While the American Revolution necessitated some readjustment of those expectations, this was by no means the end of a close relationship between the Episcopal Church and the state. The Cathedral itself is a monument to a particularly American version of how Anglicans might engage in prayer with and for civic leaders and the nation. The recent election of a right-wing populist president in the USA provides one awkward test case that has made Anglicans there ask about the character or even the fact of prayer for civil authorities. Granted the diversity of political circumstances just noted, the disintegration of any neat alignment of church and state such as the Prayer Book presupposed for the established English Church is still sinking in.Įven the more radical strands of Anglican social teaching such as Christian Socialism have often assumed a close and positive relationship between church and state, wherein justice would emerge as part of forming a more genuinely Christian society. Shadows of establishment a pew for a governor, or a flag over an altar hinted at a world-view out of place in Sydney or Singapore, even in colonial times and all the more so now. In different times and places, the same or similar prayers have shaped how different Anglicans think about the realities of power and order they encountered outside church, as well as the divine realm honored within.ĭespite never knowing arrangements like those of an established church, Anglicans nevertheless prayed for rulers and authorities with some hint of Erastianism, borne not just in the words of the Prayer Book but in cultural expectations and symbols, even if adapted to fit local conditions. Peace is emphasized both there and in the collects, where the monarch and the royal family have pride of place, granted that prayer for the King (or Queen) seeks that they may act according to Gods will.Īcross the cultural and theological diversity of the Anglican Communion, common prayer has the strongest claim to providing some continued commonality beyond the accidents of a shared history.
The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Books of Common Prayer, assuming the reality of Christendom, were intended to unite a nation in prayer not merely the personal or private, nor the narrowly petitionary or intercessory, but the whole of a corporate worship through which participants should continuallye profite more and more in the knowledge of God, and bee the more inflamed with the love of his true religion.
While prayer begins and ends with seeking the truth of Gods will, in any specific case it necessarily sketches its best sense of what that truth would be, not only with regard to individuals needs and yearnings but to the social order as well.
While this maxim is often applied or misapplied to doctrine, prayer is also a means of expressing and forming truths about the world, including the political order.
#AN ANGLICAN PRAYER BOOK 1989 PDF HOW TO#
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