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Old High Church praise for BCP 1789

Following on from yesterday's post, the 1790 An Apology for the Liturgy and Clergy of the Church of England (attributed to Horsley) also praised PECUSA's BCP 1789 - a revision heavily influenced by what are normally regarded as Latitudinarian concerns - for being 'in all material points' the same as 1662. This is particularly significant in light of the 1789 omitting both the Athanasian Creed and the special absolution in the Visitation of the Sick, revising the introduction to the Solemnization of Marriage, allowing the signing with the Cross in Baptism to be optional, and permitting the clause in the Apostles' Creed regarding the descent into hell to be changed to omitted or replaced by 'the place of departed spirits', and offering an alternative preface for Trinity Sunday.  

These changes, while strongly condemned by the late Peter Toon, did not prevent the High Church author of An Apology from regarding the 1789 as sharing the same faith as that of 1662. This contributes, contra Toon, to a wider understanding of the Latitudinarian sensibility, not as incipient heterodoxy but a conventional expression of the piety and doctrine of (to use a phrase from An Apology shared by Old High and Latitudinarian discourse) the 'sober believer' in the communion of the ecclesia Anglicana.  It also provides a more realistic and historically grounded assessment of PECUSA's BCP 1789, the Prayer Book which sustained and contributed to the flourishing of Episcopalianism in the American Republic throughout the 19th century.

... if a more direct proof be required of the high esteem in which our form of public worship is held by learned and pious persons of the present generation, the Episcopalian Church in the United States of America will furnish one, the most illustrious and decisive: the Book of Common Prayer, which has lately been adopted by them, being in all material points the same with ours, and indeed, excepting a few alterations, not one of them impugning any article of faith, an exact copy of our own Ritual.  Such is the simple force of truth! and of such little effect have been the angry declamations of the enemies of our Ecclesiastical Constitution, and their ignorant censures of its doctrines and worship, both at home and abroad!
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  1. Josh Fink9 March 2021 at 14:56

    Hi, feel free to delete this comment, I just wanted to ask if you could recommend a list of Old High Church commentators on the 39A and the BCP. There is a long tradition of Anglican divines doing theology after the restoration by doing commentary on the formularies, but it's a big field and the old high church representatives seem more obscure--at least compared to infamous things like Tract 90.

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    1. laudable Practice12 March 2021 at 15:50

      Hi Josh, yes you are entirely right about that long tradition - and high church representatives were very much part of it. Over the next few weeks I will put up a post with some suggestions. Hope that helps.

      Brian.

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