The Reformed Church of England and the ancient landmarks
Boys' Rogation Sunday sermon, on the text Proverbs 22:28, after addressing the need to maintain the ancient landmarks in the polity, turns to the Church of the realm. Against both Papalist and Puritan, Boys refuted the charge directed by both, that the Church of the Elizabethan Settlement was an innovation, a removal of the ancient landmarks.
Today's post considers Boys' response to the charge from Papalist apologists. Against the emotionally powerful Papalist narrative that the Reformed Church of England was a denial of the 'old religion' - that it was, indeed, a 'new religion' - Boys, after the manner of Jewel's Apology, presented the Reformation of the Church as a recovery of the ancient landmarks:
I know the Papists are great boasters of antiquity but they deal with us, as Tertullian in his Apology speaks of the Gentiles ... Ye magnify much antiquity, yet shape your religion after a new cut ... It is not we, but you and your fathers' house that trouble Israel; It is not we, but you, which have removed ancient bounds.
As examples of this, Boys points to how Papalists both added to and took from the Eucharist and the Scriptures:
they that remove the bounds, as they give you too much Sacrament, and too little, too much Christ's transubstantiated body, taking away the cup, even so they give you too much Scripture, and too little, too much adding to the Canon, Apocrypha, too little, clasping it up that ye may not read it.
Thus the practice of the Reformed Church of England, with its Augustinian eucharistic theology and restoration of the Cup to the laity, and reading the holy Scriptures in the vernacular and recognising, with Jerome, that "the other Books' do not have canonical authority to establish doctrine, was a restoration of the true old religion.
This was also seen in how the Reformed Church of England regarded the Fathers, with, as Boys notes, Canon 6 of the 1571 Canons exemplifying a reverence for patristic teaching:
If the Papists understand here by Fathers, those whom usually we call Fathers; the most ancient doctors of the Western and Eastern Churches, in life spotless, in learning matchless; yet our plea still is the same, that they, not we, remove the bounds ... Not we, for it is a Canon of our Church, That no preacher shall vent any doctrine, but such as is agreeable to the Scriptures, according to the collections and expositions of the Catholic Fathers, and ancient Bishops.
This attention to the Fathers, Boys stated, underpinned the understanding that Papalist doctrine and practice was not the old religion:
Bishop Jewel, Melanchthon, and other of our most acutely learned Divines, evidently shew, that Popish opinions, are novel, unknown to the Fathers, for the space of five hundred years after Christ ... To conclude this argument, we profess ingeniously, with our Judicious and gracious Sovereign, that we do not further depart from Rome, then Rome departs from herself, in her flourishing state. We do not remove the bounds of old Rome, but only shake off the the bonds of new Rome. We confess the faith of ancient Rome.
Those seeking the ancient landmarks, the old religion, "the faith of ancient Rome" were to find this in the Reformed Churches (which, by the way, Boys' invocation of Melanchthon indicates includes the Lutheran churches, a view also upheld by Jewel). This was also expressed by James I as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, in his 1616 Premonition, to which Boys here refers. That the Churches of the Reformation in general, and the Reformed Church of England in particular, were the old religion, those churches maintaining and shaped by the ancient landmarks, was no mere rhetorical device of the apologists, but central to the self-understanding of these churches.
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