Liturgy and Interpretation

By Kenneth Stevenson

Kenneth Stevenson is one of the UK's leading liturgical scholars with an international reputation. Much of his work is in the borderlands of theology, worship and history. The essays in this book are worked examples of the importance of interpretation and liturgy, particularly in the light of the growing impact in recent years of reception-history,

• Language: English
• Publisher: SCM Press
• Release date: Jan 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9780334047803

Kenneth Stevenson

Kenneth Stevenson (PhD, Southampton University) is retired from his position as bishop of Portsmouth in England. A fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he is the author of numerous publications, including Worship: Wonderful and Sacred Mystery, The Mystery of Baptism in the Anglican Tradition, The Lord's Prayer: A Text in Tradition, and Rooted in Detachment: Living the Transfiguration.

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Liturgy and Interpretation

Also in the SCM Studies in Worship and Liturgy series

The Collect in the Churches of the Reformation

Edited by Bridget Nichols

Rethinking the Origins of the Eucharist

Martin D. Stringer

SCM STUDIES IN WORSHIP AND LITURGY

Liturgy and Interpretation

Kenneth Stevenson

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© Kenneth Stevenson

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Contents

Introduction

Part 1. Interpreting the Lord’s Prayer

1. The Lord’s Prayer in Tradition

2. The Six Homilies of Peter Chrysologus on the Lord’s Prayer

3. Richard Hooker and the Lord’s Prayer: A Chapter in Reformation Controversy

4. Christology and Trinity: Interpreting the Lord’s Prayer in Augustine, Maximus the Confessor, Lancelot Andrewes and Karl Barth

Part 2. Interpreting the Transfiguration

5. ‘Rooted in Detachment’: Transfiguration as Narrative, Worship and Community of Faith

6. From Origen to Palamas: Greek Expositions of the Transfiguration

7. From Hilary of Poitiers to Peter of Blois: A Transfiguration Journey of Biblical Interpretation

8. ‘In all supernatural works we rather draw back than help on’: The Seven Transfiguration Sermons of John Hacket (1590–1670)

Part 3. Interpreting the Sermons of Lancelot Andrewes

9. ‘Human Nature Honoured’: Absolution in Lancelot Andrewes

10. Lancelot Andrewes on Ash Wednesday: A Seventeenth-Century Case Study in How to Start Lent

11. Worship and Theology: Lancelot Andrewes in Durham, Easter 1617

12. Lancelot Andrewes at Holyrood: The 1617 Whitsun Sermon in Perspective

Part 4. Two Concluding Contrasts

13. Animal Rites: The Four Living Creatures in Patristic Exegesis and Liturgy

14. Michael Ramsey Interpreting the Eucharist

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Having spent a number of years stomping round the borderlands of theology, worship and history, I want to offer the chapters here as worked examples of the importance of interpretation and liturgy, a relationship that has been gathering momentum. Perhaps one of the main reasons for this is the growing impact in recent years of reception history on biblical scholarship, of which Ulrich Luz’s work on Matthew’s Gospel is a significant example. But there are important spin-offs for worship and doctrine, which result from the subtle dialectic that exists between Scripture as canonical, and liturgy and doctrine which are not. The chapters are in four parts, each of which has figured as the subject or a major theme of books I have written. Although each has its own particular context, they share an overall approach to the way worship has been interpreted down the ages, and how we interpret the past in relation to the present as well.

