1662 is the Standard for ACNA

Nope. Reread my post, specifically the bit about nuclei.

 

Dom Gregory Dix, while having died in 1950, played a foundational role in the 1979 BCP. The other major influence was the 1969 Roman 'novus ordo' I agree, but the influence of Dix cannot be discounted. Here are the two podcast episodes I've cited before for reference:

As mentioned in the first podcast above, we have to look at more than just "The Shape of the Liturgy" in isolation, but rather to Dix's contribution to the Episcopalian 20th century liturgics as a whole. In particular we have to look at the Liturgical Commission which started operating in the 1940s and 1950s under the principles Dix established. They took Dix's principles, combined them with the 1969 Roman novus ordo, and out came the 1979 Episcopalian 'prayerbook' which effectively destroyed today's Episcopal Church.

I don't think that the England of today is a success story in any sense of the term. A collapsing economy, a nearly-lost sovereignty they're barely now recovering with Brexit, the biggest Empire in history vanished without a sight, Mohammed being the #1 boy's name nationwide, and 89% of young Britons having no purpose:
"Nine in ten young Brits believe their life lacks purpose, according to shocking new study"
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/9637619/young-brits-life-lacks-purpose/

Ultimately we can agree to disagree on the nature of the liturgy. I am just trying to speak for the classical Anglican perspective, to my best understanding of it.

My heartfelt adherence is to the Act of Uniformity, which established a single Anglican liturgy, with the best of our divines believing in a single body of the church, oriented towards God in one direction, that it was even supported by the civil arm of the government. That's how much classical Anglicans believed that we must pray with one common breath. Other churches may have a different liturgy, but for Anglicans it mandates a single liturgy of common prayer.

But even if you believed in common prayer with such intensity as our forebearers, here's the issue: how can you impose a single liturgy when people have all kinds of divergent loyalties and dis-loyalties, even back then? You had people who were loyal to Rome, people loyal to some sort of pre-Reformation Sarum observance, you had the nascent puritan movement with their no-less grievous errors. How can you make one people, one Church of England, out of such a chaotic assembly? The only way was (and is), by having absolutely unshakeable grounds for why the liturgy is in fact the best. That you're not imposing the BCP by legal fiat, by tyranny, but that you are in fact in possession of the best liturgy which should command the happy obedience of all the faithful. If you have enough of that conviction, you will begin to ask, okay, well what are the reasons why the Sarum was insufficient? What are the reasons why we don't let the Puritans run off to their conventicles? And I've given some of those reasons here. Puritanism was born in sin, and led to heresy. The Sarum did not produce holiness in the people. That is why the Prayerbook tradition, the one unified Prayerbook tradition, is the right course of action.



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I actually agree with this. The nucleus of the liturgy is indeed from the Scriptures, but that's not the argument that Rexlion and I are making (not that I want to speak for him). Yes, without the trinitarian formula, the liturgy of baptism is invalid, and those (such as the Unitarians or the Mormons) who baptize without it, we can consider as having made no baptism at all. Similarly with the Eucharistic canon, the Words of Institution, you could make a similar argument (although you yourself raise the example of historic liturgies which didn't contain the words of institution). And the last example I suppose you could cite is the Lord's Prayer which is an emphatically liturgical prayer. Our Lord certainly only conceived worship in the context of the liturgy, which is why he left us those 2-3 liturgical elements.

However we look at the Anaphora:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphora_(liturgy)

That list was not mentioned in the Scriptures. It was composed by the Church, for the work of holiness among the people. And this is just the communion rite, without covering everything else in the liturgy. Just the Anaphoras undergone many revisions, as churches adapted them to their own uses: "Many ancient texts of anaphoras have survived, and even if no more in use," In other words, there is no one "Anaphora" but rather a list of various elements, out of the 10 of which elements, only one (the words of institution) you could consider to be of divine origin. The other 9 elements were written by the Church; added, subtracted, etc.

