However austere or ascetic the new orders may have been, the very
notion that ‘religious’ was a noun applicable to professed clergy, monks,
or nuns, flew in the face of the basic implications of the Reformation
principle of justification by faith alone: ‘Therefore, those now called “the
religious”, i.e., priests, bishops and popes, possess no further or greater
dignity than other Christians, except that their duty is to expound the
word and administer the sacraments.’^109 No institution or priest mediated
the grace of salvation, such attempted mediation was rendered not only
unnecessary, but an affront to the divine economy of redemption and the
efficacy of the atoning death of Christ. Justification by faith alone cast
devotion in a new form, one removed from the sacramental system in
which the suppliant is dependent on a priest. Instead the Church
becomes an effect of salvation, an institution where the believer resides
as a consequence of grace.^110
This redefinition of devotion Jewel happily employed. In both
personal correspondence and polemical tract Jewel attacked the
fundamental medieval notion that largely identified the cleric and
monastic with the religious.
As to your expressing your hopes that our bishops will be
consecrated without any superstitions and offensive ceremonies, you
mean, I suppose, without oil, without the chrism, without tonsure.
And you are not mistaken; for the sink would indeed have been
emptied to no purpose, if we had suffered those dregs to settle at the
bottom. Those oily shaven hypocrites we have sent back to Rome
from whence we first imported them.^111Here Jewel hits upon two points, the first that the whole order of the
Catholic clergy, in and of themselves, constituted one of the chief
problems with the Church, a clergy characterized by superstition in
ceremony and rite; and second, that this problem arose as a usurpation
of each regional church’s liberties, and thus the remedy of packing them
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE ELIZABETHAN CHURCH 81
(^109) Martin Luther, An Appeal to the German Nobility, in Dillenberger, Luther:
Selections, pp. 409–10.
(^110) Luther’s Small Catechism, q. 175. ‘What is the holy Christian Church? The holy
Christian Church is the communion of saints, that is, the whole number of believers in
Christ;for all believers, and onlybelievers are members of this Church.’ (St Louis, 1943).
Cf. Luther’s Smalcald Articles, III.12. ‘Thank God, a child seven years old knows what the
church is, namely, the holy believers and the lambs that hear their Shepherd’s voice. For the
children pray thus: I believe in a holy Christian Church. This holiness does not consist in
surplices, tonsures, long clerical gowns, and other ceremonies of theirs, fabricated by them
without the warrant of Holy Writ, but in God’s Word and in true faith.’ Quoted in
Heinrich Bornkmann, Luther’s World of Thought, trans. Martin Bertram (St Louis, 1958),
p. 134.
(^111) To Josiah Simler, 2 November 1559, Jewel, Works, IV, p. 1221.