Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi

Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi is Latin for the law of prayer is the law of belief or paraphrased your prayer forms your belief. This idea was hammered home to me in seminary. It is probably the most important thing that I took away from my seminary education. I wanted my beliefs to be formed through my praying of the Anglican liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer (BCP). Many of the prayers have roots in the ancient liturgies with a few Protestant revisions made by the prayerbook's compiler Thomas Cranmer. The prayerbook struggles in a few places it is intentionally vague but the overall ethos that one gains from praying daily praying the prayers in the BCP is a very ancient one. If one prays these prayers often, I believe it will form in them with a very Benedictine ethos. As many of you know St. Benedict's Rule is rooted in the tradition of the Desert Fathers. So the closest thing in Anglicanism to Orthodoxy is her liturgy. The Anglican liturgy formed my beliefs and ethos more than any theological book ever did. It was through my daily praying of the BCP that prepared my very being for a conversion to Orthodoxy. It was often during my praying of the liturgy that theological doctrines would become clear to me. One day during Holy Communion at Holy Cross we were confessing the Nicene Creed when it hit me that the church is "one and catholic". What did we mean that the Catholic church is one? I had thought about this before but all of the sudden in the middle of the liturgy it hit me that my branch theory understanding of this is problematic. In my next post I want to explore the "Anglican branch theory" and what I, as an Anglican, believed about how the one church is catholic.