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

debate, he addressed the perception that rhetoric and oratory drove
Jewel’s arguments more than scholastic methods and syllogistic logic.^87
Cole, who spent the next several months in the Tower before being
transferred to the Fleet prison (his residence for the next 19 years), must
have thought of this often in reading Jewel’s responses to Harding.
Jewel’s slighting of dialectic, theology, and the disciplines of humanism
abound in his works.
In commenting upon the sixth proposition of the Challenge Sermon in
hisAnswere to Ivell, that Christ’s body is, or may be, in a thousand
places or more at one time, Harding had argued that

although the body of Christ be naturall and humaine in dede, yet

through the vnion and coniunction, many thinges be possible to the

same now, that to all other bodies be impossible; as to walke vpon

waters, to vanishe awaye out of sight, to be transfigured and made

bright as the sunne, to ascende vp through clowdes: and after it

became immortall, death being conquered, to ryse vp againe out of

the graue, and to entre through doores fast shutte.^88

Harding predicated his response upon the doctrine of communicatio
idiomatum, that those attributes that belonged to either nature of the
Incarnate Christ, divine or human, could be properly attributed, through
the unity of the Person, to the other nature. This would seem the same
line of argument followed by certain Lutherans in maintaining their
peculiar Eucharistic doctrine of consubstantiation, a line of argument
known as ubiquitarianism, that Christ’s resurrected body is everywhere
present, and thus can be physically present in elements of the
Communion. Only this is not what Harding is defending here, but
merely that the body of Christ, even before his resurrection, had done
things other bodies were incapable of, and now after his exaltation limits
cannot be set to the capabilities of Christ’s human nature. In response,
Jewel writes,

Now let us consider Harding’s arguments: Christ’s body walked

upon waters: It entered through the doors being shut: it Ascended

through the clouds: Ergo, it may be at one time in sundry places.

Although this argument may soon be espied, having utterly no

manner sequel in reason, yet the folly thereof may the better appear

by the like: St Peter walked upon the water: Elias was taken up into

the clouds: St Bartholomew entered through the doors being shut;

Ergo, St Peter, Elias, and St Bartholomew may be at one time in

sundry places.^89

To belabor the many places of Jewel’s illogic or his misapplication of

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE ELIZABETHAN CHURCH 75

(^87) Henry Cole to John Jewel, 18 March 1560, in Jewel, Works, Vol I, p. 26.
(^88) Harding,Answere to Ivell, p. 136.
(^89) Jewel,Replie to Harding, in Works, I, p. 483.