Samuel Bray and Drew Keane. How to Use the Book of Common Prayer. Downer's Grove: IVP, 2024. $18.00, 192pp.
Gloin began then to talk of the works of his people, telling Frodo about their great labours in Dale and under the Mountain. 'We have done well,' he said. 'But in metalwork we cannot rival our fathers, many of whose secrets are lost. We make good armour and keen swords, but we cannot again make mail or blade to match those that were made before the dragon came. Only in mining and building have we surpassed the old days. You should see the waterways of Dale, Frodo, and the fountains, and the pools! You should see the stone-paved roads of many colours! And the halls and cavernous streets under the earth with arches carved like trees; and the terraces and towers upon the Mountain's sides! Then you would see that we have not been idle.'
Those words come from the first chapter of the second book of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. In the scene the dwarf Gloin, a companion of Bilbo Baggins in Tolkien's earlier work The Hobbit, is recounting to Bilbo's nephew all that the dwarfs have done in the Lonely Mountain in the years since their adventures with Bilbo.
There is a maturity about Gloin's account that we would do well to emulate. On the one hand, he is genuinely positive and grateful for the good things that he and his friends have been able to do, recognizing their strengths, even to the point of recognizing where they have surpassed their ancestors. He is not a reactionary or even necessarily a traditionalist: He praises the accomplishments of this new generation of dwarfs.
And yet he knows it is not all progress: In metalworking they are not the match of their fathers, whose secrets have been forgotten.
A thought experiment: Suppose at some point a dwarf scrounging about in some forgotten hall of the Lonely Mountain found a book. On opening it, he discovered that it was the diary of one of the greatest metal workers from forgotten times. Not only that, but in this diary he has shared many of his methods and techniques.
Yet all is not well, because some of the tools he seems to have used are subtly different than the tools they now possess and some of the terms he uses to describe the various techniques are no longer known to them. What they would have in such a scenario is better, of course.
Now suppose one day a stranger arrives at the gates, an ancient dwarf who remembers the days before the fall of the mountain. They show him the diaries and he recognizes the unknown terms, he remembers the design of the tools. And he is willing to show them what he knows.
The above scenario is, in some respects, what I think Samuel Bray and Drew Keane have done for contemporary Christians. First, Bray and Keane edited the 1662 edition of the Book of Common Prayer, published by InterVarsity Press. This in itself was a significant step for it put the prayer book that defined English Christianity for centuries back into the hands of today's Christians, making it accessible in a way it had not been previously. Then they took the further step of writing the book that is the subject of this review. They did not stop at simply making the prayer book more accessible; they also wanted to help readers understand how to read it and pray with it.
Why is such a thing needed? Recall C. S. Lewis's account of Christendom, likening it to a house. His sketch of the faith offered in places like Mere Christianity was an explanation of the house itself. But, he often reminded readers, you have to settle in a specific room. You cannot live in the hallways. And that would mean moving into a specific ecclesial tradition, be that Anglican or Catholic or Presbyterian or Lutheran or Baptist or Methodist.
Now take Lewis's idea and pair it with Kirsten Sanders's related concept:
When I visited my in-laws the first time for Thanksgiving I was given a task in the kitchen. I was asked to help set the table. Specifically, I was asked to get the “iced tea glasses”. The trouble was, I had no idea what an “iced tea glass” was. I am from Massachusetts and have lived in the Northern states for my entire life, apart from a decade in the southeast where I went to graduate school. Where I came from, we had drinking glasses which were suitable for all purposes. In my mother-in-law’s home, it was clear there was an “iced tea glass” which was different from a glass for water or one for cocktails, and I did not know which they were.
I had to be taught. The small customs of table-setting were part of a larger story of the family I was joining. I was invited to set the table because I was being integrated into this family with its own culture and customs and preferences. I would need to learn their language and ways of speaking in order to fully understand how things were done. If I wanted to become one of them, I needed to learn to do things the way they did.
We tend to think about religion as if its primary task was to tell us what to believe. Under this view, a person demonstrates that they are a Christian by holding the right beliefs about the afterlife, for one example, or about who can be saved. It follows that a Christian must believe these things in order to be a Christian, because it is right belief that determines Christian identity. But what if “becoming Christian” was more like learning to set the table than agreeing to a set of doctrines?
