cathedral offices of the fourth-century patriarchal sees were gradually contaminated with elements proper to the monastic office. The typical account in late 20th-century liturgical scholarship goes something like this: as the power of monasteries grew in the west and parochial clergy looked to monasteries for liturgical guidance, cathedral offices adopted the themes of the monastic office. They became focused less on praise of God and intercession for the world and more on individual edification through the prayerful reading of psalms and Scripture.¹¹Taft, Liturgy of the Hours, 299. This went along with a privatization and clericalization of the service; rather than being the practice of the entire community, daily liturgical prayer became largely something priests did by themselves, something they read in their spare hours out of their breviaries.¹²Ibid In short, in this narrative, the monastic office – and, more importantly, the monastic approach to daily prayer, focused on psalmody, Scripture, and spiritual formation¹³P. F. Bradshaw, ‘Daily Prayer’, Kenneth Stevenson and Bryan Spinks (eds), The Identity of Anglican Worship (Morehouse Publishing, 1991), p. 74. – was tragically made normative for Christian daily prayer as such. The process of monasticization is thus seen as destroying the form of Christian prayer appropriate to the entire Christian community, the cathedral office of praise and intercession.

Cranmer Judged Wanting: The Prayer Book Daily Office and Liturgical Scholarship

Having completed this brief survey of late 20th-century scholarship on the daily office, we are now equipped to understand why it was that Liturgical Movement scholars judged Cranmer’s focus on psalmody and Scripture to be such a problem. I will take an exemplar one of the most thorough versions of this critique, laid out by Paul Bradshaw in an essay in the 1991 work The Identity of Anglican Worship. For Bradshaw – and here he is broadly representative – Cranmer’s office was fundamentally grounded upon faulty historical scholarship, which led him to misunderstand the true nature of Christian daily liturgical prayer and thus bequeath to Anglicanism a distorted daily office.

Pointing to the 1549 preface to the Book of Common Prayer, Bradshaw argues – reasonably enough – that Cranmer’s goal was to restore early Christian liturgical prayer, what Cranmer called the ‘Godly and decent ordre of the auncient fathers.’¹⁴Cummings, The Book of Common Prayer, 4. But unfortunately, per Bradshaw, Cranmer was incorrect about the nature of this godly and decent order. Cranmer believed incorrectly that patristic daily prayer liturgies uniformly held that ‘all the whole Bible (or the greatest parte thereof) should be read over once in the yeare.’¹⁵Ibid But this, for Bradshaw, is not in fact a description of early daily prayer for ordinary Christians at all, since such daily prayer – the ‘cathedral office’ – did not have long Scripture readings. Rather, it was a description of the early monastic office. The approach to Scripture in daily prayer which Cranmer thought was original would only become true of non-monastic daily prayer due to the unfortunate process of monasticization. Bradshaw writes, ‘While the compilers of the Prayer Book no doubt sincerely believed that they were returning to the spirit and forms of prayer current in the congregations of the early Church’, this is not what they actually accomplished.¹⁶Bradshaw, ‘Daily Prayer’, 73.v Such a genuine return would have meant restoring the cathedral office, with its brief, fixed psalmody, focus on praise and intercession, and limited or nonexistent Scripture readings.¹⁷Ibid Instead, Cranmer produced a monasticized cathedral office, intended for all people but focused primarily on the meditative praying of large portions of the psalter and the reading of hefty Scripture lections.

What this means, for Bradshaw, is not only that Cranmer gets the history of Christian daily prayer wrong. Rather, Bradshaw thinks that because Cranmer gets this history wrong, he transmitted to Anglicans a distorted conception of the nature of Christian daily prayer. By placing the praying of the entire psalter and the reading of (almost) all of Scripture at the heart of a ‘pedagogical’ daily office, Cranmer and his comrades ended up – as Bradshaw puts it – ‘restoring the spirituality of the fourth-century desert fathers, a spirituality which was essentially individualistic and non-liturgical, concerned primarily with personal ascetical growth, rather than with praying as the Church for the sake of the world.’¹⁸Ibid Thus, as Bradshaw has written more recently, Cranmer’s ‘intense emphasis on the recitation of the Psalter and the reading of scripture each day’ could be argued to obscure the older cathedral tradition.¹⁹P. F. Bradshaw, ‘The Daily Offices in the Prayer Book Tradition’, Anglican Theological Review 95 (2013), p. 459. For Bradshaw and others like him, the centrality of psalmody in course and lectio continua Scripture readings, which Cranmer saw as his greatest accomplishment in revising the daily office, instead obscures the very nature of Christian daily prayer as praise and intercession by the priestly people of God because of its emphasis on individual encounter with Scripture.

