Jeremy Taylor Week: the piety and prayer of the Nicene Christian

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Having established a rational for the place of the Nicene Creed in the Church's life - as an exposition of the rule of faith, the Apostles' Creed; as reliant upon the authority of holy Scripture; and as an expression of the Trinitarian and Christological truths confessed by the first four general councils - Taylor also demonstrated the place of Nicene faith in Christian prayer and piety.

In his Collection of Offices (1657), liturgical texts to be used in place of the then prohibited Book of Common Prayer, Taylor proposed that at Morning Prayer "The Nicene Creed [is] to be said upon the great Solemnities of the yeare". This reflected what Taylor would urge his clergy at the Restoration:

Let every Preacher in his Parish take care to explicate to the people the Mysteries of the great Festivals, as of Christmas, Easter, Ascension-day, Whitsunday, Trinity Sunday, the Annunciation of the blessed Virgin Mary; because these Feasts containing in them the great Fundamentals of our Faith, will with most advantage convey the mysteries to the people, and fix them in their memories, by the solemnity and circumstances of the day.

To say the Nicene Creed at "the great Solemnities" was to confess "the great Fundamentals of our Faith". Mindful that, in the context of the Interregnum, administration of the Holy Communion could produce controversy (if the minister was in a surplice, if the Sacrament was administered kneeling, if the form was too similar to that in the prohibited Prayer Book), Taylor's move of the Nicene Creed to Morning Prayer ensured that Episcopalians - whether individually, in families, or within the Cromwellian Church - were still professing what he termed "the Religion of the four first General Councils".

Another Interregnum publication by Taylor, Golden Grove; or a Manuall of Daily Prayers and Letanies (1655), served as a catechetical manual. In its exposition of the Apostles' Creed, it demonstrated Taylor's understanding that the faith of Nicaea was inherent to the rule of faith. The article of the Apostles' Creed confessing faith in "His only Son" was interpreted by Taylor as acknowledging the Son as "equal to God ... of a nature perfectly Divine; very God by essence". Likewise the catechism in the work provided an explicit statement of Nicene faith:

Who is Jesus Christ?

Ans. He is the Son of God, the second Person of the holy Trinity, equal with the Father, true God without beginning of life, or end of days.

This was also given devotional expression in a section of the work entitled 'Hymns Celebrating the Mysteries and chief Festivals of the Year'. In the hymns for Christmas Day, the Incarnate Word is adored according to Nicene faith:

the glorious Deity ... He that can Thunder ... The God of Day and Night.

The piety of the closet encouraged by Taylor was thus profoundly rooted in Nicene faith. The Great Exemplar (1649) exemplified this in the meditations it provided on the Annunciation and the Nativity. Indeed, the opening prayer of the entire work introduced this as the underlying doctrinal theme:

O eternal, holy, and most glorious Jesu, who hast united two natures of distance infinite, descending to the lownesses of human nature, that thou mightest exalt human nature to a participation of the Divinity ...

Regarding the Annunciation, Taylor described it as that moment "When the eternal God meant to stoop so low as to be fixed to our centre". Thus Mary was "she, who was now full of God, bearing God in her virgin womb", "the ever blessed virgin, the mother of God".

In devotions for meditating on the Nativity, "When God descended to earth", Taylor explicitly invoked and applied Nicaea's confession of homoousios:

For He that cried in the manger, that sucked the paps of a woman, that hath exposed himself to poverty and a world of inconveniences, is the Son of the living God, of the same substance with his Father, begotten before all ages, before the morning-stars; he is God eternal.

It is a powerful, beautiful expression of Nicene faith, as we behold the Christ Child. Who is this Child in the manger? He is the One who is, as Nicaea confessed, "of the same substance with his Father". Such was the Nicene piety of Jeremy Taylor.

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