Many Christians, whether they count themselves Reformed or not, speak of the Scottish Episcopalians as a less Reformed wing of the Anglican world: the puritans judge the Reformed credentials of Anglicanism by its conformity to puritanism, and the advanced Anglo-Catholics wish to ditch Reformed Protestantism altogether. Because of this mistake made by people on both sides, each for his own reasons, I want to show some things here about the Reformed nature of the Scottish liturgy, which probably will displease both the Romanizers and the Truly Reformed™, and perhaps also the more-Lutheran-than-thous. For the Americans, it seems good to know the significance of the Scottish liturgy that influenced their own after American independence; and for all Anglicans, that this is a Reformed heritage, continuing to the 1928 American Book of Common Prayer and, God willing, beyond.
The Reformed History of the Scots Episcopalians
First, a bit of history. The Scots Episcopalians, because of their Nonjuror history of rejecting allegiance to William of Orange and then the Hanoverian kings named George, are often considered ultra-high churchmen, or else schismatics with a dangerous tendency toward the Romish religion of the ousted Stuarts and other unreformed faiths, such as the confession of the Russians and Greeks. Not till the 19th century, in new circumstances and a drive for formal fellowship with the official Church of England, did the Scots adopt the 39 Articles. As Englishmen and Americans are wont to misunderstand the Chinese, so are they often kept by a silent ethnocentrism from understanding their nearer cultural neighbours, including the Scots. Not having the 39 Articles, it is often assumed, the Scots faffed about with no confession at all, and no clear Protestant convictions. This is far from the truth. Until they adopted the 39 Articles used by the then United Church of England and Ireland, the Episcopalians of Scotland used the Scots Confession (1560). Among the Scots Confession’s six authors was the redoubtable John Knox, and the Scots Episcopalians indeed considered Knox one of their own Reformers.
At the time of the “Glorious Revolution” in England in 1688, when all of the Scottish bishops refused to swear allegiance to William of Orange as king, and Presbyterianism (both the polity and the Westminster Standards) was therefore imposed upon Scotland, the Church of Scotland had not yet widely adopted the Prayer Book forms of liturgy; over time, however, the Reformed Scots who remained faithful to the now-ousted episcopate increasingly used the 1662 English Prayer Book for most services together with the Holy Communion office from the 1637 Scottish Prayer Book, and the Holy Communion office continued to evolve through various “wee bookies.” All this while, the Scots Episcopalians continued with the Scots Confession as their own Reformed confession, rather than the Westminster of the sub-Reformed puritans.
The Scots Episcopalians also maintained Reformed Protestant principles even as they hoped for churchly reunion with the Russians and Greeks. In 1716, the Scots Episcopalians and the other Nonjurors actively pursued the irenic goal of reunion with the churches of those nations within the Holy Catholic Church. Even in compromise and toleration of other churches’ customs and theology for the sake of union, however, they declared themselves unable to agree with the Russians and Greeks on (1) the binding authority of canons of ancient general councils, (2) dulia and hyperdulia to the Mother of God, (3) direct invocation of angels and departed saints, (4) the manner in which the elements in the Lord’s Supper become the body and blood of Christ, and (5) worship of images:[1]
- Tho’ they have a great reverence for the Canons of ancient general Councils, yet they allow them not the same authority as is due to the Sacred Text [i.e., Holy Scripture]; and think, they may be dispens’d with by the governours of the Church, where charity or necessity require.
- Tho’ they call the Mother of our Lord blessed, and magnify the grace of God which so highly exalted her, yet are they afraid of giving the glory of God to a creature, or to run into any extreme by blessing and magnifying her: and do hence rather chuse to bless and magnify God, for the high grace and honour conferred upon her, and for the benefits which we receive by that means.
- Tho’ they believe that both Angels and Saints have joy in the conversion of a sinner, and in the progress of a Christian, and do unite with us in our prayers and thanksgivings, when rightly offered to God in the communion of the Church; yet are they jealous of detracting in the least from the Mediation of Jesus Christ; and therefore cannot use a direct Invocation to any of them, the ever blessed Virgin herself not excepted; while we desire nevertheless to join with these in spirit, and to communicate with them in their perfect Charity.
