Abstract
The Church of England is a broad church and within it there are those who understand evil in terms of a personal battle against the devil and all his works, and others who see talk of Satan as being little more than a remnant of medieval imagery.
In Fight Valiantly: Evil and the Devil in Liturgy, Tom Clammer examines church teaching through an exploration of Anglican liturgy. The Catechism, as found in The Book of Common Prayer, speaks of being protected by God from ‘our ghostly enemy’ and evil is described in many different ways in Common Worship, the most frequently used of the currently authorized books of church liturgy in England: ‘Satan’, ‘the Evil One’, ‘the Devil’, ‘our deadly foe’ are some of the terms used. Mention of evil, as a concept and by name, is widely found in church liturgy across the centuries. Yet Tom Clammer finds that while it is generally accepted that evil is a very real presence, there is no consistent representation of this in the current choice of liturgies now authorized.
One important encounter many people will have with church teaching is when attending a child’s baptism as family members. Clammer reviews the history of the wording of the service from the sixteenth century onwards. By the twenty-first century it had evolved, through revision and redrafting, in such a way as to give clergy a considerable area of choice. Today it is possible, for the first time in history, for ‘a candidate to pass through the initiation process without the devil being named personally at any point’ (p. 103). The decision to present options has obscured rather than clarified the Church’s theology of evil, Clammer suggests. In the public perception of the Church’s understanding of the nature of evil there is perhaps far less ambiguity. It has been skewed by portrayals in popular culture of the deliverance ministry, with the entertainment industry portraying dramatic supernatural wrestling matches between the powers of good and the demonic during exorcisms.
In his chapter on deliverance liturgies, Clammer notes what he calls ‘the lack of confidently articulated demonology’ both in what has been published and in the fact that the responsibility for formulating ‘theological and liturgical provisions’ has, in England, been devolved (p. 185). The pastoral services of Common Worship have almost nothing to say about the deliverance ministry. Furthermore, the deliverance liturgies recommended for private use vary from diocese to diocese and are not normally made public. Theologies of personified external evil vary not only within the Church of England but across the other Anglican provinces. The Church in Canada, Clammer reports, ‘is highly uneasy about exorcism in general’ (p. 184), seeing it as a prayer for freedom from perceived evil that may be appropriate as part of a holistic healing process.
Tom Clammer makes an even-handed and thorough examination of liturgical sources, current and historical, and while describing the lack of consistency in teaching, he accepts that the Church is clear that evil is a reality, exists externally and is more than ‘simply the collection of sinful thoughts and actions of the individual human heart and mind’ (p. 231).