laudable Practice

On this Reformation Day, I offer extracts from various of the Confessions of the Reformation, indicating the profound continuity and retrieval at work in the Reformation, reaffirming creedal orthodoxy, proclaiming sacramental and ministerial order, and demonstrating the catholic nature of the Churches of the Reformation. Such is the richness and depth of the magisterial Protestantism which shaped the Protestant national churches of Reformation Europe. From this well these Churches should be drinking deeply, not least in the time of the Quiet Revival.  That some of those in the Quiet Revival will find the grace and truth of the Christian faith in Roman Catholicism, Orthodoxy, or Pentecostalism is only to be expected and should be recognised with joy, for Christ is the centre of the Church catholic in all its expressions. It will, however, be a fundamental betrayal of the Reformation - and, more, of the Gospel - if the Protestant national churches of Europe, exchanging their glorious...

Today commences a new series on laudable Practice , as we read through Cranmer's Answer to Gardiner (1551). We begin with an extract from Cranmer's 'A Preface to the Reader', in which he addresses the meaning of his affirmation that "Christ is present in them that worthily receive the sacrament" (words which will, of course, be made famous by Hooker: "The real presence of Christ’s most blessed body and blood is not therefore to be sought for in the sacrament, but in the worthy receiver of the sacrament", LEP V.67.6): when I say and repeat many times in my book, that the body of Christ is present in them that worthily receive the sacrament, lest any man should mistake my words, and think that I mean, that although Christ be not corporally in the outward visible signs, yet he is corporally in the persons that duly receive them, this is to advertise the reader, that I mean no such thing, but my meaning is, that the force, the grace, the virtue, and be...

Upon these premises, I will infer this conclusion ... that the reformed and conformed Protestants, in the Church of England, do justly condemn both Papists and Puritans, as upstarts and novelists, in removing the most ancient bounds of our forefathers ... Boys' Rogation Sunday sermon , on the text Proverbs 22:28, after addressing the need to maintain the ancient landmarks in the polity, turns to the Church of the realm. Against both Papalist and Puritan, Boys refuted the charge directed by both, that the Church of the Elizabethan Settlement was an innovation, a removal of the ancient landmarks.  Today's post considers Boys' response to the charge from Papalist apologists. Against the emotionally powerful Papalist narrative that the Reformed Church of England was a denial of the 'old religion' - that it was, indeed, a 'new religion' - Boys, after the manner of Jewel's Apology , presented the Reformation of the Church as a recovery of the ancient landmarks...

From the 1872 primary visitation charge of William Connor Magee, Bishop of Peterborough, a classic Old High account of the heart of the Reformation of the Church of England - the restoration of the rights and liberties of a national church: As a Church National, moreover, our Church of England has her inherent and inalienable rights and powers, as distinguished from those of the Church Catholic of which she is a part. The visible Catholic Church is not a despotism, it is a Confederation of independent States, "a republic," as it has been called, "composed of many monarchies," in which each State, that is to say, each National Church, has, if we may so speak, its own distinct and independent State rights. What these rights are, as defined by our own Church, we shall presently have occasion to consider: enough if I observe at present that it was the assertion of these, far more than of any particular doctrines, which was of the essence of the Reformation. Doctrinally...

Imagine a world without Protestantism. According to a recent First Things article, not much imagining is required. The magisterial Protestant traditions, we are told, have almost entirely disappeared: The world I invite you to imagine, then, is one in which this middle way—neither Roman nor Anabaptist, both traditional and reformed—has vanished. Is such a world possible? It is. In fact, we are living in it right now. Ours is a world without Protestantism. The slight problem with this assessment is that it is nonsense. To be more specific, it is nonsense in large swathes of the globe. Admittedly we can find evidence to support it in a particular North Atlantic context. We might, for example, point to the profoundly depressing account offered by the outgoing bishop of the Yukon , a diocese in the Anglican Church of Canada which, in 2019, had an average Sunday attendance of 191 . Yes, you read that correctly: 191 for an entire diocese. That shameful figure is unfortunately understandable...

In this week's reading from ' The Invalidity of a Late, or Deathbed Repentance ', Taylor explicitly sets out "the absolute necessity of holy living", defined by "all those Commandments in Scripture": The second generall consideration is, The necessity, the absolute necessity of holy living, God hath made a Covenant with us, that we must give up our selves, bodies and souls, not a dying, but a living, and healthfull sacrifice. He hath forgiven all our old sins, and we have bargained to quit them, from the time that we first come to Christ, and give our names to him; and to keep all his Commandements. We have taken the Sacramentall oath, like that of the old Romane Militia, we must beleeve, and obey, and do all that is commanded us, and keep our station, and fight against the flesh, the world, and the devil, not to throw away our military girdle, and we are to do what is bidden us, or to die for it, even all that is bidden us, according to our power.  For,...

In contrast to Roman Catholic Europe, one of the distinguishing features of Protestant Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries was the rejection of the Lenten fast from meat. This flowed, of course, from the magisterial Reformation, across jurisdictions, rejecting papal Canon Law and its Lenten abstinence obligation, regarding this as an offence against Christian liberty. In Ductor Dubitantium (1660), Taylor provides a characteristically Protestant critique of the law of Lenten abstinence. As discussed in an earlier post , this is certainly not because Taylor disregarded the discipline of fasting - and nor, of course, did the magisterial Reformers. There was, however, no divine or apostolic command to fast during Lent. As Taylor therefore declared in rejecting the Lenten obligation, "the Conscience is at liberty". In this extract, Taylor emphasises how a law of Lenten abstinence promotes the erroneous belief "that the keeping of Lent is so sacred, so principal a point of ...

