it in some way, because by the middle of the seventeenth century it was common coin. Taylor’s strategy is best described as softening the severity of the more Puritan approach, which could use the term to make the sacraments more restrictive (children of believing parents only) and exclusive (public debarring from communion). In this he resembles other writers of his time such as Herbert Thorndike (1598–1672) and Simon Patrick.
The covenant of grace is embarked upon by our surrender to God and a desire to glorify him, and God on his part pardons what is past and will assist us in our life of discipleship in the future. We enter that covenant sacramentally at the font and renew it at the altar; covenant figures a number of times in his baptism rite; in his eucharistic liturgy, it appears (as usual) in the words of Christ at the Last Supper, but nowhere else. Taylor likes to describe baptism as ‘the laver of regeneration’, where the Holy Spirit blesses the waters, as he did at the River Jordan, and where the believer is filled with heavenly blessing, to lead a ‘holy life’. Taylor has a high view of baptism. It draws us into the Kingdom of God; it adopts us into a new covenant, with a strong view of obedience; it brings us into a new birth; it confers the remission of sins, including those yet to be committed; and brings us sanctification. ‘By water we are sacramentally dead and buried, by the Spirit we are made alive . . . Baptism does also consign us to a holy resurrection.’ Taylor’s approach differs, however, from Thorndike’s in that while the two dominical sacraments are foundational, Taylor fits baptism into Christian living – as a ‘birth to grave’ process – rather than into a more systematic ‘theology of the Church’, in the way of someone like Herbert Thorndike.
Taylor goes on to defend the practice of infant baptism, as the opening of the door to God, ‘the first ordinary current in which the Spirit moves and descends upon us’, requiring godparents (the traditional practice), not parents, as the Reformed-minded wanted. We come across the same balance that we saw in the Eucharist between sacrament and experience – ‘baptism and its effect may be separated, and do not always go in conjunction . . . the Church gives the sacrament, God gives the grace of the sacrament’. Both here, in the Discourse on Baptism in ‘Great Exemplar’ (1649), and in his baptism liturgy are to be found references to the gift of the guardian angel, a notion which he clearly likes, but will not require as a belief.[15] His overall understanding of baptism, however, has been described by Boone Porter as more Johannine (rebirth) than Pauline (dying and rising), with a strong emphasis on re-birth (John 3.5). It is certainly iconographic, as we have already suggested, by the way he uses the narrative of Christ’s baptism as the place near which the Discourse is placed in ‘Great Exemplar’ (1649), and the way he (uniquely for his time) uses that narrative in his baptism rite.
For Taylor, the key to his thinking about baptism and Eucharist is the strong relationship between mystery and sacramentality. They are God-given mysteries, yet are sacraments that operate in our lives. Like many other writers down the ages (not just post-Reformation), he holds in tension divine act and human experience in what he teaches both about baptism and Eucharist. In his study of the eucharistic theology of John Calvin (1509–64), Brian Gerrish offers three models: symbolic memorialism, which locates the sacrament in the heart of the faithful recipient (which he associates with the Swiss Reformed Ulrich Zwingli, 1484–1531); symbolic parallelism, where the sacramental event is in parallel with the work of Christ (which he associates with Zwingli’s successor, Heinrich Bullinger, 1504–75); and symbolic instrumentalism, where the sacraments are instruments of God’s grace (which he associates with John Calvin). These terms are, of course, approximations, but they were certainly around in England (and elsewhere) from the Reformation onwards. Taylor, like other seventeenth-century writers, seems to move beyond these views to what has been described as ‘effectual instrumentalism’, which places a stronger emphasis on what the sacrament does, without underplaying human appropriation of the gifts of God, expressed by the strong role of the Holy Spirit as the means of consecration.[16]
Where does Confirmation fit in? He wrote learnedly on the subject, and saw it as a way of bringing Christians from other churches into the Anglican fold: he knows (and favours) communion for the young (and even their Confirmation) as an ancient practice in his early years as a priest, yet, as a bishop, requires the Prayer Book position on the matter; ‘Worthy Communicant’ (1660) concludes that infant communion is ‘lawful’ but not ‘necessary’. And his reading of history enables him to see the laying-on of hands by the bishop as a way of reconciling or drawing in Christians to the Church. But he still highlights the radically distinct functions of baptism as the start and the Eucharist as the renewal. That basic approach also enables him to be demanding but unrestrictive about who and how he baptizes, yet firm and searching in the recommendations he makes in all his writings on Holy Communion about due and proper preparation. In a line going back to Hooker, baptism is the start and Eucharist is the continuing of sacramental life. This could speak volumes to an age like ours, far more fragmented in human experience than many previous generations, that at times leans too heavily on different sorts of baptismal renewal.
Social and personal living
Taylor is a theologian of the whole human life-cycle, where it is difficult to distinguish between the public and the private. Otherwise we would not have had either ‘Great Exemplar’ (1649), ‘Holy Living’ (1650), or ‘Ductor Dubitantium’ (1660). ‘Holy Living’ opens on a note that could – mutatis mutandis – have been written for a modern personal organizer: ‘he that is choice of his time will also be choice of his actions’. From that starting-point, he expounds the virtues of discipleship, prayer (‘we are cabinets of the mysterious Trinity’), sobriety, temperance, chastity, humility, modesty, and contentedness. On chastity, he is more explicit than any Christian writer so far, on the basis that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit: ‘in their permissions and licence, they must be sure to observe the order of nature, and the ends of God . . . with a desire of children, or to avoid fornication, or to lighten and ease the cares and sadnesses of household affairs, or to endear each other’.
Taylor is talking openly about sex as something good, fulfilling the design of human bodies. But saying these things was not always welcomed.[17] Sexual union can stem from a number of unexpressed motives: children, physical need, release from domestic tension and sheer delight in each other. This is a far cry from the traditional Western nervousness about reproductive fluids and when it is the right time and when it is not. It is also an advance on the three reasons for marriage in the Prayer Book – procreation, a remedy against sin, and companionship. Chastity, however, takes its place alongside the other virtues in stemming human desires and directing them aright. This is not part of our contemporary culture but we could be the better for at least some of it.
It is against this background that he deals with Christian justice, making the distinction between commutative (contracts and agreements between equals) and distributative (the command of God, or a relationship not between equals), and the importance of restitution as a social responsibility. Taylor, man of his time, is more deferential about authority than he would be today, but he nevertheless balances this with a definite emphasis on the responsibilities, moral and economic, of the one who wields power over the one who doesn’t. This comes through in what he has to say about the State, and the place of the Church within it, in ‘Ductor Dubitantium’ (1660). When a civil contract is being negotiated, ‘use not many words: for all the business of a bargain is summed up in few sentences; and he that speaks least means fairest, as having fewer opportunities to deceive’ (‘Holy Living’, 1650). He condemns excessive profit-making, and the exploitation of the poor, and crippling others with excessive debt. In ways reminiscent of the mediaeval penitentials, manuals for priests when dealing with sinners, he makes recommendations about adultery resulting in offspring (pay for their upkeep) and murder of another man (ensure the widow is looked after properly).
Never one to play down the role of the entrepreneur, Taylor nonetheless cautions against greed and dishonesty, stressing again and again the importance of good human relationships.
