John Jewell, Crypto-Puritan?

"Jenkins’ basic thesis is that in Jewel’s mainly controversial and polemical works we have the public figure of the faithful and loyal bishop, but in his private correspondence, mainly with his Swiss reformer friends, we see a frustrated academic with distinct puritan leanings, bemoaning the lack of reforming progress in his native England. Jenkins terms Jewel as ‘an iconoclast in a prelate’s vestments’ and puts this observable dissonance down to the underlying tension in many of the English reformers—a pronounced Erastian worldview giving the godly prince, in this instance Elizabeth, sovereignty in both civil and ecclesiastical realms, yet solidly maintaining the traditional Protestant sola scriptura as the final arbiter in doctrinal authority. This would inevitably lead to the bloodshed of the Civil War in the next century, as the English church had no recourse after the monarch’s undisputed sovereignty."

Read the rest here.

Comments

[Dcn. Drew]

"The English Reformation is at last being studied in a wider European context with a realization that English reformers, such as John Jewel (1522–71), the renowned Elizabethan Bishop of Salisbury, could claim to his friends in Zurich that in terms of doctrine the Church of England believed the same Reformed doctrines. Any mythical notion, therefore, of the English Church being a via media between Rome and Geneva is simply an absurdly anachronistic reading of nineteenth-century High Church ideas back into the complex sixteenth-century reality."

This assumes—wrongly, in my opinion—that the English Reformation was simply a 16th century affair. And that, of course, is what the Reformed Anglicans would have us believe. But the English Reformation doesn't end until 1662. It comprises, first, a reaction against Roman abuses, but then, beginning in the turn of the century, a reaction against Puritanism.

To say that the notion of the English Church being a via media between Rome and Geneva is "absurdly anachronistic" is also wrong. One need only read George Herbert's poem The British Church, where he describes her "praise and glorie" as the "mean" between Rome and Geneva.

[Embryo Parson]

I agree entirely, Deacon. Even during the Edwardine and Elizabethan phases, the PTB were constrantly trying to mollify both Catholics and Protestants in the Church of England, and because that's the case, it can be said with great certainty that the project was an attempt at building a bridge church between Rome and Geneva.