The Lord’s Prayer

Part 1 centres on interpreting the Lord’s Prayer. As the principal prayer which comes from the New Testament itself, this inevitably takes on the cross-currents of biblical studies, before we even begin of think of multiple forms and styles of liturgical use, and the amazing array of different approaches to its shape and meaning. The scene is set with an opening chapter, ‘The Lord’s Prayer in Tradition’, based on lectures delivered in the Gregorian University, Rome, in March 2003, and at the Anglo-Nordic Baltic Theological Conference, Riga, in August of that year. This is followed by a short trip to fifth-century Ravenna, in order to look at the six homilies of Peter Chrysologus on the Lord’s Prayer; he was known for his brevity, by ancient standards, and these homilies were delivered as part of the preparation for baptism at Easter. As it happens, we have more discourses from him on this prayer than anyone else in antiquity (even beating Augustine’s five). This chapter was a Communication at the 2003 Oxford Patristic Conference and subsequently appeared in the Paul Bradshaw Festschrift. After that we move into Reformation controversy about whether and how the prayer should be used at all, whether it was a ‘vain repetition’, as some of the more Reformed traditions thought, or a proper liturgical text as directed in the Book of Common Prayer, even whether it should have an established place at the Eucharist. These issues are looked at in detail through Book V of Richard Hooker’s ‘Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity’, in a chapter that started life as a paper delivered at St George’s House, Windsor during a Conference in September 2000 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Hooker’s death. There then follows a chapter looking comparatively at how the prayer is interpreted in Augustine, Maximus the Confessor, Lancelot Andrewes and Karl Barth, from a paper read at a Conference in Yale, 2005, at the behest of Bryan Spinks.

Transfiguration

Next comes a cluster of chapters about the interpretation of a Gospel text, which in time becomes a festival in its own right – the Transfiguration. Once again, there is a scene-setter, entitled ‘Rooted in Detachment’, a quotation from Michael Ramsey’s book The Glory of God and the Transfiguration of Christ (1949), which has proved of lasting inspiration to me in looking at this great mystery. The two succeeding contributions, ‘From Origen to Palamas’ and ‘From Hilary of Poitiers to Peter of Blois’, go on to trace the pluriform exegetical and liturgical stories of East and West. They draw out the different speeds at which the transition from Lenten sermon to August feast took place, in which the Greek East was quicker than the Latin West, but where, by contrast, the role of allegory in exegesis took root more easily than in the East. The first of these chapters was read at the meeting of the Society for Oriental Liturgy, Eichstätt, July 2006. This section concludes with a journey into the seventeenth century, through the Transfiguration sermons of John Hacket while working as a London incumbent. This collection has three special features. They were delivered during Eastertide (not known elsewhere). There are seven of them (more than in any published collection I so far have discovered). And they all centre on the Lucan narrative, which becomes something of an Anglican trait; modern Anglican lectionaries have adopted the threefold Synoptic scheme for use before Lent, but many of them direct the Lucan narrative only on the August feast.

Sermons of Lancelot Andrewes

Then comes a quartet of chapters about another seventeenth-century figure – Lancelot Andrewes. He was one of the most remarkable preachers of his day – someone who could throw a text in seemingly endless directions, rich in quotations from the Fathers, exegetical and allegorical, bulging with vivid illustrations, and providing liturgical allusions whenever possible. An important aspect of interpreting a sermon is its setting and background. In this case, we are fortunate. The Absolution sermon chapter, written for the Donald Gray Festschrift, reveals how Andrewes got into trouble with the authorities after preaching on the Sunday after Easter’s gospel, Christ’s commission to pronounce the forgiveness of sins, in which he advocated the practice of private confession as found in the Prayer Book Visitation of the Sick. The Ash Wednesday chapter, based on a paper given at the St Theosevia Centre, Oxford, in February, 1999, demonstrates the wise pastor of souls urging his hearers to heed the day’s traditional Old Testament reading by rending their hearts and not their garments, even mentioning the old practice of ashing, and through the constant use of the word ‘turn’ – away from the past and back to God – providing unwitting inspiration for T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘Ash Wednesday’ composed in 1930. The two 1617 sermons date from Andrewes’ (unique) northward trip with King James and the Royal Court, via Durham at Easter (this chapter was the 2005 Michael Vasey lecture), on the typology of the sign of Jonah, applying it to the ‘three days’ of Christ’s death, burial and resurrection. Then we are on to the final destination, Holyrood, Edinburgh, for Whitsun, where he preached on Jesus’ interpretation of the Spirit of the Lord being upon him in the synagogue at Nazareth. He works through the Trinitarian implications, a favourite mannerism, and moves on to speak about ministry and ordination, doing so in the tense atmosphere of the competing claims of Geneva and Prayer Book theology and practice – harbinger of the explosions that were to erupt in the next reign. This chapter emerged from the sermon I preached at Evensong in Winchester Cathedral on 1 February 1995 for the unveiling of a commemorative plaque to Andrewes.