The Cathedral Model and Contemporary Anglican Daily Prayer

If one accepts this grim diagnosis, there is an important task at hand: to restore the proper spirit of Christian daily prayer, namely, praise of God and intercession for the world rather than meditation on Scripture. To restore the proper spirit of daily prayer, liturgical change is necessary: it will require, as Bradshaw puts it, that ‘the shape of Anglican orders of daily prayer … be revised’ along a cathedral model.²⁰Bradshaw, ‘Daily Prayer’, 75. While Bradshaw has expressed disappointment in several articles that the new liturgies emerging from the Liturgical Movement largely failed to live up to this task, in fact, he underestimates the influence of this approach. Anglican liturgy has been significantly affected by the Liturgical Movement critique of Cranmer’s office. It is to this story that I now turn.

One clear place where the influence of this critique has been felt is in the explanatory material introducing the daily office which is present in some recent Anglican liturgical books. The Canadian Book of Alternative Services and the Church of England’s Common Worship: Daily Prayer popularize the view of the history of the daily office outlined above. For example, they reference the cathedral versus monastic office dichotomy and refer unfavorably to both the monasticization of the cathedral office and the goal of praying through the entire psalter and reading through the entire Bible in Christian daily prayer.²¹The Book of Alternative Services of the Anglican Church of Canada (Anglican Book Centre, 1985), p. 36–38; Common Worship: Daily Prayer (Church House Publishing, 2011), p. 20–21. Thus, the texts that frame the liturgy proper in these prayer books reinforce a view like that of Bradshaw’s which sees the Cranmerian office as a problem to be overcome.

But this critique has also shaped the very liturgies themselves; there have been attempts in recent revisions of the daily office to restore ‘cathedral’ elements and move away from ‘monastic’ ones. I’ll provide a few examples, focusing on North America and England. In the Episcopal Church’s Prayer Book (1979), the morning and evening prayer services proper retain – if in an attenuated way – a Cranmerian commitment to comprehensive psalmody and lectio continua Scripture reading (though it includes less scripture than earlier lectionaries and assigns it over two years rather than one). But changes like the addition of a lamp-lighting service on the model of the pseudo-Hippolytan Apostolic Tradition and mid-day prayer and compline services with fixed psalms and readings are evidently attempts at importing ‘cathedral’ elements, both within evening prayer itself and in the form of other additional prayer offices. More significantly, the 1979 Prayer Book’s Daily Devotions for Individuals and Families provides invariable psalms and short readings for morning, noon, early evening, and the close of day.²²The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church: Together with the Psalter or Psalms of David According to the Use of the Episcopal Church (Church Publishing, 1979), p. 137–40. This is not just a matter of supplementing a Cranmerian form of daily morning and evening prayer but is rather intended to replace that form, albeit outside of a parochial context. John Gibaut reads this as an early example of the ‘recovery of the cathedral or parochial pattern of daily prayer: simpler, shorter, and more accessible.’²³J. Gibaut, ‘The Daily Office’, in Charles Hefling and Cynthia Shattuck (eds), The Book of Common Prayer: A Worldwide Survey (Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 458.

The 1985 Canadian Book of Alternative Services goes even further than the American book. Along with lamp-lighting and midday prayer services similar to those found in the American book, the BAS introduces a cathedral-style evening prayer office for Saturday evenings, a Vigil of the Resurrection with one set psalm and a choice between nine resurrection accounts for a reading.²⁴The Book of Alternative Services, 135. As part of its daily office lectionary, the BAS also includes ‘A Short Table of Psalms and Readings’ which gives a few options for psalms and readings keyed to various times of day for use at morning and evening prayer. These psalms and readings can replace the two-year office lectionary the BAS shares with the 1979 Prayer Book.²⁵Ibid Here the ‘cathedral’ model of relatively fixed, short psalmody and scripture is allowed not only in the form of supplemental prayer offices or for individual devotion but as a replacement for the Cranmerian model at public morning and evening prayer. Small surprise that Bradshaw specifically notes this as a significant example of the adoption of the ‘cathedral’ model.²⁶Bradshaw, ‘The Daily Offices in the Prayer Book Tradition’, 460.

