One reason why we Christians argue so much about which hymn to sing, which liturgy to follow, which way to worship is that the commandments teach us to believe that bad liturgy eventually leads to bad ethics. You begin by singing some sappy, sentimental hymn, then you pray some pointless prayer, and the next thing you know you have murdered your best friend.

         Stanley Hauerwas

What is the relationship between what we believe and our corporate worship?

Mostly, I think we would say that our church gatherings are given shape by what we believe. That is, we first decide what we believe, and then we decide what our meetings should be like. The priority is given to doctrine over liturgy.

In fact, the relationship is not as neat as that. If we think about it a little bit more carefully, we should notice that Christian doctrine is itself in fact an outworking of worship. What do I mean? I mean that we first believe - in the sense of responding in faith to the grace of God in Christ - before we believe in the sense of affirming the propositions of a creed or confession.

But that still isn’t quite right. We can’t believe in the first sense without believing something in the second sense - I need to assent to some truths about God before I can have faith in him. So what we have, in fact, is a recursive relationship between the two. We pray informed by doctrine which is in turn an outworking of our prayers.

Justification by faith is a case in point. It is (as a study of Luther’s career will show) a discovery at a existential and a doctrinal level almost simultaneously. We pray – we believe – we pray. Or: we believe, we pray, we believe.  

The Anglican Church has in its formularies not only a confession, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, but also an authorised Prayer Book – the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. These are the documents to which clergy are usually required to give assent, at least in the Anglican Church of Australia.

From the earliest moments of breaking away from the Church of Rome in the 1530s, Thomas Cranmer and others put immense effort not only into formulating the evangelical doctrines of the new church, but into framing services that would be the basis for the new church’s common life. The results can be found in the Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552, the ancestors of the 1662 book. The Articles themselves give quite a bit of space to what ought to happen in the congregations of the church – not merely what ought to be believed, but what ought to be practised.

Not only was the authority of Scripture affirmed as a point of doctrine, for example; Cranmer ensured that it was practised by having an extensive programme of readings from both testaments in his liturgies.
Since the nineteenth century, some Anglicans of a more Anglo-Catholic stripe have evoked the Latin phrase lex orandi  lex credendi  - ‘the law of prayer is the law of belief’ – in order to assert the priority of the act of corporate worship over the content of doctrine. That is, the way a church prays is determinative for what a church believes.

Allegedly, the slogan originates with Prosper of Aquitaine, a student of St Augustine’s in the fifth century. But it was in fact the invention of a Roman Catholic monk, Dom Prosper Gueranger, near the end of the nineteenth century. Later scholars of Christian liturgy have tried to find the principle in the ancient writings of the church. But it is a questionable method of doing history to say the least. Nevertheless, the catchphrase has been used in Anglican circles to diminish the sense in which Anglicanism is thought to have particular doctrinal convictions.

It is, however, quite incorrect to assert that lex orandi, lex credendi means that the way the church prays is determinative for what the church believes; or that the liturgical form cannot be separated from the doctrinal substance.

That is certainly not what Cranmer or the other framers of the Anglican formularies had in mind.

He did, however, bequeath to Anglicans a conviction that what goes on in corporate worship ought to school individual Christians in their response to the divine mercy of God. What we do when we meet together forms a regular habit of response to God which in turn forms good habits in the life of the individual Christian.

The 1552 Prayer Book was a sublime exercise in what we might call ‘reformed spirituality’. It brought the congregation to their knees in fear of the wrath of God, only to lift them up again by the proclamation of the marvellous news of the grace of God. It subjected them to the word of God in its richness. It brought them to the Lord’s Table by faith alone. It taught them to pray; and thus taught them what to believe and what to do. 
Having the BCP or something like it certainly isn’t a guarantee that people will respond to Christ in faith.

But on the hand, shallow corporate worship leads to shallow Christians – or worse.

That’s what US theologian Stanley Hauerwas is getting at in the quotation I began with. He is, of course, exaggerating. But not by a great deal.

And that I think is the question for those modern Anglicans who see themselves as the heirs of Cranmer. We know that merely following the form of Cranmer’s services isn’t the point. But are our Sunday gatherings schooling our congregations in the riches of a ‘reformed spirituality’ in a way in which Cranmer might have recognised? 

Photo credit: Tony Webster