Quotes on the Historic Lectionary
Fr Matthew Oliver, Senior Lecturer in Liturgics at Nashotah House Theological Seminary:
[[Why the RCL is killing churches – part 1 of 2]]
"The purpose of lectionaries, along with liturgies, creeds, and dogmatic statements, is among other things to provide for the church more concise articulations of “the fullness of saving doctrine” (to quote the Rev. David Curry’s essay on the three-year lectionary). Thus, one has to ask whether more Bible in the liturgy has actually brought about a better knowledge of the Bible and, even more importantly, a better grasp of “the fullness of saving doctrine.”“The problem that the [3-year lectionary] faces is simply the impossibility of providing at the eucharist what can only be properly provided through the offices.”
[[Why the RCL is killing churches, and what you can do about it – part 2 of 2]]
"The RCL sometimes proposes texts that are superficially “at odds” with each other, creating theological tensions that the preacher must then attempt to solve or leave unaddressed.’ … ‘Public recitation of these huge swathes of Scripture, all of which are basically unrelated to each other, can easily have a detrimental effect on nascent faith.”
[[One year with the 1928 lectionary - The Living Church]], D.N.Keane
"With less text at each service to mark, learn, and inwardly digest, I found it far more likely that the sermon would touch on everything read and that I would walk out of the service remembering it. Less proved to be more.’ … ‘I also began to feel a more thematic unity across the Propers. This unity is something I often wanted but felt was lacking in the RCL.”
[[Discipling children a problem with the three-year lectionary]], Father Richard Peers, Church of England
"Modern pedagogical techniques emphasize repetition, which the current three-year Sunday lectionary does not provide at all; proposes five solutions, of which only the fifth, adoption of the historic one-year lectionary, is really practical.”
[[Confessions of a one year lectionary convert]], Rev Mark Surburg (LCMS)
“ The three-year lectionary has destroyed the coherence of the whole series of propers, making services thematically chaotic and the individual lessons, including the gospel, essentially immemorable. ‘St Augustine and Luther wrote sermons on the same texts for the same Sunday, a marvellous sign of the invisible continuity of the Church over time and space, despite the cruelties of schisms. A Bach cantata, though composed for the Lutheran context, can usually be more or less directly transplanted to the Roman or Anglican context, and it still fits perfectly [because of the historic one-year lectionary].’”
[[On Changing Lectionaries (PBS Canada)]], Revd. Jonathan R. Turtle), Prayer Book Society Canada
"I contend that the ancient lectionary of the Western church –dating back one thousand years if not more –better “shows” us Jesus in the Scriptures. To borrow an analogy from Irenaeus, it accomplishes this by arranging the readings in such a way as to display the face of our Lord. Or, to mix my metaphors and borrow from Origen, the key to opening the door to one room of Scripture is hidden in another room of Scripture. As such the traditional Eucharistic lectionary teaches us to read Scripture rightly by doing so in light of Scripture’s true end, an encounter with the risen and living Jesus himself."
[[Reading the Bible as a Church]], Gavin Dunbar, president of the Prayer Book Society USA
A three year cycle took the place of the one year ancient cycle, with most of the gospels for each year chosen from one of the synoptics (Year A is Matthew; Year B is Mark; Year C is Luke; with lessons from John spread through the three years.) A reading from the Old Testament, the psalms, and the other books of the New Testament precede the gospel lesson. For part of the year (Advent to Epiphany, and Lent to Trinity Sunday), these lessons aim at doctrinally thematic coherence (albeit with less success than the ancient lectionary). But for the rest of the year (Epiphany to Lent and Trinity Sunday to Advent), clumsily dubbed “ordinary time”, the gospels and epistles are selected according to the principle of lectio continua (or semi-continua). As a result, the gospels and epistles are in principle unrelated. Though the Old Testament lessons, were still chosen for their relation to the gospel lessons, the result is a loss of coherence in the Sunday lectionary. By intention it is no longer a doctrinally coherent, cohesive presentation of the Christian mystery, but an attempt to increase the amount of Scripture read.
[[Save the Lectionary, Save the World Excvbitor]]
Educational psychology is rarely mentioned in discussions of liturgy, perhaps for good reason. Yet the three-year lectionary and the modern form of the Mass contravenes some basic principles of the discipline. Cognitive load theory argues, on the basis of the empirically well-founded theory of working memory, that since we cannot simultaneously hold more than ten chunks of information in mind at once, teachers need to focus on direct instruction, repetition, and the committing of information to long-term memory, from whence it can be more easily recalled and manipulated. The modern Mass, with its proliferation of readings, stretches the cognitive capabilities even of the most intelligent congregation members beyond what they can bear.
