Among the treasures of the Anglican Church’s Reformation heritage is the 1552 Prayer of Consecration. The older I get, the greater my appreciation of that prayer grows.
The 1552 Prayer of Consecration is biblical. As we shall see, the 1552 Prayer of Consecration is thoroughly Scriptural. It embodies a number of key themes from the Old and New Testaments.
The 1552 Prayer of Consecration is reformed. It does not focus undue attention on the priest and draw attention away from Christ. Our Lord is clearly the host at the supper. The priest is a humble steward whose duty is to serve the meal on the behalf of his Master.
The 1552 Prayer of Consecration is concise. It makes clear that the Lord’s Supper is a remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice above all else. Recalling what Christ did for us on the cross invigorates and strengthens our faith. It is by faith that we appropriate the benefits of Christ’s suffering and death and feed upon him in our hearts with thanksgiving.
The 1552 Prayer of Consecration is short. It focuses on what matters most. It does not drag on interminably like the Prayer of Consecration of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer or the so-called “Standard Anglican Eucharistic Prayer” of the proposed BCP 2019. It moves quickly to the communion of the people which is the high point of the 1552 Communion Service. Nothing comes between the consecration of the bread and wine and the communion of the people except for an “Amen” in the 1662 revision of the prayer, the only change that the Restoration bishops made in the prayer.
The Lord’s Prayer follows the communion of the people. “In it,” in the words of Evan Daniels, “we glorify God for the great privilege to which we have just been admitted, and pray for a continuance of that spiritual food which we daily need.” It is a reminder that the spiritual feeding to which the Lord’s Supper points is a daily occurrence. That feeding is not confined to one brief moment in time.
The Prayer of Humble Access follows the Sanctus and serves as a fitting response to the angelic cry, “Holy! Holy! Holy!” in which we acknowledge our unworthiness as did the prophet Isaiah. “Woe to me. I am a man of unclean lips.” Having acknowledged our unworthiness, we pray “for all that is necessary to a worthy reception of the Sacrament.”
To Anglicans who are accustomed to the Eucharistic Prayers of the 1928 Prayer Book, the 1962 Canadian Prayer Book, the 1979 Prayer Book, and the 1985 Book of Alternative Services, the sparseness and the structure of the 1552 Prayer of Consecration may initially feel strange. But repeated use of one of the simpler forms of the prayer such as the Prayer of Consecration of the Service of Lord’s Supper Form 1 of Common Prayer: Resources for Gospel-Shaped Gatherings (2012) will foster an appreciation of the prayer.* As with anything new we become comfortable with it over time.
An initial step is to disabuse ourselves of any prejudices against the 1552 Prayer of Consecration which we may have picked up from the liturgiologists of the last two centuries. These liturgiologists created their own standard of what is the ideal Eucharistic Prayer based upon the 1549 Canon and ancient, Eastern, and Oriental anaphoras. Their particular area of study and their subsequent conclusions reflects a pre-existing bias. Very few of these liturgiologists bothered to study Reformed liturgies.
The compilers of the Reformed liturgies were not concerned with the recreation of early liturgies but with the development of a liturgy that embodied the teaching of the Holy Scriptures and conformed to their teaching. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was one of them. Their guiding principle was not the rule of antiquity but the rule of Scripture.
While the compilers of the Reformed liturgies may have used prayers from earlier liturgies, they used these prayers because the prayers embodied the teaching of the Holy Scriptures or after they had revised the prayers according to the Holy Scriptures’ teaching. Archbishop Cranmer articulated the principle of retaining the old where the old might be well-used. By “well-used” Cranmer meant revised in accordance with the teaching of the Holy Scriptures and used in a manner that conformed to the Holy Scriptures’ teaching.
Liturgical commissions like the ACNA’s Prayer Book and Liturgy Task Force have tended to ignore this principle in recent years. As a consequence the rites and services that they produce use unscriptural versions of older forms in a manner that pays little attention to Scripture.
Among the objections to the 1552 Prayer of Consecration of which we may need to disabuse ourselves is the notion that the 1552 Prayer of Consecration embodies the late medieval view that the moment of consecration is when the priest rehearses the Words of Institution. Historically Anglicans have regarded the whole prayer, even the entire service, as setting the bread and wine apart for sacramental use. This misunderstanding arises from the use of the Words of Institution to consecrate more wine or more bread. It must be noted that the Words of Institution are a prominent feature of Lutheran and Reformed liturgies. In a number of Lutheran liturgies the Words of Institution are used in place of a Eucharistic Prayer. The compilers of these liturgies followed what they believed was the scriptural model. When Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper, he did not recite a lengthy anaphora over the bread and wine. He said a simple table grace. What he left us was not the words of this grace but the Words of Institution. The rehearsal of a lengthy anaphora over the elements is a later development. In giving thanks over the bread and wine, some bishop ignored our Lord’s warning about using too many words in our prayers and set an unfortunate precedent.
Among these objections is the notion that the Prayer of Humble Access should immediately precede the communion of the people. The position of the Prayer of Humble Access in the 1548 Order of Communion and the 1549 Communion Service are often cited as the basis for this notion. The Prayer of Humble Access was used in this position in the 1548 Order of Communion for barely a year and in the 1549 Communion Service for barely three years. The Prayer of Humble Access was Cranmer’s own composition. Having tried it in this position, Cranmer moved it to a position between the Sanctus and the commemoration of our Lord’s sacrifice on the cross in the 1552 Prayer of Consecration. It occupied that position in the American Prayer Book until 1928 and in the Canadian Prayer Book until 1962. It occupies that position in the Australian and English Prayer Books to this day. The 1662 Prayer Book is still the official Prayer Book of the Anglican Church of Australia and the Church of England.