Concluding Contrasts

The concluding pair of chapters summarize this travelogue of interpretation in contrasting ways. A detailed historical study of the Four Living Creatures – of long fascination to me, and the launch pad for my interest in reception history and liturgy – takes us through the complex story of the three different schemes that were at first applied to the evangelists, and how a standard approach emerged that came to operate both in iconography and, at Rome, in imaginative baptismal catechesis. A symbolic way of teaching about having no fewer – and no more – than four Gospels, which illustrated the distinctiveness of each, here is another significant use of Scripture in theology and worship. This essay was delivered as a Master-Theme Paper at the 1999 Oxford Patristic Conference. Finally, in a shorter piece, the nuanced, Anglican way of interpreting the interplay of worship and theology, already encountered in Hooker and Andrewes, is shown in a case study of a surprisingly neglected theme, Michael Ramsey interpreting the Eucharist. This was originally delivered as the Ramsey Lecture in Little St Mary’s, Cambridge, November 2001. The method adopted here is to start with Ramsey’s writings, and from there develop a ‘liturgical theology’ that embraces both doctrine, practice and devotion, each of which was central to him. Though in some respects dated, the exercise nonetheless provides a useful counterpoint to some of today’s questions surrounding the need to interpret context and affective prayer, rather than looking at official text as liturgical prayer. Interpretation can be about imaginatively penetrating the outer shell of what we see and say, in order to engage with greater and deeper levels of illumination.

Some Observations

What, then, specifically, do these groups of studies show? The Lord’s Prayer raises questions about the interpretation of shape – does it have seven petitions, as the Latin West and Luther, or six, with the doxology, as the Greek east and Calvin? – as well as the fact that, whereas the name, the kingdom and the will of God quickly move into more controverted terrain when we pray for ourselves, for food, forgiveness and protection in the future. Important, too, are the different ways in which its importance may be signalled by its position in different services, as well as the many different ways in which it has been interpreted in personal piety, such as the sevenfold schemes (from the gifts of the Spirit to the seven deadly sins) that were popular in the Middle Ages.

The Transfiguration raises symbolic questions about mountains and their significance, the number and meaning of the disciples in Jesus’ ‘inner cabinet’, who and what Moses and Elijah represent, to say nothing of the Trinitarian focus of the mountain-top scene, with its throwback to Jesus at Jordan, and the forward movement to death, resurrection, ascension and the ongoing Christian walk of pilgrimage, proclamation and change. In line with the drift of patristic scholarship over recent years, the two lengthy chapters on the East and West highlight the abiding importance of the later period in each: Byzantine writers develop the earlier trend of Christological sensitivity, whereas Bede emerges as a key figure, for example in his unique interpretation of Christ’s shining raiment as the baptismal robe – which we encounter again and again thereafter.

When it comes to the Andrewes sermons, we encounter a manner of preaching which, even though impossible today, engages with different levels of meaning and understanding, in which ‘treasures old and new’ are put to good use, and applied to the specific issues of the time, in forgiveness, penitence, new life and rebirth in the Spirit, and how context inevitably colours both the use of text and illustration.

That brings us to the question of practical application. With the Lord’s Prayer, there is one that stands out a mile. Traditionally, this prayer has – unlike any other – had its own introduction at the Eucharist. This may be because of its Gospel origins – ‘Jesus taught us’. But it could be for another reason: the first two words of the prayer – in so many languages the name by which it is called – belong to the whole people of God, and not just to the liturgical president, and should therefore not be hijacked away from the congregation, as is so often the case. With Transfiguration, it is clear that, while the ‘stand-alone’ festival is great and glorious, the older Lenten position reflects its position in the Gospel narratives more faithfully – ‘glory before suffering’. And with the Andrewes sermons, like other preachers of his age, while he was learned in many sources, medieval and contemporary, his use of the Fathers stands out strongly. In our day, different forms of biblical criticism (source, narrative, literary) rightly influence preachers, but projects like the ‘Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture Series’ are alerting us to the riches of the early centuries in a new way – which is to be welcomed.