I wouldn't express the point quite in this way—my question is why can't agreeing to a certain set of doctrines be part of learning to set the table?—but on the whole I love the extended metaphor here and have found it immensely helpful on more than one occasion.
Now join the two passages together, Lewis's and Sanders's. Lewis says you must learn to live in a room of the house. But Sanders reminds us that coming into a new place is often disorienting and challenging, not because of some willful deficiency in ourselves, let alone a maliciousness that resists the life of the place. Rather, it is simply that we don't actually know how to live there. We don't know the customs and habits and practices that make life in that place work.
This is the value, I think, of Bray and Keane's book. After all, the practices and prayers set out for God's people in the prayer book have been amongst the most formative in western and, indeed, global Christianity. But to American evangelicals in the 2020s, living after nearly 50 years in which our corporate liturgy and prayer life has soaked in the corrosive acid of seeker sensitive church life, the practices and even the language of the prayer book can feel strange and foreign and even a bit frightening, I think. We have become accustomed to three songs and a TED talk, to spectacle, and to spontaneity. And while I think there are a great many of us who are quite tired of such things, it is not easy for those on the far side of a great forgetting to regain what previous generations misplaced—unless they have help, help of the sort offered by Bray and Keane.
A word about the specifics of that help: The book is structured in such a way to make it maximally accessible and helpful to the average churchgoing evangelical who buys and reads books from an evangelical publisher or to the sort of churchgoer who perhaps doesn't buy such books themselves regularly but will do reading groups with their church or friends and read the books recommended by the group. It begins with a brief discussion of what "liturgy" is and explanation of why a set liturgy in public worship is helpful.
The authors then give a brief history of the prayer book before moving through its contents—explaining the morning and evening prayer services, how the prayer book treats specific practices in the church's life, such as baptism, confirmation, and the Lord's Supper, and how the prescribed Bible readings fit with one another and the formational logic of the prayer book. Finally, they turn to the church year, the communion of saints, and how to begin using the prayer book in your own piety. The accessibility and structure of the book makes it an ideal book to give someone seeking help and guidance with their piety more generally, but especially for someone new to Anglicanism.
A final word on that point: There is an unhappy tendency one can find in much ecclesial discourse that treats the various children of the Protestant Reformation as being wildly at odds with one another in irreconcilable ways, such that "Anglican" becomes understood as being a kind of competing tradition contra the "Reformed" tradition or Presbyterian tradition or Lutheran. In some respects that is not altogether wrong. Many Lutheran churches would not commune someone who affirms the eucharistic theology taught in the 39 Articles, for example. Likewise, there are real divisions between the Anglican and Presbyterian traditions on polity and what one might call liturgical method. (The fact that the ACNA has the Book of Common Prayer, which prescribes prayers and Bible readings for public worship while the PCA has a Directory of Worship that simply identifies the necessary elements in worship is indicative of this difference, I think.)
That being said, it is also true that prior to the Oxford Movement the Anglican tradition as such was not usually regarded as an alternative to being "reformed," but rather was simply the ecclesial expression of the magisterial reformation in the English state church. In that respect, something like the Prayer Book, though it has anchored the life of the Anglican tradition and is indeed part of the Anglican formularies, is in many ways what we might call a merely reformed prayer book—something that can, with minimal theological trouble, guide the private devotions and prayer life of any son or daughter of the magisterial reformation. At the very least, it is one of the larger expressions of reformed piety and spiritual practice alongside several other streams. The point, in any case, is that the difficulties involved in any other member of the Reformed faith adopting the structure of the prayer book are not so great as they are sometimes made out to be.
In this respect, Bray and Keane's book doesn't simply serve those Christians who have found their way into the ACNA in recent years, but is actually a great aid to many Christians outside the ACNA as well. The point, after all, is not to reinvent 17th century Anglicanism. That is not possible nor, really, is it desirable. The point is, returning to Tolkien, to perhaps regain some of the skill with metalworking, so to speak, that our ancestors had and which we have forgotten. If you wish to remember the past and grow in this way, there are few books that will serve you better than How to Use the Book of Common Prayer.