All we are trying to say is that it is impossible to argue that the liturgy as a whole (apart from the 3 elements I mentioned above) is divinely-inspired. But that doesn't mean it is arbitrary either. People always jump from one to the other. Earlier I write on the importance of the Act of Uniformity, and the grand unification of the Church in a single prayer, a prayer composed by the Church herself, for the holiness of the people.

Since the Church doesn't compose the liturgy from scratch, she studies historically what has produced holiness over the centuries. If we have a historical liturgy which can still produce holiness better than something new written, let us cleave unto that. If (like the Sarum Mass) it was around for a while but stopped producing holiness, then it is fit for it to be amended. If like the 1662 BCP it is capable of producing holiness even 400 years later, better than a modern liturgy, then it should be retained.

 

There has been positively too much bloodshed for me to be able to agree with any approach in which one religion alone becomes lawful. This was the error of Theodosius II, and it lead to needless deaths over minor misinterpretations of wording after Chalcedon, as well at the utter subjugation of the non-Christian population, and this in turn led to the successful Islamic conquest of much of the Byzantine Empire, because you had a large population of Oriental Orthodox, Jews, Samaritans, and Sabians with no loyalty to Constantinople.

~

Regarding Dom Gregory Dix, I have reviewed those podcasts, and as Michael Gove is once reported to have said, “they suffer from the very considerable disadvantage of being wrong.” The conclusions about the 1979 BCP are wrong and the conclusions regarding the influence of Dix are wrong.

Indeed, if Dix alone influenced the 1979 BCP, it would be much better. There would be a well structured communion office with no versus populum or contemporary language, and a single rite for daily prayer, but that rite would certainly feature Compline from the 1928 book and Prime and Midday Prayer taken from the usages of the Order of the Holy Cross.

My present view however is that the problems with the 1979 book were not that severe, and furthermore many congregations just continued using the 1928 book; the real issue which caused the Continuing Anglican Movement was the culture of theological liberalism (of which Dix was not remotely a part) which began ordaining women in 1979. This was the sine qua non, and correctly so; it also, from that moment, reduced the ecumenical dialogue which had previously been productive between the Anglican Communion and the Eastern Orthodox to a purely academic exercise (and since then it has changed into an exercise, to be frank, of the less financially well off Orthodox churches like Antioch or Albania perduading the Anglican Communion to give them money). This is of course because the Orthodox cannot countenance the idea of being in communion with someone who ordains women; “you are what you are in communion with” is a common axiom in our ecclesiology.

But to me, Dix represents one of the great figures of Anglicanism; he was a monastic, in an order I personally admire (and might even join); he was a charitable man, he rejected worldly pleasure, and his study of the liturgy has always struck me as dispassionate and generally accurate. Indeed I think he made only one historical error, which was his assesment of the eucharistic theology of Cranmer. Actually if I were to enumerate my three favorite Anglican thinkers from the 20th century I could do so very easily; it would consist of Dom Gregory, Fr. Percy Dearmer , and C.S. Lewis. A monastic (I think of the rank we would in Orthodocy call an Archimandrite), a secular priest, and a layman. And if I were to enumerate my three least favorite Anglicans of the 20th century they would be Bishop James Pike, Bishop James Pike and Bishop James Pike. It is impossible to overstate the damage he did to the Episcopal Church with his neo-Gnostic heresy and his dreadful, oft repeated catchphrase “We need fewer beliefs and more belief.” If you want to single out a man responsible for setting into motion the doctrinal ruination of the Episcopal church (as opposed to its mere liturgical mediocrity, which is more Bugnini’s fault than anyone’s), there is your man.

You might even be able to arrest him, because according to his best friend Philip K. Dick, who received information on Gnostic Christianity from what he believed was a pink laser beam transmitted from an orbiting satellite connected to VALIS (this being after his abuse of LSD in the 1960s), his soul transmigrated into a girl on the occasion of his accidental death while looking through the Palestinian desert for traces of the “historical Jesus”, a favored topic of my least favorite Anglican of the 21st century, John Shelby Spong. With regards to James Pike and Philip K. Dick, you can’t make this stuff up. And it gets even more shocking than that, but I just ate breakfast, and my stomach hurts.