This shift to cathedral-style primary prayer offices evident in the BAS is also found in the second generation of post-Liturgical Movement Anglican liturgies. Here the influence of the Daily Office SSF is significant, especially in its 1992 reissue as Celebrating Common Prayer.²⁷A. McGowan, ‘Moving Offices: Daily Prayer in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer and Beyond’, in Robert Prichard (ed), Issues in Prayer Book Revision, Vol. 1 (Church Publishing, 2008), p. 60–61. Celebrating Common Prayer includes a Simple Celebration of the office, providing basic services of morning and evening prayer for each day of the week.²⁸Celebrating Common Prayer: A Version of the Daily Office, SSF (Mowbray, 1992), p. 281–324. Each of these services has four potential psalms and brief Scripture readings between which the officiant can choose; there is no sense whatsoever that the purpose of daily prayer is to pray through the entire psalter or read the whole of Scripture.²⁹Ibid This thus represents the victory of the ‘cathedral’ model over the Cranmerian one; Cranmer’s understanding of daily prayer is decisively rejected. The idea that this Simple Celebration can stand alone as one’s full celebration of morning and evening prayer was only strengthened by its publication as a standalone volume in 1994 as Celebrating Common Prayer: The Pocket Version.³⁰Gibaut, ‘The Daily Office’, 458.

This Celebrating Common Prayer model – including the ‘cathedral’-style Simple Celebration – has come to impact various second generation post-Liturgical Movement liturgies, especially the Church of England’s Common Worship: Daily Prayer. In this text, a service called Prayer During the Day assigns a few psalms and short readings to each day of the week just like the Simple Celebration does.³¹Common Worship: Daily Prayer, 25–88. The rubrics indicate that this service can be used as the entirety of one’s daily prayer.³²Ibid Alternatively, its cathedral-style lectionary can be used to replace the typical morning and evening prayer lectionary, allowing (as Bradshaw approvingly notes) for a fully ‘cathedral’-style morning and evening prayer.³³Bradshaw, ‘The Daily Offices in the Prayer Book Tradition’, 460. In fact, Prayer During the Day and a similarly largely-invariable Compline are the only daily prayer services that can be actually prayed out of Common Worship: Daily Prayer itself; using the Common Worship morning and evening prayer lectionary, which operates on a more Cranmerian model, requires a separate volume. Thus, as a result of this embrace of late 20th-century liturgical scholarship, Cranmer’s criticism of late medieval daily prayer no ed at the beginning of this paper – that it neglected the full use of scripture and the psalter – can now be applied to the authorized liturgies of Cranmer’s own Church of England.

Evaluating the Liturgical Revolution: A Defense of Cranmer’s Office

Before turning to an evaluation of this liturgical transformation and the scholarship underlying it, it is worth first quickly reviewing the argument thus far. We’ve seen that the liturgical historians of the mid-to- late 20th century postulated a basic division between two early types of Christian daily prayer. ‘Cathedral’ offices were for all Christians and were characterized by praise and intercession and limited use of psalmody and Scripture. ‘Monastic’ offices were for monks and were characterized by restrained ritual and the meditative praying of psalms and, in some cases, Scripture, all for the end of individual spiritual growth. Then the history of Christian daily prayer was cast by these same historians as a declension narrative; unfortunately, in their view, the cathedral offices gradually came to incorporate more and more monastic elements, which rendered them unsatisfying for lay audiences and increasingly made them the sole preserve of clergy praying alone.

On the basis of this account of liturgical history, Cranmer’s emphasis on the praying of all the psalms and the reading of almost all the Bible within the daily office came to seem mistaken. Rather than the reversion to pure patristic precedent that Cranmer himself aimed at – which would have meant, according to this historiography, a pure cathedral office – Cranmer provided us with a heavily monasticized office that distorts the true meaning of Christian daily prayer. As a result of this critique, liturgists have sought to change Anglican daily prayer liturgies to better reflect what this liturgical scholarship holds proper daily prayer should be. And they have, to some extent, succeeded. It is my contention, however, that this critique is a mistaken one, resting both on reductionistic liturgical scholarship and insufficiently defended arguments for the normativity of patristic practice and the incompatibility of praise and Scriptural edification in daily prayer. These together, I believe, prevent contemporary liturgists from seeing the strengths of Cranmer’s office.