One of the reasons that Cranmer moved the Prayer of Humble Access to its 1552 position was that in its 1548 and 1549 position it reinforced the idea that Christ was substantively present in the consecrated elements. This is the real reason why it is placed before the communion of the people in more recent liturgies. It has nothing to do with its short use before the communion of the people in the 1548 Order of Common and the 1549 Communion Service.
If the Prayer of Humble Access has a traditional position, it is between the Sanctus and the commemoration of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Placing it before the communion of the people or before the Prayer of Consecration are relatively recent developments.
A third objection to the 1552 Prayer of Consecration is the notion that the Prayer of Oblation rightfully belongs after the Words of Institution because, well, that is where it is in the 1549 Canon. It is an argument that has little substance as does the argument that in the 1552 Communion Service Cranmer placed the communion of the people in the middle of the Eucharistic Prayer. What these two arguments do is set up their own standard for a Eucharistic Prayer and a Service of Holy Communion, measure the 1552 Prayer of Consecration and the 1552 Communion Service against this standard, and then find both wanting. Cranmer might have crafted new prayers when he compiled the 1552 Communion Service. However, consistent with the principle of retaining the old where the old may be well-used, he used texts from the 1549 Communion Service but arranged them in a different order and put them to a different use. He knew what he was doing when he used a text from the 1549 Canon as a Post-Communion Thanksgiving. He eliminated from the Prayer of Consecration anything which suggested that the priest was offering a sacrifice. The focus of the 1552 Prayer of Consecration would be Christ’s sacrifice and Christ’s sacrifice alone.
A fourth objection to the 1552 Prayer of Consecration is its failure to mention the resurrection, the ascension, and the return of Christ. Cranmer focused on what he understood was the most important event in salvation history—Christ’s suffering and death on the cross for the sins of the whole world. It is the central event of Jesus’ life and ministry as recorded in the Gospels. The importance of Jesus’ oblation once offered is emphasized in the Letter to the Hebrews. In his First Letter to the Corinthians Paul tells us that when we eat the bread and drink the cup, we proclaim Christ’s death until he comes again. None of what the New Testament says about Christ’s sacrifice was lost on the archbishop. Cranmer was a Reformed theologian. Reformed theology recognizes the importance of the atonement, If Christ’s suffering and death did not stand between a sinful, rebellious humanity and the righteous wrath of a holy God, none of us would be saved.
As we work through these objections, we come to recognize how weak they are. The 1552 Prayer of Consecration is not a cause for embarrassment. It admirably serves the purposes for which it was compiled—to set apart the bread and wine for sacramental use while focusing our attention upon what Christ has done for us, how he atoned for our sins with his own blood.
Our next step is to help the congregation to understand the biblical theology of the 1552 Prayer of Consecration and to become accustomed to the use of the prayer. Before we introduce the prayer, we might offer a succinct explanation of its different parts and how they fit together. We might want to touch on the history of the prayer. Once we have introduced the prayer, we may want to preach on the key biblical themes associated with the prayer—Isaiah’s vision of God and the cry of the seraphim around the throne, Isaiah’s response to the vision, the Syrophoenician woman’s conversation with Jesus, Jesus’ “I am the vine” discourse, the Paul’s explication of Jesus’ suffering and death in his letters, Jesus as the Great High Priest of Hebrews, Paul’s account of the Lord’s Supper in First Corinthians, and the Synoptic Gospels’ account of Jesus’ institution of the Lord’s Supper. A series of sermons on these themes would show the congregation that the 1552 Prayer of Consecration echoes all these themes.
We may want to point to the congregation’s attention that the 1552 Prayer of Consecration’s simple petition that “we may receive the inward grace with the outward sign of the Sacrament” is far more biblical than the invocation of the Holy Spirit in a number of Eucharistic Prayers. In the Bible we find no instances of the invocation of the Holy Spirit in which inanimate objects such as bread and wine or water are involved. We do, however, find a number of instances of the invocation of the Holy Spirit in which people are involved. On this basis Cranmer concluded that the practice of invoking the Holy Spirit in the consecration of the elements was not biblical.
The Anglican Network in Canada took a step in the right direction with its contemporary language version of the 1552 Prayer of Consecration. The Archbishop of Sydney’s Liturgical Panel took a further step in that direction with the Prayer of Consecration of the Service of the Lord’s Supper Form 1 in Common Prayer: Resources for Gospel-Shaped Gatherings (2012). An Australian Prayer Book (1978), A Prayer Book for Australia (1995), and Common Worship (2000) contain contemporary language versions of the 1662 revision of the 1552 Prayer of Consecration. The Anglican Mission in America and the Prayer Book Society of the USA’s An Anglican Prayer Book (2008) also contains a contemporary language version of that prayer. Anglicans wishing not just to preserve the Anglican Church’s Reformation heritage but to celebrate it in their worship have no lack of prayers from which they may choose.
*Also see Order Two in Contemporary Language in Common Worship (2000). It uses a contemporary language version of the 1662 revision of the 1552 Prayer of Consecration.
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