@Stalwart, upon reading that I would of course sympathize with any urge you had to present a bill before Parliament to order the suppression of such Gnostic conventicles and the arrest of anyone reporting contact from a pink laser beam following an acid trip, but I propose that such people owing to the absurdity of their beliefs, provided this absurdity is fully exposed, as St. irenaues and Epiphanius exposed the Gnostics of that era, will only be able to attract very likeminded people, Just as Scientology’s growth was halted and then reversed after the curtain was pulled back on their secret doctrines.

I suppose one law I could support would be one prohibitng religions from worshipping in secret.

 

I had to re-read that sentence 10 times as it was. The sentence structure lacks clarity. Maybe you'd care to "unpack it" and reveal the hidden meaning that is in your mind but not evident to me? Because all I can see is, a nucleus is at the center of a thing but the nucleus is not 'the whole thing,' it's just the nucleus. In this instance, the liturgy was created by men to surround and encompass the Sacrament. The liturgy is good and useful, I'm not saying it isn't. Yet Christ did not institute liturgies, He instituted Sacraments. Christian liturgies were developed over time since the Ascension.

 

No, the nucleus is the center of something but also integrally part of it. Thus, the most important and solemn moments in Baptism and Holy Communion are usually direct quotations from our Lord, and what is more, the Baptism on the Jordan and the Last Supper should be understood as liturgical events (in that St. John the Baptist was performing a liturgical rite with his baptisms related to Jewish ritual purification by immersion in a mikvah, but in a more pure form, which is why Jews were lining up to be baptized by him (modern Judaism is fairly radically different from Second Temple Judaism, which was divided into sects, with the Sadducees, who did not believe in The World to Come, dominating the Temple, and the Pharisees, who had the most influence on later Rabinnical Judaism but were still not quite the same, dominating the synagogues, and you had iconography in those synagogues, and then you had the ascetic, apocalyptic Essenes and related ascetic apocalyptic figures like St. John the Baptist, who had a mass appeal the Essenes lacked, and then you had Naziri, or temporary ascetics, who did not cut their hair or engage in sexual intercourse or eat meat during the term of their ascetisism, and in the courtyards of the Temple there were barbers whose duty was to cut the hair of these men after they completed their self-defined ascetic period).

In like manner, the Last Supper looks to have been a Passover Seder, a liturgical event, in which our Lord departed from the traditional rubrics to declare himself the sacrifice.

(Judaism has changed a lot, but the essence of much Jewish ritual is unchanged, which is why Karaite and Samaritan prayer books resemble Orthodox Jewish prayer books; the main difference is that in the latter, various hymns were added of a Kabbalistic nature, like Adon Olam, and in the Karaite and Rabinnical liturgies the litany known as the Eighteen Blessings was modified to add a curse against heretics in the late first century, with Jewish Christians being one of the groups that curse had in mind)

 

Puritanism was born in sin, and led to heresy. [/QUOTE]
This has been a very interesting and informative thread. Could you please expand on this statement quoted above?

 

Some say I’ve been too strident, so I won’t say very much. The fact of the Puritan schism is pretty well established if you’re familiar with the history of the Reformation in England. And furthermore schism is a sin. So that’s the first half.

And as to the second half, did you know that Harvard, established as an early Puritan seminary, went heretical by the 1700s? That’s why they had to establish Yale nearby. But that went heretical by the end of the 1700s as well. At the end of the 18th century, almost all Puritans in New England became unitarian, and cast off our Lord and Savior. John Adams, a famous American Founding Father and. Puritan, had some bad words to say about our Lord.

And they did all this centuries ago, before any of today’s pressures of secular society, technological trauma and social/family breakdown which trouble us today. They just went heretical under their own weight, once Puritan theology was formulated. If anything they helped contribute to today’s atheistical society, because they permitted divorce, abolished the episcopacy, banished the liturgy, etc.

Just imagine if they actually had won in England, as they were trying to.

 

Indeed so, the fact it took just 150 years for the Puritans in New England to largely become Unitarians, including the majority in Boston, amuses me.

