The Jewel of Anglicanism
John Jewel: What’s the Big Deal?
John Jewel (1522-1571) is not the first person we think of when we think of the Reformation in England. We might more readily think of Thomas Cranmer, or Henry VIII, or Elizabeth I, or Richard Hooker. Jewel was an instrumental figure in articulating the vision of a Reformed Church of England, and his Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicana (Apology for the Church of England) in 1562 offered an interpretation of the English church as rooted in โthe Holy Gospel, the Ancient Bishops, and the Primitive Churchโ (Apology, 14).
Jewel is important because he was central in the reconstruction of the English church in the Elizabethan period. Jewelโs vision defined the Elizabethan English church as much as Richard Hooker.
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In addition to his importance in helping establish the DNA of the Church of England, Jewel is still studied for his rhetorical power and ability to articulate what it would look like to be Protestant and yet not see the history of the church as a series of declensions from the original purity of the gospel.
T.D. Bozeman in To Live Ancient Lives argues that at the core of the Puritan movement was a belief in the idea of โprimitivism,โ or the confidence that the โprimordiumโ of New Testament Christianity in belief, polity, and worship could and must be reinstated in the contemporary context (Bozeman, 71).
Anglicans like Jewel also looked to the โconsensusโ of the early church as normative. For them, it included not just the New Testament. Biblical interpretation is drawn from the patristic era, ending in the sixth century.
As Lancelot Andrewes famously put it, Anglicans believed in โone canon reduced to writing by God himself, two testaments, three creeds, four general councils, five centuries and the series of fathers in that period.” Therefore, โthe three centuries, that is, before Constantine, and two after, determine the boundary of our faithโ (Terry, 562). Jewelโs Apologia was part of the reconstruction and self-presentation of the Church of England as an exemplar of Christianity reformed according to scripture and the church fathers.
Biography
Bishop Jewel was, by all accounts, a prodigious scholar with a remarkable memory. He matriculated to Oxford, studying under John Parkhurst at Merton College, who introduced Jewel to the humanism of Erasmus. Jewel subsequently moved to Corpus Christi College, where he graduated with a BA in 1540. He became a fellow of Corpus Christi in 1542 and proceeded MA in 1545.
In 1547, the Italian Reformer Peter Martyr Vermigli was appointed as Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford by Thomas Cranmer, and Jewel eagerly sought out Vermigliโs friendship. The two became so close that Jewel later referred to him as โmy father, my pride, and even the half of my soulโ (Zurich Letters, 28). Jewel received the B.D., a rare accomplishment, in 1552.
At the succession of Mary Tudor to the throne, Jewel, like other prominent clergy in England, was ordered to recant his Protestant views, and in Oct. 1554, Jewel did just that, much to his shame. He immediately regretted his recantation and subscription to the Marian Catholic articles; he fled England to the continent, where he served Vermigli in Strasbourg and Heinrich Bullinger in Zรผrich until the death of Mary in 1558.
Jewel’s Return as a Reformer
Upon his return in 1559, Jewel was immediately identified as a leader of the Reformation and was consecrated as the Bishop of Salisbury on Jan. 21, 1560. Jewel followed Hugh Latimer and others mocking the bishops of the pre-Reformation period and asserted that โwe require our bishops to be pastors, labourers and watchmenโ (Works, 4.1221). Bishops were to be laborious pastors and preachers and attendant supervisors rather than absentee landlords. Jewel lived a personally ascetic life, apparently allowing himself only six hours of sleep at night to pursue his scholarship and episcopal duties, a regimen that wore his body down and contributed to his early death in 1571.
John Jewel’sย Apology
Jewelโs famous treatise had two aims: to demonstrate the corruptions of the Church of Rome and the reason why Reformation was necessary, and to distinguish the Reformation in the Church of England from:
some new and strange Sects stirring, such as the Anabaptists, Libertines, Mennonians, Zwenkfeldiansโฆthank God, the World may see, that these Monsters are not of our Breeding, Educating, or Nourishing.
(Apology, 46)
Jewel resisted the common charge that Protestants were antinomians because they insisted upon justification by faith: โtrue faith is Lively, and cannot be idleโ (Apology, 42).
The English Church, according to Jewel, agreed with the Scriptures and with the early fathers of the church where the Church of Rome did not. Thus, the English separated from Rome, but that did not indicate a separation from:
the Primitive Church of Christ and the Apostles, and of the Holy Fathers which โis the True Catholick Church; and that we dare call Noahโs Ark, the Spouse of Christ, the Ground and Pillar of Truth.โ
(Apology, 74-5, see 115-116)
In the Church of England, worship is done โDecently and in Order, and as near as we can, according to the Institutions of Former Timesโ (Apology, 119). Importantly, however, the scriptures possessed final authority and were capable of judging the Fathers when they erred:
โThey are learned: they have preeminence in the church: they are judges: they have the gifts of wisdom and understanding; yet they are often deceived. They are our fathers, but not fathers unto God; they are stars, fair, and beautiful, and bright; yet they are not the sun: they bear witness of the light, they are not the lightโ
(Works, 4.1174).
