Articles by Peter D. Robinson

Peter D. Robinson

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.


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Eighteenth-Century Anglican Worship: Architecture

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series Robinson: 18th-Century Anglican Worship

Part 5. Architecture Until the mid-nineteenth century, most of England’s churches were mediaeval structures swiftly adapted to reformed worship in 1559-1562, with the introduction of the 1559 Prayer Book and the accompanying Elizabethan Injunctions. These had then been subjected to a process of slow evolution over the next two centuries as reformed worship matured and…

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Eighteenth-Century Anglican Worship: Ceremonial

This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series Robinson: 18th-Century Anglican Worship

Part 4. Ceremonial We do not think of 1700s Anglicanism as being particularly interested in ceremonial, but there was a good deal left over from Lancelot Andrewes and his school, with their concern for the beauty of holiness. There was a basic decorum to public worship, which included the basic Anglican rule of “sit to…

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Eighteenth-Century Anglican Worship: Music

This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Robinson: 18th-Century Anglican Worship

Part 2: Music Anglicanism in the 1700s had two distinct musical traditions, which, for the sake of convenience I will call “cathedral” and “parish.” In using those terms, it must be remembered that the cathedral style of worship was also maintained by other places having a choral foundation including the Chapel Royal, the Royal Peculiars…

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Eighteenth-Century Anglican Worship: The Liturgy

This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Robinson: 18th-Century Anglican Worship

Part 1: The Liturgy In the eighteenth century, liturgy meant the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. The colonies used the BCP of the parent church, and Ireland’s 1666 edition was very little different from the main text. The American BCP, of course, does not appear until nearly the end of the century, and differed only…

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Liturgy as Collective Memory and Tool

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…

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Melanchthon and Anglicanism

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…

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OUR GERMAN COUSINS: LITURGY IN THE EVANGELICAL AND REFORMED CHURCH

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…

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The Greater Church

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…

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The 1928 and Cranmer’s Shape

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…

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