Greetings and welcome to Word Magazine. This is Jeff Riddle. I'm the pastor of Christ Reform Baptist Church in Louisa, Virginia. This is going to be a shorter episode where I'm going to be looking at a kind of a singular topic and it's W.H. Auden, the poet W.H. Auden's letter to his rector in his Episcopal Church, Anglican Church. in which he encouraged his rector to stick with the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and to the King James Version. Stick to Cramner and King James, Auden famously said. So that's our topic. Probably anyone who has been in the ministry for any significant amount of time has received a poison pen letter from a church member criticizing something that he, the minister, has said or done. Maybe the person writing this note, sometimes they come anonymously, sometimes they come signed. They didn't like the sermon. They didn't like some element of the service. They don't like some new program or new practice or a misunderstanding about what was said, and so you will get poison pen letters. Any seasoned minister who has received such notes will usually also concede, however reluctantly, that sometimes the criticism is warranted, even if it's delivered harshly or bluntly. I'd much rather have someone come to talk to me face-to-face than write me a poison pen letter, or in these days, a poison pen text or a poison pen email. I recently ran across a rather pointed letter that the British-American poet W.H. Auden, Winston Hugh Auden, who lived from 1907 to 1973, once wrote to the rector of St. Mark's Church, St. Mark's Episcopal Church, in the Bowery in New York City after this minister had introduced some contemporary changes to the liturgy in the church there. Auden wrote to defend both the classic language of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer by Thomas Cramner and the use of the King James Version as a Bible translation. Believe it or not, this note is a PDF of the original is floating around online. And let me just pull it up so we can see the note. You can see there that it's got the address that's being sent to 77 St. Mark's Place, New York City. And this was written on November the 26th. It doesn't list the year. but it seems like some people think it was in 1968. It was sometime in the 1960s. So imagine you're this Episcopal minister and you get this letter from W.H. Auden, the poet W.H. Auden, respected essayist, literary critic, writer, author, and he sends you this note. Dear Father Allen, have you gone stark raving mad? Aside from its introduction of a lesson and psalm from the Old Testament, which seems to me admirable since few people go anymore to matins or even song, the new, in quotation marks, liturgy is appalling. And appalling is underlined. He continues, our church has had the singular good fortune of having its prayer book composed and its Bible translated at exactly the right time, i.e., late enough for the language to be intelligible to any English-speaking person in this century. Any child of six can be told what the quick and the dead means, And early enough, i.e., when people still had an instinctive feeling for the formal and the ceremonious, which is essential in liturgical language, this feeling has been, alas, as we all know, almost totally lost. To identify the ceremonious with the undemocratic is sheer contemporary can't. So he's anticipating the person who says, well, we don't need this ceremonious language of the 1662 prayer book or the King James Version. That's undemocratic because not enough people can readily understand it. And he says that's sheer contemporary can't. That's sheer contemporary sanctimony false piety, hypocrisy, self-righteousness. He continues, the poor Roman Catholics, obliged to start from scratch, have produced an English mass which is a cacophonous monstrosity. So this is post-Vatican II, and he calls the new Catholic mass in English a cacophonous monstrosity. He says the German version is quite good, but German has a certain natural sonority. But why should, I think they should be we imitate them. Why should we Anglicans, Protestants imitate them? He continues, I implore you by the bowels of Christ to stick to Cramner and King James. Preaching, of course, is another matter. There, the language must be contemporary. But one of the great functions of the liturgy is to keep us in touch with the past and the dead. And what, by the way, has happened to the altar cloths? He's got one more complaint. If they have been sold to give money to the poor, I will gladly accept their disappearance. I will not accept it on any liturgical or doctrinal grounds." And then after so many sort of caustic things, he signs it, uh, with best wishes, Wiston Auden, W H Auden. And so how would you like to get that poison pen letter from such a erudite and articulate critic in your church? Now, I'm not in doing this podcast on W.H. Auden's letter to His rector at his church. I'm not commending the Christian character or the spirituality of WH Auden. There are, as I understand it, many indicators that he didn't live a Christian life. I