In collecting these chapters together, I am grateful to the editors and publishers of journals and books in which they originally appeared, and also to Natalie Watson of SCM Press, for her encouragement with the project. The opportunity has been taken to make some revisions and corrections, and I also need to point out one factor of presentation in relation to the Andrewes sermon pieces: three of them use the spelling from the nineteenth-century editions, whereas the fourth – the Durham 1617 paper – uses original seventeenth-century spelling, a matter of editorial policy – which will, we hope, add a bit of spice in the reading.

Interpretation and Liturgy is a big subject, and one that is unlikely to go away, especially as theology continues to grapple with the need to counteract the fragmentation of knowledge that can be so limiting for theology’s overall impact, as we keep being told. It is in reality part of the twofold movement of divine initiative and human aspiration – or to put it more directly, what some would call the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and others would call the religious imagination, and others again would call both. The Lord’s Prayer, the Transfiguration and the sermon in context may, I hope, prove fruitful starting points for such an exercise. There are obviously many more.

Friendships, encounters of various kinds and comments from colleagues in different branches of the theological enterprise have helped the following pages to emerge – and that includes the support of Sarah and the rest of our family.

Kenneth Stevenson

Chichester, November 2010

PART 1

Interpreting the Lord’s Prayer

1

The Lord’s Prayer in Tradition

¹

Introduction: Many Tongues

My story begins in the year 1662, but not, as perhaps might be expected, with the Book of Common Prayer in England. Instead, the venue is Riga and the author is a Lutheran scholar and pastor, Janis Reiters, who published in that year a collection of translations of the Lord’s Prayer in no fewer than 40 languages. Riga then, as now, but to a lesser extent, was a good place to do that, because of the different language groups in the area: Reiters’ native German, spoken in the city itself; the Baltic languages, Latvian and Lithuanian, as well as Old Prussian, now no longer spoken by anyone; the Finno-Ugrian languages, Finnish and Estonian; the Nordic languages, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic; not forgetting Polish, Russian, Wendish, Czech, old Slavonic; and he also managed to get in Greek, Latin and Italian, as well as English.²

The wider implications of collecting versions of the Lord’s Prayer in this way can lead us further than Reiters’ quest, and take us to what David Parker of Birmingham University describes as a ‘living text’, that is to say a text among many other texts, living in translation and usage.³ From my own limited travels into the worship of various Christian traditions, both past and present, it has long seemed to me that we are (on the one hand) united by the sheer gift of the Prayer of the Lord, the dominica oratio as Cyprian described it in mid third-century North Africa,⁴ and yet we are affected by the diversity of the texts as well as the different ways we use and interpret them. I do not regard this as an impoverishment. To the contrary, I see it as an enrichment. There are a number of different ways of approaching ‘The Lord’s Prayer in Tradition’. I intend to do so by looking at seven areas: the text; its use, focusing on baptism and Eucharist; its structure, according to different authors; the way the number ‘seven’ has been applied in the West to its shape; different ways of interpreting the prayer; its ownership (who does it belong to?); and, in conclusion, some remarks on textuality, the relationship between the text and its context.

