"May agree in the truth of thy holy Word": Praying the Prayer for the Church Militant with Cosin and Taylor

... beseeching thee to inspire continually the universal Church with the spirit of truth, unity, and concord: And grant, that all they that do confess thy holy Name may agree in the truth of thy holy Word, and live in unity, and godly love.

Having prayed this petition from the Prayer for the Church Militant with Jewel and Hooker, we turn now to Cosin and Taylor.

In his account of the differences between the Church of England and Tridentine teaching, Cosin summarised the Tridentine claim for tradition he was critiquing:

That all the ecclesiastical observations and constitutions of the same Church ... are to be approved held and believed as needful to salvation and that whoever approves them not is out of the Catholic Church and must be damned.

He contrasted this with the Church of England's confession of sola scriptura, or in the words of the Prayer for the Church Militant, "the truth of thy holy Word":

All the two and twenty canonical books of the Old Testament and the twenty seven of the New as the only foundation and perfect rule of our faith.

With Scripture providing the "perfect rule of faith", traditions - as Article XXXIV puts it - need not "be in all places one, and utterly like":

in the reception of all ecclesiastical constitutions and canons made for the ordering of our Church or others which are not repugnant either to the Word of God or the power of kings or the laws established by right authority any nation.

Cosin here expounds the same eirenic vision found in the petition from the Prayer for the Church Militant - a reminder, by the way, of the Laudian commitment to a diversity of traditions and ceremonies across Christendom.

In Jeremy Taylor we see the same robust affirmation of sola scriptura which underpins this eirenic vision:

Now then, how is it possible that the Scriptures should not contain all things necessary to salvation; when of all the words of Christ in which certainly all necessary things to salvation must needs be contain'd, or else they were never revealed; there is not any one saying, or miracle, or story of Christ in any thing that is material, preserv'd in any indubitable record, but in Scripture alone? ... That the Scriptures do not contain in them all things necessary to salvation, is the fountain of many great and Capital errors.

For Taylor, this understanding of sola scriptura is fundamental to fostering and protecting unity and concord amongst the churches:

Why shall one Christian Church condemn another, which is built upon the same foundation with her self? And how can it be imagined, that the servants of God cannot be sav'd now as in the days of the Apostles? Are we wiser than they, are our Doctors more learned, or more faithful? Is there another Covenant made with the Church since their days? or is God less merciful to us, than he was to them? Or hath he made the way to heaven narrower in the end of the world, than at the beginning of the Christian Church? ... And men need not enlarge the Articles and Conditions of Faith in these degenerate ages, wherein when Christ comes he shall hardly upon earth find any faith at all: and, if there were need, yet no man is able to do it, because Christ only is our Lord and Master, and no man is Master of our faith.

This leads Taylor to pithily articulate the theological heart of the petition in the Prayer for the Church Militant:

the primitive Church being taught by Scripture and the examples Apostolical, affirm'd but few things to be necessary to salvation.

In both Cosin and Taylor, then, we see the eirenic commitment of the Prayer for the Church Militant unfolded and expounded, offering a generous vision of - to use words from Canon XXX of the Canons of 1604 - "the Churches of Italy, France, Spain, Germany, or any such like Churches" living in "unity, and godly love", sola scriptura defining the deposit of faith and what was necessary to salvation, amidst the legitimately diverse customs, rites, and traditions of national churches.

Jewel and Hooker, Cosin and Taylor exemplify the humility, joy, and hope of this petition from the Prayer for the Church Militant. It is not allegiance to one confessional document, not one ecclesiastical polity, not one magisterial authority, not one liturgical rite, not one theological system which brings unity and concord to the churches but, rather, the common Christological confession proclaimed by the Scriptures, lived out in the diversity of duly ordered national churches.