I have been rereading for fun "What is Anglicanism" by Urban T. Holmes III, which is one of the books I read years ago when first exploring Anglicanism. It is actually a very good little book in many ways, but this morning I came across a passage in the section on "Liturgy" (pp. 45-46) that disturbed me.
He was talking about an Anglican historian named Ladd who was influential in developing the 1979 BCP. Ladd had a strong distaste for the American Missal, and did not want 17th century Roman liturgical forms to become normative for the Church during the Anglican liturgical reforms of the 20th century. Ladd (and Holmes) believed that the Church should have one authoritative liturgy. In other words, we should just use the BCP and not anything else, like the missal.
Well, I would say that the 1928 BCP and the American and Anglican Missals really do form one conhesive authoritative liturgy. Besides the simple fact that the BCP mass is contained in the missals, they are unified in their strict adhearance to catholic orthodoxy.
And do the liturgical reformers have just "one authoritative liturgy" anyway? I would say that the 1979 BCP, with its many Eucharistic Anaphoras, and Prayers of the People Forms, as well as the introduction of the Alternative Service Book, shows that the liturgical revisionists of the Episcopal Church really did not (and do not) care about having multiple prayers, rites, and ceremonies available for use. They didn't care... it didn't really bother them! What bothered them was something else: orthodoxy. They simply wanted to rework those orthodox liturgies that were in use for their own questionable purposes. In other words, they wanted to undermine the catholic unity of the traditional BCP and missals, and replace it with something that was close, but not quite the same thing.
I believe that the missals and BCP (1928) form a complete whole and contain no substantial disagreements about anything of great importance (remember, the Articles of Religion are not part of the BCP). And I believe that their emphasis on penitence is something that is good for us to hear, and that it is a vital part of the true gospel.
