A Following Holy Life. Kenneth Stevenson

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СКАЧАТЬ his contribution identified by McAdoo to what we would nowadays call ecumenical theology is shown in the method he brings to such areas as baptism and Eucharist, where ecclesial act and human experience are seen not as irreconcilable contrasts but as a complementary whole, powerful without being wooden, yet personal without being wholly subjective. Taylor’s reading of the Fathers attuned him to the importance of baptismal catechesis, and the significance of ancient symbolism lost at the Reformation, such as chrism; and he saw in the patristic notion of ‘anamnesis’ the true heart of the eucharistic action.[25]

      Finally, however, it is his contribution to devotional theology that is without question immense. If he has a theological starting-point it is in life lived – hence the significance of ‘Great Exemplar’ (1649) and ‘Holy Living’ (1650) – the life of Christ into which we are called, and the life of the believer redeemed by the grace of discipleship. Taylor may be verbose at times in his determination to cover as much as he possibly he can. But he always has the praying, thinking, self-disciplined believer in his sights, precisely because he believes that prayer, reflection, and practical living have the potential to be transformative, not just for the individual but for society as a whole. Like so many of the seventeenth-century writers, Taylor’s aim was to give theology to the laity and to ensure the proper interplay of scripture, tradition and reason in the process. For Taylor, faith and reason have an intrinsic relationship – which is a lesson that badly needs learning again in our time, in a world where the two are frequently driven apart, and the believer and the non-believer – and half-believer − suffer in consequence. For Taylor, such a relationship needed to be worked out in the day-to-day task of Christian discipleship. ‘A following holy life’ sums up all his teaching in the ‘Discourse on Repentance’, by far the lengthiest in ‘Great Exemplar’ (1649). That’s not a bad place to locate it.

[1]Based on various sources, principally: C. J. Stranks, The Life and Writings of Jeremy Taylor, Church Historical Society, London: SPCK, 1952; P. G. Stanwood (ed.), Jeremy Taylor: Holy Living and Holy Dying, vol. I: Holy Living, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989; Thomas Carroll, Wisdom and Waterland: Jeremy Taylor in his Prose and Preaching Today, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001; H. Boone Porter, Jeremy Taylor – Liturgist, Alcuin Club Collections 61, London: SPCK, 1979; and the ‘Life’, in Reginald Heber and Charles Eden (eds), The Whole Works of Jeremy Taylor, vol. I, London: Longmans, 1847, pp. ix–ccl.

[2]See Reginald Heber and Charles Eden (eds), The Whole Works of Jeremy Taylor, vols I–X, London: Longmans, 1847–54; which should be read with Robert Gathorne-Hardy and William Proctor Williams, A Bibliography of the Writings of Jeremy Taylor, Dakelib IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971.

[3]Quoted, for example, in Gathorne-Hardy and Proctor Williams, A Bibliography of the Writings of Jeremy Taylor, p. 17.

[4]H. R. McAdoo, First of Its Kind: Jeremy Taylor’s Life of Christ, Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1994; see also Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England, Oxford: University Press, 2000, pp. 173–4; I am particularly grateful to Jessica Martin for the analysis in her paper, ‘Jeremy Taylor’s Life of Christ’.

[5]Reginald Askew, Muskets and Altars: Jeremy Taylor and the Last of the Anglicans, London: Mowbrays, 1997, pp. 182–90.

[6]Kenneth W. Stevenson, Covenant of Grace Renewed: A Vision of the Eucharist in the Seventeenth Century, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1994, pp. 111–27.

[7]Quoted in C. J. Stranks, The Life and Writings of Jeremy Taylor, Church Historical Society, London: SPCK, 1952, p. 216.

[8]Stranks, Life and Writings, pp. 289–96.

[9]Perhaps the most difficult area of interpretation; see general Kenneth W. Stevenson, The Lord’s Prayer: A Text in Tradition, London: SCM and Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005, and esp. pp. 182–3, on Taylor, who, like other seventeenth-century Anglican writers, deals with the prayer in seven petitions (the Latin tradition), but structures it round six, merging temptation and evil, and commends the doxology (the Greek – Erasmus – Calvin tradition), not added to the Prayer Book version, and only in certain services, till 1662.

[10]Paul Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church: Theological Resources in Historical Perspective, Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1989, pp. 121–7.

[11]See Charles Taliaferro and Alison J. Teply (eds), Cambridge Platonist Spirituality, Classics of Western Spirituality, New York: Paulist Press, 2004.

[12]H. R. McAdoo, The Eucharistic Theology of Jeremy Taylor Today, Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1988, pp. 143, 189; this is the definitive study of all aspects of Taylor’s eucharistic theology.

[13]See Daniel B. Stevick, The Altar’s Fire: Charles Wesley’s Hymns on the Lord’s Supper, 1745: Introduction and Exposition, Peterborough: Epworth Press, 2004, p. 22; cf. a similar view on Taylor’s view of consecration, p. 17.

[14]Bryan D. Spinks, ‘Two Seventeenth-Century Examples of Lex Credendi, Lex Orandi: The Baptismal and Eucharistic Theologies and Liturgies of Jeremy Taylor and Richard Baxter’, Studia Liturgica 21.2 (1991), pp. 165–89; see also Kenneth W. Stevenson, The Mystery of Baptism in the Anglican Tradition, Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1998, pp. 96–111.

[15]See B. A. Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin, Minneapolis IL: Fortress Press, 1993, p. 167.

[16]I owe the term ‘effectual instrumentalism’ to Jeffrey Steel and his work on Lancelot Andrewes; for more on Taylor’s liturgy, see W. J. Grisbrooke, Anglican Liturgies of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Alcuin Club Collections 40, London: SPCK, 1958, pp. 19–36, 183–99; also Porter, Jeremy Taylor, pp. 71–82.

      In addition to its appearance in the Heber–Eden edition (vol. VIII), pp. 631–8, see Porter, Jeremy Taylor, for text of rite in facsimile between pp. 40 and 41.

[17]Criticized by Edmund Gosse, Jeremy Taylor, London: Longmans, 1903, p. 75.

[18]P. G. Stanwood (ed.), Jeremy Taylor: Holy Living and Holy Dying, vol. II: Holy Dying, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

[19]See Bryan D. Spinks, Reformation and Modern Rituals and Theologies of Baptism: From Luther to Contemporary Practices, Liturgy Worship, Society Series, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, pp. 74–6; Stranks, Life and Writings, pp. 145–51; McAdoo, Eucharistic Theology, pp. 25–34.

[20]F. R. Bolton, The Caroline СКАЧАТЬ