All Things Seen & Unseen

"A Prayer Book for Australia" Anglican worship is typically ordered by the use of a prayer book. In fact, Anglicanism may be said to be recognisably Anglican because of its use of set forms of worship based on a prayer book usually found in the pew for worshippers to use. In Australia, Anglicans used the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) (1662) until 1978 when the first modernised An Australian Prayer Book (AAPB) was produced.  The Prayer Book was again revised in 1995 to make its language more inclusive; hence A Prayer Book for Australia (APBA) is now commonly used in most parishes using a prayer book today. (The BCP is still in use in some Australian parishes and is still part of Church practice by church law in the Anglican Church of Australia.) Though some still call the Anglican Church of Australia 'The Church of England', the Anglican Church of Australia was constituted in 1981. However, the history of the English church is relevant to Australia because of the fact ...

The Book of Common Prayer (BCP)--'common' means 'public' in this context--came out of the fires of the English Reformation and its words have found their way into the English language and into the liturgies of other denominations. We speak of 'the world, the flesh and the devil' which we might imagine is a Biblical phrase but no, it's found in the prayer book during the time of Edward VI (1549) composed by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. Archbishop: Thomas Cranmer Cranmer was a genius without doubt, a learned scholar and not a combatant but he was used to translate the former Roman Catholic liturgical forms from Latin into English and purge them from their Romish errors. However, he was no mere translator but an active shaper of the religious consciousness of the English people. He was responsible for the first two editions of the Book of Common Prayer (1549, 1552 ). The definitive BCP of the period was appointed for use in the Church of England in 1662. I've...

Of course, I'm wondering with all this whether Scott McKnight has got it right. Certainly a few others think the same way. See here and here for examples.  Not to say that McKnight isn't a writer to be read and listened to. I think he says some valuable things which the evangelical churches and mainline churches need to hear. But just a few points that I noticed that I would need more detail about are: His distinction between gospel and salvation I'm not sure that this distinction can be so easily sustained. I appreciate what McKnight is wanting to say: the message of the gospel is not the same as its effects (salvation); gospel doesn't equal salvation because God is more concerned about gospel than salvation it seems. For a theologian who is a theoretician by training distinctions are always important. However, when one gets into church ministry settings I wonder whether such issues have much moment.

Postscript to my recent post on the life of Alexander Cruden (1699-1770). We find it quite hard to imagine to imagine how people could found themselves so easily incarcerated in gaols or private asylums supposedly 'mad' or 'insane'. Julia Keay has an interesting comment on that fact. She said that when one looks that earlier centuries that the mad and insane are treated quite differently from those unfortunates of the 18th century because in former times they were usually left alone. When Robert Burton (1577-1640) wrote his justly famous Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) he took the view that melancholy was a complex phenomenon. For him it had physical, social, spiritual, biotic, mood and actions aspects to it. Burton saw melancholy (clinical depression) as related to sin and the devil but also realised that other matters contributed such as diet, fresh air, exercise, and amount of sleep. Burton also used the ancient idea of the four humours to explain depression:...