We all "repose our whole trust in the only mercies of God"
John Boys' surprising irenicism and Reformation soteriological disputes
In his commentary on the Gospel passage for Septuagesima Sunday, the Jacobean English postil writer John Boys makes what seems to be a shocking claim: that “the Scriptures, the Fathers, and many learned Papists” all agree that salvation is entirely by God’s free grace and not by works. He goes on to provide a catena of patristic and medieval citations and then suggests that even Cardinal Bellarmine in his account of justification “at the last holds it is the safest course to repose our whole trust in the only mercies of God.”
He adds that when you look beyond the genre of formal theological or polemical writing at religious practice, this convergence becomes especially clear:
Now for their practice, that learned clerk Chemnitius hath observed long since, that most of them in the question of justification by works, have said one thing in their disputations, and another in their meditations; otherwise behaving themselves at their death, than in their life. For when once they see that they must appear before the bar of God’s justice, they plead for the most part guilty, craving a psalm of mercy: Miserere mei Deus, & secundum multitudinem miserationum tuarum, dele iniquitatem meam.1
He goes on to provide a set of examples of this sort - Gregory the Great, Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux. And then, most strikingly, he finishes by recounting the execution of the Roman Catholic missionary priest Ralph Sherwin in 1581:
Sherwin, a seminary priest, executed for treason with Edmund Campion at Tyburn, when he was in the cart, ready to die, though he held himself a martyr for the Catholic faith, acknowledged notwithstanding ingenuously the miseries, imperfections, and corruptions of his own vile nature, relying wholly upon Christ, and invocating no saint but his Savior, ending his life with these words: O Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, be to me a Jesus.
Here, Boys’ sense that even Roman Catholics throw themselves wholly on divine mercy in good Protestant fashion in their devotional life and especially at the end of life extends even to one executed for attempting to (as he saw it) overthrow both godly monarch and true religion. Indeed, he recounts Sherwin’s execution in a way somewhat reminiscent (to me, at least) of Foxe’s telling of the execution of Protestant martyrs during the Marian persecutions: the condemned person dies confessing sin and casting him/herself solely upon Jesus’ mercy.
Now, there are several ways to understand this move by Boys. There is somewhat cynical or polemical read. Throughout his writing, he is determined to cast Papists as treasonous, threats to the good order of the realm. Minimizing Catholic-Protestant theological differences would allow him, one might argue, to suggest that recusant reticence to conform to the Church of England is the product not of genuine theological difference but traitorous allegiance to a foreign political power.
One might also say that he is simply wrong, that he fails to understand that even similar words may conceal a vastly different understanding of the Christian life and the role between grace, faith, and works. After all, no good Roman Catholic would deny that salvation is by grace, even if demurring from the Protestant idea that this grace is received solely by faith!
I think there might well be a measure of truth in each of these suggestions. But I also think I see a genuine generosity here, even amidst the sharp confessional divisions of the early seventeenth century. Boys seems to me to express the intuition which Protestants have at our best held (but, alas have sometimes forgotten): that we believe that it is faith in Christ alone, not faith in justification by faith alone, that saves — that Christians of all sorts can and do throw themselves ultimately on God’s mercy for salvation.
Indeed, I think he is also right to see this common language of foreswearing merit and begging mercy across confessional lines particularly expressed in texts and practices of Christian devotion. It’s hardly escapable, given the prevalence of this language in the psalms. I have found that for precisely this reason I am often able to use Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox devotional material for my private prayers, our genuine theological disagreements aside. Interestingly, C. FitzSimons Allison makes a very similar point to Boys in The Rise of Moralism, his analysis of English accounts doctrine of justification from the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth century. Allison deplores what he sees as a loss of a properly Protestant account of imputed righteousness in Caroline and Restoration divinity2 — but notes that theologians like Jeremy Taylor, who he thinks at the level of explicit doctrine get justification wrong, nonetheless depend wholly on God in their prayers.
But back to Boys: remember that this was a moment in which many divines of the Church of England were rather happy to consign not only all current Roman Catholics but also their own forebears who lived and died under (as they saw it) unhappy papal error and tyranny to perdition. In this context, I find it quite moving that John Boys was willing to recount the death of a hated seminary priest in terms which made clear that he, too, confessed the faith in Christ that saves.3 I only hope that when my own time comes, God will grant me as good a death as Ralph Sherwin, that I like him may cry out “O Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, be to me a Jesus” as I prepare to meet him face to face.
Lord, have mercy upon me, and according to the multitude of your mercies put away my iniquity; a slight emendation of the Vulgate of Psalm 51:1.
This argument is, of course, contested.
He doesn’t explicitly say that Sherwin is saved, I suppose, but it seems the inescapable conclusion given Sherwin’s confession of faith and Boys’ Protestant soteriology.