But you are forgetting the other half of the story: the majority of the Congregational churches rejected Unitarianism. And Yale is not “nearby” Harvard; MIT is, indeed one could walk from Harvard to MIT, but Yale is in New Haven, Conneticut, which is halfway to New York. Closer than Oxford to Cambridge, but still in the regional vernacular, a “schlep,” (somewhat mitigated since the New Haven-Boston railway was electrified for the Acela high speed train, where it gets its fasted speeds).

The other aspect is that the congregationalists have since remained theologically parallel to the Episcopalians, with conservative groups emerging inside the UCC and also as separate alignment.

I also have to confess I cannot pronounce a congregational church as being heretical owing to its polities, because in essence they have merely localized the bishop and made each parish a diocese. But most denominations which use this polity, like the Baptists, the Unitarian Universalist Association, and the SDA, are heretical, but for other reasons. Park Street Church, the only ancient church in Boston that is still conservative, I can find no fault with.

 

Yale and Harvard are "near" one another in the sense that both are in New England, a distinct region of the US, and the general hotbed of Puritan establishment... once upon a time. It's true about the unitarianism, you drive around here and see a lovely historic white church building in the center of practically every town and village, and nearly every single one has the rainbow flag out front. When you put the words "congregationalist" and "New England" in the same sentence, the default assumption is always going to be the UCC or other such heretical sect. Park Street Church in Boston is a (very) noteworthy exception, as are a handful of lesser-known churches, such as the one I grew up attending.

Puritanism as an entity clearly failed. But, theologically, it's basically a particular expression of calvinism, which has survived most distinctly (here in the US) in the Presbyterian churches, which (like us) run the gamut of crazy liberal to crazy conservative. So we should be careful to say what we mean when making judgments about puritanism.

 

@Fr. Bench, on a related question, do any ACNA congregations still use the 1979 BCP, will its use be retained, and since the 1662 BCP is the standard, will other editions of the Book of Common Prayer faithful to the 1662 BCP, such as the 1892 and 1928 American BCP, or services taken from the 1662 BCP, be allowed, or is the 2019 BCP going to be required, with the 1662 as the only alternative?

For that matter @Stalwart, will the BCP editions of the Reformed Episcopal Church remain canonical for use in the ACNA, or will they be suppressed?

Personally I hope that the current range of liturgies in the ACNA and its member provinces remains available for use; I think the focus should be on improving the music of the ACNA by stamping out CCM and Praise and Worship music and restoring Anglican Chant and the traditional hymns, canticles and psalms one associates with Anglicanism, as well as preserving the beautiful selection of Protestant chorales one finds in the 1940 Hymnal and to a lesser extent the 1980 hymnal.

 

The REC Prayer Book (basically the 1928 BCP) is canonical for all of REC, and permissable within ACNA, although they latter would probably just use the default 1928 (the same text just different editions).

I hope that the range of liturgies shrinks down to just a handful, and eventually back down to one, as it was until the 1970s. Having multiple liturgies, like having breakaways and schisms, is just not the Anglican way.

 

Splendid.

My view is that what matters is that the prayers are common, but a diversity of liturgical uses is inevitable and not undesirable. For example, Americans cannot sing the same way the English can sing; the American accent has different properties, and when the language changes, which it does frequently in Anglicanism, you have even more of a shift (for example, compare the sound of the boys’ choir of Milan Cathedral in Italy with that of Westminster Abbey).

 

In my experience, if there is a diversity of liturgical uses, then it would be practically impossible for the prayers to be common.

But as importantly as that, the Prayerbooks are how, in the Anglican mindset, doctrine becomes taught, lex orandi lex credendi. With uniformity of liturgies, there will be a uniformity of doctrine. With a multiplicity of liturgies, you will inevitably result in differing doctrines.

 

Yes and yes. The Diocese of the Carolinas and Great Lakes are still predominantly on that book (and I suspect at least 50% of ACNA). There are a few parishes here and there that have made a change, such as the one I consulted with a while back to assist them in transitioning to the '28. I've got a parish in NJ on my radar that wants me to supply that is '79. I've never served that rite: only '28, '62, or the Missal. Could I wing it? Yeah. Would my bishop approve? That remains to be known.

