Jeremy Taylor's sermon 'The Invalidity of a Late, or Deathbed Repentance': undoing the Reformation?

On the Fridays of Lent, laudable Practice will be posting readings from perhaps one of the more controversial of Jeremy Taylor's Golden Grove sermons, 'The Invalidity of a Late, or Deathbed Repentance'. The accusation that Taylor was here exalting works over faith, and so undoing the Reformation, is significantly flawed. It implies that the Reformation did not take repentance seriously. By contrast, Luther famously proclaimed otherwise in the first of his 95 Theses:

When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, "Repent", he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

Likewise, Calvin:

But lacking any semblance of reason is the madness of those who, that they may begin from repentance, prescribe to their new converts certain days during which they must practice penance, and when these at length are over, admit them into communion of the grace of the gospel. I am speaking of very many of the Anabaptists, especially those who marvelously exult in being considered spiritual; and of their companions, the Jesuits ... Obviously, that giddy spirit brings forth such fruits that it limits to a paltry few days a repentance that for the Christian man ought to extend throughout his life (Institutes of the Christian Religion Book III.3.2).

Taylor's critique of late or deathbed repentance reflects this Reformation concern that repentance - the first call of the evangelical proclamation - must be a serious, ongoing reality in the life of the Christian. Like Luther and Calvin, he is conscious that some approaches to repentance "have crowded this duty into so little room". To again quote Calvin:

Those who think that repentance precedes faith instead of flowing from, or being produced by it, as the fruit by the tree, have never understood its nature, and are moved to adopt that view on very insufficient grounds (III.3.1).

In responding to his critics who deemed that his account of Christian righteousness "confound[ed] the condition of the present life with the celestial glory", Calvin responded by stating that such critics were minimising the call to repentance:

I make the image of God to consist in righteousness and true holiness; as if in every definition it were not necessary to take the thing defined in its integrity and perfection. It is not denied that there is room for improvement; but what I maintain is, that the nearer any one approaches in resemblance to God, the more does the image of God appear in him. That believers may attain to it, God assigns repentance as the goal towards which they must keep running during the whole course of their lives (III.3.9).

It is this insistence on repentance as the means by which grow into life in Christ that Taylor proclaims at the outset of the his sermon; through repentance we are conformed unto Christ, who is - echoing Taylor's text, Jeremiah 13:16 - the glory of the Father:

But above all, God rejoyced in his Holy Son, for he was the image of the Divinity, the character and expresse image of his person, in him he beheld his own Essence, his wisedom, his power, his justice, and his person, and he was that excellent instrument, designed from eternall ages to represent as in a double mirrour, not onely the glories of God to himself, but also to all the world; and he glorified God by the instrument of obedience, in which God beheld his own dominion, and the sanctity of his lawes clearly represented; and he saw his justice glorified, when it was fully satisfied by the passion of his Son; and so he hath transmitted to us a great manner of the Divine glorification, being become to us the Authour, and the Example of giving glory to God after the manner of men, that is, by well-doing, and patient suffering, by obeying his lawes, and submitting to his power, by imitating his holinesse, and confessing his goodnesse, by remaining innocent, or becoming penitent; for this also is called in the Text Giving glory to the Lord our God ... as repentance does contain in it all the parts of holy life which can be performed by a returning sinner (all the acts, and habits of vertue, being but parts, or instances, or effects of repentance): so all the actions of a holy life do constitute the masse and body of all those instruments whereby God is pleased to glorifie himself.

When Taylor declares serious, life-long repentance - rather than, to use Calvin's words, repentance of "a paltry few days" - to be the way to our glorification in Christ, he was not undoing the Reformation. The Reformation is, instead, undone by those who fail to recognise the serious, life-long repentance taught by Luther and Calvin. Opening his critique of late or deathbed repentance, emphasising that by repentance we are conformed to Christ, Taylor is echoing both the first call of the gospel and the opening declaration of the Reformation: "When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, 'Repent', he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance".