undermine any sort of ancient Catholic consensus would be the negative
foundation of his Challenge Sermon and a tool repeatedly used in both
hisReplie to M. Harding’s Answer(Jewel’s extended apology of the
Challenge Sermon) and his Defense of the Apology. These two forms of
argument, the silences of and dissonances within the Fathers, however
embryonic circa 1551, Jewel made staples of his later apologetics.
The second point concerns the most radical element Jewel included in
the sermon, an almost bald Zwinglian interpretation of the Lord’s
Supper. Jewel defends this Reformed doctrine (hardly the only Reformed
view on the question) and used it as an illustration of how far removed
he believed the traditional church was in its use of Scripture as regards
the presence of Christ in the elements of the Eucharist. Jewel cited several
passages concerning the presence of Christ in heaven, and since these
verses referred to Christ’s continued bodily presence with respect to his
physical human form, and not to his Divine nature, ergo, he could not
be physically, corporally or carnally present on, in, with, under, or
substantialiterin the place of, the bread and the wine of the sacrament.^94
Jewel drew this Eucharistic doctrine almost definitely from Peter Martyr.
What it was that he borrowed and why, call for some explanation, for in
Jewel’s confession we see one of the chief polemical matters that
occupied the English Reformation.
When Martyr had come to England in 1547 he had professed a
Eucharistic doctrine more akin to that of Bucer in Strasbourg than to
either Zurich or Wittenburg,^95 and though this was not the view publicly
espoused by both Cranmer and Ridley upon Henry VIII’s death, it seems
to be the one they held.^96 A Lutheran view had been tolerated by
traditionalists late in Henry’s reign, but by 1549 Martyr was not only
teaching the more Reformed notion in his private quarters, but was also
delivering the same in his lectures on I Corinthians.^97 In this Cranmer and
Ridley were firmly behind him. Martyr’s public lectures at Oxford’s
JEWEL TILL 1558 29
(^94) ‘Hoc Christus non de numine suo, quo Patrem æquabat, aut cœlesti natura, sed de
corpore suo loquebatur.’ Ibid., p. 959.
(^95) Jewel’s Eucharistic doctrine, and those of Cranmer and Martyr, will be discussed fully
in Chapter Three. The basic point to be made here is that Jewel, having been in an England
that would seemingly allow the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation as the most radical
doctrine it would embrace, at least up until 1547, is now identifying himself with Martyr
and certain strains of Continental Protestant thought on the question of how Christ’s
physical body is present (if it is) in the Eucharist. Whether Jewel’s theology follows Bucer
is problematic, for he does a poor job of it, especially with the notion of ‘Haec illa est
carno, hic ille sanguis Jesu Christi’.
(^96) MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 380ff. Cranmer may well have still embraced
consubstantiation upon Henry VIII’s death, but the rapidity with which he discarded it
makes the question merely academic.
(^97) McNair, ‘Peter Martyr in England’, pp. 101–105.