The Text

As is well known, there are two versions of the prayer in the New Testament, right in the very centre, as Graham Stanton points out,⁵ of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 6.9–13), where Jesus says ‘pray like this’, and the second when the disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray, and he responds more prescriptively (Luke 11.2–4). The differences between them are slight but significant; Matthew’s inclusion of material not in Luke can be explained by Matthew’s priorities; he likes to refer to God as ‘heavenly Father’; his inclusion of the petitions for the doing of the will and deliverance from evil are paralleled also in his Gospel; and the variations at the petition for bread can be explained by Luke’s more literary style. Origen, writing in mid third-century Palestine, suggested that these texts were given by Jesus on two different occasions,⁶ but most scholars regard them as emanating from two different communities. However, signs of the triumph of the Matthew version can be seen as early as the late first–early second century, in Syria, in the Didache (8.2–3), a document that shows signs of familiarity with parts of Matthew’s Gospel, but not Luke.⁷ Here we have slight editorial touches, such as Matthew’s ‘have forgiven’ (aphekamen) replaced by Luke’s ‘forgive’, but in classical Greek (aphiemen), not koine (aphiomen), as well as the addition of a doxology that mentions power and glory, but not kingdom. It is this text that becomes the standard version of the Greek-speaking churches, the doxology (with kingdom added) appearing from the late fourth century onwards, as witness John Chrysostom’s homilies on Matthew’s Gospel preached at Antioch in 390.⁸

But the rest of the tale is hardly straightforward. Two petitions emerge as problems to translate. First of all, there is ‘ton epiousion arton’. In the Old Syriac version, we have ‘constant bread’ (lahma ‘amina), on which Ephrem comments, whereas the (early fifth-century) Peshitta alters this to ‘bread of our need’ (lahma d-sunqanan), which is what subsequent Syriac liturgies use.⁹ The Old Latin versions opt for the more ambiguous quotidianum, ‘daily’, which could (just) embrace all possibilities of meaning, ‘for existence’, ‘for today’, ‘for the coming day’, or ‘for the future’. But when Jerome put together what was to become the Vulgate version of Matthew in 383, he was inspired by Eastern exegetes such as Origen, and translated epiousion as supersubstantialem, also pointing forward to the Peshitta’s ‘bread of our need’; in so doing, he was to pitch his own translation for an indefinite period against the liturgical Latin version.¹⁰ Then there is temptation: can God ‘lead’ us there? Jean Carmignac suggested in an article in 1965 (backed up in his exhaustive study of the prayer in 1969) that the real meaning is to be found in the Semitic background, where the causative-negative applies to the result (temptation), and not to the process (being led). This leaves us with a more straightforward meaning, along the lines of ‘don’t let temptation happen’; and it is borne out by the Aramaic version used by many Syrian Christians today, which reads wla tualan l’nesyuna, ‘and don’t let us enter into temptation’.¹¹ Christians have indeed struggled with this petition, in the same way that they struggle with the issue of suffering in their own lives. Tertullian in early third-century North Africa offers ne patiaris (‘do not suffer us to be led’) as its meaning, which Cyprian uses in the text; and it is clear that Augustine knew of this version, for he cites it on a number of occasions, but prefers ne inferas, ‘do not bring us’; ne patiaris is referred to by many subsequent commentators, Hildefonsus of Toledo even adopting it in the text itself.¹²

These instances are only the tip of the iceberg. We could mention the Syriac ‘as we have forgiven’, more faithfully translating Matthew’s aphekamen; and Tertullian’s inversion of the kingdom and will petitions. Gregory of Nyssa uses a textual variant in Luke 11.2, where instead of praying for the kingdom we pray that the Spirit will come and purify us; and in the sixth century, Narsai at Nisibis attests to a tradition of expanding the prayer, which we find in the daily prayer of the Church of the East to this day.¹³ When we look at sixteenth-century England and Scotland, there is an equally mixed scene; Henry VIII insisted on ‘suffer us not to be led’ in the 1538 English Primer, but no sooner was he dead than Archbishop Thomas Cranmer reverted to ‘lead us not’ in the 1549 Prayer Book, the version used by the majority of late medieval English vernacular texts.¹⁴ The (English) Geneva Bible of 1560 followed Calvin, who in the Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536) viewed the doxology as an integral part of the prayer; it therefore appeared at Matthew 6.13, but in the version ‘for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory for ever’. There was a more significant variation at the forgiveness petition, with ‘debts’ and ‘debtors’ (following Miles Coverdale’s translation of 1536), instead of the more literary ‘trespasses’ and ‘them that trespass against us’ of William Tyndale’s translation of 1534, which was adopted in the Prayer Book. These two separate traditions, English Prayer Book and Scots Calvinist, were to solidify over the years, and they were to be exported across the Atlantic Ocean and beyond.¹⁵ On any score, over and above the Eastern–Reformation (and now Roman) consensus that the doxology is a constituent part of the prayer, the text is not stable and never was.