 

I hear this a lot, mainly from Latin Mass enthusiasts, but the experience of the Eastern churches does not bear this out. The Eastern Orthodox churches have, in use at present, several subtly different forms of the Byzantine Rite, one radically different form (the Russian Old Rite), another highly divergent form at New Skete, and three or fourn versions of the Western Rite (St. Andrew’s Prayerbook, St. Coleman’s Prayerbook, both BCP derivatives, Orthodox Prayers of Old England, and now a new set of service books for the ROCOR Western Rite), but the faith is the same across all these churches. Of course, you might cite jurisdictional squabbling or the problems with the Ecumenical Patriarchate (which all involve Greek Orthodox jurisdictions using only one liturgy, the Greek parish use of the Byzantine Rite on the New Calendar), but I can then cite the Oriental Orthodox.

There, you have four, previously twelve (there used to be a Western Rite in Ceylon, of disgruntled Roman Catholics, who sought out the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch rather than becoming Old Catholics, and there were also the Nubian Orthodox, the Albanian Orthodox (in what is now Azerbaijan, also known as Iberian Albania, rather than Albania adjacent to Greece, Macedonia and the former Yugoslavia on the Adriatic), and several other rites which became extinct due to Islamic persecution, and later, the Portuguese conquest of the Malabar Coast and the forced conversion of large numbers of Indian Orthodox to Roman Catholicism. Yet despite all this, there are still four liturgical rites, and of these, setting aside the Armenian Rite, which has problems due to Latinization (a failed attempt by the Roman Catholics to take it over around 700 years ago, which was thwarted, but the liturgy requires repair), you have in the three other rites three distinct anaphoras (like a Eucharistic Prayer), in the Coptic Rite (including the oldest documented Holy Communion service), fourteen in the Ethiopian Rite, and over eighty in the Syriac Orthodox, of which thirty are well known and fifeteen are readily available in English.

Yet despite this incredible liturgical diversity, the faith is the same. Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi works when the semantics of the prayers are identical. All of the Eastern Orthodox, and the Oriental Orthodox, liturgies, and also those of the Church of the East (which has three anaphoras, or Eucharistic prayers, including the second oldest attested Holy Communion service), have similiar semantics, and within their specific communions the semantics are identical (among the EO, the OO and the Assyrian and Ancient Church of the East, respectively).

So, all of the Oriental Orthodox believe the same faith, despite their highly divergent liturgies (an Armenian Soorp Badarak is structurally, musically and aesthetically highly divergent from an Ethiopian Kidase, but both are Holy Communion services with a similiar structure, and all of the common pieces one would expect in a divine liturgy), because the semantics are the same. The Oriental Orthodox churches, by the way, despite this remarkable liturgical diversity, managed to preserve this doctrinal unity, with virtually no contact with each other. The first meeting of all the Oriental Orthodox patriarchs in, probably, the past thousand years, was convened by Emperor Haile Selassie in Addis Ababba in the 1960s. But because the meaning of the liturgies was the same, and the semantics of the prayers, the same, the faith was the same.

This is a very important point, it should also be noted, because as we all know, languages can experience semantic drift, and semantics vary between language, hence the phrase “Lost in translation.” For example, if one translates the Cranmerian English of the Book of Common Prayer to contemporary English, the loss of the second person pronoun can create ambiguity, and this has to be addressed; simply saying “You” instead of “Thou” when “Thou” is semantically indicated, is inadequete. But the task is not insurmountable. However, when one considers the extreme bother of having to deal with the changing vernacular, the appeal of the liturgical language becomes evident (but I agree that services must be understood by the people; of late, and of neccessity, due to changing language knowledge between generations, the Coptic and Syriac Orthodox churches have done something rather brilliant and used screens to display the liturgical text in English, Arabic and Syriac or Coptic, or another combination of languages; the two churches are having considerable success teaching Syriac and Coptic to their youth, and separately, they want to phase out Arabic in the diaspora as they view it as a linguistic symbol of Islamic oppression.

The reason why the 1979 BCP was controversial and still is, and why @Shane R may have trouble getting his bishop to let him serve from it (by the way Shane, I dare you to serve Eucharistic Prayer C, the Star Trek prayer, if you get it ), is because it has semantics which are incongruous with those of older editions of the Book of Common Prayer. The Alternative Service Book in Canada, Common Worship in the UK, and the horrific New Zealand prayerbook, and the horrid 2004 Irish book, are much much worse than the 1979 BCP because the semantics are radically divergent from their predecessors. They contain new and strange doctrine, grotesque modern language, often “gender neutral”, politically motivated content, rather than religiously motivated content, and so on.

Conversely, the 2019 BCP is getting good reviews from lots of people, including myself, because the semantics of its prayers align well with traditional BCP editions. It is not perfect, but it is the first major Anglican liturgical text in years which is not complete rubbish; indeed, the contemporary language portions of it are vastly superior to those in the 1979 BCP both in terms of doctrinal cohesion facilitated by semantic equivalence, and the stylistic elegance of the text itself. The new BCP could represent the starting point for new tradition-minded translations into modern English.

~

So in a nutshell, my view is you can’t get common prayer from one single text, due to linguistic variations, and also, the evidence in the form of the experience of the Eastern churches says it is not neccessary. For that matter, I propose the Anglican experience also suggests it is needless; there is no substantial variation between the 1662, 1666, 1892, 1912, 1918, 1926, 1928, Deposited, 1929, 1938, 1954, 1960 and 1962 editions of the Book of Common Prayer of England, Ireland, America, Scotland, Canada, Melanesia, South Africa and Ghana, respectively. The first prayerbook that was disturbingly different was the 1979 BCP, but the Anglican Service Book heroically manages to correct it and turn it into something interoperable with the other BCP editions.

Also, when we step back and consider the territory of the ACNA, there are three major languages (English, Spanish and French), and several widely spoken languages of immigrants, and of Native Americans, various BCP editions having been translated to several of them. In North America, north of the border between Mexico and Guatemala, you have five states: Mexico, Belize, the United States, Canada, and France (which controls St. Pierre and Miquelon off the coast of Newfoundland, and also the uninhabited Clipperton Island off the coast of Mexico). So depending on where the ACNA feels a need to minister, it could require a large array of languages and also collects for different governments, also given the semi-autonomous nature of the Native American tribes in the US and the First Nations in Canada.

But this is not a problem to worry about, because the Oriental Orthodox preserved a common belief system, a common faith, with highly variable liturgies, stylistically, structurally, syntactically, visually, musically, ethnically and linguistically diverse, because the semantics are identical. If you read the Syriac Orthodox anaphoras, for example, the fourteen translated into English, you will see that although the wording varies in places, the meaning is always the same. This applies also to the Coptic liturgies, which have only three anaphoras, but a very large number of fraction prayers, some proper to particular occasions, and others selectable at the discretion of the priest, and to the Ethiopian liturgies, one of which by the way happens to be very similiar to the liturgy of St. Hippolytus in the Apostolic Tradition, from which the dreadful Eucharistic Prayer B originates. But in the context of the Ethiopian liturgy, this anaphora, called The Anaphora of the Apostles, works.

Here are the Syriac Orthodox anaphoras, which are quite beautiful by the way, Stalwart, so you can see my point. Note that the Syriac Orthodox equivalent to the 1662 BCP is the Divine Liturgy of St. James; most of the other anaphoras are written to correspond with it, and its use is mandatory on certain occasions, but there are also other anaphoras of equivalent age which nonetheless convey a common faith (for example, the Anaphora of the Twelve Apostles, and its derivative, the Anaphora of St. John Chrysostom, which we also find in the Eastern Orthodox church, and the Anaphora of St. Cyril, which is the ancient Coptic liturgy translated into Syriac (probably from the original Greek), and structurally modified to fit the Antiochene liturgical structure, specifically that used by the Syriac Orthodox Church. http://sor.cua.edu/Liturgy/Anaphora/index.html