don't think that he even maybe was a professed Christian. Perhaps he was just interested in the. Episcopal Church for the literary aspects of hearing the Bible read and hearing the cadences of the Book of Common Prayer, God himself will be Auden's judge, as he will be the judge of all of us. But whatever Auden's spiritual state, I'm not commending that. I can commend, however, his thoughtful pushback against the effort to modernize the text, both the prayer book for the Anglicans and the Bible that was going on in the mid-20th century, without considering what is lost when that was done. Especially, of course, from my perspective, with respect to the classic English translation of the Bible. What was lost when we abandoned a common uniform translation of the Bible as Protestants that had been in use for hundreds of years for a whole stable of new versions. In fact, as Adenreuther points out, He speaks of these works like the King James Bible being written at just the right time. It was translated in the early modern period. It's not Old English. It's not the language of the Canterbury Tales or Beowulf. It's called early modern English. So as Auden says in this letter, it is late enough to be understood by modern men. But it's also early enough to capture a spirit of reverence and awe, what Auden calls formal and ceremonious language that comes from the pre-modern period. So it's late enough, written in the early modern period, that modern English speakers can understand it. He says even a child can ask what the quick and the dead means, assuming that reading the Bible, hearing liturgy in the church, requires learning and requires instruction. But it's not completely foreign. It's not arcane. Again, it's not Beowulf. aside from being intelligible enough, it's also written with a kind of literary elegance and formality that is also distinctive of the era from which it comes, conveying a pre-modern type of dignity that really can't be reproduced in modern translations today, which have a tendency to sound very dantic. very much like a grocery list sometimes rather than something that is elevated. I love the call, the exhortation that he gives. I implore you by the bowels of Christ to stick with Cranmer and King James. Again, I'm a Reformed Baptist. We don't use the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. In fact, we would identify with those Puritan ministers who were rejected from the Church of England because they did not want to tie themselves to a Book of Common Prayer. But we can resonate with the use of the King James. And we could say the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the King James version of 1611, both had a profound influence on the formation of the English language. That statement, I implore you by the bowels of Christ to stick to Cranmer and King James. And that's something that would be printed on a coffee mug or put on a t-shirt, except that would be too democratic, I guess. That would be too much contemporary cant if we did that. He also makes the point that these works, his case, the 1662 prayer book, the 1611 translation of the Bible that was based by the way, on a whole Protestant English Bible translation that stretches back to William Tyndale, who coined many of the terms used in English Protestant Bibles all the way through to the Bishop's Bible and the Geneva Bible, And so it's not just the King James Version. Some would like to make it about that. It's a whole Protestant English translation tradition. And what he says, the continued use of this keeps us in touch with the past and the dead. Not only does it keep us in touch with the English Protestant reformers, but also with our past descendants, English-speaking descendants, our grandparents even, who read this Bible. And if we continue to use it, it will connect us to the generations that will come after us if the Lord tarries. Auden commended the literary excellence of these works. He himself had won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1948 for his book titled The Age of Anxiety, subtitled A Baroque Eclogue. And so the title of that book, The Age of Anxiety, coined a term that was used to describe the modern age, the mid 20th century. He said it was an age of anxiety. He was a literary man and he was commending the literary aspects Again, both of the 1662 prayer book and the 1611 translation of the authorized version. It has long been said that the King James Version is despised in the religion department while it is allotted and cherished in the English department. Before we abandon this spiritual, religious, and cultural classic, this cultural treasure, for some dumbed-down, cookie-on-the-bottom-shelf, pedantic modern version, we ought to consider Auden's attention-getting opener to Father Allen. Have you gone stark raving mad? Well, with that, I'll bring this short episode to a conclusion. I hope this has been helpful and thoughtful for those who are listening. I'll look forward to speaking to you in the next episode of Word Magazine. Until then, take care and may the Lord richly bless you.