Including the Old Testament readings in the Historic Lectionary:
[[A Neglected Gem The Sunday First Lessons in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer]]
"Moreover, the [1662] Sunday First Lessons better fit ancient Christian tradition than other schedules of Old Testament Lessons do. There is a very long history of Christian reading of Isaiah in Advent and Genesis in the Sundays preceding Lent (Septuagesima, Sexagesima, Quinquagesima). And the logic is sound: Isaiah prepares us for the birth of the Savior at Christmas, and the failures of Adam and the patriarchs prepare us for the mortification of Lent. Neither one of these ancient Christian patterns is consistently followed in other lectionaries, including the lectionary printed in the 1928 prayer book (i.e., the 1943) and the Revised Common Lectionary. In those lectionaries there is some Isaiah in Advent and some Genesis before Lent, but without consistency.”
Notes on the Historic Lectionary
- Young Tractarians Podcast
- Gary Thorne, in Robert Crouse and Prayer Book Catholicism (Prayer Book Society USA)
- Cally Hammond, from The Sound of the Liturgy
- Prayer Book Society Canada Historic Lectionary Introduction
1. The Young Tractarians Podcast: On the 1-Year Historic Lectionary
(Topic begins as 22:00 into the audio)
2. Gary Thorne, in the essay Robert Crouse and Prayer Book Catholicism (Prayer Book Society USA), for the Prayer Book Society Magazine, Anglican Way: https://anglicanway.org/robert-crouse-and-prayer-book-catholicism/
This one-year lectionary has its roots in the fourth through sixth centuries, was firmly established by the time of Gregory the Great in the seventh century and continued with very few minor adjustments throughout the whole of the medieval period. It was passed on in its integrity from the Sarum Missal to the first English Prayer Books in the sixteenth century. Thus this ancient Eucharistic Lectionary has been part of the Prayer Book tradition from the very beginnings of Anglicanism and has shaped Anglican spirituality by its abiding influence on Anglican preaching, doctrine, theology, and devotional practice, until the later part of the twentieth century. It has now fallen almost entirely into disuse and only in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer does this ancient Eucharistic lectionary survive.
In this Eucharistic lectionary we submit to the consensus fidelium of the early Church, or you might say, the catholic understanding of scripture. In it we experience in the logic of conversion and continuing conversion (or what would become known later in the tradition as the doctrine of justification and sanctification) as it was experienced and understood by the early church. The Epistles and Gospels not only relate to each other in the context of the Eucharist, but the readings of a given Sunday relate to those of the week before and point ahead to those in the week that follows, according to the seasons of the church year. Over the course of a year, therefore, this Eucharistic lectionary offers ‘a systematic, doctrinal, and spiritual teaching, by way of Biblical texts.’7 It teaches the regula fidei (rule of faith) as understood by the consensus fidelium by the seventh century and it leads, in the words of Matthew Olver, to ‘the fullness of saving doctrine’.8 The centuries immediately following the Council of Chalcedon in 451 were a period of intense theological debate, especially about the character and relation of the human and divine natures of the person of Christ. Nonetheless, along with the three Creeds and the first four Ecumenical Councils that were also forged in times of vigorous theological debate, the ancient one-year Eucharistic Lectionary in these centuries became the consensus fidelium of what was to survive for 1500 years as the regula fidei of the Western Church.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of the Eucharistic Lectionary for the Anglican claim of liturgical catholicity.
3. Cally Hammond in her excellent The Sound of the Liturgy:
Note that the Historic Collects are intrinsically tied to the Historic Lectionary, so the repetition of both scripture readings and phrasing of the collects form a cohesive whole not found in the contemporary collects and lectionary, which are given the formidable task of aligning one collect to nine readings of scripture, excluding psalms.
Hammond writes,
Repetition is of the essence of Christian worship … Repetition works so effectively in rhetorical terms because it sidesteps the privileged but parvenu category of rational, informative speech and the conveying of factual content … the most sublime power of the words lies in the act of performing them. This way of learning … enables movement between the worlds of the conscious and rational on the one hand, and the emotional and the spiritual on the other … so that words can resonate as they are meant to do. […] The BCP 1662 Collects provide a case-study of how rhythm and punctuation are tied together when speech-acts are consigned to writing. The Collects have long been recognized as being of the highest literary quality; and long accepted as easy to memorize and, conversely, difficult to forget.
