"Both Sides be Christians, Good Friends, and Brethren"
John Jewel, the Church of England, and International Protestantism
The research on Jewel discussed here was originally presented as a talk given as part of the Wittenberg Center Summer Course on June 14, 2023 entitled “John Jewel, Luther, and the Construction of Protestantism: The Wittenberg Reformation as Seen from a Sister Reformation.”
Why study church history?
Why study the English Reformation? Why devote years of one’s life – especially given the urgent need of the church for ministers now – to poring over old prints and manuscripts, learning ancient languages, presenting at conferences and publishing papers, to uncover just a little bit of English church history? The question is unavoidable for PhD students like me, not least because the increasingly grim job prospects in the theological academy mean that one can have precious little confidence that a PhD will lead to a secure academic job.
Part of my answer to this question is to defend the value of this study for its own sake. I believe that it is good in its own right to contribute to our knowledge of the history of the church and the human past more broadly. It is important to preserve space, even in the midst of pressures on both the church and the academy, for scholarship that is not oriented towards an immediate payoff, an obvious application. In a more theological vein, I might say that is a way of loving God with my mind, of using the gifts that he has given me to spend time thinking and learning about how he has acted in his Church throughout history. Church history, I would argue, is a means of being with and bearing witness to the Christian dead in the ways they attempted to be with and bear witness to the God made known in Jesus Christ.
But of course, as is often the case, I do hope that my research has some purchase on the current needs of the church. First of all, the English Reformation and especially the Elizabethan settlement is important for contemporary construals of Anglican identity. And so, I think it is vitally important to get the history right. We need to offer the most plausible and well-sourced accounts we can of the 16th c. Church of England – and we historians need to communicate these accounts beyond the small world of the academic guild to clergy and laypeople.
The situation at present shows, I fear, just such a failure to communicate: there is a high degree of scholarly consensus about the nature of the Elizabethan church, but this consensus is often not reflected in how people in Anglican churches talk about their history. That is, historians broadly agree that the Elizabethan church was unequivocally Protestant in its self-understanding, teaching, and church life. Further, it was Reformed Protestant, generally taking the Reformed position on matters of Reformed-Lutheran differentiation (most importantly, Holy Communion). Yet in the parishes and in Anglican popular writing, one still hears not infrequently about the ‘via media’ or the supposed Elizabethan desire not to make windows into people’s souls as descriptors of the Elizabethan settlement! The notion that Anglicanism is defined by a via media between Protestantism and Catholicism or a latitudinarian comprehensiveness might be attractive on a variety of theological grounds. It could even be plausible description of Anglicanism at some other points in its history. But it simply does not work well for the second half of the sixteenth century. To be sure, scholarly consensuses can change (although this question feels quite well-settled), and one isn’t necessarily obliged to ground one’s account of Anglican identity in the sixteenth century. But if you are going to do so, it seems to me that church history is vital in helping make sure you are talking about the Anglican past responsibly.
But I confess that I have hopes for my own work on the English Reformation beyond joining the ranks of historians who try to fact-check (with varying degrees of grumpiness) the claims of theologians or popular writers about the Christian past. No, I am not only interested in the English Reformation because it has played and continues to play a significant role in Anglican self-understanding. I am interested in the English Reformation because I think that the account of Christian faith and life worked out in England in the second half of the sixteenth century and extended through time and space to the present day has much that is worth retrieving for us today. To name a few: irenic Protestantism, Scripture-saturated liturgical life, commitment to justification by faith alone and the consolation of the Gospel, confidence in the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit to lead to imperfect but real holiness of life, and more. I’ve written about this on my Substack before (see, for example, here, here, and here), so I expect that this is not a great surprise to any of you. But especially for newer readers, it’s perhaps worth saying again! The point is not a simple repristination of the 16th century; it is rather to (as I have said before) “embody a reformed catholicity centered in the historic formularies of the Church of England and their reception.” And I hope that looking back to the past, as I do in my research, with an eye towards retrieval might give us some fresh and perhaps surprising ways to think about our life and faith today.
It’s with both of these purposes in mind – regulating the use of history in theology and self-understanding and helping us think constructively about faith today – that I want to share a little bit of my current research on John Jewel and how he thought about the relationship between the Church of England and the broader Protestant movement.
