Theologia Cambrensis

Protestant Religion and Theology in Wales, Volume 1: From Reformation to Revival 1588-1760

D. Densil Morgan

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781786832382, 9781786832375
• eBook ISBN: 9781786832405
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Winner of the 2021 Francis Jones Prize for Welsh History.

The first of a two-volume analysis of theology in Wales, this volume begins with the publication of Bishop William Morgan's Bible in 1588 and concludes with the first phase of the Evangelical Revival in 1760. It assesses the development of Puritanism and of doctrine within the Church of England, Dissenting theology including Calvinism and Arminianism, the doctrinal vision of Griffith Jones Llanddowror, and the way in which an evangelistically vibrant moderate Calvinism contributed to the rise of the Methodist movement. As well as evaluating thought and ideas, it assesses the contribution of such vivid personalities as Morgan Llwyd, Charles Edwards, James and Jeremy Owen, Daniel Rowland and William Williams Pantycelyn.

1

1588–1642

Theology in Wales and the late Elizabethan Church, c.1588–c.1603

The first significant contribution to the dissemination of reformed theology in Wales was the work of Maurice Kyffin (c.1555–98). The eldest child of a distinguished family from Oswestry, Shropshire, Kyffin was steeped in the Welsh bardic tradition. Following bardic training at the hand of the master poet Wiliam Llŷn, he migrated to London and by 1578 was employed as tutor to the household of Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, the first earl of Dorset. His first published work, The Blessedness of Britain (1587), was a thirty-three stanza poem celebrating the virtues of Queen Elizabeth, not least her championing of the true faith according to the Scriptures and, in Wales, the preaching of the gospel in the vernacular. It was written in the wake of the Babington Plot which sought to assassinate Elizabeth and transfer the throne to her cousin, the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots. A year later Kyffin published an English prose translation of the comedy Andria by the Latin dramatist Terence. By then he was no longer in the employ of Buckhurst but in the civil service and abroad, first as surveyor of the muster rolls and then, in 1591, in Normandy as vice-treasurer to the forces. It was during this period that he began his most ambitious literary project to date, the translation into sonorous Welsh of the Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1562), Bishop John Jewel’s classic defence of the reformed, biblical and catholic nature of the established church of the realm.

The translation was published in London, the dedication being dated October 1594. ‘Here’, he claimed, ‘for the good of your soul, in this book, is the essence or summary of the true catholic faith, to train and perfect you in the path of God’s service and humankind’s salvation’.¹ Kyffin, a layman, explains how he took it upon himself both to share the rudiments of the Protestant faith with his compatriots for their spiritual benefit, and to ensure that Wales, and the Welsh language, be afforded the same honour as was taken for granted among the cultured peoples of Europe. This renaissance ideal, typical of that nurtured by Welsh humanists of his generation, fused a fervent patriotism with a zealous Protestant commitment in which Kyffin strove to take forward the Christian mission which had been so ably served by the publication of William Morgan’s magnificent translation of the Welsh Bible six years earlier. It was, he claimed, ‘a necessary, masterly, pious and learned work for which Wales can never repay that which he deserves’ (p. ix).² Unlike Lady Anne Bacon’s English translation of the Apologia issued in 1685 in which she inserted convenient chapter divisions and numbered paragraphs, Kyffin’s translation reproduced faithfully Jewel’s unbroken Latin text. Although this makes it more difficult to follow, the quality of the translation is excellent and modern literary scholars have acclaimed the work as a classic.³

In Anne Bacon’s version, the volume consists of six sections of between seventeen to thirty numbered paragraphs of which only section two, namely the doctrines held by the reformed English Church, need concern us. Jewel, in Kyffin’s translation, begins with an affirmation of the trinitarian nature of God and proceeds to delineate the reality of the incarnation which occurs in order, through God’s gracious decree, to accomplish human salvation. He affirms the sacrificial nature of Christ’s death, his bodily resurrection, ascension and session along with the expectation of his coming again in glory to judge the world. The Holy Spirit, which proceeds from both the Father and Son, is shed abroad in order ‘to soften the hardheartedness of men … either through the sound preaching of the gospel or through any other means’ (p. 26), leading to newness of life and the eternal hope of salvation. The emphasis, however, is on the reality of the church. God’s holy church possesses unity and catholicity; Christ is her only prince and head whose people are served by a diverse order of ministers including deacons, presbyters and bishops. Quoting the authority of Cyprian, Jerome and Augustine, Kyffin claims that unlike the bishop of Rome, the bishops share jurisdiction rather than have it centralized in a single person who ‘has turned his back on the faith and is the forerunner of Antichrist’ (p. 29).

All ministers, he claims, should be lawfully called, and on fulfilling their calling are granted the power of the keys to bind and loosen sin solely through the preaching of the gospel. Auricular confession, ‘these whispering murmurs as the popish priests everywhere do’ (p. 31), is forbidden, priestly celibacy is rejected and the honour of marriage upheld not only for lay people but for those ordained as well. The supreme authority in all religious matters is the canonical scriptures of the Old Testament and the New:

These scriptures, we claim, are the very voice and speech of heaven through which God has made known to us his will, in which alone the human heart can safely find rest, in which fully and sufficiently all things needful for our salvation have been provided. (p. 35)

The patristic authorities here quoted are Origen, Augustine, Chrysostom and Cyril. As well as through the Word, Christ makes himself known among his people through the two sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, ‘both being kinds of visible words, the seals of righteousness and the symbols of grace’ (p. 36). The doctrine set forth here is not memorialist but participatory, signifying a deep spiritual union while communion should be available in both kinds, in bread and in wine. Through ‘the enlivening flesh of the Son of God, the communion of the body and blood of Christ’ claims Kyffin, we are ‘quickened, strengthened and fed to immortality and conjoined with, united to and incorporated in Christ that we may remain with him and He with us’ (p. 37). Baptism, for its part, signifies the washing away of sin in the blood of Christ and is open to infants as they too belong to the covenant people of God.

For Bishop Jewel, like all the principal Continental reformers, this high sacramental doctrine was in full accord with biblical teaching, especially that of the Apostle Paul. Union with Christ was not mystical but through faith, a lively apprehension of God’s forgiving grace through the gospel. Christ is certainly present through the Spirit in the sacrament, but in no way did this imply a change in the elements. Adoration of the elements was idolatrous and a blasphemy. The change occurred, rather, in those who partook of the sacraments in true and simple faith. ‘By saying this we do not scorn the Lord’s Supper nor teach that the sacrament is merely a cold unbeneficial ceremony as many believe’ (p. 41). Rather in baptism we are clothed in Christ and in the Supper, through faith, we can feast on him. The difference between the faith of the reformed English Church and that of Rome was total: ‘They have turned the sacraments of Christ into pageantry and pomp’, he claimed, while ‘purgatory is a late invention and an old wives’ tale’ (p. 44). Similarly Christ, not Mary, was the sole mediator between humankind and God. Although it had rejected the superstitious idolatry of Rome, nevertheless the English Church remained hierarchical, governed by its bishops, and liturgical possessing its own forms of public worship:

Prayer should be offered, as is proper, in the tongue the people can understand, so that the people are edified, as St Paul stated, through common prayer, this being the universal practice of the ancient fathers and the catholic bishops in the Old and New Testaments. (pp. 46–7)

Although Deffynniad Ffydd Eglwys Loegr is more a treatise on ecclesiology and church polity than on personal religion, Jewel, in Kyffin’s translation, does not neglect the importance of the individual’s appropriation of the gospel. In full accord with Reformed theology,⁴ he holds to the radical sinfulness of humankind through the Fall, the impotence of good works as a means of being justified before God, and the supreme necessity of turning to Christ alone for salvation. That salvation was wrought through the cross, the fount of the divine forgiveness, Christ’s sacrifice being wholly sufficient for our redemption: ‘Thus, when he gave up his spirit and said “It is finished”, in that hour he fully paid the price and ransom for the sins of all the world’ (pp. 48–9). Our responsibility is to make this redemption our own through faith and costly repentance, and thereafter live lives of obedience to God’s command:

True faith is living and fruitful, and we cannot be idle. See how we teach the people, that God has called us not to debauchery or licentiousness as St Paul says, but to good works that we can walk in them, as He has called us out of darkness to serve the living God. (pp. 49–50)

Kyffin’s work was a masterpiece of Welsh prose which partook of the humanist ideal of wedding the Word of God to the treasures of antiquity according to the best in European culture of the day. He set out his scholarly principles in the book’s introduction, namely to follow the practice used in English, French, Italian and Spanish literature of augmenting the ordinary speech of the people with technical words which accorded best with ancient Greek or Latin. His contempt towards those who saw no purpose in providing literary instruction in Welsh as this impeded the people from quickly learning English, was withering: ‘Could not the devil himself say anything better!’ (p. xiv). In September 1596, a year after Deffynniad Ffydd Eglwys Loegr was issued, Kyffin was appointed Comptroller of the Musters in Ireland where he died, in his early forties, on 2 January 1598, and was buried in Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral. There is no evidence that he ever returned to Wales.

Huw Lewys (1562–1634) was a Caernarfonshire man who matriculated at All Souls College, Oxford, aged twenty in 1582, graduated BA from Hart Hall in 1587 and proceeded to take his MA from St Edmund Hall four years later. Since 1579 the Oxford curriculum had included compulsory instruction in the Calvinist Alexander Nowell’s catechism, the Heidelberg Catechism and that of John Calvin himself, with optional reading of the Geneva reformer’s Institutio, Jewel’s Apologia and the works of the Zürich reformer Heinrich Bullinger. This reflected the highly Reformed tone of Oxford divinity at the time and there is every reason to believe that Lewys affirmed this teaching wholeheartedly. He would have been encouraged to pay especial heed to the university’s preachers: ‘Throughout the 1590s the Calvinist message rang loudly and clearly from the Oxford pulpits.’⁵ His only published work, Perl Mewn Adfyd (1595) (‘A Pearl in Adversity’), a skilled translation of Miles Coverdale’s A Spiritual and most Precious Pearl (1550) which was itself a translation of the Zürich pastor Otto Werdmüller’s 1548 treatise on self-discipline and Christian fortitude, was written during his time at Oxford, presumably after 1591. It was the first Welsh book to be printed by Joseph Barnes whose publishing house, next door to the university church of St Mary’s, issued a wealth of Protestant literature during these years.

The Perl, a close translation of the work of Coverdale, doctrinally a Lutheran, and the Zwinglian Werdmüller, was more an exercise in pastoral theology than dogmatic theology as such. Its content was uncontroversial. Its three sections include thirty-one chapters counselling believers to draw close to Christ in adversity, to practise evangelical repentance and to have faith in the merciful God. Lewys’s preface reflects a young clergyman’s reforming zeal. The Reformed ideal was for the inculcation of practical godliness through the preaching and application of the Word. ‘Many prelates and churchmen are neglectful of their calling’, he complained, ‘and do not preach or apply the mystery of God’s Word to the people, but ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Bible in Welsh
• Chapter 1: 1588–1642
• Chapter 2: 1642–1660
• Chapter 3: 1660–1689
• Chapter 4: 1689–1760 (i)
• Chapter 5: 1689–1760 (ii)
• Bibliography