Article Review John Jewel: Anglicanism's Bane Or Blessing?

Ecclesiology 4 (2008) 345–355 www.brill.nl/ecso

Article Review

John Jewel: Anglicanism’s Bane or Blessing?

Paul Avis

Gary W. Jenkins, John Jewel and the English Church: Th e Dilemmas of an Erastian Reformer (Aldershot, Hants and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2006), viii + 293 pp. £55.00. ISBN 0 7546 3585 6 (hbk).

Th e ‘judicious’ Richard Hooker described Bishop John Jewel (in words slightly misquoted in this book) as ‘the worthiest Divine that Christendome hath bred for the space of some hundreds of yeers’. 1 Hooker did not claim that Jewel was the most learned, or the most eloquent, or the most profound, or the most courageous of all the divines who had ﬂ ourished in the late mediaeval period and during the Reformation, but that he was the ‘worthiest’. Although Hooker was praising his patron and mentor, he was not entirely leaving his celebrated good judgment to one side when he implied that Jewel was ‘worthier’ than say, the great Conciliarists (d’Ailly, Gerson or Cusanus), or the great Reformers (Luther, Calvin or Cranmer). Even if we allow for some rhetorical exaggera- tion, Hooker’s words surely imply that he found real spiritual, moral and intellectual integrity in Bishop Jewel. Indeed, John Jewel (1522-1571) was acclaimed in his day, and esteemed long afterwards by a succession of Anglican divines, as the formidable contro- versialist of St Paul’s Cross, as the author of the elegant Apologia Ecclesia Anglicanae and of the exhaustive Defence of the Apology, and as the admirably dutiful Bishop of Salisbury. Worn out by the time of his death at the age of

1 ) Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, II, vi, 4: Th e Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker , ed., W. Speed Hill (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977-), 1, p. 171; cf. Works , ed. John Keble (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1845), vol. 2, p. 314. Jenkins misquotes this as ‘some hundred years’ – thus missing the extremely fulsome scope of Hooker’s comparison.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI 10.1163/174553108X341323 346 P. Avis / Ecclesiology 4 (2008) 345–355 forty-nine, he had spent himself in the cause of the reformed English Church, both by his pen and his pastoral labours. Th e Apologia was considered by Archbishop Matthew Parker to be worthy to go in parish churches, to refute any parish-pump anti-Reformation polemics, and was translated into English by Lady Bacon, the mother of Sir Francis Bacon – a compliment in itself. Th e qualities of spiritual, moral and intellectual integrity, that Hooker and many other Anglican divines saw in Jewel, are precisely those that the author of this new study attempts to strip away. In an extraordinary attack, one that savours of Counter-Reformation or Ultramontane anti-Protestant polemic, Professor Jenkins devotes much of his three hundred pages to attempting to prove that Jewel was ‘illogical’ in argument, ‘duplicitous’ in controversy, slap- dash with his sources, and unpatristic and uncatholic in his theology. He takes issue with the pioneering twentieth-century Jewel scholars, W.M. Southgate and John Booty, who saw Jewel as one the founders and fashioners of what eventually became Anglicanism. 2 As far as Jenkins is concerned, Jewel could not have been a founder of Anglicanism, or of anything else, because he had no positive or coherent contribution of his own to make. Jewel, insists Jenkins, was without a coherent or distinctive theology, and derived whatever theology he did possess from Peter Martyr Vermigli, his acknowledged spiritual father. Th ough how anyone could ever be said to have founded, or even not founded, an entity as ‘protean’, ‘nebulous’ and ‘malleable’, as Professor Jenkins fi nds Anglicanism to be, is a paradox. Citing Cox and Jewel’s affi rmation at Frankfurt that the exiles there ‘would have the face off [sic] an English churche’, Jenkins gratuitously glosses this as ‘a Church independent of an intangible entity called the universal Church’ (p. 164) − as though the English Reformers did not explicitly acknowledge the universal or Catholic Church and moreover insist that it was wider than the Church of Rome and that the Church of England remained a part of it, while asserting that each particular church had authority to decide human rites and ceremonies for itself. 3

2 ) W.M. Southgate, John Jewel and the Problem of Doctrinal Authority (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). John E. Booty, John Jewel as Apologist of the Church of England (London: SPCK, 1963). 3 ) Cf. Article XXXIV of the Th irty-nine Articles: ‘It is not necessary that Traditions and Ceremonies be in all places one, or utterly like; for at all times they have been divers, and may be changed according to the diversities of countries, times and men’s manners, so that nothing be ordained against God’s Word... Every particular or national Church hath authority to ordain, change, and abolish, ceremonies or rites of the Church ordained only by man’s authority, so that all things be done to edifying’.