Christological confession and "an old English custom"

... an old English custom.

Thus did a Canadian cleric in 1866 refer to the practice of turning East during the saying or singing of the Creed. Such a description may explain the hostility towards the practice, outside of the expected neo-Puritan circles. After all, a custom particular to the post-Reformation ecclesia Anglicana sits very uncomfortably with those who desired Anglican liturgical revision to meekly conform to bland post-Vatican II Roman norms.

That the practice is, however, rooted within how the Common Prayer tradition of the ecclesia Anglicana. Richard Mant's 1820 Notes on the BCP quote both Thomas Bisse (d.1731) and Archbishop Secker defending turning East during the Creed. Bisse describes the practice as "proper and significant", while Secker notes of it "many do". Similarly, John Jebb in his 1843 The Choral Service of the United Church of England and Ireland: Being an Enquiry into the Liturgical System of the Cathedral and Collegiate Foundations of the Anglican Communion states:

The custom of turning to the East during the Creed, immemorial in many parish Churches, in the country especially, and universal in Cathedrals and Colleges ...

Interestingly, both Bisse (as quoted by Mant) and Jebb refer to the practice as turning "to the Altar or the East". In other words, there is no embarrassment regarding the practice being understood as directed towards the altar. We turn East, says Jebb, "at to the place where the Dayspring from on high visited us" (emphasis added). To turn East, then, is to affirm that the central confessions of the Apostles' and Nicene creeds - the Lord's Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection - happened in time and in history, for they happened in a particular place.

In turning East, however, we also then turn towards the altar. Mant quotes Clutterbuck (from his 1712 work on the Prayer Book): "In that part also the holy table or altar is placed". For Jebb, the practice is thus intimately connected with the Eucharist:

We turn to the Altar, to express more strongly our Faith in Christ, whose death is there specially commemorated, and whence those holy elements are dispensed, which are peculiar means of grace, to refresh our souls, and to strengthen our faith.

Here, too, the Christological confession at the heart of the Creeds is rooted and grounded in place and time, for at the Holy Table are heard the words "Who, in the same night that he was betrayed ... my Body which is given for you ... my Blood of the New Testament, which is shed for you".

The practice, then, is a sign of the Church's Christological faith not as myth or metaphor of God Incarnate, but of God becoming Incarnate in that place and time, there and then dying and rising. It is a practice embodying Apostolic, Nicene Faith, that in a place and at a time, witnesses could say of the Eternal Word, Very God of very God, "which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled".

We should be grateful for this "old English custom" and its place in the Anglican tradition. Its very particularity speaks of the reality of the Incarnation for, in the words of John Milbank, a church that is "disincarnate" - aloof and apart from place and culture - "is not really the religion of the Incarnation at all".

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