The fathers were nonetheless given great weight in the interpretation of the scriptures in Jewelโs attempt to find โan interpretive authority without accepting either the solution of an authoritative church or the opposite extreme of complete dependence upon special revelationโ (Southgate, 119-20).
Jewel’s High View on the Sacraments
Jewelโs high ecclesiology in the Apology was accompanied by a rich view of the sacraments. Although he insisted that there was no change in the substance of the bread and wine, Jewel argued
that the Body and Blood of our Lord are verily and indeed given to the Faithful, in the Lordโs Supper; the Flesh of the Son of God Quickning our Souls, Meat from Heaven, the Food of Immortality, Grace, Truth, and Life; and that it is the Communion of the Body and Blood of Christ, by Partaking of which, we are Quickned, Strengthned, and Fed unto Immortality, and by which we are Joyned, United, and Incorporated with Christ, that we may Abide in Him, and He in us.
Likewise, baptism for Jewel was the:
โSacrament of the Remission of Sins, of that Washing which we have in Christโs Blood; and that it is not to be denied to any Body that will profess the Name of Christ; not even to the Infants of Christians, forasmuch as they are Born in Sin, and do belong to the People of God.โ
(Apology, 31).
Assessment & Critique
Contemporary Anglicanism still has much to learn from Jewel. His belief that the visible church is โNoahโs Ark,โ outside of whom no one can be saved, is an important corrective to the individualist tendencies in contemporary Western Christianity. Jewelโs understanding of the Eucharist also cuts a middle way between memorialism and transubstantiation. In his recent work The Unintended Reformation, Brad Gregory states that Reformed Eucharistic theology, with its insistence that Christโs physical body is in heaven, made Christโs presence in the Eucharist โspiritualโ such that Christ was not truly present (Gregory, 42-3).
Lessons from the Right Reverend
Jewel, by contrast, demonstrates that Christโs presence is no less real for being spiritual. โSpiritual presenceโ for Jewel does not mean mental or private, it means that Christโs body and blood is present by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Our partaking of Christ in the Eucharist does not mean that the bread and wine change, but that as a people, we do. Christ gave us this sacrament that it โmight change us, and, as Theophylact words it, might Transform us into his Bodyโ (Apology, 34). In other words, for Jewel, the Eucharist is central because by making Christ present to us in it, the Spirit also makes for Christ a new people, his mystical body.
At the same time, there are many negative lessons to be drawn from Jewelโs Apology. He shares with the age a regrettable vitriol towards Roman Catholics. He misplaced confidence both in his sanctity and that of his church.
There are at points a tendency towards vulgar self-justification that should repulse contemporary readers1. One of the great gains of the late twentieth century is the Anglican consensus that Roman Catholics are our brothers. The Nottingham Statementย of the National Evangelical Anglican Conference confesses:
Seeing ourselves and Roman Catholics as fellow-Christians, we repent of attitudes that have seemed to deny it.
Jewel’s work defending the Elizabethan church is valuable, even with its faults. He presents a vigorous defense of the visible church and a refusal to set scripture and tradition in opposition. Jewel made a robust place for the sacraments in the life of the church.
1E.g., โGod be praised, though we are not altogether as good as we ought, and as we profess to be, yet, as bad as we are, when compared with Them, the Innocency and Integrity of our Lives, will be sufficient to disprove the Crimes we are charged withโ (Apology, 61).ย
Bibliography
- Booty, John, John Jewel as Apologist of the Church of England (London: SPCK, 1963).
2. Bozeman, T.D., To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension of Puritanism (Reprint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011
3. Gregory, Brad, The Unintended Reformation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).
4. Jewel, John, The Apology of the Church of England, trans. Thomas Cheyne (1714).
[I have chosen this later translation for citation in this post because, as the translator indicates, โthe Old Translations are now become so obscure, by reason of the Variableness of our Language, that the English Reader, for whose sake this is intended, cannot be much benefited by them.โ]
5. Jewel, John, The Works of John Jewel, ed. John Ayre, 7 vols. (1850).ย
6. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. โJewel, John.โ
7. Southgate, W.M., John Jewel and the Problem of Doctrinal Authority (1962).
8. Terry, Justyn, โTheology in the Anglican Communion,โ The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Anglican Communion (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
9. The Zurich Letters: Or, the Correspondence of Several English Bishops and Others, ed. Hastings Robinson (1856).
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