the institutional Church. While Jewel embraced the central aspects of
Luther’s theology, he found only a passing need to defend them, as his
goal was not the positive affirmation of any of the particulars of
Protestantism in and of themselves; sporadically, however, he did do this.
Rather, it was to establish that Rome had no claim to the Patristic
Church, while England in some sense did, especially as adumbrated in
the Elizabethan Settlement of religion and Jewel’s notion of the Christian
Commonwealth. Jewel constrained the conscience of the English
Christian to the political realities of the 1559 Settlement. As shall be
seen, Jewel’s idea of the English National Church assumed a Protestant
visage, yet one commensurate with certain ‘Genevan’ sentiments. But
most importantly for Jewel, the conscience of English piety ended where
Her Majesty’s began. Given that the prince’s decree can make the
polluted licit, could it enforce that which was contrary to God’s Word?
Jewel would never have said ‘Yes’ to this, but none of the Catholics with
whom Jewel fell into controversy would have said it of the pope either.
Neither Precisian nor Papist: ecclesiastical reductionism in rochet and
chimere
In his ApologiaJewel had reduced the content of the faith to a slight
minimum of dogmas, and thereby created a whole new set of categories
into which could be shoved adiaphora. To effect this, Jewel had taken
certain matters once integral to the life and practice of the Church – rite,
ceremony, numerous devotional practices – and had made them practical
nullities, matters left to the discretion of Her Majesty and convocation.
Jewel’s polemical method reduced these categories, once employed as
canonical norms among the Catholics, to ineffectual courts of appeal. It
is sufficient here to note that during Jewel’s tenure as bishop of Salisbury
his intellectual activities were largely consumed by his controversies with
Recusant antagonists, and almost wholly with Thomas Harding. In his
Challenge Sermon, and in the Apologiaas well, Jewel had chosen the
parameters of his arguments to suit his polemical needs, giving himself
the advantage. But in doing so he had argued for what the Church
Fathers had not said, not so much for what they had. The onus for
dogmatic assertions in this debate he laid on his opponents. For Jewel,
the obligation of any specific doctrinal formula is immense.
In his Epistla ad Scipionemand his A View of a Seditious BullJewel
likewise goes over some familiar territory, though now directed at more
specific ends: a repudiation of both Trent and Papal sovereignty, and the
valorizing of the prince as the true guardian of religion and piety. In all
his writings Jewel is expansive in his eager assertions of the primacy of