Thus, one can even import prayers and services that predate the main liturgy while maintaining semantic equivalence. I think the greatest Anglican accomplishment in this respect was reviving the Mozarabic Rite, which under Roman Catholic Roman Rite chauvinism, dwindled to one chapel in the cathedral of Toledo, but before that happened, in Mexico, the local wedding service from the Spanish colonial period was partially Mozarabic, so the first Mexican Book of Common Prayer translated a much simplified Mozarabic Rite into English and Spanish, while, in my opinion, maintaining semantic equivalance with other BCP editions of the same era (and much more semantic equivalence than the Anglican Missal). That said, the Anglican Missal could have worked better had it been less Anglo Papalist and more Anglican.

…

By the way @Stalwart, I did not intend to have this conversation with you, but I want to thank you for it, because I love discussing the faith with you even where we do not agree. I love having you as a friend and admire your devotion and piety.

 

As I understand it, the '79 is pretty much banished from use in the ACNA, such that none of the churches are allowed to use it in their services. Of course the individual members are still free to use whatever edition they wish. In our parish, the '79s were given away to anyone who wanted them for whatever reason (after the local used bookstore was consulted, and they declined to purchase even a single copy).

 

What BCP edition does your church use now?

By the way, let the record state that I am interested if any church is disposing of hymnals or prayerbooks of any type or vintage.

 

Where did you hear that? The book is broadly used in several dioceses. It didn't just disappear overnight.

 

The '79 was allowed to be used until the new ACNA Prayer book was officially promulgated, which it finally was a few months ago, after a labor of 10 years. I will be very surprised if there are any '79 holdouts left in the next 5 years.

And yet on the other hand, look also at the current schism between the Russians and the Greeks, which has already rent the Eastern Orthodox world which you love, into two. The Greeks are very liberal, while the Russians are implacable; those differences may not be 100% caused by their differing liturgies, but that difference certainly magnifies their alienation from each other.

Also, look at how the Latin church, and the Greek church, slowly drifted from each other leading to the lamentable schism in 1054. By that point they were simply two different understandings of Christianity, not entirely foreign to each other, but different enough to cause friction, each with its own 1000 years of venerable tradition. The pride went up, and the Church was rent in two.

 

On this point, you would have one were it not for the fact the feud is between the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Moscow Patriarchate, not the Greek Orthodox in general. The Church of Greece, headed by the Archbishop of Athens, is autocephalous and accounts for most of the Greek population; only those areas added after the War of Independence as a result of the later collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the Greek diaspora outside of Africa, are under the EP. And the liturgy of the Church of Greece and a typical EP parish is entirely identical.

Furthermore, the bone of contention in the schism involves Ukraine and the EP’s support of the schismatic Orthodox Church in the Ukraine. This church uses the same liturgy as the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, under the Moscow Patriarchate, in every respect, except they are commemorating Patriarch Bartholomew I rather than Patriarch Kyrill II in the Diptychs.

And these Diptychs are different for every Orthodox church in the same way that each Anglican Province has different bidding prayers for its leadership and national government. So the difference is insubstantial, except in this case where every Orthodox church other than the EP, including several which use the same liturgical Typikon as the EP, including the Church of Alexandria, Romania, Cyprus, and most especially Antioch, is condemning the EP over their course of action.

The UOC-NA in North America is also under the EP and again follows the same typikon as the Russian Orthodox church. If you visited a UOC NA parish and a canonical UOC parish in Ukraine, you would not be able to perceive a difference except that in North America you might hear a mixture of English and Church Slavonic in the liturgy.

These were bona fide substantial differences in the semantics of the liturgy, introduced by Roman innovation. By 1054 Rome had suppressed the Gallican Rite, and was working on killing off the Mozarabic Rite; one Pope during that era actually burned all the Mozarabic service books, but his successor reversed the decision and the Mozarabic clergy rewrote them from memory. The related Ambrosian Rite, still used in Milan (which has Orthodox-style features in terms of a 6 week Advent, the vestment colors used during Lent, a chant style closer to Byzantine than to Gregorian, and so on) was also repeatedly targeted for elimination, and probably has survived only because of the popularity of St. Carlos Borromeo, an Archbishop of Milan admired for his piety, and also the fact that Pope Pius VI had previously been Archbishop of that city. The Gallican and Mozarabic Rites have even more similiarity to the Eastern liturgies, for example, very extensive use of the Trisagion, Anaphoras that are variable and change based on liturgical propers, and which sometimes include epikleses, and which sometimes are addressed to Jesus Christ rather than the Father (like the Coptic Liturgy of St. Gregory).