Before unpacking this defense of Cranmer’s office, I want to first turn to the better-known case of the transformation of Anglican Communion rites under the influence of liturgical movement scholarship. I do so because the story in both cases is a similar one: scholarly reconstructions later found to have serious problems are used to criticize historic Anglican liturgy and norm contemporary practice. In the case of the Communion service, liturgical scholarship exemplified by Gregory Dix’s The Shape of the Liturgy postulated a putatively universal patristic liturgical order; Anglican liturgists then used that scholarship to judge the Communion services of the historic prayer books as wanting and propose new rites supposedly more closely aligned with the patristic model.³⁴One of best of the few scholarly accounts of the liturgical movement in Anglicanism (and more broadly) is John Fenwick and Bryan Spinks, Worship in Transition: The Twentieth Century Liturgical Movement (Bloomsbury, 1995). On the transformation of Anglican eucharistic liturgy under the influence of Liturgical Movement scholarship, see Samuel Bray, ‘The Book of Common Prayer as Text’, Faith & Worship 86 (Trinity 2020), p. 6-18. Their proposals were largely adopted, with the result that new communion services were produced across the Anglican Communion in the second half of the 20th century which represented – and were understood by their proponents as being – a radical break with the previous prayer book tradition in a way that previous revisions to the prayer book were not.³⁵See Bray, ‘The Book of Common Prayer as Text’, 6.

But unfortunately, the liturgical scholarship upon which this reconstruction was based has proven to have significant problems. More recent scholarship has cast doubt upon the authenticity of the Apostolic Tradition ascribed to the second-to-third century Roman bishop Hippolytus, which Liturgical Movement scholars often held up as the model of pure patristic liturgy to be used to norm contemporary practice.³⁶As Bray notes in ‘The Book of Common Prayer as Text’, 7, drawing in particular upon the work of Bryan Spinks. The very idea of a uniform eucharistic shape undergirding both Dix’s scholarship and mid-twentieth-century liturgical reform has been subjected to heavy criticism.³⁷Bryan Spinks’ Do this in Remembrance of Me: The Eucharist from the Early Church to the Present Day (SCM Press, 2013) is perhaps the most important attempt to replace Dix’s The Shape of the Liturgy, providing a comprehensive history of eucharistic worship that explicitly rejects Dix’s ‘shape’ view. More fundamentally, critics have raised the question of why, exactly, the fourth century is the liturgical golden age to which contemporary liturgy must conform. Even Liturgical Movement scholars like Bradshaw have admitted that contemporary liturgical reform has been driven by insufficiently interrogated arguments that contemporary liturgy should as a matter of course conform to patristic example (or our best reconstructions thereof).³⁸Bradshaw, ‘Daily Prayer’, 69; See also P. Bradshaw, ‘Doing What the Early Church Did?’, Theology 123:3 (2020), p. 183–90. Thus, not only has much of specific scholarship upon which the transformation of our eucharistic worship was grounded been contested or debunked, but the very goal of seeking conformity to a patristic model for the Eucharist has been challenged.

I contend that the story is much the same for the daily office: the scholarship underlying a neat monastic-versus-cathedral dichotomy has been challenged and the argument for conformity to a (probably nonexistent) uniform patristic precedent has been more often assumed than made. To begin with the dichotomy between ‘cathedral’ and ‘monastic’ styles of daily prayer, Andrew McGowan has argued convincingly that while the ‘cathedral’ versus ‘monastic’ typology can help us think about the possibilities of ancient Christian communal prayer, these distinctions nevertheless represent ‘ideal types’ constructed by later interpreters rather than ‘fixed or clear ancient realities.’³⁹A. McGowan, Ancient Christian Worship (Baker, 2014), p, 213–14. This does not mean that we cannot meaningfully talk about ‘monastic’ or ‘cathedral’ tendencies. But it does mean that we ought not to postulate the existence of a clear and self-conscious ‘cathedral’ model of prayer as anything other than a scholarly invention. But of course, the case against Cranmer’s office depends on exactly such a postulate! Just as we have seen with the Eucharist, one danger of basing modern liturgy upon scholarly reconstructions of early Christian worship is that the scholarly consensus changes, especially given the fragmentary and difficult nature of much of our evidence for the earliest Christian liturgies.

