High Church Varieties

Three Essays on Continuity and Discontinuity in Nineteenth-Century Anglican Catholic Thought

Mattijs Ploeger

Publicatieserie Stichting Oud-Katholiek Seminarie instalment 36

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HIGH CHURCH VARIETIES

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HIGH CHURCH VARIETIES

Three Essays on Continuity and Discontinuity in Nineteenth-Century Anglican Catholic Thought

Mattijs Ploeger

Publicatieserie Stichting Oud-Katholiek Seminarie instalment 36

Amersfoort/Sliedrecht 2001

Merweboek

eiBIJOTHEEK DER

RIJKSUNIVERSITEIT f T K E C H T j

Mattijs Ploeger (bom 1970) studied theology at Leiden University, particularly at the departments of New Testament and Church History. He received his education to the ministry at the Seminary of the Netherlands Reformed Church, Leiden, and at the Old Catholic Seminary, Utrecht. Additionally, he studied at Westcott House, Cambridge. Now he is assistant priest in the Old Catholic parish of Saint Agnes, Egmond-aan-Zee.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to express his gratitude to the Archbishop of Utrecht, the Most Revd Dr Antonius Jan Glazemaker, and the Bishop of Haarlem, the Rt Revd Dr Jan-Lambert Wirix-Speetjens, who allowed him to study at the Anglican theological college of Westcott House, Cambridge, during Easter Term and the summer of 1998. Gratitude should also be expressed to the United Old Catholic Study Funds “Seminarie” and “Rens” for their considerable financial assistance, and to the Rector of the Old Catholic Seminary, now Archbishop of Utrecht, the Most Revd Dr Joris Vercammen, for his co-ordinating work.

The author owes much to the Vice-Principal of Westcott House, the Revd Dr Jeremy Morris, who supervised the present essays. Without the kindness of the Revd Michael Roberts, Principal, Mrs Zo« Bennett Moore, Tutor, and many Westcott students during Easter Term, the writing of these essays would not have been the pleasure which it has been. Thanks should also be expressed to the Revd Andrew Greany, Vicar, and the other clergy and people of Little St Mary’s, Cambridge, who provided the present writer with a lively example of Anglo-Catholicism today.

The author also acknowledges with gratitude the remarks made by the Revd Wietse van der Velde, Lecturer in Church History at the Old Catholic Seminary, and the decision of the Venerable Dr Koenraad Ouwens and the other members of the Old Catholic Seminary Staff to include these essays in their publication series.

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Introduction

High Church varieties

“Few would claim that the second half of the twentieth century was among the most glorious or noteworthy periods in the history of Anglican Catholicism, ’’

comments Kenneth Hylson-Smith at the end of his thorough overview of four centuries of Anglican High Church thought and practice. * The last part of his account shows, indeed, a decline of unity and strength among those Anglicans who can be called High Churchmen, or Anglo-Catholics, or as Hylson-Smith calls them, Anglican Catholics. An antithesis has appeared between the more conservatively minded Anglo-Catholics and the Anglicans who consider themselves to be in continuity with the same heritage, but who show themselves more open-minded to the theological, moral, and social changes to which twentieth-century Church and society are exposed. So today’s Anglican Catholicism forms a differentiated pattern. There can be no way of speaking about the High Church wing of the Church of England, or about Anglo-Catholicism in general.

Moreover, historical research reveals these “High Church Varieties” to be no novelty to the second half of the twentieth century. Modem differentiation within the ranks of High Anglicanism dates from the nineteenth century, which saw two important watersheds dividing High Churchmen from each other. The first major change was inaugurated in the eighteen thirties by the Oxford Tractarians, who saw John Keble, John Henry Newman, and Edward Bouverie Pusey as their leaders. They converted the traditional High Church outlook, which interpreted the English Reformation as the basis of a “Via Media” Anglicanism, into a much more “Catholic” oriented Anglican identity. The first of the following essays will be devoted to this discontinuity.

