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Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi: the law of what is to be prayed, is the law of what is to be believed. As is well known, this famous phrase is usually attributed to Augustine's disciple, Prosper of Aquitaine (390-455).1 Aquitaine employs its near equivalent to affirm that, as Kevin Imin puts it, "the Church's prayer grounds the Church's belief."2 For Aquitaine, the common prayers of the church must be upheld because they are the means by which the church preserves its common, doctrinally articulated and scripturallygrounded Apostolic faith. And the inverse is equally true: this doctrinally articulated and scripturally-grounded Apostolic faith upholds the common prayers of the people of God.
Anglicans have long held a special fondness for Aquitaine's dictum, in large part because it reflects the central role of common prayer in their tradition. This fondness is evident even in dissenters who rejected the Anglican faith they once embraced. Theophilus Lindsey (1723-1808), the founder of the first English Unitarian church, is one such dissenter. A seasoned Anglican priest, Lindsey had spent much of his adult life leading parishioners through the Church of England's authorized forms of prayer, which included Trinitarian creeds and many other prayers which expressed Trinitarian doctrine. He wanted English Christians to move away from their traditionally held belief in the Trinity, because he reckoned it was contrary to scripture and made their common prayers blasphemous. Yet he knew that they would not let go of this belief as long as they worshipped according to the Book of Common Prayer. After much wrestling, Lindsey determined he could only hope to change what the people believed if he changed what they prayed. He found, however, that it wasn't enough to change the explicit doctrinal formulations of the liturgy: he needed to alter the scriptural basis of these doctrines, as liturgically expressed. Lindsey's reformed Book of Common Prayer is the foundational document of the English Unitarian Church. Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi can thus be regarded as a foundational principle of English Unitarianism. This being said, for Lindsey, Aquitaine's dictum was not, as it was for Aquitaine, a plea for liturgical stability, but rather, an impetus for liturgical innovation.
SCRIPTURE AND DOCTRINE IN THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER
Anglicanism has, in recent history, splintered into an...