Use

Whatever we make of the text, it is clear from its two Gospel settings that it is intended for use. And yet the evidence for its liturgical use in the early centuries is slender indeed, if (for example) we take into account the important work of Maria-Barbara von Stritzky.¹⁶ People wrote and preached about it: Tertullian, Cyprian, Origen, Ephrem and Gregory of Nyssa. The Didache directs its use three times daily, which probably embraces what we nowadays would describe as both private and public prayer, but it is unlikely to refer to a formal daily office. On the other hand, as Taft points out, by the mid fourth century, it is already firmly established as the ‘prayer of the gospel’ in Coptic monasticism, in connection with the start of daily prayer, with the sign of the cross as a mark of baptism.¹⁷ But it is not until the late fourth century that we have concrete evidence of its place in the baptismal and eucharistic liturgies.

For baptism, in spite of all the emphasis on learning the Lord’s Prayer in the preaching of Augustine and others, there is no special place until Antioch, c.380, in the document called Apostolic Constitutions (3.18.1–2 and 7.45.1–3), when the newly baptized is to recite the prayer, followed by a prayer for himself and the church in general, immediately on coming from the font; and this same practice is alluded to by John Chrysostom in a homily on Colossians preached in Constantinople in 399 (but nowhere else),¹⁸ Gabriele Winkler’s groundbreaking work on the Armenian rite published in 1982 drew attention to its Syriac origins, and in the ninth- and tenth-century texts at her disposal, the same practice appears of the newly baptized reciting the prayer (but after the reading of Matt. 3.13–17, the narrative of Christ’s baptism); it also comes in the Syrian Orthodox rite, but after the post-baptismal consignation, and with an introductory and concluding prayer.¹⁹ Interestingly, the Reformation provides its own counterpoint; in Martin Luther’s Taufbüchlein (1526), the pastor lays his hand on the candidate’s head, with the godparents, before baptism and recites the prayer at this point; Thomas Cranmer places the prayer, but to be recited by all, immediately after baptism, in the 1552 English Prayer Book, where it remained until the recent revisions; and in 1912, the Danish Lutheran rite, influenced by the baptismal teaching (the Lord’s Prayer as the prayer of the baptized) of the nineteenth-century preacher and theologian Nikolai Grundtvig, moved the prayer, with the hand-laying, to after the baptism, thus making prayer and symbolic action even more dramatic.²⁰

What of the Eucharist? The Apostolic Constitutions does not mention it at all, which indicates a baptismal focus for the prayer, at least in its (possibly mildly) heterodox Antioch milieu. But late fourth-century–early fifth-century evidence from Ambrose of Milan, Augustine, Jerome, John Chrysostom and the Jerusalem Mystagogic Catecheses all point to a position between the Eucharistic Prayer and the communion. Robert Taft has looked at this area with his customary thoroughness, suggesting that it was the sense of unworthiness that warranted the prayer’s introduction.²¹ Perhaps it also resulted from the impact of baptismal teaching. Gregory the Great at the end of the seventh century moved the prayer in the Roman rite from after the breaking of the bread to before it, following the rest of the East (except Alexandria). But he retained the Roman–North African tradition of the priest only reciting the prayer, echoed in the Rule of Saint Benedict, where at Lauds and Vespers only the superior recites the prayer; this contrasts with what we can glean from Gregory of Tours (and elsewhere), that across the Alps everyone joined in, as in the East.²² But unlike most of the East, there is no sign of the doxology in the West until the Reformation. The classic liturgies of East and West all (with some variations) introduce the prayer by mentioning its dominical origin and our ‘boldness’ (pawhesia – ‘freedom of speech’) in calling God ‘Father’, and follow it with some kind of prayer (the embolism), which in the West begins ‘deliver us from every evil’, because of the sevenfold structure of the whole prayer, whereas in the East (where the embolism does occur) it opens with reference to temptation, because of the East’s regard for its overall sixfold structure. It is as if the prayer’s uniqueness has to be highlighted in an elaborate liturgy.²³ At the Reformation, however, both introduction and embolism disappear, although the introduction has reappeared in recent revisions, no doubt also intended to ensure that the whole congregation joins in with the opening words, ‘Our Father’.

