Jewel’s Swiss affinity, coupled with his negative polemical stance, also
addresses the use made of Jewel by Peter White. White fails to grasp that
Jewel was neither a theologian nor a systematic thinker, nor even a
dialectician. That he never overtly dogmatizes on predestination says
little, though Jewel does proffer enough throughout his works to clearly
place him as a Protestant Augustinian to say the least.^75 Jewel’s basically
negative and reductionist approach to dogma yields little that passed as
positive theology. Thus, any sweeping generalities drawn from his
polemical works about what Jewel was or was not theologically are
tenuous observations at best. Jewel was a Protestant called upon to
defend the political necessity of the Elizabethan Settlement. Jewel wished
the Settlement were more precise, but at the same time he realized that it
alone protected England and England’s Protestants from the shades of
Marian persecutions and ignorance. These contraries must be held in
equipoise when reading Jewel. In this sense, Jewel’s larger works will
appear as the public, rhetorical, exercises that they were: aimed at
strengthening Protestant resolve and censuring traditionalist obstinance.
Conversely, Jewel’s private correspondence, while persistent in its anti-
Catholic invectives, also betrayed the more precise elements in Jewel’s
disposition, one who wished more for English Protestantism than a
meager implementation of the 1559 Settlement. Publicly, Jewel always
remained the dutiful prelate, privately, the wistful precisian; but it was
this dichotomy that allowed others to insinuate their private notions into
the Church of England’s life as well.
Jewel’s was no English theology, nor was he a champion of some
creature later termed via media. What theology he had, he had garnered
from Peter Martyr. But even this cannot be so quickly asserted without
the very real proviso that Jewel is not simply Martyr sitting in rochet and
chimere at Salisbury: Martyr, a Florentine, though he had left his
Catholicism in Italy, had never abandoned his native city’s
republicanism. His Reformed theology, as that of Zurich, fit nicely with
the republicanism of the Swiss cantons. As such, and even though there
was a strong element of Erastianism in Zurich, it was never such that
anyone believed that the decision of the magistrate would make that
which was defiled clean, for example, vestments. Adiaphora was a
concept the English conveniently coopted from the Lutherans and
applied to their situation. Such distinctions as indifferent things have
only a passing place in Reformed thought, and apart from the one
passage of Martyr, which Whitgift was happy to force down the throat
THE IDENTITY OF THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH 249
(^75) Cf. Jewel’s commentary on I Thessalonians 1:5, Works, II, p. 821; and II
Thessalonians 2:13, Works, II, p. 933. As noted, the second of these two texts Jewel makes
the statements, consonant with Calvin, that the Christian stands only by the mercy of God,
and not by faith, and that assurance proceeds from faith itself.