'Whether the Lutheran Churches have right Ordinations and perfect succession of Bishops': Jeremy Taylor, 'Episcopacy Asserted', and Lutheran orders

Amidst the bitter controversies over episcopacy in the Three Kingdoms during the early 1640s, controversies which had become war in Scotland in 1637 and then in England in 1642, Jeremy Taylor wrote his Laudian defence of episcopal order, The Sacred Order and Offices of Episcopacy Asserted and Maintained. He proposed in this work that the non-episcopal Reformed churches could have had episcopally-ordered clergy:

Those good people might have had order from the bishops of England or the Lutheran churches, if at least they thought our churches catholic and Christian.

Leaving aside the reality that, for example, French Protestants would have been placed in an invidious political position if they had done as Taylor proposed, it is the reference to "the Lutheran churches" which is significant. 

To begin with, a large portion of the Lutheran churches - those in the German lands - were governed by a system of superintendency. It is almost inconceivable that Taylor was not aware of this. His mentor, Archbishop Laud, when tried before the House of Lords in 1644, described Lutheran superintendency as episcopacy in all but name:

in Sweden they retain both the Thing and the Name; and the Governours of their Churches are, and are called Bishops. And among the other Lutherans the Thing is retained, though not the Name. For instead of Bishops they are called Superintendents, and instead of Archbishops, General Superintendents. And yet even here too, these Names differ more in sound, than in sense. For Bishop is the same in Greek, that Superintendent is in Latin.

Bramhall, Bishop of Derry, in his defence of episcopacy against Richard Baxter at the Restoration, would similarly view Lutheran superintendents:

They [i.e. Episcopalians] unchurch not the Lutheran Churches in Germany, who both assert Episcopacie in their Confessions, and have actual Superintendents in their practice, and would have Bishops name and thing if it were in their power.

The fact, therefore, that Taylor does not specify only particular Lutheran churches from which episcopal order could have been derived by Reformed churches without bishops might reflect a wider Laudian interpretation of Lutheran superintendency.

Perhaps not unrelated to this, in Episcopacy Asserted Taylor uses the language of 'superintendency' a number of times to describe the episcopal office. The Apostles had "superintendency, and superiority of jurisdiction"; Titus and Timothy had "superintendency of their several churches"; the early bishops had "superintendency over the presbyters and the people"; presbyters "had no superintendence of God's making". Such language does not automatically mean that Taylor affirmed Lutheran superintendency, but it does reflect a wider Laudian view that such superintendents were exercising episcopal office.

Alongside this there is the issue of the episcopal order of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Denmark. While it was governed by bishops, its episcopacy was outside the historic succession, derived from consecrations by a German Lutheran superintendent in 1637. In Episcopacy Asserted, Taylor does not distinguish Danish Lutheran bishops from those of the Church of the Kingdom of Sweden. 

Some might suggest that when Taylor refers in the above passage to "bishops of ... the Lutheran churches" his intention was not to include either German superintendents or Danish bishops outside the historic succession. If this was the case, however, why, when he was presumably aware that his mentor Laud understood German Lutheran superintendents to be bishops in all but name, not explicitly exclude them? Why not refer only to the bishops of the Lutheran church of the Kingdom of Sweden? Why leave this a matter of doubt? 

What is more, mindful that much Laudian emphasis in debates over the place of the Continental Churches of the Reformation was to stress the significance of the Lutheran Churches as a counter-weight to the influence of Geneva, why would Taylor undermine this Laudian strategy by implicitly denying the orders of a large portion of Lutheran churches? Indeed, this would also undermine the same point he makes in Episcopacy Asserted:

But shall we then condemn those few of the reformed churches, whose ordinations always have been without bishops? (emphasis added).

The thrust of Taylor's question here is that it is not the Churches of England, Ireland, and Scotland alone which have maintained episcopal order amongst the Churches of the Reformation. This, in other words, had to necessarily include the Lutheran churches. With, therefore, the Churches of the Three Kingdoms and those of the Lutheran territories having episcopacy, it was the non-episcopal Reformed churches that were out-of-step. Denying that a majority of Lutheran churches possessed episcopal order would entirely refute Taylor's typically Laudian emphasis.

