J. I. Packer: The Prayer Book Path

J. I. Packer’s The Prayer Book Path is mentioned in the Summary of Resource Materials in the ACNA’s Prayer Book & Common Liturgy Task Force’s Initial Report: What the Guiding Principles of Christian Worship Should Be, also known as the ACNA’s “theological lens.” 

In The Prayer Book Path Packer examines five principles Archbishop Thomas Cranmer implemented in the 1549 and 1552 Prayer Books.  The Prayer Book Path was one of three addresses given at St. Paul’s Church, Bloor Street, Toronto, on May 1, 1999 at a special event organized by the Prayer Book Society of Canada, Toronto Branch, in celebration of the 450th anniversary of the Book of Common Prayer. 

As it did in its initial report, the Prayer Book & Common Liturgy Task Force has given scant attention to these principles in the rites and services that it has produces to date. However, they are important principles and Packer’s examination of them deserves wider attention. 

 I have also included a link to Packer’s The Gospel in the Prayer Book, published in 1966 and reproduced on the website of St. Paul’s Anglican Church, Los Altos, California 

My task is to celebrate the Prayer Book, not to talk about myself, and I intend to keep to my agenda. But I think I need to start by telling you straight out that I am speaking to you as one of those rare birds who over the years has found the historic Anglican Prayer Book to be a source of increasing delight and excitement (I choose my words; I mean them), so that now in my eighth decade I find myself valuing it more than at any earlier time in my life. I was brought up on the Prayer Book, in the sense that I was baptized and confirmed in the Church of England and attended church regularly with my parents till I went up to Oxford at age eighteen. Throughout those years, however, the Prayer Book bored me stiff, simply because Christianity bored me stiff. I was an intelligent, introverted, isolated boy who lived, I suppose, respectably but conventionally. I knew God was real, and that Christianity was no doubt true, but I had no interest in knowing God relationally, and I hated the pilgrim perspective of the Prayer Book and the hymns, which told me that the supreme significance of this present life is as preparation and training for a more important, endless life that Christians will live in God’s immediate presence. After Jesus Christ made himself known to me and claimed me, however, and once I had got beyond my resentment of the Church of England for never having clearly explained the gospel to me, I began to value the Prayer Book as what others have often called it, namely the Bible arranged for worship, and to see its two-world, grace-oriented, Christ-centred outlook as the highest wisdom. I began to discover how as you use it pulls you into its own world (which is, of course, what Karl Barth once called the strange new world of the Bible). I began to find out how it expands you emotionally and relationally as a person, and how at every turn of the road it highlights and honours our Lord and Saviour Jesus. I came to see that the root problem with the Prayer Book (if “problem” is the right word) is not that its language is ceremonial in an old-fashioned way, but that it is a spiritual book for spiritually alive people, and you cannot expect anyone to be other than bored with it until Jesus Christ renews their hearts and the Bible itself begins to open up to them. So. now, in my eighth decade, I am more of an enthusiast for the Prayer Book than ever, I am increasingly grateful for what it gives me, I find that during the past ten years I have spoken and written more on its behalf than ever before, and it is as an enthusiast that I move at this moment into my announced subject. Keep reading

See also
J. I. Packer: The Gospel in the Prayer Book