John Jewel: A Very Brief Introduction
First of all, who was John Jewel? If you found yourself wracking your brain for an answer, fear not: you aren’t alone. He is far more obscure than he deserves to be (at least by my lights!). John Jewel (1522-1571) was one of the key architects of the so-called Elizabethan Settlement, the restoration of Protestantism after the reign of Queen Mary. Jewel matriculated at Oxford in 1535, the year after Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy separated the Church of England from Rome. He was involved in reforming circles at Oxford and was an avid student of the exiled Italian reformer Peter Martyr Vermigli, who came to England and was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford in 1548. Jewel would in fact serve as Vermigli’s amanuensis at the famous 1549 Oxford disputation on the Eucharist. After the death of Edward VI, Jewel originally conformed with the restoration of Roman Catholicism but before long fled for the continent. He first moved to Frankfurt, where he participated in the conflict-ridden English exile community there, and then moved to Strassburg, where Vermigli was teaching. He would then follow Vermigli to Zurich, where he would remain until Elizabeth’s accession to the throne.
Jewel returned to England in March 1559 and in 1560 was consecrated bishop of Salisbury. Until his death in 1571, he played an important role as an architect and defender of the religious settlement under Elizabeth. He edited the Second Book of Homilies, to which he also contributed several sermons. And so he played a role in the development of the Anglican formularies (these, to refresh your memory, are the doctrinal and liturgical standards of the Church of England and, eventually and now rather contestedly, global Anglicanism: the 39 Articles, the Book of Common Prayer, the Ordinal, and the two Books of Homilies). He is best known, however, for his involvement in the ‘Great Controversy’ of the 1560s, in which Jewel engaged in fierce polemics with defenders of Roman Catholicism about the reformed Church of England and produced the first extended defense of the Elizabethan Church of England, the Apology of the Church of England, which would come to enjoy quasi-official status as a description of that church’s teaching.
The ‘Great Controversy’ began with a sermon. On November 26, 1559, John Jewel ascended the open-air pulpit at St. Paul’s Cross in London and preached his famous Challenge Sermon. In this sermon, which he would preach two more times – once at court and once again at Paul’s Cross – Jewel laid out a set of objections to Roman Catholic practice, focusing on Communion, and laid down his challenge. He challenged his hearers to prove the superiority of Roman Catholic over Protestant practice with Scripture or the early church: “If any man alive wer able to proue, any of these articles, by anye one cleare, or plaine clause, or sentence, ether of the scriptures: or of the olde doctours: or of any olde generall Counsell: or by any example of the primitiue church: I promised then that I would geue ouer and subscribe unto hym.” Unsurprisingly, the challenge was taken up, beginning a lengthy war of pamphlets and treatises primarily between the Elizabethan theologians in England and English Roman Catholic exiles in the Low Countries.
We don’t need to get into all the details of the back-and-forth, but one text in particular that came out of this controversy is worth knowing. In 1562, Jewel published his Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae, or Apology of the Church of England, as an expansion and elaboration of material from his Challenge Sermon. As the name suggests, the text was originally in Latin, but Anne Bacon translated it into English in 1564 (interestingly, it was translated into German and printed in Zurich in 1563 – so the Apology of the Church of England existed in a German version before an English one!). This text involved Jewel in a polemical contest with Thomas Harding, an English Catholic priest; Harding published pieces excerpting Jewel’s text and commenting negatively on it, and then Jewel put out a Defense of the Apology of the Church of England in which he included his original text, Harding’s comments, and his own refutation of Harding’s critiques. Far more than any other text of the Great Controversy or even the Challenge Sermon that began it, the Apology would come to be important for defining the theological identity of the Church of England. In 1609, Archbishop of Canterbury Richard Bancroft ordered that a copy be placed in every parish church in England. While it never had the confessional status the formularies enjoyed, it was seen as an authoritative description of the teaching of the Church of England. By the way, if this has whetted your appetite, you can read the 19th century Parker Society publication of the Apology here (note that it is part of a larger edition of his collected works).
John Jewel and the Identity of the Church of England
So what does Jewel think about the nature of the Church of England after its break from Rome? One answer is to say that Jewel sees the reformed Church of England as holding to a non-Roman Catholicism, one which hews to the Fathers and avoids medieval distortions of patristic teaching. This reading has tended to be particularly popular with those who see the English Reformation as a distinct and sui generis event, owing relatively little to the continental Reformation. On this reading, the Church of England is distinguished from Roman Catholicism, Continental Protestantism, and Puritanism by its unique commitment to the Fathers.