That said, there is a complication in interpreting Taylor's understanding of the Lutheran churches. It comes in his later work, written at the end of the 1650s, Ductor Dubitantium. In it, Taylor rejects the notion that invoking 'the Catholic Church' can determine what it is we are to believe:

In our inquiries of faith we doe not run to the Catholic Church desiring her to judge our questions; for she can never meet together; and she is too great a body to doe single acts and make particular sentences: but to her we run for conduct, by inquiring what she believes, what she hath receiv'd from Christ and his Apostles ...  when this is reduc'd to practice in matters of belief, it will come to this onely, That she bears witnesse to the Scriptures, that they are the word of God; but beyond what is contain'd in Scripture, she hath no article of faith.

This is also a wise recognition of the fallibility of both the Church Catholic and our own knowledge:

it [i.e. appeals to 'the Catholic Church'] can be of no use in the conduct of conscience. Because if ever there be a dispute in the Church, there is no Catholic Church to which we can goe: and if we call that the Catholic Church which is the greater part, that may deceive us; for in the days of Elias almost all Israel had corrupted himself, and in the time of the Arrians almost all the world was Arrian; and at this day a very great part of the Catholic Church is stain'd with the horrible errors and follies of Popery: and besides our notices are so little and narrow of the belief of Christendome, our entercourses so small, our relations so false, our informations so partial, that it is not possible for us to know what is the belief of the major part.

Readers may very well be wondering what this has to do with episcopacy and the Lutheran churches. The answer is that Taylor points to the limits of his own knowledge regarding Lutheran episcopacy as an example of such limits:

We cannot tell in England at this day whether the Lutheran Churches have right Ordinations and perfect succession of Bishops in their Churches. I have endeavoured very much to inform my self in the particular, and am not yet arrived to any certain notice of it. This therefore, to appeal to the sense of the major part of the Church in a question, will signify nothing at all as to our conscience.

Taylor's limited knowledge of Lutheran practice and history regarding episcopal succession was not, he states, a safe guide his conscience on this matter. His examination of the issue had not produced "any certain notice of it". This, however, contrasts sharply with his critique in Ductor Dubitantium of ubiquity in Lutheran eucharistic theology ("heaven and earth confute them") and his account of how Lutherans approach the Second Commandment, noting that in this regard "the Church of Rome and the Lutherans have several interests". Not unafraid to directly criticize and challenge Lutheranism, Taylor did not do so regarding the episcopal order and historic succession of Lutheran churches, despite his doubts on this matter.

It might be suggested that Taylor, for very good Laudian reasons, intentionally moderated his concerns regarding Lutheran episcopal succession, accepting that it was more important to present a wider episcopal coalition amongst the Churches of the Reformation, than it was to question Lutheran orders. Also worthy of note is that Taylor's caution and hesitation concerning Lutheran orders in Ductor Dubitantium was not accompanied by a clarification, or rejection, of his earlier proposal in Episcopacy Asserted. Both statements therefore stand: not a whole-hearted endorsement of Lutheran episcopacy and orders, but also not a denial

A good case can be made that, as with his approach to the non-episcopal Reformed churches, Taylor's chief concern was to secure the episcopal order and succession of the Church of England against those who urged that it did not require restoration on the same grounds as before the civil wars. A too enthusiastic embrace of Lutheran orders may have had similar consequences to earlier Hookerian acceptance of the non-episcopal orders of the Continental Reformed churches, as he stated in Episcopacy Asserted: "our own episcopacy is not thought necessary".

Writing in 1659, amidst the ruins of ecclesiastical order left by the Interregnum, with the constitutional future hanging in the balance, Taylor was no doubt thinking that it was not a time for further confusion and uncertainty. An unqualified embrace of Lutheran episcopacy and orders could have encouraged such confusion and uncertainty. It was best, therefore, to urge the restoration of the order of the Church of England, with no doubt about "right Ordinations and perfect succession of Bishops in their Churches".