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Lord Chatham (1708-1778) quipped that the Church of England of his day had: "A Popish liturgy, Calvinistic Articles and an Arminian Clergy".
- Popish liturgy - enshrined in the Book of Common Prayer, itself an Act of Parliament
- Calvinistic Articles - contained in the Thirty-Nine Articles, enshrined in an Act of Parliament
- Arminian clergy - named after the theologian Arminius (1560-1609) rejecting the Calvinist doctrines of predestination and election and believing that human free will is compatible with God's sovereignty.
The first two points confirm the Church as
- Erastian - named after the Swiss theologian Erastus (1524-83), proposing a structurally theocratic state under the governance of a secular sovereign, anticipated by the ecclesiastical enactments of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.
The Henrican and Elizabethan settlements were designed to retain within the Church Established the maximum number of Christians, who were obliged by law to attend church on specified occasions and, being based on a Prayer book rather than a doctrinal confession (the Thirty-Nine Articles were widely regarded, not least by Clerics, as a political device rather than a theological confession), commanded wide and growing loyalty except from Calvinist dissenters (Puritans) and Roman Catholics.
The openness of the Church meant that it contained a wide variety of religious perspectives, including a "High Anglican" party represented by such figures as Bishop Andrewes (1555-1626) of Chichester (1605-09) and Archbishop Laud (1573-1645) under whom it prospered before the Civil War but then declined, notably with the accession of William and Mary and the "Glorious Revolution" in 1688 and the identification of anything "catholic" with the Jacobite cause.
There are two ways of looking at the Oxford (or "Tractarian", named after the tracts which launched it) Movement:
- As an attempt to re-anchor the Church of England in the early faith of the Fathers and re-connect it with the rest of Christendom as a local manifestation of the universal church; or
- As a move towards re-integrating the Church of England with the Roman Catholic Church.
In spite of the high motives which the Movement took on, its origins were local and practical: in 1828 the Test Act, requiring all state office holders, including Members of Parliament, to be Anglicans, was repealed; in 1829 Catholic Emancipation was enacted; in 1832 the Reform Act was passed, widening the franchise and leaving open the greater possibility of dissenter MPs. What would the Royal supremacy mean if Parliament was not exclusively Church of England? Lord Charles Grey (1764-1845; Whig Prime Minister 1830-34) told the Bishops to get their house in order and abolished ten Irish bishoprics, emphasising secular power. The Evangelicals were growing stronger, the "High and dry", non theological clergy sat on their hands and the "High Church" party feared disaster.
The situation was "saved" by Oxford, the "Home of lost causes" and particularly by Oriel College among whose Fellows were Keble, Pusey, Hurrell Froude and Newman (not to mention Copleston, Whately, Hawkins, Davison and Arnold). They were styled "Noetics" because they refused to accept conventional wisdom.
- John Keble (1792-1865), the leading Fellow, was a shrewd and saintly man but no theologian nor orator; yet his not very striking sermon on July 14, 1833 on National Apostasy, marking the birthday of a "Second Reformation" launched the Movement. Keble was deeply attached to the English church and deeply anti Rome. His "Aaron" was
- Hurrell Froude (1802-36), a graceful writer and speaker, deeply attached to Rome, whose friendship with Newman introduced the man of Evangelical origins to Catholic doctrine. In spite of Froude, the early Movement was notably anti Roman and its chief aim was to overcome a feared Parliamentary coalition of O'Connell, Whigs, dissenters and Benthamites to overthrow established religion.
- John Henry (later Cardinal) Newman (1801-90) wrote the first - and the majority - of the Tracts for the Movement in September 1833, focusing on the Apostolic Succession of the episcopacy. Newman was a Patristics scholar with little idea of the history of the English church. In spite of the outpouring of his brilliant sermons and tracts, the Movement made little headway because the language was so specifically theological that it frightened Erastian bishops; and the Movement became somewhat sidetracked by a fight to preserve the specifically Christian character of Oxford. It needed a sustaining power which was provided by:
- E.B. Pusey (1800-1882, who was not only revered in Oxford but by the wider public, who joined the Movement in 1834. He was a man of authority and vision, assumed leadership and wrote some of its weightiest tracts.
Controversy over the lectures of Hampden who was deemed "unsound" was soon forgotten when Froude's letters and diaries were posthumously published declaring, inter alia, the English Reformation as "a limb badly set". His Remains caused a great uproar, not least amongst Tractarians, but it marked out the ground of dispute and delivered a mortal blow to reformation meta-theology , i.e. not Luther and Calvin but the secondary authors who tried to fuse English Erastianism with these great writers. Amid the storm Newman was supreme and by 1838 the Times was sympathetic and the Evangelicals in disarray but the charge of popery was beginning to stick. The controversies came to a head with Tract 90 by Newman which distinguished between Roman "corruption" and its sound doctrine; it maintained that Anglicanism was not incompatible with Catholicism which was, in the terms of the Henrican and Elizabethan settlements, literally true but opponents were not disposed to be scrupulous and what was intended as a peace offering was a grave miscalculation. Oxford's governing body condemned Newman. After more heated controversy Newman retired from the Movement. Shortly afterwards an Anglican bishop was jointly appointed by The Government and Prussia to Jerusalem which led Newman to question whether his Church was a church at all. Skirmishes continued in Oxford and Pusey was summarily suspended in 1843 for a modest sermon on the Eucharist; and W.G. Ward (1812-1882, a fiery Tractarian, was ejected from his Lectureship at Baliol on his publication in 1844 of The Ideal of a Christian Church.
Ward identified what was Roman with what was catholic and applied this test to the Church of England which emerged disastrously. Whereas Newman had tried to reconcile, ward tackled solefidianism head-on, sweeping away the studied calm of Tract 90. In December 1844 Oxford's Convocation was due to debate three measures; to:
- Condemn Ward's book
- Rescind his degree
- Compel under pain of expulsion everyone who subscribed the Articles to do so in the sense of their original meaning and that understood by the University.
The first two were of little account but the third aroused opposition from liberals, was deemed illegal and withdrawn to be replaced by a condemnation of Tract 90. Convocation met on 13 February 1845 and passed the first two measures but rejected the third. This was the last day of the Movement, many of whose adherents followed Newman to Rome, but also the last day of Oxford theological, oligarchical solidarity.
Newman's idea of a Church was an ideal not a practical proposition and to that extent the Movement failed. With respect to its initial aim, it failed to overturn Erastianism; in spite of the inception of the General Synod in 1970, the Church of England is still subject to the Crown in Parliament. Without it, however, the catholic wing of the Church of England would almost certainly have died instead of which it enjoyed a sustained revival, culminating in the Parish Eucharist movement of the 1920s. Ironically, too, Newman, the target of popery accusations while in the Church of England became the means as a Roman Catholic of defusing anti Catholic paranoia and both his Churches vie with each other in loving him.
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Added: 24th September 2010