4. The Historic Lectionary (PBS-CA)
from Prayer Book Society Canada, Preface to the Old Testament Supplement
I. Introduction to the One–Year Lectionary
The traditional one-year lectionary in every edition of the Book of Common Prayer up to 1962 is its most enduring connection to the mind and practice of the early church, even more than the daily office and eucharistic services which have been revised more often down the centuries. The lectionary shows us how the early church understood the scriptures and understood itself. The scriptures are a witness to the person of Christ, who is alive, and through whom the church lives in God by faith. Christ is the church’s living head, “for whom and to whom are all things” (1 Corinthians 8:6). The lectionary mirrors this faith because it is always structured “for Christ and to Christ”; in the lectionary, the readings break out of their canonical context to give voice to the church’s communion with Jesus. The church’s self-understanding as the body of Christ is so essential to the Christian message that, despite centuries of revisions to other aspects of the church’s worship, the lectionary which emphasizes this theme has endured with relatively little change.
HISTORY
The Christian church inherits lectionary reading—the practice of reading scripture at public worship in a structured way associated with a calendar—from the synagogue, which to this day has a weekly Torah and Prophet selection for Sabbath services. In the New Testament, Jesus reads and interprets the appointed prophetic reading from Isaiah at the Nazareth synagogue (Luke 4:16–21). Paul may be referring to the appointed synagogue readings when he tells Timothy to “devote [him]self to the public reading of Scripture” (1 Timothy 4:13). Showing early signs of a distinctly Christian lectionary practice, Paul commands that his letters be read during the church’s worship (1 Thessalonians 5:27, Colossians 4:7). Justin Martyr records that the apostolic writings were read alongside the prophets in the second century.
Each early Christian community set it own pattern for the proclamation of the scriptures. Most communities engaged in lectio continua (reading through a book in order over several weeks), but practices varied widely, from reading in totally continuous canonical sequence to reading collage-like compositions of verses from several places in scripture. As the church calendar developed, congregations began associating readings with certain occasions. At the same time, churches across regions were woven together by developing episcopal superstructures, which became a vehicle for standardizing and spreading the worship patterns of the most influential churches, especially Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Rome, and Constantinople. Patristic testimony suggests that many places in Western Europe were still reading the Old Testament at the Eucharist until the seventh century, after which time only the city of Milan used the Old Testament regularly at Mass.
Our first reference to the existence of a complete lectionary for the entire year is from Gennadius of Marseilles in the middle of the fifth century, although he does not list the readings. Around the same time, a document called the Comes Hieronymi, which is traditionally (and plausibly) attributed to St Jerome, first records particular readings for Sundays and Holy Days. The formative period of the Roman lectionary was in the seventh and eighth centuries, when it merged with and replaced local lectionaries across Western Europe, partly under the influence of standardization efforts during the Carolingian period. Although changes would later occur in the readings for individual occasions, the outline of the Western one-year lectionary has remained in place ever since.
It is remarkable—and a testimony to the lectionary’s enduring value—that in both Lutheran and Anglican realms the traditional lectionary remained mostly intact through the Reformation. Thomas Cranmer’s revisions to the lectionary in the first Book of Common Prayer involved the lengthening of several readings to include an entire biblical pericope, a small number of moved or changed readings on Sundays, and a greater number of substitutions on Holy Days, usually in the Collects and Epistles. The 1962 Canadian Book of Common Prayer introduced another round of revisions—arguably more intrusive than the Reformation changes—but still the 1962 Prayer Book agrees with the medieval readings more often than it disagrees.
PURPOSE OF THE ONE–YEAR LECTIONARY
However, antiquity alone could not justify continuing to use the one-year lectionary today. The best apology for the ancient lectionary is the one St Paul gave for all of scripture: it is given “to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” and it is “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:15–17). The purpose for which God breathed out the scriptures is not so that we could know the scriptures, but so that we could know him. Scripture is for given for our “training,” our formation, so that we can achieve spiritual maturity (Ephesians 4:13) as we are conformed to the image of God’s Son (Romans 8:29).
In the patristic and medieval periods, the difference between reading for the sake of familiarity with the text and reading for the sake of spiritual enlargement was discussed as a difference between “literal” and “allegorical” reading. The meaning of these terms has shifted in modern times, so that we now take “literal” to mean “reading the text according to its intention and context” and we take “allegorical” to mean “reading the text as a metaphor for a concern extrinsic to the text itself.” But ancient commentators understood the contrast differently: “literal” and “allegorical” refer to different levels on which a text operates simultaneously, both intrinsic to the text. Literal reading concerns the “facts” of the text: facts about the story it tells, facts about its prose or poetry style, facts about the logical structure of its argument, etc. Good literal reading yields a “detached,” “scholarly,” or “neutral” view, an understanding of details in the text with no interpretive comment on their relationship to the reader or the reader’s world. These higher-level questions about a text’s meaning to us, the validity of its claims, its appeal to our moral intuitions, its ability to stir our hopes and fears, and every other question of response and application, belonged to the “allegorical sense.”
The one-year lectionary is built for allegorical reading. Through it we learn about Jesus himself rather than learning about the biblical text which testifies to him. The one-year lectionary dislocates its readings from their context in the canon of scripture—canonical context being a concern which belongs to the “literal” analysis of the biblical textual tradition— to help the church realize the purposes for which it reads scripture in worship at all. The lectionary proclaims the lordship of Jesus Christ, it testifies to the church’s encounter with that living Christ, and forms the faithful into mature members of his body. The lectionary is an allegory, a text that comes preencoded with an interpretive purpose. This purpose is to show Jesus to the church as he is understood by the church’s faith.
Both before and after the Reformation, commentators have presented lectionary’s testimony to Christ as an aspect of the church’s “doctrine,” since the essential elements of the church’s belief are represented with simplicity and acuity in the traditional readings. For example, rather than focusing primarily on the birth narrative as one might expect, the principal service for Christmas Day treats the doctrine of the Incarnation in theological language from John’s Gospel and from Hebrews. For another example, both Passion Sunday and Good Friday discuss the doctrine of the Atonement directly. The treatment of so many essentials of the Christian faith has led to the development of commentary traditions which associate different periods of the year with catechetical schemes such as “the Apostles' Creed,” “the Ten Commandments,” and “the Seven Deadly Sins.”
But if the lectionary is “doctrine,” it is a curriculum for Christian life as much as it is a static representation of the truth perceived by faith. The commentary tradition especially emphasizes this in the second half of the year. A common complaint about the Revised Common Lectionary is that, in Ordinary Time, it dallies through long Old Testament narratives, context-less theological Epistles, and repetitive Gospel miracles without ever arriving at “the point.” This is not so in the ancient lectionary. The second half of the year uses some of the most celebrated and familiar passages of Paul’s Epistles, especially passages with a moral focus, alongside evocative and challenging Gospel scenes and parables— and each pair rewards the reader with a practical encouragement to live virtuously by the grace of God. Among the available sources of spiritual refreshment, the one-year lectionary is the bread-and-butter option: nourishing, reliable, revisitable.
The lectionary reflects the ancient and intuitive wisdom that human beings learn through repetition. People not familiar with the one-year lectionary often assume that it must be tiresome to repeat readings every year, but this is not the experience of most people whose parishes use this lectionary. Instead, their experience is one of deepening familiarity. It is not uncommon in traditional lectionary environments to hear laypeople say things like, “I’ve heard it every year for the past ten years, but I think I’m finally getting a handle on the parable of the wedding banquet,” or “I’ve always found today’s Gospel about the raising of the widow’s son comforting since my own son passed.” This deepening familiarity with essential scriptural texts is simply not available when repetition is spaced out every three years, or in the context of a higher volume of scripture per Sunday, as in the Revised Common Lectionary.
The traditional lectionary is the voice in which the church articulates her life in Christ. The lectionary is not just a form in which doctrine is presented to the church, but a document of the church. The lectionary is one the church’s ancient constitutional documents alongside the scriptures as a canon, the ancient liturgies, the creeds, and the apostolic episcopal form of polity.
We can therefore ask of the lectionary, “What does the church say about herself?” The lectionary’s answer could be stated this way: “The church is Christ’s body, the site of his continuing incarnate life, a participant in his divine sonship to the Father, and the bearer of his Spirit.” The lectionary has a builtin theological disposition, a tendency to emphasize the indwelling of God in the church and the church’s participation in God through Christ. This focus emerges, despite the relatively small portion of the Bible which it uses, because the lectionary returns repeatedly to a group of themes which all resonate with the central idea of participation in God: that we are given new birth by God’s Spirit, that the love of Christians for one another is the love of God made manifest, that both our repentance from sin and our rising to new life take place as members in Christ, that the joy of the kingdom is realized among us as we await his return, and that Christ is our daily spiritual food.
Although a doctrinal approach to the lectionary illuminates some of its aspects, it is also true that, were it simply presenting a systematic theology, it would be very different indeed. For example, it might include readings from the early chapters of Romans, which the received lectionary does not even though modern commentators usually consider them essential; or it might omit much of the lengthy and winding discourse on the Holy Spirit in John 14–16 in Eastertide. This latter example is illustrative: although John 14–16 is difficult for interpreters and preachers, and although it takes up “space” which might otherwise be used for more obvious Eastertide choices such Jesus' resurrection appearances, it is included in the traditional lectionary because discussion of the Holy Spirit concerns the church’s experience of living in present communion with the risen Christ.
