theological or dialectical grounds. Jewel developed a via negativi
canonis, a set of parameters devised to assert what was not held by the
ancient church, never a canon to divine what the Fathers positively held.
This basic negative approach served more as a means to eradicate the
whole edifice of traditionalism by embracing a minimum of fundamental
dogmas, than as any positive platform on which to construct a purely
Protestant theology.
Jewel’s polemical method: the Challenge Sermon, Henry Cole and
Thomas Harding
The Challenge Sermon made Jewel a controversialist in his own right.
Though it never directly addressed the powers of national churches, both
the substance of the Challenge Sermon and the circumstances in which it
originated, reveal fundamental methodological aspects of Jewel’s
apologetic, particularly when aimed at Rome. For Jewel, it was Rome
that was the innovator, not only in that it had abandoned the
early Church on certain matters, but that it as well claimed the early
Church as an authority on certain points on which the Fathers had in
fact been silent. Ironically, Jewel himself finds little positive content in
the Fathers for his own creed. Jewel’s response to Cole merely
adumbrated the more extended rebuttal he would give to Thomas
Harding. Jewel’s written disputes with Cole lasted but two months
(18 March to 18 May); his exchange with Harding would consume the
largest part of the rest of his polemical life. Jewel’s tedious and
pedantic response, following the commonplace of his day, virtually
reproduces Harding’s almost equally tedious and pedantic Rejoindrein
his own Replie unto M. Hardings Answer. Paragraph by paragraph,
section by section, Jewel seeks to contravene Harding’s assertions and
responses to the Challenge Sermon. Why Jewel did not eventually
answer Harding’s 1567 Rejoindre, which specifically addressed the
matter of the real presence in the sacramental elements, and the
propitiatory nature of the Eucharist, is not known, though he did
answer Harding’s later attacks on the Apologia. The answer may be
that Jewel became consumed in his Defense of the Apology, first
published in 1567 in response to Harding’s 1565 Confutation of a
Booke intituled an Apologie. Jewel then expanded and republished his
Defense in 1570 and 1571, following Harding’s 1568 Detection of
sundry foul errors uttered by M Jewel in his Defence of the
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE ELIZABETHAN CHURCH 73
humanist from a scholastic, that scholastics merely piled one proof text on top of another.
Cf. Harbison, The Christian Scholar in the Age of the Reformation, pp. 59–61.