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On Saintly Celebration
Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical Body of your Son: Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you; through Jesus…
Tracts for the Times 2.0
The launch of the Oxford Movement is traditionally dated (following John Henry Newman’s reckoning) from John Keble’s Assize sermon on Bastille Day, July 14, 1833. But it wasn’t until the inauguration of The Tracts for the Times, also in 1833, that the Oxford Movement became a public movement for the renewal of the Church of…
Commandment Boards and Catechesis
Recently my friend John Wallace, an avid church-crawler, posted on Facebook a photograph he had taken of the old commandment boards from the original building (built 1752-3) of Trinity-on-the-Green, New Haven, CT. The commandment or decalogue boards originally hung behind the Communion table. Though not very familiar to most Anglicans today, they were a staple…
Common Authority in the Midst of Uncommon Prayer
The advent of the ACNA 2019 Book of Common Prayer raises an important question: what authority does it have in comparison with the other historic Books of Common Prayer? After all, the 1979 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer varies from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer not merely in liturgical form but also in doctrine…
Calvinism and Eucharistic Sacrifice
Anyone who reads the early church fathers (Irenaeus, Tertullian, etc.), knows that they used the language of ‘sacrifice’ to describe the Eucharist. The Protestant Reformers also read the fathers, and read them more thoroughly than most of us today. As recent scholarship in Post-Reformation Reformed theology has shown, for all the confessional agreement among the…
Clarifying Confusion: An open letter from Jefferies to Keane
Dear Mr. Keane — You wrote that you were confused by my comments, so I wanted to make an effort at public clarification. First, as a general proviso: In the podcast interview with Fr. Gerry, I was (as you noted) speaking off the cuff, not only that but also with an awareness of who I…
The Love of Churches
“He stopped and looked up, recognising the place as a church. The thought quickly came to him that since he was tired he might rest there; so that after a moment he had in turn pushed up the leathern curtain and gone in. It was a temple of the old persuasion, and there had evidently…
The ACNA Prayerbook: Faithful to the 1662 BCP?
Last month, Gerald McDermott interviewed the Rev. Ben Jefferies, the secretary of the Liturgy and Common Worship Task Force, regarding the 2019 Book of Common Prayer. In the wake of this interview, a massive debate has raged across the Anglican side of social media about whether or not, as Fr. Jefferies has claimed, the 2019…
Response to Jefferies: 1662BCP a norm for ACNA?
On Beeson Divinity School’s Anglican podcast, Gerald McDermott recently interviewed Ben Jefferies, Secretary of the ACNA liturgical committee. McDermott and Jefferies discuss the ACNA’s 2019 Prayer Book. Jefferies’s characterization of the new book leaves me bewildered. A centerpiece of the discussion is the normativity of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. Jefferies calls it the…
Cranmer and Ussher – ‘Bookends’ of the English Reformation
Today marks two anniversaries – the martyrdom of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury in 1556, and the death of Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh in 1656. In some respects, these two are the intellectual ‘bookends’ of the English Reformation, with Cranmer being in some respects the pioneer of the English Reformation, and Ussher perhaps the…