Through the later medieval West, there grew up a rich tradition of vernacular paraphrase, including one attributed to Francis of Assisi, and this tradition lived on after the Reformation, principally in private devotion. We find examples in such distinguished figures as Lancelot Andrewes and Jeremy Taylor in seventeenth-century Anglicanism,²⁴ and also in the liturgical work of Luther and Calvin. Luther preaches frequently about the prayer, and in a much simplified liturgy, the Lord’s Prayer stands out with a stark prominence, aided by his Catechism metrical version of the prayer, Vater Unser (1539), a new and characteristically Lutheran departure.²⁵ Although his 1526 Deutsche Messe recommends a paraphrase to prepare the communicants, subsequent Lutheran practice placed the full text of the prayer between the thanksgiving and the institution narrative, just before Communion, following the (more conservative) Formula Missae of 1523. When we come to Calvin, theology and liturgy walk side by side, if a little nervously. The third volume of the Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536) concludes with an exposition of the prayer, which he ends by pointing out that it is not intended to be a set liturgical text but a guide to all prayer. The 1542 edition of Calvin’s Strasbourg Service Book directs a catechesis of the Lord’s Prayer at the end of the Sunday Morning service intercession, which on Communion Sundays (quarterly in practice) includes the full text of the prayer. But this is short lived: in Calvin’s 1542 Geneva Service Book, it is replaced by a paraphrase, more lengthy and wide-ranging (and less devotional) than Luther’s. Whereas the prayer was directed to be said at baptism, eucharistic practice varied between Geneva (where the paraphrase tradition persisted) and Strasbourg (where the Lord’s Prayer was said in full). Calvin’s clear preference, therefore, is for the paraphrase at ordinary Sunday Morning worship. A more conservative approach, however, of the 1542 Book is adopted in John Knox’s 1564 (Reformed) Scottish Book of Common Order, where it is used in full at the end of the intercession.²⁶

The English Prayer Books, on the other hand,²⁷ use it twice at the Eucharist: at the very beginning (following late medieval devotional practice for the priest) and, from 1552, immediately after Communion (cf. baptismal practice); there is an interesting parallel here, because in the Assyro-Chaldean Liturgy, it is recited both before and after Communion, as we know from the teaching of Narsai in the sixth century.²⁸ But because it also appeared twice at each of the daily offices, and in the litany, and because the Eucharist was supposed to be celebrated after these two services, many of the Genevan-minded in England, who were unhappy with the Prayer Book, questioned these directions, and cited the 1560 Geneva Bible’s translation of Matthew 6.7, ‘use not vain repetitions’, which they interpreted in an anti-Catholic manner. This controversy led in time to the non-use of the prayer by the early Baptists.²⁹ John Smyth, for example, in 1605 wrote in his Pattern of True Prayer that ‘I had rather speak five words to God in prayer from understanding, faith and feeling, than say the Lord’s Prayer over a thousand times ignorantly, negligently or superstitiously’.³⁰ That liturgical rejection has cooled over the years somewhat, but its inherent (apophatic) scepticism should not be overlooked. However, many of the Reformation controversies about the prayer appear to have been settled in the recent liturgical revisions: the Roman rite now adopts popular recitation, with the doxology, and Anglicans, Lutherans and Methodists, as well as many Presbyterians, now agree on a pre-Communion position. What we all lack, however, is the dramatic Syrian–Armenian use of the prayer immediately after baptism.

Structure

What of the structure of the prayer? The dominant