Perhaps more importantly, Liturgical Movement proposals for the daily office often assume rather than explicitly argue that the task of Christian liturgist is to seek conformity to patristic example, even granting that such patristic example could be confidently established. However, it is not clear to me that such an assumption should be granted. Why, after all, should we assume (as Liturgical Movement activism so often did) that the story of Christian liturgy is one of development until the fourth century and then decline from patristic perfection?⁴⁰It is worth noting that the Liturgical Movement historical narrative is odder than biblicist Protestant accounts which narrate church history as a story of simple decline from apostolic perfection. The Liturgical Movement narrative seems to depend upon the Holy Spirit guiding the church in the development of liturgical practice for four hundred years (into the Constantinian period!) and then disappearing from the scene, with further changes examples of decline or confusion rather than further progress. Why this is so is never quite clear. I am thankful to Samuel Bray for this observation. It seems to me more plausible to read liturgical history, like Christian history as a whole, as a complex mix of productive development and decline and to be at least somewhat cautious about the confidence with which we can identify either. Why should we assume that, in our case, ‘monasticization’ is always and only a bad thing, or that the importation of ‘monastic’ elements always adulterates daily prayer rites? Those who advocated for increased psalmody and Scripture in Christian daily prayer for all people, not just for monks, presumably saw this as an improvement rather than a diminishment. It is worth at least asking why they did so rather than embracing a fourth-century fundamentalism in our liturgy.

To be sure, it is true that Cranmer sought to conform his daily prayer services to his reconstruction of universal patristic precedent and indulged in his own rhetoric of tragic decline from a pristine liturgical past. It is also true that contemporary liturgical scholarship strongly suggests that Cranmer’s godly and decent order was no more universal than ‘cathedral’ daily prayer. Now, it is worth remembering that conformity to patristic practice was not Cranmer’s only criterion for liturgical revision; the enactment of the gospel of justification by faith alone functioned as an arguably more important guiding principle in his liturgical work.⁴¹Zac Hicks makes this point well in Worship by Faith Alone: Thomas Cranmer, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Reformation of Liturgy (Intervarsity Press, 2023), although to my mind he underestimates the significance of the ‘Third Use’ of the Law in Cranmer’s liturgy. See also J.I. Packer, The Gospel in the Prayer Book (The Marcham Manor Press, 1966). But it must be admitted that, yes, Cranmer’s historical scholarship was faulty, and that his reconstruction of what he thought was early Christian daily prayer reflects medieval developments. Still, it is not clear that this warrants condemnation of his liturgy. Is it really necessary that our worship be based on the example of the earliest possible liturgies?

I believe that the answer to this is no, for to answer it in the affirmative would unjustly constrain the liberty of the church. I want to draw upon the thought of Richard Hooker to explain why. Richard Hooker, in fact, addresses this very question (albeit, of course, with very different interlocutors) in Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, primarily in Book IV. There, Hooker demurs from his disciplinarian opponents’ advocacy for absolute conformity to apostolic example as found in the Bible for all matters of church order. It is true, he notes, that the church today and the that of the apostles share a common aim – ‘the glorie of God and the good of his Church was the thing which the Apostles aymed at, and therefore ought to bee the marke whereat we also levell’ – but this does not mean exact emulation of all apostolic ‘waies and meanes.’⁴²Richard Hooker, The Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie IV.2.3 in W. Speed Hill, general editor, The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977-1990), Vol. 1, 278. Operating on a basic distinctions between things necessary to salvation, which the church has no capacity to alter, and things accessory to salvation, which the church may change, Hooker argues that matters pertaining to the ‘externall regiment of the Church’ are part of the latter category, and that the church is thus free to change them.⁴³Hooker, Lawes III.3.4, FLE I, 212. Ironically, given that many critics of the prayer book often criticize its emphasis on liturgical uniformity, Hooker helps us see that the Liturgical Movement is committed to a yet stronger form of liturgical inflexibility. For Hooker (and the classical Anglican tradition more broadly), the demand for uniformity is an assertion of the right of a given individual church body to require adherence to its set liturgies. But the principle of conformity to patristic example central to Liturgical Movement liturgical thinking means that, in principle, all Christian daily prayer everywhere should conform to the ‘cathedral’ model, with departures from it as problems to be addressed rather than an appropriate diversity in external ceremonies.⁴⁴The case of the Communion service is once again instructive here. It is remarkable how much more similar post-Liturgical Movement liturgies are across church bodies than was the case beforehand. Over and over again, one finds that distinctive elements of Lutheran or Anglican or Roman Catholic or Presbyterian eucharistic worship have largely dropped away. One can, of course, read this as a heartening convergence around a new consensus. But it could equally be considered the destruction of liturgical diversity in the name of a demanding principle of liturgical uniformity across the entire Church of Christ.