Another step, anticipating much of the modem quarrelling among Anglican Catholics, was taken by the group of High Churchmen who published the essay volume Lux Mundi in 1889. This book, under the editorship of bishop Charles Gore, took the lead in confronting Anglican Catholicism with the fundamentally “modem” questions of new scientific, historical, and literary views, primarily Darwinism and biblical criticism. The publication of Lux Mundi turned out to be the watershed between those Anglican Catholics who above all resisted the theological, moral, and social implications of modernity, and their fellow Anglican Catholics who were less defensive and made a

' Kenneth Hylson-Smith, High Churchmanship in the Church of England: From die Sixteenth Century to the late Twentieth Century, Edinburgh: Tamp;T Clark, 1993, p. 367.

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first attempt at integrating aspects of modernity into their theology and Churchmanship. This discontinuity will be treated in the third of the following essays.

These two watersheds are most important to trace the origins of modem Anglican Catholicism and its varieties. A third historical discontinuity has also to be pointed at: the change from the primarily academic, theological “Oxford Movement” to the much more practical and broadly influential “Ritualism”. The difference between the two, which will be elaborated in the second of the present essays, is another warning against a too uniform conception of Anglican High Churchmanship, in which “High Church”, “Oxford Movement’’, “Ritualism”, and “Anglo-Catholicism” are supposed to be synonyms. The aim of these essays is to make clear that they are not, quot;nbsp;and thereby to provide an historical background to the present phenomenon of Anglican Catholicism and its inner tensions.

An Old Catholic perspective

The present author cannot write but from his own perspective, which is that of a Dutch Old Catholic. The present state of the Old Catholic Churches makes a glance at our Anglican fellow Christians, and on Anglican Catholics in particular, very worthwhile. Many of the tensions they perceive are ours as well; part of their theological history is ours, too. Between the Old Catholic Churches of the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, the USA and Canada, and Poland, as well as within these national churches themselves, a diversity of theological, moral, and social viewpoints can be registered. This situation not infrequently leads to tensions between these churches, sometimes to the degree of challenging their bond of unity, the Union of Utrecht (1889). The study of continuity and change in Anglican High Churchmanship can provide the Old Catholic reader with analogies as to the questions of (non-)acceptance of, for instance, biblical criticism, changing sexual and political values, liturgical attitudes, and the gender of ordained ministers. The Anglican Catholic adherence to Scripture and tradition, to the visible Church, sacraments, and ministry, — in short, their catholicity, — and at the same time their independence from Rome and their relatively open attitude towards modernity, makes Anglican Catholicism more directly recognisable and appealing to Old Catholics than any other group of fellow Christians. The official sacramental bond between the Churches of the Anglican Communion and the Old Catholic Churches, established in 1931 by the Bonn Agreement, underlines and strengthens this fellowship.

On the nomenclature and its changed meanings, see Peter Benedict Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760-1857, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 25-43.

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The relevance of the following essays for Old Catholics will not be explicated separately. The continuity and discontinuity will speak for themselves, to Old Catholics and others. The fact that the various aspects of High Churchmanship, as most historical phenomena, did not follow each other in due course, but existed (and partly still exist) together in the same period of time, thus causing embarrassment between individuals and tensions between groups, is, though a predictable, nevertheless an important observation in view of the present.

The title of this publication tries to indicate the author’s perception of all these strands of High Churchmanship as different but real heirs of the same catholicity. These should, in his view, be seen not as diversities but as varieties within High Churchmanship, which in its turn is one of the ways in which Christ’s Church is present in this world.

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The Oxford Movement and traditional

High Churchmanship

The Oxford Movement can be described as a High Church revival, which occurred within the Church of England in the eighteen thirties. The Oxford Movement has changed the face of Anglicanism immensely. But to what extent was it a change, actually? The present essay will deal with this question. To what extent did the Oxford Movement cause a change in Anglican theology, and to what extent did it represent the traditional High Church branch which was and is a recognised part of the Anglican heritage?

