ELIZABETH THE FIRST

ELIZABETH AND RELIGION

SECTION 7 : ANGLICAN DEFENCE OF THE ANGLICAN CHURCH

Defence of the Anglican Church

Many did not see the Elizabethan Settlement as the final word, and during her reign there was constant pressure, particularly by Puritans, to change the Settlement. The Puritans produced numerous tracts criticising the Elizabethan Church. This led some Church leaders to write in defence of the Elizabethan Settlement and the Anglican Church.

(1) RICHARD HOOKER

At the end of the 16th century Richard Hooker produced the classic defence of the Elizabethan settlement in his Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, a work which sought to defend the Church of England against its Puritan critics who wanted further changes to make the Church of England more like the churches of Geneva or Scotland.

The English Puritanism opposed by Hooker in the Laws asserted that there is only one true law, God's law; that Scripture clearly and adequately states this law; and that this law has exclusive authority in all things. Hooker, drawing upon Thomas Aquinas (1225�1274) and Aristotle (384�322 B.C.E.), responded that Scripture clearly is neither intended nor sufficient to address matters of ecclesiastical or civil government; where Scripture was found wanting, recourse must be made to tradition and human reason. And in England, Scripture, tradition, and human reason supported the 1559 Elizabethan Settlement, which established Anglicanism as the state religion and adopted for it the Book of Common Prayer.

The general, Books 1�4 of the Laws lay the groundwork for the more specific Books 5�8. Book 1, the most widely read, deals with the fundamental characters of and the relations among divine, natural, and human laws. Book 2 contains proofs that Scripture does not contain laws governing all things. Along these same lines, Book 3 denies that Scripture designates an absolute form of polity. Book 4 defends the overlaps between Anglican and Catholic practice and ceremony attacked by the Puritans.

Book 5, the central and largest, seeks to conserve the Christian Commonwealth established by the settlement by defending the Book of Common Prayer�especially its role in shaping the moral character of the people. Book 6 rejects the Puritan claim that lay elders must govern the church, while Book 7 defends the continued church governance by bishops (episcopacy). Book 8, which has attracted the most critical scholarly attention, deals with the royal supremacy in religious matters and the impossibility of rigidly separating church and state.

(2) JOHN JEWEL

 John Jewel was a graduate of Oxford University and became public orator for the school. Impressed by their teaching he joined the reformers. When the Catholic Queen Mary came to the throne, his position required him to compose a congratulatory letter to her, which he did. His reformation principles were not firmly fixed. After helping Cranmer and Ridley with their defences, he buckled and signed Catholic articles. Despite this, he was under suspicion and stripped of his position. He fled to the continent. There he apologized publicly for signing the confession that he did not believe in.

Mary died in 1559 and John returned to England. He urged Queen Elizabeth I to adopt a low church position. She did not. John accommodated his views to the new monarch. The queen appointed him to St. Paul's Cross where, on this day, he challenged anyone to prove the Roman Church position from the Bible and the writings of early church fathers.

He repeated the challenge again the following year, when he became Bishop of Salisbury in 1560. Various Catholics took it up. Chafing under the charge of heresy, John said he would prove his case from scripture, arguing: "But seeing [the Roman Church] can produce nothing out of the Scriptures against us, it is very injurious and cruel to call us Hereticks, who have not revolted from Christ, nor from the Apostles, nor from the Prophets . . ." His work defined and clarified points of difference between the churches of England and Rome, thus strengthening the ability of Anglicanism to survive as a permanent institution. In 1562 he published the Apologia pro ecclesia Anglicana (�Defense of the Anglican Church�), seen as the first methodical statement of the position of the Church of England against the Church of Rome. After Thomas Harding, who had been deprived of the title of prebendary (honorary canon) of Salisbury, published his Answer to Jewel in 1564, Jewel wrote his Reply in 1565, which evoked a Confutation from Harding the next year. Jewel responded with his Defense of the Apology (1567).

Jewel carried the attack into the enemy camp. He listed twenty-seven significant Roman Catholic beliefs and practices, mostly relating to the eucharist, and offered to convert to Rome 'if any learned man of all our adversaries or if all the learned men that be alive, 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' to prove that such had been held or done during the first six centuries of the Christian church.. Jewel's appeal was to the scriptures as containing all things necessary to salvation and to the consensus of antiquity in disputed points. His tactics were effective: with massive learning and enormous polemical skill, he succeeded time and again in manoeuvering his opponents into a position where they directly contravened the authority of the Fathers. No wonder the Apology was placed, chained, in churches, to settle parish pump theological arguments, and that Archbishop Parker wanted it appended to the Articles of Religion! It is a classical document of Anglican self-definition.

CLICK HERE TO RETURN TO ELIZABETH AND RELIGION MENU