This reading gets some things right. Certainly it is true that Jewel believes strongly that the teaching and practice of the Church of England are in accord with the Fathers; citations of the Fathers run through his Apology and his Challenge Sermon explicitly claims the patristic heritage for the Elizabethan Church. But if this reading correctly highlights the importance of patristics for Jewel, it makes one huge assumption: that we should see Jewel’s claimed adherence to the Fathers as an alternative to allegiance to the Reformation construal of the Gospel. Yet both defenders of the papal church and adherents of the evangelical movement across Europe saw themselves as faithfully hewing to the tradition of the early church and engaged in lengthy polemics to prove it! It is probably the case that there are unique features about early Church of England appeals to patristic sources in comparison to the appeals by Lutherans or the continental Reformed, but I suspect that this is a difference of degree rather than kind [ed note: I accidentally had this switched in the first published version - apologies!]. Incidentally, this is an important avenue for comparative research that has not really been done, at least not in any systematic or thorough way.
Fortunately for us, Jewel is crystal clear that he, at any rate, sees no contradiction between claiming the Fathers and claiming the Reformation Gospel. For Jewel tells us that he sees the Church of England not as a uniquely patristic-oriented, non-papal catholic church, but as part of a broad movement for the Gospel encompassing the Lutherans and the Reformed. Jewel gives us a helpful delineation of this movement in the Defense of the Apology, where he provides a list of the “princes and countries…that have submitted themselves to the gospel of Christ.” These jurisdictions are “the kingdom of England, the kingdom of Scotland, the kingdom of Denmark, the kingdom of Sweden, the dukes of Saxony, the duke of Brunswick, the palsgrave of Rhene, the duke of Wirtenberg, the landgrave of Hessia, the marquis of Brandeburg, the prince of Russia, all other the earls and noblemen and great cities throughout the whole country of Germany, the mighty commonweals of Helvetia, Rhetia, Vallis Telllina, and so many hundred thousands besides in France, Italy, Spain, Hungary, and in the kingdom of Poole.” England is included in this list amidst other Protestant territories, both territories that look to Wittenberg and territories that look to Zurich or Geneva. And so, England and the English Church is just one part of a broader movement for the Gospel – and this movement includes Lutherans and Reformed alike.
This movement for the Gospel, Jewel believes, was begun by God’s will through the work of Luther and Zwingli. To be sure, it’s not that the Gospel is new – Jewel argues that the Reformers taught in the sixteenth century what the Fathers taught centuries ago – but Jewel traces the rediscovery of the Gospel to either Luther and Zwingli or Luther alone. In the Apology Jewel discusses the time “when also Martin Luther and Hulderic Zuinglius, being most excellent men, even sent of God to give light to the whole world, first came unto the knowledge and preaching of the Gospel.” In the Defense, he discusses the late medieval church as existing in an era “before the time that God's holy will was that Doctor Luther should begin, after so long a time of ignorance, to publish the gospel of Christ.” Note here a difference in self-understanding between Jewel and the most hardline of Lutherans, who would repeat Luther’s dictum at Marburg that Bucer and Zwingli have “a different spirit”, are engaged in a fundamentally different project: for Jewel, Luther and Zwingli are both key leaders promoting submission to the Gospel.
In fact, Jewel complains that papal polemicists exaggerate the differences among Protestants to score points. “Yet what a stir and revel keep they at this time upon two poor names only, Luther and Zuinglius!” he complains in the apology, grumbling that “because these two men do not yet fully agree upon some one point” the Roman Catholics argue that they must be wholly in disagreement and wholly misled. Rather, Jewel responds to Roman Catholic writers holding up Protestant disunity as either proof in itself of Protestantism’s godlessness (because the true church is unified) or as proof of the falsity of the Reformation doctrine of the perspicacity of Scripture by arguing that Protestants are agreed on the most important questions.
The Apology is worth quoting at some length here:
And as for those persons, whom they upon spite call Zuinglians and Lutherians, in very deed they of both sides be Christians, good friends, and brethren. They vary not betwixt themselves upon the principles and foundations of our religion, nor as touching God, nor Christ, nor the Holy Ghost, nor of the means to justification, nor yet everlasting life, but upon one only question, which is neither weighty nor great; neither mistrust we, or make doubt at all, but they will shortly be agreed.
Protestants, Jewel avers, agree on the doctrine of God, on Christology, on soteriology – their only difference is in sacramental theology, which is “neither weighty nor great.”
