The Tyranny of the Codex — Worship of Technology and American Prayer Book Revision
“Oh my God, these are beautiful!” My wife and I had just opened the box from Church Publishing and pulled out the monogrammed, leather-bound, Gilt-Edged 1979 BCP/1982 Hymnal combinations we had ordered as our anniversary gifts to each other. They looked good, they smelled divine, and they had ribbons to mark each part of the liturgy for the day. But they were more than just beautiful objects of art. They were a tangible link to our faith. As young Episcopalians who had both come from outside the tradition, they marked a membership in our church in a real, material way.
It wasn’t just us. Anglicans have high regard for our Prayer Books. The Windsor Report of 2004 noted, “Throughout its history, the Anglican Communion has been sustained by a common pattern of liturgical life rooted in the tradition of the Books of Common Prayer.” While all of the Anglican prayer books descend from the 1662 English BCP, the diversity that can be seen between English-language descendants like the Irish Book of Common Prayer and a New Zealand Prayer Book exposes the fact that while some there are still common linguistic and liturgical patterns, each province of the Anglican Communion has adapted the prayer book tradition to local language and culture, sometimes in very idiosyncratic ways.
Let me be honest and confess my love for the 1979. It is the only Prayer Book I have ever known. Its liturgies formed me as a new Episcopalian Christian. My two children have been baptized using it, and I have buried many people I love using it. Nevertheless, I am aware of its shortcomings. At the time of its revision, many complained that it didn’t go far enough in using expansive and inclusive language, and that lack has only become more apparent over the nearly forty years of its use. It left several ecumenical and interfaith difficulties in its text (Retention of the Filioque despite our agreements with the Orthodox and the readings for Good Friday being two examples.) And Prayer C? While I use it during Lent for its brilliant retention of penitential language, I think it’s hard to deny that it could have benefitted some more trial use and revision.
Prayer Book Revision has always been fraught with peril. Our first proposed American revision of the 1662 English BCP (the 1786) was rejected because of perceived Universalist and Anti-Trinitarian tendencies. We are only in our fourth revision of the American prayer book — the original 1789 BCP being revised in a minor way in 1892, and a little more thoroughly in 1928. Nothing prepared the church for the upheaval caused by the revision resulting in the 1979 BCP.
Opponents labeled the ’79 revision as a complete change in theology, and in many ways they were right. The most sweeping change was that Baptism was restored to its rightful place as a Sunday sacrament rather than a Saturday family affair. Eucharist was assumed as the principal service of an Episcopal Parish on Sunday morning. The Eucharistic Prayers were provided in both Sacred English and Modern English, and ordered along the ideas put forth around the (now somewhat discredited) four-action “Shape of the Liturgy” championed by Dom Gregory Dix and the Liturgical Movement.
When I became an Episcopalian in 1985, members of my Kentucky parish were still muttering about “The New Prayer Book,” which some of them felt had been delivered in a very high-handed way. In fact, the 79 prayer book was a source of schism, often cited for better or for worse along with the admission of women to the ordained ministry as a Casus Belli for the self-identified “Continuing Anglican Movement.”
Episcopalians of a certain age hear “Prayer Book Revision,” and a shudder runs through them. I have heard several times, “I lived through one, and I don’t want to live through another.” It needs to be understood that many Episcopalians experienced that period as a negative one. We also need to recognize the magisterial and patriarchal process by which that revision was handled. Many of the decisions were made in (literally) smoke-filled rooms of (mostly) male liturgical scholars. At the end of the process, after the required approvals, the 1928 Prayer Books were removed from Episcopal Church pews and replaced with 1979 ones. Linked with the change from the 1940 to the 1982 Hymnal, this process had a hefty price tag from the national church all the way down to the parish. When people oppose “Prayer Book Revision,” they are talking out of the only experience they have had with this process.
I hear and agree with the call from our more progressive liturgists that it is time to move forward with work on our liturgies. But I also understand the reality of what this process felt like for people in the pews in the 1970s. I wonder if the entire problem with our discussion has to do with the fetishization of a technology. Im not talking about computers or iPads, or Smartphones here — I’m talking about the codex.
When we talk about the Book of Common Prayer, people envision a black, red or blue book with a cross on the cover. But that’s not the book, any more than the book of Genesis is a separate printed volume. The Book of Common Prayer can be a separate volume, or an e-text, or a web page, or part of a larger volume. What we are talking about in our popular conception is actually a codex, “a book constructed of a number of sheets of paper, vellum, papyrus, or similar materials”.
The codex, as opposed to a scroll, a tablet or an e-text, was a new technology at the time of the emergence of Christianity. It was more transportable and easier to copy than the preceding scrolls or tablets. This technology helped our forbearers spread the letters of Paul and the Gospels quickly. Gutenberg’s press made the codex even more ascendant as costs decreased. Until the advent of the Information Age, the codex reigned supreme as the method of transmitting information.
I would submit that many of our assumptions about “Prayer Book Revision” have to do with thinking rooted in this technology of the codex. People who fear revision talk about the costs associated based on thoughts of paper and binding. The fear that something will be imposed magisterially also rises from the 79 process, in which the experimental “Zebra” and “Green” books were not universally circulated due to the cost of requiring a book for each person in the pews. But this fear ignores our ability to use the internet for distribution and feedback in a way that was impossible in the 70s, and the fact that many churches already use full or partial text bulletins for ease of use.
Likewise, I wonder if the strong impetus to “Revise the Prayer Book” among progressives is not sometimes locked into the same technological bias towards the codex. As American Episcopalians, we are used to having one authorized liturgical set of texts inside one set of covers, nicely set in Sabon. If there are problems with that text, should we not just replace it outright?
Part of our problem in the Episcopal Church is how we handle authorization of our liturgical texts. Only the Prayer Book is generally authorized, meaning that any priest can use it, and diocesan bishops do not have the authority to forbid its use. We also have two other levels of texts — the Book of Occasional Services, which is considered authorized unless a bishop specifically forbids the use of its texts, and provisional texts (such as Enriching our Worship) which have to be positively and specifically authorized by the diocesan for use. The problem is that when all of our liturgical experimentation happens at the level of provisional texts, the amount of use from which to draw feedback is severely curtailed. What we need is a way to create generally authorized liturgies that are intended to be temporary to move towards more permanent ones. Imagine what Prayer C could have looked like with a few years of use and feedback via the Internet.
While the idea of generally authorized liturgies not in the Book of Common Prayer is outside our American experience, it is normative in other parts of the Anglican Communion. The Scottish Episcopal Church currently has three authorized Eucharistic liturgies — that of 1929, 1970, and 1982. Also, they have “Permitted changes to the 1982 Liturgy” that reflects work done since that liturgy was authored. This kind of “Cascading revision” is part of their history and also ours, since our first Eucharistic prayer was drawn in part from the Scottish “Wee Bookies” of the 1700s. It transforms liturgical revision from a lurching, zero-sum struggle into a more organic, continual conversation. Technological advances can facilitate this kind of process in ways that were unthinkable even thirty years ago.
Perhaps we are a “People of a book,” but do we have to be people of a codex? Do we have to continue to either push or fear liturgical revision based on the love or dislike of what is currently between two covers with a cross on it? What would it look like if we opened ourselves up to other models that are not limited by paper-bound technology? I continue to treasure the codexes in my life, including the BCP/Hymnals my wife and I bought each other. But I wonder if we are not binding ourselves in the stitching of them by continuing to think in page-bound ways of how we raise our hearts to God.
