John Jewel: Reformation Anglican
JOHN JEWEL died 450 years ago today. He was one of the most important, and least known, theologians of the English Reformation in the Church of England.
On November 26, 1559 Jewel preached a sermon at St. Paul’s Cross issuing a famous challenge, 27 disputed points with the Medieval Roman Catholic Church, in which he said he would become “Catholic” if anyone could reconcile the church's teaching to Scripture and the church fathers. Several took up the challenge and, in the context of “the challenge sermon” and this debate, Jewel wrote The Apology for the Church of England. The Apology seeks to clearly distinguish a church marked by the authority of Holy Scripture and the early church fathers from the later scholastic aberrations. Jewel explained why schism is, at the same time, regrettable and sometimes necessary - the only proper response towards an institutional church that refuses to reform itself according the authority of Holy Scripture. The schismatic is the one who causes the separation, not the one who separates (schismaticus est qui separationem causat, non qui separate), i.e. the Medieval Roman Catholic Church. If there is no purity of faith, there is no catholicity.
Jewel, like Cranmer and all the other reformers, went through different theological phases in his personal life, but he landed squarely with Cranmer and Hooker in Reformation Anglicanism. He became the Bishop of Salisbury in 1560 and served to help land the Church of England plane into Protestantism, what he considered the true catholic church. When Jewel died September 23, 1571, just shy of his fiftieth birthday, Richard Hooker, whom Jewel had befriended and helped as a boy, wrote that Jewel was the “worthiest divine that Christendom hath bred for some hundreds of years.”
An interesting part of the story is that the English translation in 1564 (it was originally written in Latin) was done by Anne Cooke Bacon, a serious self-trained scholar and Protestant theologian in her own right. Matthew Parker originally published The Apology without credit out of sensitivity to cultural female modesty. In 17th century England women were just beginning to be recognized as intellectual equals to men (Catherine Parr waited until Henry VIII’s death to publish her influential The Lammentaction of a Sinner in 1547). Every Anglican and Episcopalian should read The Apology every year - well, at least once through seriously. You will see the beauty and logic of Jewel's case. The Church of England stands for the supreme authority of Holy Scripture and common consensual Christianity over and against the novel traditions and magical inventions of the Medieval Catholic Church.
The Apology serves to allow everyone to
“. . .determine with themselves, whether that faith which they must needs perceive to be consonant to the words of Christ and the writings of the apostles, and the testimonies of the catholic fathers, and which is confirmed by the examples of many ages, be only the rage of a sort of madmen, and a combination or conspiracy of heretics.”
Defending the Faith: John Jewel and the Elizabethan Church, Ed. Angela Ranson, Andre A Gazal, and Sarah Bastow
John Jewel: And the Problem of Doctrinal Authority, W. M. Southgate
An Apology of the Church of England, Ed. Robin Harris and Andre Gazel