The Commandments, the Prayer Book, and the Good Life
There's an annoying mantra from the SBNR types that I heard ad nauseam growing up: ‘Faith isn’t about rules but relationship.’ The problem here isn’t what is being affirmed; it’s what’s being denied. To say faith is about relationship not rules makes rules sound simply restrictive. But this isn’t the way rules work in the Abrahamic faiths. God’s laws are the ways of life, grooves marked out for us to make our way through often perilous ground. Rules are not imperatives imposed upon us from without. Rather, they answer to our innate orientation to goodness.
This reflects how the Commandments are presented in Deuteronomy as gift, the way of flourishing:
See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil; In that I command thee this day to love the Lord thy God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commandments and his statutes and his judgments, that thou mayest live and multiply: and the Lord thy God shall bless thee in the land whither thou goest to possess it.
As Rowan Williams has recently emphasised, this vision of our flourishing being caught up with God's law remains a characteristic of the New Testament and the Church's life:
the community created by God in the covenant made with Israel and in the invitation declared in the resurrection of Jesus and the gift of the Spirit is most emphatically a community of 'lawfulness' in the sense that each of us knows that our well-being is bound up with the well-being of our neighbours.
The Church, no less than the Israelites receiving the Torah from Moses, is a society in which mutual accountability is built into the very foundations of common life.
It is perhaps not without significance that one of the few contemporary Anglican sources in which the Prayer Book practice of liturgical recitation of the Commandments liturgical is described positively is in the Church of England's recent statement on Christian-Jewish relations, God's Unfailing Word (2019), in the context of similarities between Christianity and "morally formative" Rabbinic Jewish practices:
Thus in the Book of Common Prayer, which has shaped the Church of England's worship for nearly half a millennium, the Ten Commandments are to be recited at the beginning of every service of Holy Communion, as a reminder of God's will for our lives and to provide a space for consideration of where we have resisted it.
This also points to what was a characteristic of much Anglican preaching and piety during the 18th century: an emphasis on the "morally formative" nature of the Commandments, shaping the living out of Christian religion in the duties and obligations of daily living. Thomas Le Mesurier gave expression to this in his 1807 Bampton Lectures:
For we know that it requires both knowledge and temper and patience to reason soberly "of righteousness, temperance and judgment to come," but it requires no paiņs nor study to qualify a man for harping always upon the same string; for bellowing out to affrighted multitudes that unless they feel quite sure that they shall be saved, they will inevitably be damned. Instead of bidding men to "do justice and to love mercy, and to walk humbly before their God," and shewing them the way in which these and the like commandments must be fulfilled, how much more easy must it be to say and to repeat only, Be confident and have faith, and your salvation is sure (Sermon VIII).
In a contemporary cultural context marked by confusions brought about by the absence of a coherent, meaningful vision of the good life and our flourishing, in which 'spirituality' can be encouraged precisely because it offers mere transitory 'experiences', there surely is something to be said for Anglicanism reviving the liturgical and catechetical practices, and the preaching and piety, which emphasise the Commandments as a means of ordering our shared life towards that which is good, true, and just. It is easy, of course, to lampoon this as the urgings of a reactionary conservatism, harking back to the repressive certainties of yesteryear. Rowan Williams, however, has indicated this need not be so, that such an approach to the Commandments offers a rich vision of the moral vision necessary for communal flourishing:
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