Prayerbook Preface, Part I
I have been promising for some weeks to do a series on the Preface to the First Book of Common Prayer. I have been researching that topic, but then I hit vacation and &c., and have not gotten around to posting on this yet. I am about to remedy that now. Before I get into that, a little preface on the Preface might be in order. We, Episcopalians, take the Book of Common Prayer for granted. As is common in most Church life, the things we do, we often do without really stopping to think why we do things a certain way. "We've always done it this way!" In some ways, this is actually a true statement, at least as it pertains to how worship came to be governed in what became the Church of England via the English Reformation and the Church of England's theological descendants like the Episcopal Church in the USA. The Book of Common Prayer was the brainchild of a man named Thomas Cranmer. I have written on this before at some length. (I was halfway through seminary b...