- Tho’ they believe a divine mystery in the Holy Eucharist, through the Invocation of the Holy Spirit upon the elements, whereby the faithful do verily and indeed receive the Body and Blood of Christ; they believe it yet to be after a manner which flesh and blood cannot conceive. And seeing no sufficient ground from Scripture or Tradition to determine the manner of it, are for leaving it indefinite and undetermined; so that every one may freely, according to Christ’s own institution and meaning, receive the same in faith, and may also worship Christ in spirit, as verily and indeed present, without being obliged to worship the sacred Symbols of His presence.
- Tho’ they honour the memory of all the faithful Witnesses of Christ, and count it not in itself unlawful to assist the imagination by pictures and representations of them and their glorious acts and sufferings, they are yet afraid of giving thereby, on one hand, scandal to the Jews and Mahometans, or on the other, to many well meaning Christians. And they are moreover apprehensive that, tho’ the wise may be safe from receiving any damage by a wrong application, yet many among the vulgar may come thereby to be ensnared, and be carried to symbolize too much with the custom of idolaters without designing it. To prevent which, they therefore propose, that the 9th Article of the second Council of Nice, concerning the Worship [i.e., outward honouring] of Images, be so explained by the wisdom of the Bishops and Patriarchs of the Oriental Church, as to make it inoffensive, and to remove the scandal which may be occasion’d by a direct application to them.
On these five points the Nonjurors said they could not, “at present, so perfectly agree” with the Greeks and Russians.
Disagreements on those five points reflect the Reformed character of the Scottish liturgy. What Scripture does not teach, the Scots did not include as worship. Rather than accepting the veneration of images, the Scots in line with the Council of Frankfurt willingly acknowledged only “that the use of images in churches is not only lawful, but may be serviceable for representing the history of the Saints, for refreshing the memory and moving the devotion of the people.”[2] Rather than bless and magnify the Virgin Mary herself, the Scots blessed God in the Magnificat and elsewhere “for the high grace and honour conferred upon her, and for the benefits which we receive by that means.” Rather than invoke saints and angels in prayer, the Scots expected them to “unite with us in our prayers and thanksgivings, when rightly offered to God in the communion of the Church.” And in the Lord’s Supper, rather than accept a doctrine that seemed foreign to Scripture and the fathers, they held their ground for their own church in the hope that future understanding would deepen.
This is the context in which we ought to read the Scottish liturgy, that we may understand it aright.
The Prayer of Consecration
Just as the English liturgy must be understood on its own terms, and not judged according to the liturgical norms of Rome, Constantinople, or any other particular church,[3] so must the Scottish. In the office of Holy Communion, the Prayer of Consecration essentially needs two things: some form of the biblical narrative of Christ’s institution, and some form of petition for the Holy Ghost’s sacramental use of some particular bread and wine – not any old bread and wine you retrieve in your kitchen as you watch a live stream. So long as a Prayer of Consecration meets these basic requirements, whether it be a Lutheran canon with just the words of institution and the Lord’s Prayer, or the Anaphora of Addai and Mari with an explicit epiclesis (invocation for the Holy Ghost to hallow the bread and wine) and a diffuse institution narrative but no explicit words of institution, such a prayer is sacramentally valid. For an unimpeachably Reformed example of an epiclesis, one may see what the puritan divine Richard Baxter wrote in his 1661 proposal to reform the Book of Common Prayer: “Sanctify these thy creatures of bread and wine, which according to thy will we set apart to this holy use, that they may be sacramentally, the body and blood of thy Son Jesus Christ.” These two requirements satisfied, for an institution narrative and an invocation asking God to hallow the sacrament, let us judge the Scottish office of Holy Communion on its own terms.
The Scots Prayer of Consecration that influenced the American has a different structure from the English, which had been used in the thirteen colonies before American independence. The English Prayer of Consecration first briefly recounts that God the Father gave his only Son Jesus Christ to die as a sacrifice for us, and then asks the Father to hear us and grant that we who take the bread and wine may partake of Jesus’s body and blood according to his institution, and finally specifies the content of that institution by rehearsing the narrative from the words of Scripture. The Scots Prayer of Consecration, in contrast, first
- glorifies God for giving his Son, who instituted the Supper, and
- rehearses the narrative of that institution as a reason for giving glory to God;
then, in response to that institution of Christ, the prayer
- makes an oblation of the bread and wine in remembrance,
- invokes the Father to send his Holy Spirit to make the bread and wine “become the Body and Blood of [his] most dearly beloved Son,”
- asks the Father to accept this sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving with salvific effect for the Church,
- offers the recipients as a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice to him, and
- beseeches him to accept this whole bounden duty for the merits of Jesus Christ.
