First of Its Kind

The Great Exemplar was the first Life of Christ in English. It was an innovation also in being the first combination of a 'Life of Christ' and an 'Imitation of Christ' as a book of practical devotion. Furthermore, it is Jeremy Taylor's first assay in the reintegrated and restructured Anglican moral/ascetical theology in which he came to be one of the subject's leading exponents and practitioners. Here, in First of its Kind: Jeremy Taylor's Life of Christ, the author demonstrates how this renewed Anglican moral theology anticipated most of the major reforms in moral theology which have come about since the middle of the twentieth century. Taken together with the author's The Eucharistic Theology of Jeremy Taylor Today (1988) this book provides a theological portrait of one of the greatest of Anglicans. In The Great Exemplar Taylor's robust, unapologetic Anglicanism, Christ-centred, Spirit-conscious and eirenic in outreach, is the setting for his practical and devotional picture of the Christian vocation.