No "new Communion": Laud's defence of the 1637 Scottish liturgy
What are we to make of Laud's defence of the inclusion of the 1549 invocation in the 1637 Scottish liturgy? The Scottish liturgy had obviously revealed his desire for the restoration of elements of the first Edwardine liturgy, on the grounds that features such as the invocation were "more agreeable to use in the primitive Church". That said, however, Laud emphasises that these changes - including the invocation - involve no doctrinal change.
Following the example of Cranmer's defence of the 1549 rite against Gardiner's deliberate misinterpretation, Laud also stresses the doctrinal significance of "unto us" in the invocation:
Heare us, O mercifull Father, we most humbly beseech thee, and of thy almighty goodnesse vouchsafe so to blesse and sanctifie with thy word and holy Spirit these thy gifts and creatures of bread and wine, that they may bee unto us the body and bloud of thy most dearly beloved Son.
The purpose of the invocation, Laud insists, is to give expression to the classically Reformed Eucharistic teaching
that these elements might be, to us worthy receivers, the blessed Body and Blood of our Saviour.
Alongside the characteristically Reformed understanding of worthy reception, Laud also interprets the invocation by means of another distinctively Reformed emphases, that the bread and wine are identified with the Lord's Body and Blood in terms of sign and use:
For as the elements after the benediction, or consecration, are, and may be called, the Body and Blood of Christ, without any addition, in that real and true sense in which they are so called in Scripture; so, when they are said to become the Body and Blood of Christ, nobis, to us that communicate as we ought; there is by this addition, fiant nobis, an allay in the proper signification of the body and blood: and the true sense, so well signified and expressed, that the words cannot well be understood otherwise, than to imply not the corporal substance, but the real, and yet the spiritual use of them.
This is further highlighted when Laud discusses the use of the 1549 words of administration in the Scottish liturgy, without the addition of the 1552 words. This does not, he declares, undermine the teaching that the Sacrament is a "feeding on Christ by faith" because the Scottish liturgy includes the same prayer of thanksgiving after reception included in the English Book:
for that thou doest vouchsafe to feed us, which have duely received these holy mysteries, with the spirituall food of the most precious body and bloud of thy Sonne our Saviour Jesus Christ ...
Laud states that this prayer demonstrates that "the feeding on Christ by faith and the spiritual food of the Body and Blood of Christ are all one", with it being very difficult to suggest "the omitting of it in
one place, should be of greater force than the affirming it in another".
What, then, of his criticism of the second sentence in the English Book (the words of 1552)?
[they] may seem to relish somewhat of the Zuinglian tenet, That the Sacrament is a bare sign taken in remembrance of Christ s passion.
Refuting a Zwinglian understanding, however, was a concern of Reformed Eucharistic teaching from the outset, a concern shared by those who had shaped the Reformed orthodoxy of the ecclesia Anglicana. In the words of Jewel:
We affirm that bread and wine are holy and heavenly mysteries of the body and blood of Christ, and that by them Christ Himself, being the true bread of eternal life, is so presently given unto us as that by faith we verily receive his body and his blood ... we mean not to abase the Lord's Supper, that it is but a cold ceremony only, and nothing to be wrought therein (as many falsely slander us we teach). For we affirm, that Christ doth truly and presently give His own self in His Sacrament.
The Scots Confession of 1560 also demonstrated how significant this was to Reformed orthodoxy:
And thus we utterly damn the vanity of those that affirm sacraments to be nothing else but naked and bare signs.
Alongside his rejection of "the Zuinglian tenet", Laud at this point also definitively rejects the allegation that the Scottish liturgy promotes an understanding "that Christ is received in the Sacrament corporaliter, both objective and subjective":
And tis well known, I have maintained the contrary, and perhaps as strongly as any my opposites, and upon grounds more agreeable to the doctrine of the primitive Church ... For this opinion, be it whose it will, I for my part do utterly condemn it, as grossly superstitious.
Laud's defence of the 1637 Scottish liturgy, and of the invocation in particular, has a significance because it was the first instance of the 1549 invocation being restored. What is clear is that for Laud this change had no doctrinal importance. The Eucharistic doctrine of the Scottish liturgy was the Eucharistic doctrine of the English Book. Yes, he did believe that the Scottish order "came nearest to the primitive Church" but, crucially, he criticised those who referred to it as "a new Communion, only because all the prayers stand not in the same order". Furthermore, a preference for the Scottish order was no critique of the English order:
I shall not find fault with the order of the prayers, as they stand in the Communion-book of England, (for, God be thanked, tis well).
1549/1637 was no separate liturgical stream, embodying a supposedly richer Eucharistic theology to 1559/1662. There were, Laud states, "no differences" between the two rites other "than those which were in the order of prayers".
(Laud's words are taken from the 'History of Troubles and Trial' in his Works, Volume III.)
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