By Davis Carlton

As a Christian father I want to impart a love of Scripture in my children. My children are currently young so most of their knowledge of the Bible comes from reading stories in Children’s Bibles or listening to the songs on Bible singalong CDs that inevitably drive parents crazy during long car rides. These certainly have their place but children also need to grow into a deeper appreciation for the Bible. To this end I’ve been using the 1928 Book of Common Prayer daily office lectionary as a jumping off point for regular Bible reading. I appreciate the elegance of the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) in its incorporation of certain traditional prayers and Christian practices while also being firmly rooted in sound theology.

I tend to use the daily office lectionaries for daily Scripture reading with my family. At the time of the Reformation Archbishop Thomas Cranmer simplified the extant liturgy of the hours into two daily prayer services called Matins and Evensong (often modernized to Morning and Evening Prayer respectively). The purpose was to make the daily prayers of church life more accessible to laity so that they could be prayed at home if meeting in churches was not possible. The lectionary is the prescribed Scripture readings for each day using the traditional Western Christian calendar. Most of the Scriptures are read lectio continua and this means that one book is read through continuously from start to finish. This continuity is sometimes interrupted during particular seasons and feast days during the year when texts appropriate to the occasion are selected. The lectionary hasn’t been completely static throughout history. Minor changes have been made, but the lectionary has retained its basic composition throughout the centuries.

The readings consist of selections from the Old Testament, a Psalm or Psalms, and a New Testament reading. The Old Testament readings are more comprehensive than exhaustive, with significant portions of the Old Testament Scriptures glossed over during the process of reading through a particular book. This is fine for the purposes of giving a general overview, but obviously it is necessary to read the entire Old Testament as well, so the BCP lectionary shouldn’t be used as the sole means of Scripture reading or study. Recently I’ve discovered that I’ve actually been using a 1945 revision of the lectionary of the original 1928 lectionary, and this version has some important differences from other versions that preceded it.

I’ve noticed a trend throughout history of more and more abbreviation of the texts that are read. Typically all the Psalms were read and sung at these prayer services and the entire New Testament was read without any truncation of any kind throughout the year. But I noticed something in the particular lectionary that I had printed off that piqued my interest. The New Testament is covered in almost entirely, except for a few places in which Scriptures are skipped over.

Why would this be? It isn’t because the readings are too long, so there must be something else behind this determination. I made a point of reading the verses omitted in the lectionary, and noticed a common trend in New Testament passages that were omitted. They speak disparagingly of Jews. John chapter 8 is vivisected in order to avoid Jesus’ pointed rhetoric against the Jewish leaders.¹ Perhaps the most pointed statement of Jesus in this passage that is omitted is his accusation against the Jewish leadership: “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father will ye do” (John 8:44).

The other example that I came across is from 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16. This passage is one of the most direct in ascribing the Crucifixion of Jesus to the Jews in which the Apostle Paul also insists that the Jews “please not God” and “are contrary to all men,” which means that “wrath is come upon them from the uttermost.” This is omitted on multiple occasions when 1 Thessalonians is read. The passage does manage to sneak into the lectionary once as if by accident after the third Sunday before Advent, but the omission is glaring given that the rest of the epistles are read multiple times without any other omissions.

It’s certainly likely that a good many Episcopalians probably were not always attending morning or evening prayer services or even reading the appointed Scriptures at home on a daily basis, but the changes to the lectionary signal a conscious change in which Episcopalians approached difficult passages of Scripture. The change to the BCP lectionary made after the conclusion of the Second World War was the vanguard of a disturbing trend that ultimately has managed to destroy Anglicanism and its American iteration Episcopalianism. While most Scriptural teachings on traditional Christian morality were left intact, it was only a matter of time until these were ignored as well. By the mid-1940s overt criticism of Jews was no longer considered acceptable and today only decades later this has extended to traditional Christian teachings on God’s just wrath towards unrepentant sinners, traditional gender roles, and foundational moral issues like abortion and homosexuality. Today the Anglican Communion has abandoned virtually any pretense of orthodox Christianity and has approved of a service for confirming transgenders in their “new” gender.

Episcopalians in the mid-1940s decided that some Biblical passages were simply too controversial to be read to believers as part of the regular worship of the church. This approach has metastasized to every other point of orthodoxy and has killed its host. Today the Anglican Communion is largely an ecclesiastical corpse that smells rotten. The Anglican Communion is an object lesson about what happens when men think themselves wiser than God. Certainly the Bible does contain many passages that are hard to understood or accept. Peter himself says this about Paul’s epistles (2 Pet. 3:15-16). The problem is when we decide that we’ve outgrown or matured beyond God’s revelation. Once this happens it is only a matter of time before orthodoxy is banished and the faith becomes completely unrecognizable.