The Litany: no secular polity

Here followeth the Litany, or General Supplication, to be sung or said after Morning Prayer, upon Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays ...

One of the characteristics of the Litany in the Prayer Book tradition, lost in contemporary versions of the Litany, is that the petitions for the state are included within the petitions for the Church and her ministers. Thus the petition for monarch or president follows a petition for the Church catholic:

We sinners do beseech thee to hear us, O Lord God: and that it may please thee to rule and govern thy holy Church universal in the right way,

We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

Similarly, petitions for those who govern, magistrates, armed forces, and the peace of all nations are set alongside the petition for the Church's ministers:

That it may please thee to illuminate all Bishops, Priests, and Deacons, with true knowledge and understanding of thy Word; and that both by their preaching and living they may set it forth and shew it accordingly,

We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

In contemporary versions of the litany, petitions for the Church are set apart from petitions for the polity. We see this, for example, in the litany in both TEC 1979 and Common Worship, in which petitions for the polity follow after those for the Church. In fact, the Common Worship litany clearly distinguishes them as sections IV and V.

There is a sense in which this ordering in contemporary versions of the litany embodies a secular logic, a liturgical laïcité. By contrast, the Litany in the Prayer Book tradition - in which petitions for the state are included within the petitions for the Church - reflects what John Hughes termed "Anglicanism as integral humanism", in which our common life within the polity is understood as "flowing from and to him, who is the Alpha and Omega of all things".

The state is not, cannot be, 'secular'. Our common life within the polity is both gift and vocation, to be ordered towards the common good. Within the Church's proclamation, no space, no realm can be excluded from the Lordship of the Crucified and Risen One, who has said "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth". While John Milbank was referring specifically to the coronation rite of a British monarch when he described the polity "as a body within the ecclesiastical body", there is a deep sense in which this is the calling of any polity, a calling to be reflected in the Church's prayer for the polity.

And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.
And he is the head of the body, the church.

This is definitively not a clericalist vision. As Hughes reminds us, an Anglican integralism is akin to "a more Byzantine or Carolinian view of the priestly nature of 'secular' authority". The monarch or president is thus prayed for, as also the legislature and the magistrates, because they are vocations and institutions with duties and obligations that are the gift of the Triune God. The very fact that petitions for such offices and institutions within the polity are placed alongside - rather than separated from - petitions for the Church and her ministers is testimony to their integrity as gifts and vocations bestowed by God. In fact, separating them from the petitions for the Church and her ministers can signal that are removed from the dynamic of vocation and gift, reducing them to mere secular phenomena.

This is no less true in cultural contexts which are avowedly 'secular'. Here the Litany's vision of "Anglicanism is integral humanism" can assist in addressing the contradictions and confusions of a political order which cannot provide a compelling, convincing account of the common good, authority, and obligations.

Rather than a political order shaped by the will to power and a public realm stripped of meaning beyond empty procedural norms, the Prayer Book tradition Litany - precisely because its prayers for the polity are included within and alongside petitions for the Church - sets before us an understanding of the polity shaped by vocation, gift, and duties flowing from and to the Author and Giver of Life, not set apart in a different realm outside this economy.

(Thoughts on the Litany in the Prayer Book tradition will be a regular focus of posts on Wednesdays.)

Why I support the ordination of women: a High Church reflection

A number of commenters on this blog have asked about my occasional expressions of support for the ordination of women to all three orders. With some hesitation, I have decided to post a summary of my own views on this matter. The hesitation is because I have sought on this blog to focus on issues and themes which can unify those who identify with or have respect (grudging or otherwise!) for what we might term 'classical' Anglicanism (the Anglicanism of the Formularies and - yes - of the Old High Church tradition). Some oppose the ordination of women (and I have friends and colleagues who do so, Anglo-Catholic, High Church, and Reformed Evangelical). Some of us support it (again, friends and colleagues covering a wide range of theological traditions). Below, I have organised my thinking around 5 points (needless to say, no reference to Dort is implied). 1. The Declaration for Subscription required of clergy in the Church of Ireland states: (6) I promise to submit ...

How the Old High tradition continued

Charles Gore's 1914 letter to the clergy of his diocese, ' The Basis of Anglican Fellowship ', can be regarded as a classical expression of the Prayer Book Catholic tradition. A key part of the letter - entitled 'Romanizing in the Church of England' - addressed the "Catholic movement", questioning beliefs and practices within it which tended to "a position which makes it very difficult for its extremer representatives to give an intelligible reason why they are not Roman Catholics". Gore provides the outlines of an alternative account and experience of catholicity within Anglicanism, defined by three characteristics. What is particularly interesting about these characteristics is their continuity with the older High Church tradition. Indeed, the central characteristic as set out by Gore was integral to High Church claims over centuries: To accept the Anglican position as valid, in any sense, is to appeal behind the Pope and the authority of t...

'Whether the Lutheran Churches have right Ordinations and perfect succession of Bishops': Jeremy Taylor, 'Episcopacy Asserted', and Lutheran orders

Amidst the bitter controversies over episcopacy in the Three Kingdoms during the early 1640s, controversies which had become war in Scotland in 1637 and then in England in 1642, Jeremy Taylor wrote his Laudian defence of episcopal order, The Sacred Order and Offices of Episcopacy Asserted and Maintained . He proposed in this work that the non-episcopal Reformed churches could have had episcopally-ordered clergy: Those good people might have had order from the bishops of England or the Lutheran churches, if at least they thought our churches catholic and Christian. Leaving aside the reality that, for example, French Protestants would have been placed in an invidious political position if they had done as Taylor proposed, it is the reference to "the Lutheran churches" which is significant. To begin with, a large portion of the Lutheran churches - those in the German lands - were governed by a system of superintendency. It is almost inconceivable that Taylor was not aware of th...

laudable Practice

Search This Blog