Dates (1522-1572)

1522 Born at Buden, Devonshire
1535 Enters Merton College, Oxford
1539 Transfers to Corpus Christi, Oxford
1540 Receives Bachelor of Arts
1545 Receives Master’s Degree
1548 Elected as Reader of Humanity and Rhetoric
1551 Receives license to preach at Sunningwell
1552 Accession of Mary Tudor; Jewel deprived of his fellowship at Corpus Christi
1554 Jewel signs articles agreeing with Roman Doctrine
1555 Jewel flees to Frankfurt, Strasbourg and later Zurich (with a letter from Cranmer); is deeply affected by disagreements among English exiles at Frankfurt
1558 Death of Mary and accession of Elizabeth; Jewel returns to England
1559 Jewel participates in disputation at Oxford against Roman clergy; Paul’s Cross “Challenge Sermon”

“If any learned man of all our adversaries . . . be able to bring any one sufficient sentence out of any old catholic doctor, or father, or out of any old general council or out of the holy scriptures of God, or any one example of the primitive church, whereby it may be clearly and plainly proved . . .”

1560 Consecrated Bishop of Salisbury
1562 Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (Apology of the Church of England)
1565 Reply to Harding
1566 Defense of the Apology

“What mystical catholic ears M. Harding hath, that cannot abide the phrases and speeches of the ancient fathers.”

1570 Paul’s Cross Sermon against the Puritans (not published)

John Jewel (1522-1571) was a second-generation Anglican Reformer. He was a protege of Thomas Cranmer, and thus knew Cranmer personally. Later the great Anglican Divine Richard Hooker was a protege of Jewel’s. There is then something like a three-generation passing of the torch from Cranmer to Jewel to Hooker.

For a number of reasons, Jewel is unfortunately less well known than either Cranmer or Hooker. Cranmer is best known for his role in the creation of the Book of Common Prayer, which has provided the structure for Anglican worship for four hundred years. Richard Hooker is known for his writing of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, which is probably the closest thing that Anglicans have to a systematic theology at the time of the Reformation. While his contribution is less, Jewel is nonetheless a significant figure, particularly for the development of Anglican ecclesiology – how Anglicans understand what it means to be a church, and, in that regard, how they address the question of the relationship between Anglicanism (or the Church of England) and the pre-Reformation western Catholic church.

In apologetic discussions, many Protestants and Roman Catholics agree in viewing the relationship between the medieval Catholic church and the post-Reformation Protestant churches as a simple break. This can be seen in such questions as “Did Henry VIII found the Church of England?” or “Where was your church before the Reformation?” or “Did the Church of England break with the Catholic church in order for Henry VIII to get a divorce?” Jewel’s approach to ecclesiology rejects this dichotomy. He refused to understand the Reformation as a simple break with the Roman Catholic church or to interpret the Reformation as a new beginning that leapt over sixteen hundred years of history to go straight back to Scripture, forgetting everything that had happened between the time of the death of the last apostle and Martin Luther’s 95 Theses.

At the heart of Jewel’s argument is the claim that Anglicanism was not the beginning of a new church; rather, the English Reformation was indeed a reformation, the reforming of the late medieval western Catholic church that Jewel claimed had in many ways departed from the historic church of the Patristic era and of the church of the New Testament Apostles before that. (more…)