Moreover, the liberty of Christian churches is not the only worth defending in its own right; Hooker helps us see that a church’s ability to frame its external forms of worship helps it fulfill its mission. If indeed the church wishes to fulfill the apostolic aim of glorifying God and edifying God’s people, this will, Hooker believes, at times require departure from the details of ancient liturgies or church orders. He asks, ‘seeing those rites and orders may be at one time more, which at an other are less available unto that purpose [namely, God’s glory and the good of the church]: what reason is there in these things to urge the state of one onely age, as a patterne for all to follow?’⁴⁵Hooker, Lawes IV.2.3, FLE I, 278. While Hooker is certainly respectful of antiquity, he opposes any attempt to set a specific age as definitive for the church’s external life because churches need to be alert to what best contributes to God’s glory and the people’s edification in a given moment. While Hooker’s opponents have fixed the apostolic age rather than the fourth century as the pinnacle of Christian life, the arguments he makes against the disciplinarians apply equally well to Liturgical Movement advocates. Simply put, for Hooker, there is nothing stopping us from judging the focus on scripture and psalmody characteristic of the ‘monasticized’ daily office as a beneficial development worth emulating rather than simply a decline from past glory. A simple argument from antiquity will not do.

Now, it is important to note that not all those who seek to conform the office to the ‘cathedral’ model argue for adherence to a primitive past for its own sake. As mentioned above, Bradshaw has written critically of this tendency. To his credit, he offers (as we have seen above) a theological and not merely chronological argument for reform of Anglican daily prayer according to the cathedral model. But in this argument, Bradshaw falls prey to assuming, rather than proving, a basic opposition and incompatibility grounded upon his reconstruction of liturgical history. Because he sees ‘monastic’ and ‘cathedral’ models emerging as distinct types of daily prayer with very different features, he assumes an opposition between the spirits of ‘cathedral’ and of ‘monastic’ prayer services, between praise and intercession on one hand and meditative encounter with Scripture for individual edification on the other.⁴⁶Bradshaw, ‘Daily Prayer’, 74. As a result, any combination of the two services must be an intermixture of opposites, and one that he seems to think will fall in a ‘monastic’ direction. He believes that the experience of traditional Anglican daily prayer, for example, is likely to be understood ‘along principally monastic lines: that [prayers] are fulfilling a religious duty … and that they are intended to derive understanding and spiritual benefit from the reading’ rather than as ‘participation in the priestly prayer of Christ’ of praise and intercession.⁴⁷Bradshaw, ‘Daily Prayer’, 74. Thus, since he argues that services which emphasize the hearing of the Word cannot serve well for praise and intercession, he thus requires on those grounds (rather than strictly historical ones) that Anglican daily prayer be reformed along a cathedral model.⁴⁸Ibid

But turning to Cranmer’s daily prayer orders and Hooker’s Lawes will help us see that this is simply not an incompatibility that we need to grant. Rather, this assumed incompatibility prevents Bradshaw from seeing the genius of Cranmer’s liturgy in its combination of edification, praise, and intercession. Now, it is certainly true that Cranmer conceived of the daily office in terms of spiritual edification. The regular recitation of Scripture in the office, Cranmer wrote in the 1549 preface, helps the clergy ‘be stirred up to godliness themselfes, and be the more able to exhort other by wholesome doctrine, and to confute them that were adversaries to the trueth’ and makes the laity ‘continuallye profite more and more in the knowledge of God, and bee the more inflamed with the love of his true religion.’⁴⁹Cummings, The Book of Common Prayer, 4. But Cranmer did not see this service as one exclusively of edification and therefore somehow opposed to praise and intercession. After all, the invitation to the confession added to the beginning of morning and evening prayer in 1552 asserts that the congregation is gathered:

to render thankes for the greate benefites that we have received at his hands, to sette furth his moste worthie praise, to heare his moste holye worde, and to aske those thynges whiche be requisite and necessarie, aswel for the bodye as the soule.⁵⁰Cummings, The Book of Common Prayer, 103.

