Gary W. Jenkins - John Jewel And The English National Church The Dilemmas Of An Erastian Reformer

throughout Jewel’s works, but even these elements are faint, ephemeral,
enervated and sometimes illusory. But in what then does Jewel’s
significance consist? It goes back to Jewel’s use of the Church Fathers. In
that Jewel approached his topics with zeal he was no different from any
other controversialist of his day. In that he at times let his beliefs get the
better of his judgment and discretion, damns him with everyone else in
that age. But in his use of the Fathers he erected a new set of criteria, new
canons, through which theology was filtered, canons negative and not
positive. In short, Jewel attacked the very notion that there was a
Catholic consensus among the Fathers, and ultimately there can be no
doubt that Jewel found no Reformed consensus among them either. In
this regard Jewel’s ambivalent use of the Fathers, a via negativarum
canonum, a minimalist patristic hereditament, seems more aleatory than
purposeful, stochastic than precise. The dilemma is whether Jewel
wished it this way.

INTRODUCTION 5