But is difference on the sacraments really a matter not weighty nor great? Harding pushes Jewel on this, and Jewel concedes that in itself there is grievous error in the different views of the sacraments, but he continues to assert that Protestants’ basic agreement on doctrine of God, Christology, and soteriology is more important. While he doesn’t state it quite this baldly, I think that Jewel is in fundamental agreement with the phrase ascribed to Luther: justificatio est articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae, that is, justification is the article upon which the church stands or falls. Next to agreement on justification, sacramental differences, although important in themselves, are less important. Still, we should not let Jewel’s irenicism deceive us. While he speaks respectfully about Lutherans, he is clearly a proponent of a Reformed view of the sacrament, writing in his Treatise on the Sacrament that “Some say, the words are plain: Christ himself spake them: he is almighty, and can do whatsoever he will: he hath not spoken otherwise than he meant: if we expound them by signs and figures, we take away the force of the holy mystery, and making nothing of it…Therefore at this day many wise men, which yield from other points of superstition, and in many other things receive the truth [that is, the Lutherans], stand here, and stick at this, and cannot yield.”
There are, however, limits to Jewel’s vision of Protestant unity and amity. Specifically, the Anabaptists are excluded. Indeed, straining credibility, Jewel asserts in the Apology that Anabaptists and spiritualists have nothing whatsoever to do with the movement for the Gospel he sources to Luther and Zwingli: “Indeed we grant that certain new and very strange sects, as the Anabaptists, Libertines, Menonians, and Zuenckfeldians, have been stirring in the world ever since the gospel did first spring. But the world seeth now right well (thanks be given to our God), that we neither have bred, nor taught, nor kept up these monsters.” He is clearly responding to Roman arguments that Protestantism leads to social disorder; it is possible that this line-drawing also responds to Lutheran assertions that the Reformed and the Anabaptists ought to be grouped together, but regardless: Jewel’s movement for the Gospel is not simply comprised of all religious movements that rejected papal authority in the 16th century.
Given all this, perhaps it is no surprise that the Apologia was sent to Zurich and printed in German before it was translated and printed in English. For the Apology turns out not to be an apology for a distinctive English form of Christianity, differentiated from both continental Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. No: the Apology was not so much a defense of specifically English Christianity as an English defense of Reformed Protestantism. It situated the Church of England as a member of a pan-Protestant movement for the Gospel incorporating Lutherans and Reformed alike, with their sacramental differences cast as less important than their agreement on doctrine of God and Christology (which all disputants, Roman Catholic and Protestant alike, share) and soteriology.
Concluding Thoughts
So why does it matter how John Jewel construed the identity of the Church of England? Well, I talked in my somewhat lengthy introduction about two ways that the work of historical theology or church history can help the church’s proclamation today: first in regulating the use of history in the church, making sure that we are using responsible, plausible tellings of the Christian past; second in retrieving the riches of the Christian past for potential constructive use today. And here’s how each of them might apply to Jewel:
As to the first, if one wants to ground Anglican identity in the Elizabethan settlement, I think it matters that Jewel – one of its key architects – had no truck with the ideas of the ‘via media’ or ‘not making windows into men’s souls’ often associated with that settlement in popular portrayals. Moreover, one cannot really find in Jewel a uniquely English form of Christianity, a primitive, non-papal catholicism focused on the Fathers articulated in distinction from both Roman Catholicism and Continental Protestantism. Jewel was a Protestant, and a Reformed Protestant (a ‘sacramentary,’ to use his language) at that. Now, of course, you might well say that while you may not find the via media or primitive catholicism in Jewel, you still think that one or the other of them should determine Anglican identity – and so you just won’t argue for it in terms of the Elizabethan settlement. And this is, at least speaking with my historian’s hat on, fair enough! I just think we owe it to our forebears in faith to be as careful as we can be in reading their words, to strive to understand them on their own terms as best we can.
But as to the second part, engaging with the Christian past as a source of teaching for us today, I am struck by how different Jewel’s focus is from so many of our current ecumenical conversations, or indeed our conversations about what makes our unity as a church. The questions of church structure that determine so many of our ecumenical endeavors (the ‘historic episcopate’, etc.) just aren’t of primary concern for him. What matters is core doctrinal unity: on doctrines of God and of Christ, and on soteriology. Even very important matters like the sacraments are secondary, Jewel thinks, to these. And it is ultimately soteriology that marks the division between Catholics and Protestants: the belief that God is the sole actor in our salvation, freely justifying us by his grace poured out through Jesus Christ, which we apprehend through faith. It is above all this, for Jewel, that is distinctive of the churches who have, as he puts it, submitted to the Gospel. And – without denying the serious issues involved in ecclesiology, and while acknowledging that many of my fellow Anglicans have strongly-held commitments around the episcopate in particular – I do wonder if we might be a healthier church in both our relationship with other churches and in general if we, like Jewel, kept the main thing the main thing: the glorious proclamation of the free gift of salvation in Jesus Christ.