MetaCatholic

There are a (smallish) number of features in the official Anglican Common Worship texts that I can only describe as “Common Worship Annoyances.” One is the wording of the adapted RC offertory prayers. The word over the bread goes like this:

Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation:
through your goodness we have this bread to set before you,
which earth has given and human hands have made.
It will become for us the bread of life.

I have two problems with this. The first comes from the sole Anglican adaptation: those words “to set before you” replace the RC words “to offer.” This is a result of trying to defuse a political debate about which a small number of evangelicals care passionately, and a larger number are prepared to vote for (or against) tribally. And, unfortunately, the process by which texts are finally decided is a political one.

I note (and then put aside) my view that popular mediaeval catholic developments of the mass as a repeated sacrifice, and the reformers’ suppression of all language of eucharistic sacrifice, are both wrong and fail to do justice to the relationship between the sacrifice of the cross and its eucharistic remembering and appropriation.

These words do not refer to that offering, or its relationship to the Eucharist , but the bringing of the bread and wine as an offering. Objections to some form of semi-Pelagianism won’t do either. The gifts we bring are acknowledged as being ours to bring only “through [God's] goodness.” Atavistic and visceral protestant reactions to the word “offer” seem strangely misplaced.

What I object to, however, is not per se doctrinal. It is rather the clumsy English of “set before you.” It wanders into the liturgy out of a completely different register to the more elevated language of the prayer.

I likewise object to the last line with that clumsy “It will become for us”. What is still (just about) recognizable in the Latin as a divine passive (ex quo nobis fiet ) sounds bizarrely disconnected from God’s action in the contemporary English. Leaving aside my bafflement that doughty evangelicals can strain at the gnat of “offer” and swallow the camel of “It will become” I really think that both “set before you” and “It will become for us” need a tin ear to go on being used. The RC word over the cup is even worse: “It will become for us our spiritual drink” — at least Common Worship changed that to “cup of salvation”

What is needed is a text that is both kinder on the ear, and that safeguards not only the idea that anything we bring comes only because we have been given it through God’s goodness, but that also what we receive outmatches our offering completely. God’s generosity is non-reciprocally overwhelming. It would also help and be more in accord with Anglican tradition if rather more mystery and rather less mechanism was allowed to the work of the Holy Spirit in the sacrament.

Accordingly I propose these lightly amended texts as rather better than the clunky official provision.

Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation:
through your goodness we have this bread to offer,
which earth has given and human hands have made.
You will offer us the bread of life.

Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation:
through your goodness we have this wine to offer,
fruit of the vine and work of human hands.
You will offer us the cup of salvation.

I’m prompted to make this second post on a fuzzy-edged Bible by the useful posting on the Better Bibles Blog listing all those English versions of the Bible that come with a complete or partial set of apocryphal / deuterocanonical books. The post also has a number of helpful comments.

Saying a “complete or partial set” indicates one part of the problem: different Christian groups differ (and perhaps have always differed) over precisely what the extent of the First Testament Canon is. The actual existence of different Bibles between the denominations / traditions creates a fuzzy edge for the Bible, where the answers to the questions, say, how many books are in the Bible, or how long is the book of Daniel, depends on the Christian tradition of the person answering the question.

The Anglican tradition deals with this fuzzy edge in a particular way. According to article 6 of its 39 articles of religion:

Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation. In the name of the Holy Scripture we do understand those canonical Books of the Old and New Testament, of whose authority was never any doubt in the Church.

[There follows a listing of the Jewish canon of the First Testament]

And the other Books (as Hierome¹ saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine; such are these following:

[There follows a listing of the Apocrypha]

I will leave aside the dubious historical validity of “whose authority was never any doubt in the Church” — suffice it to say that the evidence shows considerable doubt over the first few centuries of the Christian era about several books of the New Testament. What concerns me here is the meaning of “the Church doth read” the other books of the Apocrypha.

The interpretation of those words must be guided, surely, by the lectionaries that accompanied the English Prayer books of 1549, 1552, 1559 and 1662. In that lectionary, to be followed compulsorily, the First Testament is largely read in cycle in the course of a year as the first reading at Morning and Evening Prayer. That cycle of readings in the earliest versions leaves out large chunks of what was regarded as “proper Old Testament” on the basis that they were mainly repetitive of other passages — Deuteronomy is largely preferred to much of Leviticus and some of Numbers, and most of Chronicles is omitted. It also includes the vast bulk of the Apocrypha — the omitted material is essentially the longer version material in Esther and Daniel. In later renditions of the lectionary the amount of material overall, but especially the proportion of Apocrypha, is reduced, but still very obvious.

“The Church doth read” means exactly what it says on the tin. The deuterocanonical writings exercise authority in their telling of the story as a guide to living for the ordinary Christian community. Their disputed status renders them non-authoritative for doctrinal arguments among the learned theologians of the church.

Some Anglicans today live in happy ignorance of all this. The last century’s worth of the Bible publishing industry has been interdenominational and correspondingly many people’s Bible’s don’t contain those books. Others of us think that the overwhelming use of the Septuagint by the early church as their First Testament, (and the many and frequent allusions in the NT texts to verses in these disputed books ) mean that the Reformers were misled by their respect for Jerome’s minority view, and that these books should have been accounted canonical.

Either way, at least for this Anglican, both historical and contemporary fact point to the apocryphal / deuterocanonical books creating yet another fuzzy edge to what we mean by Scripture.

1. i.e. St Jerome [↩]