On Cranmer's Daily Office

Sharing some recent work and some recent experiences

Last spring, I was thrilled to get to present at The Anglican Way/Prayer Book Society USA conference in Savannah, GA. I gave a paper on Cranmer’s daily office which was published in the most recent edition of The Anglican Way journal; I wanted to share it with you all (you can read it online here).

Here’s a few-paragraph precis of the paper:

In this paper, I explore critiques of Cranmer’s daily office over the last half-century, tied to a Liturgical Movement-era reconstruction of the history of Christian daily prayer. Liturgical Movement scholars argued that there were two original forms of liturgical Christian daily prayer: a ‘cathedral’ office for the laity focused on praise and intercession, with fixed psalms and little if any Scripture read and a ‘monastic’ office focused on the ruminative reading and meditation on the whole of the psalter and large passages of Scripture. The history of Christian daily prayer, then, was cast as a declension narrative, in which elements of the ‘monastic’ office are gradually brought into the ‘cathedral’ office, making it less suitable for lay usage and gradually the preserve of the clergy (I’ve written about this before for Draw Near With Faith here).

Scholars and liturgists trained in this account of the history of liturgy then found much to criticize in Cranmer’s office, and especially criticized precisely what Cranmer thought was his office’s greatest feature: the reading of the psalter in course and of (nearly) the entire Bible. Cranmer, on this account, wanted to restore a truly primitive/patristic daily prayer liturgy but actually succeeded in restoring a ‘monasticized’ one. And so revisions - perhaps most notably in England and Canada - have sought to move away from Cranmer’s model, providing instead fixed psalms and readings for ‘cathedral’-style daily prayer services.

Probably unsurprisingly, given both my own commitments and the setting, I offered a critique of this critique and a defense of Cranmer’s office. I argued that (much as with Liturgical Movement-era scholarship on the Eucharist) the value of conformity to patristic example was more asserted than argued for, and further that the supposed uniform patristic style of ‘cathedral’ daily prayer turned out to be more a scholarly construct than a fourth century reality. Drawing on Richard Hooker, I argued that the church should be free from conformity to a fourth-century ‘golden age’ in framing its liturgy, and that the combination of praise and contemplation, Scripture and prayer was not incoherent but in fact one of Cranmer’s liturgy’s greatest strengths.

If this whetted your appetite, I’d encourage you to read the whole piece. I’d love any comments or feedback you might have. And I wanted to share a few other related points about the daily ofice that I’ve been thinking about since.

Cranmer and Scripture as Liturgical Text

First, it is worth reflecting on what it means that the daily office was Cranmer’s program for bringing the Word of God to the English people so that the Spirit might work repentance and faith in them. For Cranmer, as for Protestantism in general, the Word was not a merely a book of information about God to be learned and analyzed (never mind ‘a book that tells us about certain cultures’ and individuals’ thoughts and practices relating to God’, as the Bible is treated in much contemporary Biblical scholarship). No: the Word was the chief means or instrument by which God works faith through the Holy Spirit! The goal was, as Cranmer put it in his Homily on Scripture, for the reader or hearer of Scripture to not just regularly read Scripture but be “turned into it…in his heart and life altered and transformed into that thing which he readeth.” And thus, in a transformation of earlier Scripture-focused monastic piety and humanist hopes for wide Scriptural knowledge, Protestants put a great deal of emphasis on being regularly steeped in the Scriptures.

And for Cranmer, the chief means of doing this - of steeping people in the Scriptures - was morning and evening prayer. That is, the normative way of encountering Scripture for the English Reformation was as liturgical text. This should help us see just how vital morning and evening prayer were to Cranmer’s reformatory program (even if, of course, his dream of all the Christians of the parish coming upon the ringing of a bell to pray and hear the Word every morning and evening was always a bit utopian). It also reminds us that the most common ways of encountering the Bible in much of contemporary Protestantism, in group or individual Bible study or ‘quiet time’, is historically peculiar. Indeed, it is not uncommon to find Sunday gatherings for worship among many evangelicals without the public reading of Scripture at all. And I think it is worth asking what distortions might emerge from this resituating of Scripture from the liturgy to the study. The point is not that such study is wrong, of course. I don’t think it is! But rather that it should be a secondary rather than primary mode of engagement with Scripture. Indeed, it seems to me that one advantage of the daily office is the way it situates our primary encounter with Scripture in worship, where we read or hear the Word not firstly to analyze it but to obediently hear it and respond to it with prayer and praise.