It is worth noting here that, at the institution narrative, God has not been asked to do anything, but only glorified God the Father for giving his Son to die on the Cross, and told what God the Son did at the Last Supper. At the oblation, too, God is not yet asked to do anything, but rather “we thy humble servants” use “these thy holy gifts, which we now offer unto thee,” to “celebrate and make here before thy Divine Majesty … the memorial thy Son hath commanded us to make.” At this point, when offering the gifts to God, the Scottish Nonjurors might lift the paten and the chalice to chest height.
What happens liturgically in the Scottish prayer differs somewhat from the perspective of John Johnson of Cranbrook, a Church of England priest, who in The Unbloody Sacrifice (1718) articulated a eucharistic doctrine later called virtualism: “But now the sum and substance of the true doctrine of the Eucharist I take to be this, that what Christ offered to God, and gave to his disciples to eat, was consecrated Bread; and that the reason why He honoured it with the title of His Body was, because He did, in offering the Bread to God, in His own intention offer His Body as a Sacrifice for the sins of men. If the Church of Rome had not departed from this doctrine of the Scriptures, as understood by the primitive Church, by supposing that Christ did twice offer His own personal Body, first in the Eucharist, afterward on the Cross, she could never have fallen into so absurd a notion as that of Transubstantiation.” In the English prayer, what Johnson says is fully embodied, because the consecration takes place before any word has been said to offer a sacrifice here and now. In the Scottish Nonjuror prayer, however, as noted above, what is done now and what Christ did then do not occur in the same order. It is, in the process of time, before the bread is even consecrated for the purpose of consumption that the Scottish prayer has the priest offer the bread and wine in order to make before God the memorial Christ commanded us to make, showing them forth to the Father as tokens of Christ’s body and blood, and pleading the merits thereof. This is the offering that the congregation in the person of the priest makes to God the Father; while doing so, the congregation (1) has in remembrance Christ’s blessed passion and precious death, his mighty resurrection and glorious ascension; and (2) renders to the Father most hearty thanks for the innumerable benefits procured unto us by the same.
Becoming the Body and Blood
But most striking, perhaps, is the petition to God the Father: “to hear us, and to send thy Holy Spirit upon us and upon these thy gifts and creatures of bread and wine, that, being blessed and hallowed by his life-giving power, they may become the Body and Blood of thy most dearly beloved Son, to the end that all who shall receive the same may be sanctified both in body and soul, and preserved unto everlasting life.” Specifically, “that … they may become the Body and Blood of thy most dearly beloved Son” is perhaps the most difficult for modern Reformed ears to listen to. In what sense is a Reformed Protestant to admit a petition for bread and wine to become the body and blood of Christ? We must take those words in a sense consonant with the Scots Confession, a confession that the Scottish Nonjurors treated as their own nation’s confession of faith: “Not that we imagine any transubstantiation of bread into Christ’s natural body, and of wine in his natural blood (as the Papists have perniciously taught and damnably believed).” So the bread and wine’s becoming the body and blood of Christ is not to be taken as a transubstantiation into Christ’s natural body and blood; still less are we to suppose that the bread and wine become Christ’s body and blood in such manner as to be fit for divine adoration. Instead, the Prayer of Consecration asks that they become Christ’s body and blood, not to be adored as the body and blood of God, but “to the end that all who shall receive the same may be sanctified both in body and soul, and preserved unto everlasting life.” These words we must understand according to the Scots Confession’s alternative to transubstantiation: “But this union and conjunction which we have with the body and blood of Christ Jesus, in the right use of the sacraments, is wrought by operation of the Holy Ghost, who by true faith carries us above all things that are visible, carnal, and earthly, and makes us to feed upon the body and blood of Christ Jesus, which was once broken and shed for us, which now is in heaven, and appears in the presence of his Father for us.” The bread and wine become Christ’s body and blood to this end, and in this respect: that in receiving we may “be sanctified both in body and soul, and preserved unto everlasting life.” Or the same, in the words of the Scots Confession, “as the Eternal Godhead has given to the flesh of Christ Jesus (which of its own condition and nature was mortal and corruptible) life and immortality, so does Christ Jesus’ flesh and blood eaten and drunken by us, give to us the same prerogatives.”