But what caused the break was a series of actions by Rome, which were despised by the reformers, which caused the Roman Rite, which thanks to Charlemagne was being propagated as the standard throughout the Roman church, albeit in a very broad diversity of uses (compare the Rites of Braga, Lyons, Sarum, York, Cologne, the Dominican Order, the Norbertine Order, the Carmelite Order, the Carthusian Order, and the Tridentine standard liturgy in the “Missal of Paul V”, or the vast difference between the Dominican and Benedictine breviaries and the Roman Breviary).

These actions, which created semantic differences in the liturgy, included:

- Refusal to serve the liturgy in the vernacular, instead using Latin for everything (ironic, because Latin was introduced to serve less well educated, and therefore generally poorer, Roman people who could not speak Greek by St. Victor).
- Refusal to distribute the Blood of our Lord to the faithful, which Rome had historically engaged in.
- Refusal to respect local liturgical traditions in areas already evangelized by Eastern churches (also known as Latinization).
- The introduction of innovations such as Eucharistic Adoration and Purgatory.
- The privatization of the Breviary into a personal devotion read by priests; as a rule, after about the year 1,000, the Divine Office was only celebrated publically in Cathedral Churches, Abbeys and some churches operated by the friars, which were generally using local rites such as that of Lyons or York, or the Norbertine Rite, or monastics using the Benedictine Rite, the Carmelite Rite, or Friars using the Dominican Rite. In contrast, in the East, the communal celebration of the Divine Office remained universal.

All of these issues were corrected by the Anglican church.

What I have been stressing is that even if you try, you cannot get the same liturgy; Rome, for example, after the Council of Trent, experienced an explosion of regional diversity in terms of liturgical music and nearly lost Gregorian Chant, and the chant that it does have is partially reconstructed. In like manner, a number of other regional customs immediately inserted themselves, for example, in France, the organ was traditionally played during a Low Mass, rather than it being done in silence as was the custom elsewhere (after Roman priests stopped chanting it in monotone).

Thus, what one has to do is aim for semantic equivalence, and avoid doing what Rome did. Also, it is a fact that all recent schisms in the canonical Eastern and Oriental churches have not concerned the liturgy. Indeed, the only major ongoing schism is between the Jacobite Syrian Orthodox Church of Malankara, under the Patriarch of Antioch, and the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, under the Catholicos of India, a position originally created by the former, and the two churches use the exact same Syriac Orthodox liturgy. The same vestments, the same chants, the same 86 anaphoras, and so on. And then there is the Malankara Independent Syrian Church, which exists to some extent for the benefit of those who cannot stand the pointless schism between the two major Syriac Orthodox jurisdictions in India, which has a connection to the Anglican communion in that it is in communion with the Protestant Mar Thoma Syrian Church, which is in communion with the Church of South India and I believe also with Canterbury directly; the church was established by Anglican missionaries in the East India Company along with a local Indian bishop.*

* I should clarify some terminology for the sake of clarity, in Orthodox terminology, an autocephalous jurisdiction is equivalent to an independent Anglican province in communion with, but not subordinate to, a Metropolitan of a larger area. For example, the Church in Wales would be autocephalous, whereas the Province of York, being subordinate to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is also Metropolitan of All England, is not. And some parts of ACNA under the Diocese of the Southern Cone, or of African countries, were, at that time, equivalent to what the Orthodox call an autonomous church, which is a church subordinate to an autocephalous church but otherwise independent. The canonical Ukrainian church is an autonomous church under the Moscow Patriarchate, for example, whereas the Church of Finland is an autonomous church under the Ecumenical Patriarchate.