Although we have said that the one-year lectionary is practical, it is also challenging. Its challenge and invitation is to peel back, cycle by cycle, the layers of meaning in the Gospel proclamation that Christ is alive and present among his people. Even though any congregation can profit from adopting the one-year lectionary, its real value will not be realized in one, or two, or even five or ten cycles. Its sweetest fruits are given to people and parishes who commit to using it for a very long time.
The goal is that, over the course of years, these carefully-chosen group of passages will become so familiar that, transcending their role as objects of interpretation and understanding, they will become a form of thought and language through which a community understands itself and its world. The point is not for a congregation to understand what the Bible has to say about participation in Christ, but to receive the biblical text as the articulate testimony of what the body of Christ experiences in living communion with her Head.
COMPARISON TO THE REVISED COMMON LECTIONARY
Jesus criticizes those who “search the scriptures because [they] think that in them [they] have eternal life” while forgetting that the scriptures have shape and meaning as a testimony to God the Word (John 5:39). All of scripture is useful for growth in holiness, but that does not mean that knowledge of scripture is equivalent to or unfailingly promotes spiritual flourishing. The Revised Common Lectionary may be built for learning about scripture; but the ancient lectionary is built for learning about Jesus—and entering communion with him.
The Revised Common Lectionary is built on the assumption that scripture literacy alone is enough to promote spiritual revival, without theological structure being given to that literacy. In the middle of the last century, amid general efforts for spiritual and liturgical renewal, the Roman Catholic Church addressed the truly lamentable poverty of biblical literacy among Catholics by discarding the traditional lectionary and substituting a new three-year cycle. Mainline Protestants, who shared struggles with biblical literacy, also signed on, hoping that the new lectionary would give them opportunities to tell the whole story of the Bible. Everyone reasoned that, if laypeople knew the Bible better, they would see how they are participants in an ongoing story that reaches back to creation and forward to the consummation of all things in God. They would learn to receive the Christian faith as a narrative for life into which they could fit themselves, rather than just a set of opinions and ritual practices according to their various church traditions.
This is an inspiring thought, and doubtless there are some attentive people for whom the Revised Common Lectionary has been fruitful. But overall the project was unsuccessful. Instead of a period of renewal, the introduction of the new lectionary correlates, alongside many other factors, with a period of precipitous decline in faith engagement. Either the Revised Common Lectionary was unable to significantly improve biblical literacy, or it was incorrect that biblical literacy by itself would produce renewal. In fact, both explanations of the RCL’s failure are true.
The RCL was not able to significantly impact biblical literacy of the Bible for at least two reasons. A three-year cycle of three long readings and a psalm every Sunday is far too much text and far too little repetition for deep learning. But even were congregations able to process all the material put before them, the RCL would still be unable to meet its purported goal of proclaiming the entire Bible. Despite having the reputation of going through “the whole Bible” in three years, in fact it only covers about 20% of the scriptures. Walter Deller breaks down the coverage of each biblical book in “Lectionary, Church, and Context—the Disaster of the Revised Common Lectionary.” Only 8.4% of the Old Testament is read, and only 50% of the New. No book is betterrepresented than Ephesians, of which nearly 75% is read, while several books (Obadiah, Nahum, Zechariah, Song of Songs, 2 John, 3 John, Jude) are excluded entirely. Many others only receive a handful of verses over the entire three-year cycle (six verses of Jonah, eight from Habbakuk, eleven from Esther, just over 10% of Revelation, etc). Introducing the entire Bible is a task far too large to be accomplished on Sunday mornings alone.
But even if biblical literacy could have been achieved this way, the assumption that it would have brought about renewal is not necessarily true. As mainline denominations collapse, it has become apparent that the problem is not only that people have left, but that those who remain are woefully uninformed about basic tenets and practices of their faith. Although contemporary ecumenical criticisms about sectarianism may be well-placed, previous generations at least knew enough about their faith to disagree over it!
The decline in theological and spiritual literacy would be no surprise for a user of the one-year lectionary. The traditional readings provide opportunities for addressing key doctrinal, moral, and spiritual themes. Annual repetition means that congregations can advance these conversations from cycle to cycle. Treating important issues of faith and spirituality with subtilty is a privilege of those who have steadily built a deep familiarity with the relevant biblical texts. By contrast, the RCL is the lectionary for a church that wants to be a mile wide, even if the cost is being only an inch deep.