On the 1662ie Daily Office Lectionary

A second, somewhat more personal point: I have been praying my daily prayers using the 1662 International Edition for the last few months, which uses the original 1662 daily office lectionary (if I remember correctly, it actually dates to Parker’s revisions in 1561). And I have been very struck by how different, and how much better, the experience has been for me than using more modern daily office lectionaries.

For this lectionary, the readings are almost invariably a chapter each, for four chapters a day. The first lessons at both Morning and Evening Prayer go through a given book of the Old Testament while the second lesson at Morning Prayer goes through the Gospels and Acts and the second lesson at Evening Prayer goes through the Epistles. It follows the secular calendar rather than the ecclesiastical, although there are proper lessons for Sundays and feast days, which typically replace the given first (ie, Old Testament) lessons at morning and evening prayer with a sort of greatest-hits-of-the-Old-Testament series of readings related to the Sunday/feast day Epistle and Gospel.

This lectionary started to be amended in the eighteenth century in the United States. The 1789 USA BCP cuts readings from the Apocrypha and shortens some of the lessons; the later American tradition continued to modify this lectionary. The English daily office lectionary was revised in 1871, and then an additional optional lectionary was provided in 1922. And, of course, the Liturgical Movement liturgies also included changes to this lectionary across the Anglican world. In general, the old 1662 lectionary seems to have been found to be too onerous, its readings too long. However, I have found this lectionary not only helpful in providing more coverage of Scripture but also in terms of user-friendliness and retention. Let me explain.

The point about coverage is presumably clear enough; shorter lessons means you get through fewer books of the Bible and you get through them less often. Now, to be fair, the 1979 BCP’s daily office lectionary has quite good coverage of the New Testament (especially combined with the eucharistic lectionary). But over the entire two years of the lectionary cycle, it covers less than half of the Old! And compare this with the old lectionary: you are reading nearly all of the Old Testament and a good chunk of the Apocrypha yearly (minus the Song of Songs, certain passages from the Torah and historical books, and some visionary prophecy). The entire New Testament, then, is read three times a year (sans Revelation). I should add here that I am not convinced that all Cranmer’s omissions were justified, but even so the difference in the amount of Scripture one reads is evident.

But in fact, I find this lectionary easier to use and more helpful for retention too. Having a yearly lectionary based on the secular rather than church year makes it easier to locate the reading: no need to look up or try to recall whether you are in Year I or Year II or which Proper you’re in. And then, the fact that the readings are almost always an entire chapter means that you don’t have to recall at what verse a given reading starts and stops. Perhaps I’m unusual in this, but when using a more modern lectionary like the 1979, I often need to keep a finger in the lectionary page while doing the reading so that I could remind myself when the reading was supposed to stop. I certainly need to refer back to the lectionary between readings to let me know what the second one is. But with the (original) 1662 lectionary, I can often just glance at it while preparing to say the office for the readings with no need to refer to it during the office itself.

As far as retention goes, I often find that the 1979 (or even the 1962 Canadian) daily office lectionary breaks up passages so much that it is - perhaps counterintuitively - harder for me to recall what is going on from day to day than when using the 1662’s longer readings. I find this to be especially the case for the epistles of the New Testament and the prophetic books of the Old. If a single argument stretches over several days’ reading (as is often the case with the modern lectionaries), I often find myself struggling to remember the ten verses I read yesterday when I pick up the reading again. Whereas reading an entire chapter, while admittedly demanding more time, often gives me a better sense of the shape of an argument or narrative.

Now, to be clear, I share this not to burden anyone’s conscience or make anyone feel that they aren’t doing enough if they are content with, say, the 1979 lectionary. I would much rather you use that one than none at all! And obviously for Episcopalians, the 1979 daily office lectionary is the one duly authorized for public worship in our church, and I am not one to advocate the use of unauthorized resources. Of course, just how broadly one wants to construe the allowance on BCP 1979 p. 935 regarding the office lectionary - “On Special Occasions, the officiant may select suitable Psalms and Readings” - I leave up to the reader.

However, for private rather than public prayer (if you are not in a jurisdiction in which it is authorized for public use), if any of my experience resonates or you are looking for a fuller exposure to Scripture, I commend the 1662ie lectionary to your use. In fact, the good people at IVP have made this lectionary available for free online here. The first few pages are proper lessons for Sundays and holy days (which if they are too complicated can be safely ignored at first) and then the regularly daily lectionary keyed to the secular calendar follows. As I said, I think it is a wonderful resource, one that has enriched my daily prayers, and frankly I would love to see it authorized as an alternative lectionary in our church.