In affirmation and celebration of The Episcopal Church’s LGBTQ+ members, the Office of Communication is pleased to unveil a new Pride shield.
Dr. Alice C. Linsley
The shrinking Episcopal Church welcomes all. It prides itself on diversity and inclusion. In 1976 the General Convention of ECUSA affirmed homosexual behavior when it passed the “we are children of God” resolution.
In 1977, Bishop Paul Moore (NY) ordained the lesbian Ellen Marie Barrett to the priesthood. She served as Integrity's first co-president along with the late Louie Crew.
Most Episcopalians slept through these changes, many of which were launched with great stealth, as Crew admits in this statement from his paper
Changing the Church: "More 'irregular' ordinations of women took place… after our convention. In Washington at the time, on a missionary journey to our new chapters in the east, Jim Wickliff and I yielded to the counsel of friends who advised that our visibility at the ordination might put in jeopardy lesbians among all early ordinands."
However, the consecration of Gene Robinson in November 2003 stirred many to wakefulness, but by then it was too late to reverse the disastrous course of the Episcopal Church.
There is a popular saying Lex orandi, lex credendi. It means that there is a direct relationship between the law of praying (lex orandi) and the law of believing (lex credendi). Change the prayers of a community and you can change their beliefs. Innovation can direct people's thoughts away from the received tradition. That happened when the Episcopal Church introduced its 1979 prayer book. It should have been called "A Book of Alternative Services" as was done in other Anglican Provinces that introduced experimental liturgies in the 1970s.
By comparing the ECUSA/TEC prayer book to the Book of Common Prayer 1928 one sees the degradation of orthodox theology and the exultation of TEC's social justice agenda. Even advocates of the 1979 prayer book recognized that it presents heterodox theology, what Urban T. Holmes termed a "differentiated" theology. An Episcopal priest and theologian, Holmes understood that the liturgical revisions of the 1970s drew more on Process Theology and modern philosophy than on Scripture, Tradition, and the Church Fathers. In reference to the Episcopal Church 1979 Prayer Book, he wrote, "It is evident that Episcopalians as a whole are not clear about what has happened. The renewal movement in the 1970s, apart from the liturgical renewal, often reflects a nostalgia for a classical theology which many theologians know has not been viable for almost 200 years. The 1979 Book of Common Prayer is a product of a corporate, differentiated theological mind, which is not totally congruent with many of the inherited formularies of the last few centuries. This reality must soon ‘come home to roost’ in one way or another."
Holmes added, "The church has awakened to the demise of classical theology."
Holmes admitted that the 1979 prayer book is not orthodox, and it does not align with what Anglicans have always believed and how they have always prayed.
The sacrament of Baptism was turned into a pledge of allegiance to the social justice agenda of ECUSA (TEC).
Celebrant: Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?
People: I will, with God's help.
The baptismal liturgy of the 1979 book virtually deleted the doctrine of baptismal regeneration. It barely gets a nod in this sentence: "Through it [water of baptism] we are reborn by the Holy Spirit." Contrast that with this from the Book of Common Prayer: "
Dearly beloved, forasmuch as our Saviour Christ saith, None can enter into the kingdom of God, except he be regenerate and born anew of Water and of the Holy Ghost; I beseech you to call upon God the Father, through our Lord Jesus Christ, that of his bounteous mercy he will grant to this Child (this Person) that which by nature he cannot have; that he may be baptized with Water and the Holy Ghost, and received into Christ's holy Church, and be made a living member of the same."
And this: "We yield thee hearty thanks, most merciful Father, that it hath pleased thee to regenerate this Child (this thy Servant) with thy Holy Spirit, to receive him for thine own Child, and to incorporate him into thy holy Church. And humbly we beseech thee to grant, that he, being dead unto sin, may live unto righteousness, and being buried with Christ in his death, may also be partaker of his resurrection; so that finally, with the residue of thy holy Church, he may be an inheritor of thine everlasting kingdom; through Christ our Lord. Amen."
The 1979 book moved around some collects so that, depending on the church calendar, some do not get prayed. This is one: " Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast, the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen."
The ECUSA prayer book deleted 5 convicting sections from the Decalogue. This was removed: "for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, and visit the sins of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; and show mercy unto thousands in them that love me and keep my commandments."
This was removed: "for the Lord will not hold him guiltless, that taketh his Name in vain."
This was deleted: "Six days shalt thou labour, and do all that thou hast to do; but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God. In it thou shalt do no manner of work; thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, thy man-servant, and thy maid-servant, thy cattle, and the stranger that is within thy gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it."
Following the commandment to honor thy father and mother, this was deleted: "that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee."
Following the commandment not to covet, this was removed: "thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his servant, nor his maid, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is his."
The collect for the Circumcision of Christ (Jan. 1) was deleted. After all, circumcision is a touchy topic these days.
