Skip to main content

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

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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why I support the ordination of women: a High Church reflection

A number of commenters on this blog have asked about my occasional expressions of support for the ordination of women to all three orders.  With some hesitation, I have decided to post a summary of my own views on this matter.  The hesitation is because I have sought on this blog to focus on issues and themes which can unify those who identify with or have respect (grudging or otherwise!) for what we might term 'classical' Anglicanism (the Anglicanism of the Formularies and - yes - of the Old High Church tradition).  Some oppose the ordination of women (and I have friends and colleagues who do so, Anglo-Catholic, High Church, and Reformed Evangelical).  Some of us support it (again, friends and colleagues covering a wide range of theological traditions). Below, I have organised my thinking around 5 points (needless to say, no reference to Dort is implied). 1. The Declaration for Subscription required of clergy in the Church of Ireland states: (6) I promise to submit ...

How the Old High tradition continued

Charles Gore's 1914 letter to the clergy of his diocese, ' The Basis of Anglican Fellowship ', can be regarded as a classical expression of the Prayer Book Catholic tradition.  A key part of the letter - entitled 'Romanizing in the Church of England' - addressed the "Catholic movement", questioning beliefs and practices within it which tended to "a position which makes it very difficult for its extremer representatives to give an intelligible reason why they are not Roman Catholics".  Gore provides the outlines of an alternative account and experience of catholicity within Anglicanism, defined by three characteristics.  What is particularly interesting about these characteristics is their continuity with the older High Church tradition.  Indeed, the central characteristic as set out by Gore was integral to High Church claims over centuries: To accept the Anglican position as valid, in any sense, is to appeal behind the Pope and the authority of t...

1928 practices and the 1979 book: unthinking conservatism or popular piety?

Those responsible for Earth & Altar - a new blog emanating from a group within TEC - are to be congratulated for an excellent contribution to wider Anglican discussion and debate. The commitment to "an expansively conceived credal orthodoxy as fully compatible with LGBTQ inclusion, gender equality, and racial justice" is an important part of a wider retrieval of creedal orthodoxy within what we might call the post-liberal generation. It is in this spirit that I want to respond to a recent post on the site by Andrew McGowan , Dean of the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale and Professor of Anglican Studies at Yale Divinity School.  Against the background of another round of "ill-defined" liturgical revision in TEC, he understandably urges that a fuller reception of the 1979 BCP should occur before further reforms. In doing so, however, he takes aim at what he describes as "clinging to the ritual structures of 1928" while using the text of 1979.  We ...