To mark Reformation Day, words from a sermon - ' Objections against the Ceremonies used in our Church answered ' - by George Smalridge, Bishop of Bristol 1714-19, in which he points to how such ceremonies did not separate the Church of England from "other reformed churches". The fact that Smalridge was a Tory with Jacobite allegiances, and a close friend of Francis Atterbury, emphasises that this was no Whiggish, low church declaration serving partisan Hanoverian purposes: rather, this was a sermon by a bishop who, unlike his low church colleagues, was pronounced in his criticisms of Dissent and supported Tory legislation against the Dissenting interest. This, in other words, was a thoroughly high church statement of the 18th century Church of England's care and affection for, and communion with, the other Churches of the Reformation, Lutheran and Reformed. I proceed now to consider another objection urged against them [i.e. ceremonies] in order to render them odi...

On this commemoration of the martyrdom of Bishops Latimer and Ridley, words from Jeremy Taylor indicating the esteem in which Episcopalian and Laudian thought held them and the other martyrs of the Reformed Church of England: ... thus as it [i.e. the Book of Common Prayer] was framed in the body of its first constitution and second alteration, those excellent men whom God chose as instruments of His honour and service in the Reformation, to whom also He did shew what great things they were to suffer for His name's sake, approved of it with high testimony, promoted it by their own use and zeal, and at last sealed it with their blood. That they had a great opinion of the piety and unblameable composure of the common-prayer-book, appears, in the challenge made in its behalf by the archbishop Cranmer, to defend it against all the world of enemies; by the daily using it in time of persecution and imprisonment; for so did bishop Ridley, and doctor Taylor, who also recommended it to his w...

In his sermon ' The Minister's Duty in Life and Doctrine ' - preached at the primary visitation of his diocese in 1661 - Jeremy Taylor set out three reasons why "in all the interpretations of Scripture, the literal sense is to be presumed and chosen, unless there be evident cause to the contrary": 1. That God hath plainly and literally described all his will,  both in belief and practice, in which our essential duty, the  duty of all men, is concerned. 2. That, in plain expressions,  we are to look for our duty, and not in the more secret  places and darker corners of the Scripture. 3. That you  may regularly, certainly, and easily do your, duty to the  people, if you read and literally expound the plain sayings,  and easily expressed commandments, and promises, and threatenings of the Gospel, and the Psalms, and the prophets. On this basis he then warned his clergy against setting aside "the literal sense" of Scripture in favour of "a spiritual and...

... the Church of England is the best Reformed Church in the world. Jeremy Taylor's declaration in his sermon at Bramhall's funeral would have won the vigorous agreement of Bramhall's predecessor as Archbishop of Armagh, Ussher. Something of this was indicated by  Richard Parr , a chaplain to Ussher and later biographer, describing how the Archbishop viewed the fate of the Church of England in the 1640s as "the greatest blow that had been ever given to the Reformed Churches". When Charles Richard Elrington - Regius Professor of Divinity, Trinity College Dublin - edited the works of Ussher in the mid-19th century, his introduction used the same phrase to describe Ussher's view of the Churches of England and Ireland: "the best reformed in the world". For Taylor, no less than for Ussher, the Churches of England and Ireland were Reformed . Both Taylor the Laudian and Ussher the Reformed Conformist were sons of the Reformation. In controversy with Count...

In the seventh of his 1807 Bampton Lectures, On the Nature and Guilt of Schism , Le Mesurier presents an understanding of the English Reformation that is now deeply unfashionable: Both the mode and progress of the Reformation, it may first be observed, were very different in this country from what happened with other nations. In the first place, with us it began at the head. It was not a comparatively obscure and unauthorised individual who first questioned, and put down the usurped dominion of the pope; but it was the actually existing government, the king himself, who, with the concurrence of the legislature, and of his subjects at large, resumed those rights of which his predecessors had been stripped, and which had from himself been withheld.  Secondly, the work begun did not go on without interruption. On the contrary, it received very material checks, as well from the capricious humour of Henry, as from that dispensation of Providence which suffered the kingdom, after being ...

In 1618, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland accepted the Five Articles of Perth , proposed by James VI/I. These Articles restored to the Scottish Church practices quite common elsewhere in Churches of the Reformation: kneeling to receive the holy Sacrament; administering holy Communion to the sick in the home; administering the Sacrament of Baptism, when necessary, in the home; Confirmation administered by bishops; and observance of the festivals of our Lord. Contrary to the populist polemics found in Presbyterian histories, these Articles were not 'imposed' on the Scottish Church. No, the Church of Scotland acceded to the direction of the magistrate who had a concern for the good order of the ecclesiastical estate.  As the preacher at the Perth Assembly noted, such a synodical process was right and proper, "for what Christian king did euer determine in ecclesiasticall matters any thing without aduice of his clergie?". The preacher was John Spottiswoode, A...