Ramsey on the Caroline Divines and the Study of the Fathers

"Whereas the **Edwardian and Elizabethan divines had been interested in the Fathers chiefly as a means of proving what had or had not been the primitive doctrine and practice**, the Caroline divines went farther in using the thought and piety of the Fathers within the structure of their of their own theological exposition.  Their use of the Fathers had these two noteworthy characteristics. (1) **Not having, as did the Continental Reformers, a preoccupation with the doctrines of justification or predestination** they followed the Fathers of the Nicene Age in treating the Incarnation as the central doctrine of the faith.  Indeed a feeling of the centrality of the Incarnation became a recurring feature of Anglican divinity, albeit the Incarnation was seen as S. Athanasius saw it in its deeply redemptive aspect.  (2) Finding amongst the Fathers the contrast of Greek and Latin divinity, the Anglican divines could be saved from western narrowness, and were conscious that just as the ancient undivided Church embraced both East and West so too the contemporary Catholic Church was incomplete without the little known Orthodox Church of the East as well as the Church in the West, Latin, Anglican and Reformed.  The study of the Fathers created the desire to reach out to Eastern Christendom.  Thus did Anglican theology find in the study of the Fathers first a gateway to the knowledge of what was scriptural and primitive, subsequently a living tradition which guided the interpretation of Scripture, and finally a clue to the Catholic Church of the past and the future: in the words of Lancelot Andrewes 'the whole Church Catholic, Eastern, Western, our own." - Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey, "The Ancient Fathers and Modern Anglican Theology", Sobornost, Series 4: no. 6 (Winter-Spring 1962), p. 290.  (Emphases  in asterisks mine.)
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"No one doubts that Cranmer, Jewel, or Hooker were deeply committed to the witness of the ancient Church and the Fathers. The real question is whether or not their reading of Christian antiquity and the Church Fathers was superior to that of the Caroline divines, non-jurors and Tractarians (the theological lineage from which Anglo-Catholicism derives)."