Episcopalians who wanted to hold on to the historic Anglican Eucharistic prayers were told they could do so in Rite 1. However, except for the older language, Rite 1 is essentially the same as Rite 2, Prayer A. The Prayer of Humble Access, one of the most profound Anglican prayers is preserved in Rite 1 as optional. It does not appear in Rite II (the contemporary language text), but it is noted as an option.
Two good features of the 1979 prayer book are the inclusion of Old Testament readings at the Eucharist, and a short but worthy Noonday Prayer.
We do well to wonder how orthodox Anglican scholars reacted to the 1979 prayer book. Peter Toon and Louis Tarsitano were experts on the history of the Anglican liturgies. Peter Toon had this to say:
"People who have the time and inclination to read my little tracts and books will have noticed that consistently over the years I have referred to the official Prayer Book of the Episcopal Church, USA, as “the 1979 Prayer Book.” This is a reasonable title to use and it is used by me for one basic reason -- in order to avoid using the official title as given to it by the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in Minneapolis 1979 which was “The Book of Common Prayer….”
Why do I seek to avoid calling this Book by its official title? The answer is simple. I cannot in conscience or historical judgment see it as “The Book of Common Prayer.” It is most certainly a Prayer Book, but to my eyes it is not “The BCP.” If we actually take note only of its internal contents which are characterized by variety and choice, we see very clearly and quickly that they belong to the new class of Prayer Books which were produced from the early 1970s onwards in the western/northern parts of the Anglican Communion, after the Lambeth Conference gave its moral backing to this enterprise. These new Books were intended to provide experimental, alternative forms of public services alongside the received, historical, Book of Common Prayer. Thus they usually contained the word “alternative” in their titles – e.g., An Alternative Service Book (England 1980).
Therefore, as a historian of doctrine and of forms of Anglican worship, I see that the 1979 book was given the wrong title. It should have been something like, An American Prayer Book (1979) or A Book of Alternative Services (1979). When I enquire why it has the wrong title, I find a long and involved story about the ecclesiastical politics operative in the Episcopal Church from the 1960s into the 1970s and it is not necessary to tell that story here.
However, looking back over the history of the Episcopal Church from the new millennium back to the 1960s, I can see clearly how so often the General Convention is driven not by a commitment to biblical truth and historical orthodoxy, but by the desire to innovate to be relevant to a fast changing society and culture. So, it seems to me, the title of the new Prayer Book was a major innovation, a novel way of using an hallowed and distinctive title in order to make easy the speedy entrance of innovation and change of doctrine. And as such it worked as bishops took up the cause and pressed its use upon all dioceses of the Church."
Dr. Louis Tarsitano was an Associate Editor of Touchstone and the author of
An Outline of an Anglican Life. He wrote, "Reformed catholicism is both evangelical and catholic, and when we remain loyal to it, as we should since it is the original faith of the historic Church, we cannot help but be both evangelical and catholic. If we find ourselves merely one or the other, we need to refine our own understanding of the great inheritance that we have been given by Christ and his Church, through the Anglican Way."
The Episcopal Church's 1979 prayer book does not strike the balance of catholic and evangelical. It has effaced the historic Anglican approach to common prayer.
This from "Of Forms and the Anglican Way" by Louis R. Tarsitano is especially relevant.
"In 1976, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church made two fatal departures from the faith embraced in 1789. The first was the claim to legalize the “ordination” of women, contrary to the Scriptures and nineteen centuries of Christian formularies. The second was to introduce a replacement for the Book of Common Prayer, which it illegitimately called by that name, to be finally adopted in 1979. In hearings at the General Convention of 1997, in Philadelphia, Frank Griswold, then chairman of the Standing Liturgical Committee and soon to be elected Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, freely admitted that the American Church had replaced the traditional Prayer Book and that it was the only Anglican church in the world to have done so.
While this admission surprised some people, it should not have. As early as 1976, in a review article in The Anglican Theological Review, Aidan Kavanagh, a Roman Catholic scholar, had noted: First, the Book as a whole is clearly not a mere updated revision of its predecessors since 1549 [the date of the first English Prayer Book]. It is nothing if not a new formulary that contains some structural and phraseological traces of what has gone before but which goes quite beyond it (LVIII, No. 3, 362).
For this new formulary to be Anglican, it must be consistent with other Anglican formularies. It contains, however, merely “traces of what has gone before.” For this new formulary to serve as an adequate basis for the Episcopal Church in the United States to claim that it remains a true local church within the one Church of Jesus Christ, it must be consistent with the forms and formulas of the undivided Church. It fails in this regard as well, since its Trinitarian language, liturgical formulas, mistranslation of the Scriptures (especially in the “Psalter”), confused or false teaching (especially in the “An Outline of the Faith”), and unisex “Ordinal” all fall short of the requirements of the formularies of the undivided Church.
Furthermore, the adoption of this book and the approval of the “ordination” of women are clearly outside the authority of any national church to legislate for its people or to impose its will on the rest of the Church of Christ. These actions are null and void, and they cannot bind the conscience of any Christian. The real effect of these actions was to render the Episcopal Church, stripped of its proper formularies, tohuw bohuw (formless and void) as a national church of any description."
