The Most Rev. Peter D. Robinson is the Presiding Bishop of the United Episcopal Church. He also serves as ordinary of the Missionary Diocese of the East and vicar of Good Shepherd Anglican Church in Waynesboro, Virginia.
Growing up in the Church of England the Book of Common Prayer (“BCP”) was more of a tool and a reference point than anything else. By the time I came along, it was not the exclusive liturgy of the Church, and modest attempts to modernize the liturgy were being made in the form of the…
I spent an interesting twenty minutes on Monday reading an article entitled, “The Anglican Appeal to Lutheran Sources: Philipp Melanchthon’s Reputation in 17th Century England” by Dewey D. Wallace Jr., which first appeared in the Journal of the Historical Society of the PEC in 1983. In it, Wallace outlines the Philippist influence on the English…
Anglicans tend to worry about liturgy in the same way that cage-stage Calvinists worry about the Ordo Salutis – obsessively. This can blind them to the fact that the Eucharistic Rite of the Book of Common Prayer is not a unique creation, but the product of the widespread endeavor to reform the liturgy in accordance…
Scanning through the documents pertaining to the Anglo-Prussian Bishopric of Jerusalem recently helped to focus my mind on what one might call the proto-ecumenical movement. The nineteenth century was an age of rampant denominationalism, but it also saw the first tentative moves toward ecumenicism. Unlike twentieth-century ecumenicism, which at times sounded like an exercise in…
As I have noted previously, Cranmer’s Eucharistic liturgy of 1552 had a distinctive shape – Law-Gospel-Repentance-Supper-Thanksgiving – which was retained for most Anglican rites down to the middle of the twentieth century. The main, and for almost two hundred years the only, exception was that of the Scottish Episcopal Church, which was a hybrid of…
One of the old saws when I was training for the ministry, was that Cranmer had the shape of the Communion service all wrong. This assertion was, of course, based on a 1945 book called The Shape of the Liturgy by an Anglican Benedictine called Gregory Dix. Leaving aside the fact that Dix rejected Cranmer’s…
Intellectually, one grasps that someone of 96 is at the close of their earthly life, but when someone who has been a comforting, familiar, and wise public figure not only for the whole of one’s own life but for a goodly number of years before, steps off the stage into eternity it still comes as…
One of the doctrines that were always considered representative of the Old High Church school within Anglicanism, is that of Baptismal Regeneration. Whilst not usually controversial, there have been occasional flare-ups over it, of which the best known is the Gorham Case of 1848-50. The roots of this doctrine lie in Holy Scripture, for example,…
I came across this somewhat humorous description of Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575) when engaged in some random reading about the Swiss Reformation. The reference is apt because if you look at portraits of Bullinger painted from the 1540s onwards he sports the grandest of all the beards of the Reformation, singularly long and full, spreading out…
In this case, “How far, etc…?” is being asked about the English Reformation, and its formularies. The reason it is being asked is to try and give shape to the concept of ‘Confessional Anglicanism’ – an idea which has been batted around a lot over the last five years. Unfortunately, much of the discussion has…
