Taylor seeks to justify a necessary and positive place for liturgical arts in public worship. He reacts to the ‘shame’ of liturgical arts within the Reformed tradition by retrieving a positive doctrine of creation and embodiment as well as trinitarian elements from Calvin's thought. Calvin's mixed attitude to musical instruments, on biblical, theological and pastoral grounds, is a case study to this end (chapter 1). Taylor briefly contextualises Calvin by comparing him with other Reformers, and with Catholic responses to music and worship. While there is always more that could be said, Taylor does well to highlight the complexity and contextually specific forces impacting Calvin. Rightly we are reminded that Calvin is a man of his times.
The study begins with Calvin's theology of creation (chapter 2). Contrary to some, Taylor observes Calvin's pervasive optimistic and triune attitude to materiality. This grand theatre reveals, teaches, delights, admonishes and praises. Taylor also emphasises the teleological drive to Calvinian creation.
Within this larger context, Taylor retrieves Calvin's thought from more than the Institutes and deepens our understanding of right worship as free from shadowy figures, spiritual and simple. Guided by Calvin's own methodological biblical emphasis, Taylor explores: the connection of temple, creation and worship (chapters 3–5); the physical body's relation to the imago Dei (chapters 6–7); and simple spiritual worship grounded in John 4:23–24 (chapters 8–9).
Taylor observes the role of Old Testament figures in training the church in its infancy. Likewise, New Testament signs are provided that believers may ascend to true spiritual eternal worship of God. But now with an intensity foreign to the Old Testament, dangers are warned against: multiplication of signs, hypocrisy, idolatry, rupture of Word from sign and dwelling on the material sign rather than its spiritual end. Many of the lessons are the same, but there is a real discontinuity in Calvin's thought with the arrival of Christ (pp. 58, 73).
Taylor observes Calvin's salvation historical and eschatological logic. Since Calvin anticipates seeing God immediately and intimately, face to face, material helps of this age are assessed accordingly; this world is for a time and should not be treated otherwise. Taylor turns to a biblical theology of temple to argue that materiality in itself is not problematic (p. 83). Contrary to his reading of Calvin, Taylor presses a vision that is present and physical rather than future and spiritual.
Taylor agrees with Calvin on many things, but also believes he has a deep-seated difference. Taylor diagnoses a focus on God's immaterial essence in worship and hence on interior experience for the believer. This drives his divergence from Calvin. He notes the realm of worship as exceptional when he says, ‘Calvin's ambivalence toward the liturgical arts is undergirded by a persistently negative view of materiality’ (p. 2). He argues that metaphysical dualism haunts Calvin.
Taylor finds similar platonic limitations in Calvin's treatment of the body; it must be fully christologically and pneumatologically considered, without materiality itself becoming problematic. Taylor concedes that some of Calvin's excesses are explicable by historical circumstances and rhetoric, but he desires a ‘richly corporeal, kinetic vision of worship that God in Christ enables the church to enact by the power of his Spirit’ (p. 121). Taylor also finds that Calvin's exegesis of John 4 is likewise limited by a dualistic, essentialist reading instead of a triune affirmation of material worship.
In each case, a fuller trinitarian account, embryonic in Calvin himself, is seen to provide stronger grounds for positively promoting liturgical arts. In this way Taylor, implicitly impacted by Gunton and other anti-dualistic theological promotions of sacramentality, has an Irenaean turn to the two hands:
On this view, the liturgical arts do not diminish corporate worship. Nor do they endanger the ‘acceptable’ worship of God. Instead, they ably serve the economy of God in the public praise of God, as a portrait of God's glory in and through the physical creation. (p. 195)
Overall, Taylor helpfully highlights trinitarian and positive creational thinking by Calvin, which has been ignored by many. Calvin stands well within the great tradition so that affirmation of creation's goodness, and God's trinitarian relation to creation for redemption and new creation can be found embryonically and even more fully in Calvin's thought. Taylor pushes against some Reformed embarrassment on these points.
Yet, as with many projects of retrieval, it is unclear how ‘Calvinian’ Taylor's position remains in its theological selectivity and explicit move beyond Calvin by reading scripture differently and applying theological concepts beyond Calvin's bounds for them. Taylor's project could be strengthened by a fuller context of Calvin's teaching on preaching and sacraments, word and sign. Questions remain about how deeply haunted Calvin is.
Further, the overwhelming goodness and fullness of Christ and the beatific vision fuel Calvin's focus on discontinuity and relativisation of material symbols. These appear to have little impact on Taylor's appropriation of Calvin. For Calvin, Adam is the infancy of unfallen humanity, the history of Israel is the infancy of the church, the incarnation is redemptive of flesh and even in the rebirth of the Spirit believers have not reached their maturity. Embodied worship now in the Spirit and Truth is an anticipation, not a realisation, of new creation. The victory is won. And there is better to come. Taylor seems to work with a different view of unfolding salvation history and eschatology than Calvin. Taylor helpfully corrects misappropriation of Calvin in one way, but pushes beyond Calvin in another.
