This volume adds worthily to the Brill series of ‘Anglican-Episcopal Theology and History’. Australia, after 1788 was largely colonized from Britain, and its Anglican Church in the nineteenth century regularly reflected tensions within the Church of England and in the twentieth century developed those tensions within its own structures. It became a single church with its own General Synod in 1962, still then called ‘The Church of England in Australia’, becoming ‘The Anglican Church of Australia’ (ACA) in 1981.
ACA’s official texts provide a backbone to the eucharistic history told here, well illustrated by the front cover featuring the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) of 1662, An Australian Prayer Book (AAPB) of 1978, and A Prayer Book for Australia (APBA) of 1995. However, provisional and experimental eucharistic texts flourished before, between and after AAPB and APBA, and the overall story needs Douglas’s expertise to guide us through its complexities. The Australian church scene has differed from the English one, notably in the near-independence of the dioceses (General Synod initially met only once every four years), and in a theological polarization that has gone well beyond the Church of England’s experience.
The first half of the volume spells out how the various forces arranged themselves and influenced each other in the century and three-quarters before the General Synod began. Key to it all was the strong evangelicalism of the Sydney diocese, often highly defensive in its relationships to other dioceses, yet powerful in its convictions, its urban numbers and its considerable wealth. Thus, when General Synod in 1962 appointed the first Commission on Prayer Book revision, Sydney was strongly represented, with Donald Robinson combining deep evangelical conviction with liturgical learning, and also relating warmly with those from whom he differed. The early revision process went peacefully. The Commission’s report in 1966 shop-windowed a new communion rite, A Modern Liturgy, which, in a dead-heat with New Zealand ’66, provided the first Anglican rite anywhere addressing God as ‘you’. The whole English-speaking world followed in the 1970s.
A Standing Liturgical Commission came next, producing experimental rites in booklet form, Australia ’69 and Australia ’73. These kept an eye on developments in England, but established their own Australian path. Then came the first full book, the AAPB, approved almost unanimously in Synod in 1977, published in hardback in 1978, and claimed by Douglas as the first full Prayer Book of the Anglican Communion to be using modern language (the USA’s Book received provisional approval in 1976, but final authorization only in 1979). The Eucharist in AAPB owed much to Donald Robinson working with an Anglo-Catholic, Brother Gilbert Sinden. It was welcomed into widespread use. Alongside it came 1662 in modern language, another first in the Anglican world. Next officially came a draft for trial use in 1993, for the first time called the ‘eucharist’, and, from a suspicious Sydney viewpoint, moving the rite towards a slightly more ‘catholic’ position.
Douglas overlooks another different need it met, namely the call for ‘inclusive’ language. The ecumenical texts proposed ‘for us and for our salvation’ rather than ‘for us men and for our salvation’. The 1993 rite adopted inclusive language ready for when the Commission’s next proposals came to Synod in 1995. This Synod differed from past ones: not only was there now no Donald Robinson, but there was an Anglo-Catholic raising dust clouds, David Silk, fairly newly arrived from England as Bishop of Ballarat, not on the Commission but pursuing his own agenda. This focused a wholly new eucharistic prayer (not wholly drawn from rites in England), and disrupted the business and the decorum of Synod. Late-night meetings produced a compromise text. But the Sydney representatives were clearly disturbed, and the Book was only passed as ‘A Prayer Book for Australia’ (APBA) and subtitled ‘Liturgical Resources authorized by General Synod’.
Douglas comments: ‘The Book of 1978 brought a measure of cohesion to the ACA but that of 1995 did not’. Archbishops of Sydney have prohibited the use of some parts of APBA. It differed from AAPB in its sheer bulk. Whereas the 1978 Book could sit in quantities in the pews for handy use, the 1995 publication was a ‘resource’ book with many options, from which parish uses, assisted by digitilization, were presented in local form; and in a context of diocesan centrifugalism national cohesion was at a discount. Douglas does not discuss those trends.
To this main textual history of the Australian Anglican Eucharist, Douglas adds supplementary chapters; first on a draft eucharistic prayer echoing so-called Hippolytus, published in 2009 (redressing the loss of a Hippolytan text in 1995); then on lay presidency of the Eucharist (a sustained Sydney concern), on ‘virtual’ Eucharists during lockdown, and a conclusion with reflections on ‘The Aboriginal Spirituality – An Inherent Sacramentality’.
While the three Books on the cover signal the main agenda, Brian Douglas seeks to read within the texts what theological encounters and outcome are being revealed in their drafting. He employs categories of ‘realism’ and ‘nominalism’; within ‘realism’ is ‘extreme realism’ (sometimes ‘immoderate realism’) meaning full-blown Anglo-Catholicism with something near to transubstantiation as its distinguishing feature, such that the consecrated bread is Christ present locally ‘under the form’ of bread. ‘Moderate realism’ Douglas invokes to identify references to eating the body and drinking the blood of the Lord in the process of receiving the bread and wine (as opposed to 1552 ‘Take and eat this [unidentified]’). However, a receptionism in which it is believed that to the faithful recipient the bread and wine convey as the body and blood of Christ the benefits of his death seems to risk his label of ‘moderate realism’; this reviewer finds this muddling. Surely there is a receptionism which conveys true benefits without being dismissed as ‘nominalism’ (a term more pejorative than informative’)?
Reviews from Sydney – or Ballarat – will make interesting reading. Douglas’s work is definitive and irreplaceable. To this English reviewer with some Australian experience it is enthralling.
