'They stand or fall to their own Master': Taylor, Bramhall, and the case of the non-episcopal Reformed churches

I hope it will so happen to us, that it will be verified here, what was once said of the catholics, under the fury of Justina: "Sed tanta fuit perseverantia fidelium populorum, ut animas prius amittere, quàm episcopum mallent;" if it were put to our choice, rather to die, (to wit, the death of martyrs, not rebels) than to lose the sacred order and offices of episcopacy, without which no priest, no ordination, no consecration of the sacrament, no absolution, no rite, or sacrament, legitimately can be performed, in order to eternity.

Jeremy Taylor's declaration in his 1642 work Episcopacy Asserted was a statement of Laudian maximalism that would, as we have seen, be later repeated in the very different circumstances of his sermon at the 1661 consecration of two archbishops and ten bishops for the restored Church of Ireland. As previously suggested in the post regarding that sermon, however, there are grounds for understanding this maximalist Laudian claim as fundamentally determined by the ecclesiastical and political context. Above all, it was not a claim aimed at the non-episcopal Continental Reformed churches. Unconcerned with these churches, it sought to address the confusions and wreckage of the ecclesial landscape left by the Interregnum.

I have previously pointed to extracts from Episcopacy Asserted which help explain this. Today we turn to other extracts from that work. Amidst the intense political and theological assault on episcopacy in the early 1640s, Taylor - as we have seen - critiqued the 'necessity' argument put forth by Hookerian Conformity regarding non-episcopal order of the Continental Reformed churches. Such rejection of the Hookerian approach, however, does not require him to straightforwardly condemn those churches:

But shall we then condemn those few of the reformed churches, whose ordinations always have been without bishops? No, indeed; that must not be: they stand or fall to their own master. And though I cannot justify their ordinations, yet what degree their necessity is of, what their desire of episcopal ordinations may do for their personal excuse, and how far a good life and a catholic belief may lead a man in the way to heaven, although the forms of external communion be not observed, I cannot determine.

It is not without significance that Taylor's words are echoed by his fellow Laudian Bramhall. Writing in the 1650s, Bramhall considered three streams of opinion in non-episcopal Reformed churches: those who desired episcopacy, but could not have it; those who generally approve of episcopacy, but lacked it for historical and political reasons; and those who rejected episcopacy for presbytery. Of this latter group, Bramhall states:

All that can be said to mitigate this fault is, that they do it ignorantly, as they have been mistaught and misinformed. And I hope that many of them are free from obstinacy, and hold the truth implicitly in the preparation of their minds, being ready to receive it, when God shall reveal it to them. How far this may excuse (not the crime but) their persons from formal schism, either à toto or à tanto, I determine not, but leave them to stand or fall before their own Master (emphasis added).

The use of the nearly identical phrase would suggest that Bramhall was deliberately echoing Taylor. The argument is also the same - Bramhall, like Taylor, refuses to pass judgement on the consequences of the lack of episcopal order. We can also detect something of an echo - albeit less direct - of Taylor's "the forms of external communion be not observed" when Bramhall discusses the status of the non-episcopal Reformed churches:

But because I esteem them Churches not completely formed, do I therefore exclude them from all hope of salvation? or esteem them aliens and strangers from the commonwealth of Israel? or account them formal schismatics? No such thing.

Admittedly Bramhall is couching his argument in more positive terms than does Taylor. That said, the conclusion is similar: it cannot be said that the salvation of those of the non-episcopal Reformed churches is imperilled by the lack of episcopacy.

What Taylor and Bramhall also emphasise is a focus on the episcopal order of the Churches of England and Ireland. For both, the concerns of the non-episcopal Continental Reformed churches are, at very best, secondary and any considerations of their order cannot have the consequence of undermining the order of the Churches of England and Ireland. 

Bramhall commenced his discussion of those churches by stating his reluctance to debate this matter in light of the necessary limitations of his understanding of their context:

I do not understand exactly the history of their reformation, nor the laws and privileges of particular foreign Protestant Churches. 'Qui pauca considerat facilè pronunciat'- 'he considereth few circumstances giveth the sentence easily,' but seldom justly.

Bramhall's interlocutor was the Roman Bishop of Chalcedon, who had challenged him on the point of "other Protestant Churches". He therefore goes on to state:

But because he presseth me so much, I will give him a farther account of myself in this particular than I intended, or am obliged.

There was no eagerness in Bramhall to condemn the non-episcopal Reformed churches. His preference would clearly have been not to comment on their orders and affairs. This was also the case with Taylor in Episcopacy Asserted:

But this I would not have declared so freely, had not the necessity of our own churches required it, and the first pretence of the legality and validity of their ordinations been buoyed up to the height of an absolute necessity; for else why shall it be called tyranny in us, to call on them to conform to us, and to the practice of the catholic church, and yet in them be called a good and a holy zeal to exact our conformity to them.

'Had not the necessity of our own churches required it.' It is this which drove and - from Taylor's perspective - required the maximalist Laudian statement with which this post opened. An embattled Episcopalianism - whether in the context Taylor faced in 1642, or that faced by Bramhall in the 1650s - required a robust jure divino case for episcopacy. In the words of Bramhall:

there are others who ... condemn [episcopacy] as an Antichristian innovation and a rag of Popery. I conceive this to be most gross schism materially. It is ten times more schismatical to desert, nay, to take away ... the whole Order of Bishops, than to substract obedience from one lawful Bishop. 

Taylor and Bramhall were explicitly reluctant to address the matter of the non-episcopal Reformed churches, those whom Taylor called "the good people of the transmarine churches". They both sought to mitigate, nuance, and qualify the consequences for those churches of the maximalist Laudian defence of episcopacy. This demonstrates to what extent the non-episcopal Reformed churches were not their concern. The concern was the domestic assault on and, subsequently, dismantling of episcopacy in the Three Kingdoms. Laudian maximalism was a response to these circumstances.

If this caused collateral damage to the non-episcopal Reformed churches of the Continent, so be it: for Taylor and Bramhall, the besieged episcopal order of the Churches of England and Ireland was self-evidently of infinitely greater importance. As for those non-episcopal Reformed churches across the sea, "they stand or fall to their own Master".

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