In this way, we may note, the reverently realist language of the Scots Prayer of Consecration steers clear of the indiscreet “IS MEANS IS” rhetoric of Christians who ignorantly deny that “hoc est corpus meum” has any rhetorical figure. If “this is my body” be devoid of rhetorical figure, if it be literal plain and simple, what that means is that the piece of bread Jesus held at the Last Supper, and nothing else, was the body of Christ conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, and about to suffer under Pontius Pilate; thus, at the Last Supper, a feigning likeness of Christ’s body was holding his true body in its false hands. That is the meaning if “is means is” without any figure of speech. Such an absurd conclusion, to which even the papists have not fallen, the authors of the Scots Prayer of Consecration wisely avoided. For rhetorical figure, there are three possibilities: synecdoche (reference to a part by naming the whole), metonymy (reference to something or someone by naming one of its attributes), or metaphor. The papists believe in synecdoche, and the bare memorialists in metaphor; the Scots, with the rest of the Reformed, held the body and blood of Christ by metonymy, and in this sense they besought God the Father, by the power of God the Holy Ghost, to make the bread and wine become God the Son’s body and blood, according to the intent of his institution. Let us not shrink from “this is my body” and “this is my blood,” and let the elements so become in effect, that we may reverently consume it and gain holy life and immortality.
Eucharistic Sacrifice
It is at this point, after the epiclesis, that a second offering is made to God, a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving through the now-consecrated bread and wine. It lies upon God the Father, however, “to grant, that by the merits and death of [his] Son Jesus Christ, and through faith in [Christ’s] blood, we and all thy whole Church may obtain remission of our sins, and all other benefits of his passion.” Without the merits and death of Christ, and without faith in Christ’s blood, both provided by God himself, no valid sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving can be made by us or accepted by God. The merits and the faith go together. The mention of faith here, as a necessary means by which we make an offering that actually avails for the remission of our individual sins and the sins of the whole Church, is eminently Protestant: a Romanist might say such a prayer off the page in good conscience, but I do not believe that a Romanist would naturally write such a thing himself. This part comes from Cranmer, but its placement after an epiclesis is a strong confession of the need for faith to make the offering at all effectual before God.
A third offering is made: “ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice” unto God. Believers’ souls and bodies are offered in anticipation of what God will make of them by incorporation into Christ himself, by which they partake of his being like tissue transplanted into a living body.
For the Scots using the Scottish Nonjuror prayer, the adoration that follows is not a kneeling and gazing upon a consecrated wafer as if it were God, but the Prayer for the whole state of Christ’s Church. There is no trace here of later Tractarian views of adoration directed toward or through the holy gifts:
Neither the Laudians nor even the Nonjurors had held Robert Wilberforce’s or Pusey’s later eucharistic doctrines of an objective presence and eucharistical adoration. There was also a gulf between the authentic Nonjuring doctrine and that of Pusey’s leading Scottish episcopalian follower, Alexander Penrose Forbes, Bishop of Brechin. While defending the Scottish Communion Office as more primitive than the English rite, Bishop Forbes maintained that virtualist doctrine was ‘rationalistic’ as well as inadequate. Bishop Forbes’s own teaching was opposed by his brother, George Hay Forbes, who represented the genuine Nonjuring tradition in Scottish episcopalianism. From the later Tractarian perspective [as opposed to the Tractarians’ earlier views], the Nonjuring doctrine amounted, in Newman’s words, to the ‘real absence’.[5]
Implications for Liturgical Practice
In the spirit of the words and the structure of the prayer, many of the gestures I see in American churches do not fit well. The American ritual deserves a cæremonial that fits it, and that amplifies what is already expressed in the text itself.
One does not rarely see elevations, or even a smaller gesture such as holding the thumb and forefinger together, that take for granted that the gifts are become the body and blood as soon as the words of institution (the Verba) have been said. Liturgically, this is true in the English Prayer of Consecration, as it is in the Gregorian Canon used to this day in the Church of Rome, but it is not true of the Scottish Prayer of Consecration used in American churches. Consequently, a thoughtful use of the American liturgy will avoid implying that it is so. Still less should bells be rung, immediately after the words about the bread and then the words about the wine, to draw attention to a consecration that has not yet even taken place: devotionally, what the worshipper needs is the quiet to give all glory to our heavenly Father for what his Son did, both on the Cross and in the institution of this holy sacrament. For us to glorify God well, the Prayer Book has even provided that the priest perform some manual acts to set before our eyes what was then done: to take the paten modestly into his hands, as Jesus took bread; to break the bread, as Jesus broke it; to lay his hands on all the bread, as Jesus identified a certain piece of bread to eat as his body; to take the cup, as Jesus took the cup; and to lay his hands on all the vessels where wine is to be consecrated, as Jesus identified a certain cup from which to drink wine as his blood. As F. C. Eeles describes in Traditional Ceremonial and Customs Connected with the Scottish Liturgy, “In the earlier part of the consecration during the words THIS IS MY BODY, and THIS IS MY BLOOD, the priest crossed his hands, keeping them extended with the fingers joined and the palms downwards, the left hand being uppermost, and so laid them upon the bread and upon the chalice respectively – if there were more than one chalice, he laid his hands in this way upon each in succession.”[6] Through these modest cæremonies, we see in our minds what the disciples saw on the night when the Lord instituted his holy Supper for the life of the Church.
As for elevations, Eeles mentions some, but not over the head for adoration, in a practice similar to that of the Russian church: “At the words DO THIS, a very slight elevation of each kind of made, and at the word WHICH WE NOW OFFER UNTO THEE, a considerable elevation, but not higher than the breast of the celebrant, and both kinds were offered simultaneously, the paten in the right hand, the chalice in the left hand of the priest.”[7] Elevations of this sort are more in keeping with both the meaning of the prayer and the doctrine of the Thirty-Nine Articles, being as much as showing forth to God as they are a showing forth to man.
Finally, in the Invocation, one might make the sign of the Cross as the Scots did: “At the words ble+ss and sanc+tify, with thy wo+rd and Holy Spi+rit, the sign of the cross was made as here indicated, and some also made it at the words become the bo+dy and blo+od of thy most dearly beloved Son, after which in certain churches the priest made a slight inclination.”[8] To do so in this part of the prayer indicates what is at that very moment being done: a petition that God bless and sanctify some particular bread and particular wine, by the promise of his sure and certain word spoken in the past and the power of the Holy Spirit applied now, that we may partake of Christ’s true body and blood when we receive these gifts according to “Christ’s holy institution, in remembrance of his death and passion.”
May the Lord sanctify us, to give us both a clear understanding of his holy sacrament and a becoming liturgical and devotional practice, that we may be well disposed to receive his gifts with meek heart and due reverence.
Notes
- Text from George Williams, The Orthodox Church of the East in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1868). https://pages.uoregon.edu/sshoemak/325/texts/nonjurors.htm. ↑
- Sergiusz Michalski, ‘The Image Controversy in the Religious Negotiations Between Protestant Theologians and Eastern Orthodox Churches’, in The Reformation in Eastern and Central Europe, edited by Karin Maag (Routledge, 2016), 123–24. Compare Edward Harold Browne, Lord Bishop of Winchester, in a letter to Ignaz von Döllinger, 3 August 1875, quoted in an appendix to Report of the Proceedings at the Reunion Conference Held at Bonn (London: Basil Montagu Pickering, 1876), 142. ↑
- G. W. O. Addleshaw applies this principle to the English liturgy in The High Church Tradition (Faber and Faber Ltd., 1941), 110–111. ↑
- John Johnson, The Unbloody Sacrifice 2, Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology vol. 23, no. 2 (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1847), 3–4. https://books.google.com/books?id=oLVEAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA3. ↑
- Peter Benedict Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857 (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 243; see also pages 244–45. ↑
- F. C. Eeles, Traditional Ceremonial and Customs Connected with the Scottish Liturgy (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1910), 64–65. https://books.google.com/books?id=EXhbAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA64. ↑
- Eeles, 65. ↑
- Eeles, 66. ↑
