My mother, now with the Lord, used to have a stack of devotionals that she would work through systematically. An old-guard evangelical, and without any Anglican tendencies that we could detect, she did not mind having The Book of Common Prayer occupy an honored place in that stack. In the English-speaking world, that book has had this unique kind of universal appeal for some time now.

But it got there by a circuitous route, and Alan Jacobs gives us a very deft accounting of that wending trail. His role in this all began when someone at Princeton University Press had the great idea of releasing a series of biographies … of books. Other books to receive this treatment have been the Dead Sea Scrolls, Augustine's Confessions, and the Book of Job. Forthcoming books in this series will include Calvin's Institutes, C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, and the Bhagavad Gita. This is obviously not possible to do with all those modern books of ours that have the publishing life-cycle of a fruit fly, but when a book spans many years or even centuries, it becomes possible to tell the story of that book's life.

Before turning to the life of that honored Prayer Book, I should say a word or two about Jacobs' writing. One of the marks of great literature—which The Book of Common Prayer most certainly is—is that it provides us with the pleasure of seeing how it can inspire others to love and good works. Alan Jacobs is the kind of writer who polishes clear glass windows, and they are very easy to look through. His prose is engaging, interesting, and pellucid, largely because he doesn't use words like pellucid. In this book, he writes about a book that has established many of the cadences of the modern English language for us, and he does so as someone who understands and loves those cadences. This is a good book, about a worthy subject, and is well written.

The BCP was born in 1549, with the great Thomas Cranmer as midwife attending. He was an interesting man embedded in an interesting time, and he was used by God to develop a form of worship that would unite a divided kingdom in unexpected ways. Over the course of the next few centuries, the BCP would go a great deal farther than that. The Prayer Book also established a distinct and lasting presence in India, in Africa, and in the Americas.

Many of the battles that the BCP has been through, especially in the early years, were the result of these forms of prayer being imposed by law. Even for many Puritans, the prayers were fine; it was the compulsion that rankled. Because you cannot have religious laws without religious cops, and you cannot have religious cops without religious resentment and resistance, it is no wonder that the life of the BCP has had its moments of tumult. For example, Jacobs describes the reception it got in Scotland in 1637, when King James tried to impose a version of the BCP on the Church of Scotland:

Riots broke out. The most famous tale of the conflict involves one Jenny Geddes, who, when a minister began saying the Communion service in Edinburgh's St. Giles Cathedral, threw a stool at the man and shouted, "Daur ye say Mass in my lug?"

There are several things we must understand here. First, lug meant ear. Second, theological debate had far more of a robust character than it does today. And third, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, you can call up a picture of that very stool if you would like.

As Jacobs describes it, the BCP was born in controversy—with papists hating it because it was evangelical and evangelicals hating it because it was papist. Under the reign of Elizabeth I and James I, it was established long enough to develop, as we would say today, its own constituency. As the years went by, it gradually became venerable. This golden age for the Prayer Book was shattered by World War I (along with all the other forces that were contributing to that meat grinder that we call modernity).

It had become obvious that the BCP needed to be revised, but uniform agreement on which direction to go had become impossible. The 20th century was just as divided as the 16th had been. The Anglo-Catholics wanted to go in one direction, the evangelicals were fine with it as it was, and the liberals wanted to go in another. The end result was that no formal revision was made at all:

In June of 1928 it failed again in a fuller House of Commons, this time 266 to 220. And that is why, as I write these words in 2012, the only official Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England is a very slightly altered version of the one introduced in 1662.

But what could not be accomplished through direct alteration was nevertheless accomplished by other means. The Prayer Book was kept just as it was, but with multiple alternative rites developed and authorized. This gave the option of mixing and matching, in a sort of liturgical choose-your-own-adventure approach. For the traditionalists, to be told that they "had options" was the very heart of their problem with this new approach: "many traditionalists reply that the very existence of such options, of such a buffet, is the greatest offense of all."

A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with six watches is never sure. In the older order, the goal was to get it right, and the possibility of getting it wrong was one of the risks you took. That, and the occasional religious war. But the gods of the new order have names that all rhyme with choices. And the point of having a prayer book in the first place disappears.

In Letters to Malcolm, C. S. Lewis argues for a set liturgy, and his one request is that everybody just stop messing around with it:

Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. And it enables us to do these things best—if you like, it "works" best—when, through long familiarity, we don't have to think about it. As long as you notice, and have to count, the steps, you are not dancing but only learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you do not notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling. The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.

Rootless evangelicals will sometimes drift toward what might be called liturgical dress-ups. They read an article online, or visit a cousin's church, or collect a smattering of ideas at liturgical conferences. I have seen some pretty interesting outfits. What Jacobs' book makes clear is that this same mania for choosing options afflicts the communion that used to have "a prayer book." Both inside and outside that august communion, people are choosing, not worshiping—counting, not dancing.

Douglas Wilson is pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and a faculty member at New Saint Andrews College. He is the author most recently of a new verse rendering of Beowulf (Canon Press).

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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