In this description, praise, thanksgiving, hearing of Scripture, and intercession – that is, both ‘cathedral’ and ‘monastic’ elements – are all woven together. What’s more, the liturgy itself matches the description: these elements are all woven together in the praying of the office itself as well.

Lest one worry that this is a matter of Cranmer’s own over-optimism about the possibilities of his rite, Richard Hooker saw precisely this combination of praise and Scripture as one of the great strengths of the English liturgy. He argues that a service of only praise and intercession or only Scriptural instruction could easily weary us; prayer in particular requires a ‘vehement attention’ that is difficult to sustain for long periods.⁵¹Hooker, Lawes V.34.1, FLE II, 140. Thus, he argues, the Church of England has seen fit to combine the two so that by this variety, the parts of the mind involved in prayer and in hearing scripture would not ‘feele any greate weariness, and yeat each be a spurre to [the] other.’⁵²Ibid As he puts it,

prayer kindleth our desire to behold God by speculation; and the minde delighted with that contemplative sight of God taketh everie where newe inflammations to pray, the riches of the mysteries of heavenlie wisdome continuallie stirringe up in us correspondent desires towards him.⁵³Hooker, Lawes V.34.1, FLE II, 140.

That is, prayer increases our desire to know God – leading us to Scripture – while learning from Scripture about God’s grace and goodness leads us to prayer. In an exceedingly lovely passage, Hooker links both praise and instruction with angelic mediation:

Betwene the throne of God in heaven and his Church upon earth here militant if it be so that the Angels have theire continuall intercorse, where should we finde the same more verified thenin these two ghostlie exercises, the one ‘Doctrine’, the other ‘Prayer’? For what is thassemblinge of the Church to learne, but the receivinge of Angels descended from above? What to pray, but the sending of Angels upward? His heavenly inspirations and our holie desires are as so many Angels of entercorse and comerce betwne God and us.⁵⁴Ibid

On Hooker’s reading, rather than a confused juxtaposition of confusing principles, the combination of Scriptural edification and prayer mirrors the double movement of angels ascending and descending. We simply need not accept the basic opposition that Bradshaw’s critique of Cranmer’s daily prayer office depends upon. Rather, the liturgy itself and Hooker’s commentary upon it invites us to see Cranmer’s service as integrating both praise and instruction for the deepening of both.

To sum up, I have argued that there are three primary problems with the Liturgical Movement critique of Cranmer’s daily prayer service. First, the criticism of Cranmer’s office that I have traced in this paper rests upon outdated liturgical scholarship that views the ‘cathedral’ and ‘monastic’ styles of daily prayer as historical realities rather than categories of scholarly analysis. Second, it wrongly assumes that the goal of contemporary liturgical practice is conformity with a fourth-century golden age. Even if we could be more confident in our reconstruction of patristic liturgical practice, such conformity is neither necessary nor beneficial. Rather, as Hooker shows us, demands for universal Christian conformity to a single model such as liturgy infringe upon the freedom of individual church bodies and prevent them from framing their external life according to the exigencies of their particular situation. Third, even critics who avoid the second issue wrongly assume that praise and Scriptural edification cannot coexist in a daily prayer liturgy because they ascribe the former to ‘cathedral’ and the latter to ‘monastic’ styles of daily prayer. Yet an examination of the liturgy itself as well as Hooker’s early commentary upon it shows us that we need not grant such an opposition. Instead, the combination of the two may well be a particular strength of Cranmer’s daily prayer liturgy.

Indeed, my own life of prayer has confirmed Hooker’s insight that the combination of prayer and instruction is the great genius of Cranmer’s morning and evening prayer services. I cannot imagine a better way to praise God than using the inspired texts of praise he has given us in the psalter. I find that long scripture lessons give me more cause to praise God and intercede for the world rather than less. Conversely, then, I cannot imagine a better way to prepare to hear God’s Word and respond to it than confession, praise, intercession, and thanksgiving. I am convinced that the method of engaging with Scripture that Cranmer has given us – even if it is grounded in a not-entirely-accurate picture of early Christian prayer practices – remains immensely valuable today. It still fulfills excellently the purpose of (to paraphrase Cranmer) stirring us up to godliness and inflaming our hearts with love of God. Against critiques that cast Cranmer’s focus on psalmody in course and lectio continua Scripture as an anachronistic failure, we should be unafraid to celebrate it as a great gift.