If you have ever attended a Church of England funeral you will probably have heard the words ‘In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life’ – either at the graveside while earth is being thrown onto the coffin or as the curtains close around the coffin at a Crematorium. They point to the ultimately forward-looking nature of Christian funerals which is based on a belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. But within this forward-looking and hopeful setting a lot has changed over the years.
This article focuses on the words of Church of England funeral services since Henry VIII separated the English church from Roman governance at the Reformation. Before this point the deceased person had, unsurprisingly, been the focal point of funeral liturgies. From about 1200 this had led to an increasingly ‘transactional’ way of thinking about the relationship with the dead, with the prayers of the living aiming to ‘buy’ relief from purgatory for the dead.
The Reformation led to a different tack completely, seeing any form of liturgy which could be interpreted as ‘prayers for the dead’ as smacking of superstition and ‘popery’. The Church of England new Prayer Books were produced in 1549 and 1552. The funeral service in the former was not so different from the medieval rite, it ended with the Mass (renamed as Holy Communion), and included prayers for the dead – though had no mention of purgatory which was forbidden by the 39 Articles of Religion as a ‘fond thing, vainly invented … repugnant to the Word of God’. By 1552 the changes were more significant. This was a much shorter rite, with no Communion and no prayers for the dead. The soul of the dead was acknowledged to have been taken by God, and thanks were given for their deliverance from the misery of this world – but there is no suggestion that the prayers of the living have anything to do with the soul now that it is with God. The focus is on disposing of the bodily remains as they are committed to the earth.
During the English Civil War the Westminster Assembly (a group of puritan theologians and parliamentarians who came together to reduce the influence of the Prayer Book) produced the Directory for Public Worship, which completely omitted a funeral liturgy, perhaps because of fears that this would be seen as ‘praying for the dead’. But with the restoration of the monarchy and Church of England came the publication of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which remained the authorised liturgy for all church services, including funerals, for over 300 years. Despite some tinkering in the twentieth century it was not until 2000 that the funeral service received a major overhaul – though the original 1662 version is still authorised for use.
It is of course important to bear in mind when considering these early texts that they were compiled in a context when just about everyone would have been a churchgoer. Death would have been surrounded by church liturgies, including those for visiting and taking communion to the sick and dying. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer (‘BCP’) makes this community setting clear. Although there are no choices for the Minister to make in the liturgy nor any stated purpose or preamble, the rubric does contain one instruction: that the service is not to be used for the unbaptised, the excommunicate or those who have ‘laid violent hands on themselves’ – ie those who have by any of these three reasons forfeited the right to be members of the Christian community. Within this community context the focus of the BCP service is not only on marking the death of an individual (who is not named during the service) but on reminding the community of the brevity of life and the need to direct their own thoughts towards the day of judgement and resurrection, and consider their own participation in that.
Twentieth century revisions included the option to say the well-known 23rd Psalm (‘The Lord is my shepherd’) and there was a brief nod to prayers for ‘those we see no longer’ and a formal entrusting of the deceased to God’s care. But the introduction of wholescale new liturgy in 2000, known as ‘Common Worship’, saw significant changes. The Minister now has lots of choices to make – and there are extensive notes to help them. The instruction about who is eligible for a funeral has been dropped (though the law was only changed in 2017 to reflect this), and the purpose of a funeral is made clear: it is ‘to express our faith and our feelings as we say farewell, to acknowledge our loss and our sorrow, and to reflect on our own mortality’. Rather than letting prescribed Scripture readings speak for themselves a sermon is now required, and any Bible reading can be chosen (though my experience as an ordained minister who conducts funerals with this liturgy suggests Psalm 23, or verses from Ecclesiastes 3: ‘…a time to be born, a time to die….’, or John 14 : ‘in my Father’s house are many mansions…’, dominate).
Three key differences between the BCP and Common Worship which are worth exploring further are the view of the deceased; language relating to resurrection; and the role of the mourners.
With regard to the deceased (and in fact its general understanding of what it means to be human) the 1662 BCP assumes a dualist, or body/soul, split in which God has taken the soul of the deceased and we are left to dispose reverently of the body. The contemporary Common Worship, on the other hand, takes a ‘whole person’ approach to the deceased, reinforced not only by the inclusion of the deceased’s name throughout but also by a eulogy (to recall the whole of a person’s life before God) and personal tributes.
The message to the mourners is similarly different. The 1662 BCP encourages repentance and learning from the prospect of death. Common Worship, on the other hand, seeks more to offer comfort and hope and create a sense of forward movement into the dawn of a new life. Its prayer that God will ‘turn the darkness of death into the dawn of new life, and the sorrow of parting into the joy of heaven’ can be read as applying either to the deceased or to the mourners – or both.
But perhaps one of the biggest changes is the language about resurrection and future life. As might be expected the 1662 BCP language about the eventual resurrection of the deceased and the mourners is frequent and literal. The prescribed Scripture reading from 1 Corinthians 15 discusses the nature of the resurrected body. In contrast Common Worship prefers references to the promise of ‘eternal life’. Many of the references to resurrection now fall in optional parts of the service. Where they do occur they are intended to make clear that Christ’s resurrection is the context for our own resurrection while leaving open what that actually means.
It is of course difficult to know exactly how funeral liturgies were and are used. Time limits nowadays often mean the structured liturgy has also to incorporate family tributes and favourite music in a way that still fits the 30 minutes permitted in the chapel. It is even harder to know what those attending absorb and take from the funeral and there is inevitably a gap between the broad spectrum of popular belief and the nuances of church doctrine. But that does not detract from the wider significance of these authorised liturgies since, in the absence of a formal statement of belief, those are the means of expressing and bearing witness to the beliefs of the Church of England. And throughout much of the last five centuries it is the authorised liturgy of the Church of England that has provided the primary (though not the exclusive) framework for dealing with death in England. Similarly, given the domination of the British Empire, often accompanied (and fuelled by) the missionary work of the church, this framework will inevitably have been exported to much of the world.
And familiar liturgy, as the funeral service would have been, inevitably shapes spirituality. Despite the changes made in the contemporary twenty-first century Common Worship the importance of the forward-looking nature of Christian life remains clear – whether to an improvement in this life, or beyond it to eventual resurrection and eternal life with God. This reinforces the place of the funeral in occupying the liminal space in which the deceased transitions to the next world, and the mourners begin their future life in a world now without the deceased, always against the backdrop of a ‘sure and certain hope’, even if the nature of that hope is now left more open to personal interpretation. With the increasing tendency of contemporary funerals now (both religious and secular) to give centrality to a retrospective celebration of the deceased’s life, it is perhaps worth asking if this forward-looking vision is also changing. And if so, what might be the consequences of that change for our view of death – both that of others and our own?
Rev Harriet Johnson
Indicative Bibliography
Cummings, Brian (ed) The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (Oxford: OUP, 2013)
Giles, Gordon, ‘Funeral’ in A Companion to Common Worship ed by Paul Bradshaw (London: SPCK, 2006), pp. 194-218
Horton, R Anne, Using Common Worship: Funerals (London: Church House Publishing, 2000)
Sheppy, Paul Death, Liturgy and Ritual (2 vols) (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2004)
Information about the Common Worship Funeral Service can be found at https://www.churchofengland.org/prayer-and-worship/worship-texts-and-resources/common-worship/death-and-dying/funeral
The Order for the Burial of the Dead in the Book of Common Prayer can be found at https://www.churchofengland.org/prayer-and-worship/worship-texts-and-resources/book-common-prayer/burial-dead
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