Church and State

Introduction

There is something strange about the prominent role attributed to Keble’s Assize Sermon as the beginning of the Oxford Movement. In his sermon, preached before the Judges of Assize at Oxford on 14 July 1833, John Keble protested against the increase of liberalism in Society and Church, and against the negative role of State interference in Church affairs. Although these themes would soon be taken over by the Oxford Movement, Keble’s way of dealing with them was not yet an example of thought and practice of the Oxford Movement. While the Oxford Movement was to encounter the fundamental changes then taking place in the relation of the English nation to the English Church as a challenge to form a new ecclesiastical identity, Keble chiefly

’ Sheridan Gilley (Newman and His Age, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1990, pp. 111-112) is one of the few authors who challenges the traditional apprehension of Keble's sermon as a masterpiece which marked the beginning of the Oxford Movement. The main reason for the general appreciation of this sermon will be Newman’s remark that he ‘ever considered and kept the day, as the start of the religious movement of 1833’ (Apologia Pro Vita Sua: Being a History of His Religious Opinions, Edited, with an Introduction and Notes, by Martin J. Svaglic, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967, p. 43). Without too much psychologizing, however, it has to be noticed that Newman heard the sermon preached on the Sunday after his arrival on Tuesday from a demanding sailing journey from Rome, during which he had been seriously ill. Something of a feeling of ‘being home’ and being prepared for a new task has to be taken into account. The famous quotation from the Apologia clearly occurs in this context, which should be cited with it. The statement says more about Newman than about Keble’s sermon. An early relativist of the sermon is Burgon, who comments, ‘indeed the sermon in question is by no means extraordinary’; John William Burgon, Lives of Twelve Good Men, London: John Murray, 1888, p. 173.

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looked back to the High Church heritage of which he was an heir, and which now seemed to him to be falling into ruin. Rather than being a manifesto of the Oxford Movement, his sermon can be seen as the turning point in between traditional High Churchmanship and the new spirit of the Oxford Movement.

Church and State in traditional High Churchmanship

The High Church tradition, which can be traced back to the time of the Elizabethan Settlement (1559), paid great reverence to the relation between the Church of England and the monarch. This reverence even mounted up to a theory of divine kingship, which can be found, for instance, with bishop Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), with archbishop William Laud (1573-1645) in his attitude towards King Charles I, in the Restoration Church (1660-1688), and after the Glorious Revolution (1688) especially with the Non-jurors, who refused to break their oaths to the exiled King James II by accepting the new monarchs William and Mary, because of which they were separated from the Church of England.

Absolutist monarchy came to an end with the BUI of Rights (1689). Thence, history was to be made rather by Parliament than by individual kings. The theory of the divine right of kings, however, remained important in the eighteenth century Church, although it gradually changed from an “indefeasible hereditary right” into a “providenti-ary right”, which could more easily be applied to dynastic changes such as the defeat of the Stuarts and the beginning of the Hanoverian dynasty. ® When High Churchmen kept the theory of divine right, they mainly interpreted it in an anti-Erastian way, that is, upholding the monarch as a protector of the Established Church, but not as an autocratic ruler over it. So the Oxford Movement’s claim that their eighteenth century forebears were excessive Erastians who saw the English Church only as a subordinate part of the English State, has to be questioned. Such a “high establishmentism” was not representative of High Churchmen in general.

Nevertheless, the High Church tradition counted on the protection of the State as far as the upholding of the Church of England as the established and privileged church was concerned. Even when this attitude did not include the submission of the Church to State authorities (that would have been Erastianism), High Churchmen considered

Hylson-Smith, High Churchmanship, pp. 18, 34, 43, 73.

5 J.C.D. Clark, English Society 1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice During the Ancien Regime, Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 119-198 (esp. 173-189), 216-235.

Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, pp. 50-63.

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the English nation to be a Christian country, the members of which were united in a single Christian community, the Church of England. Although we nowadays are likely to see this as intolerance from within the Anglican Church, it should historically be viewed from the opposite side, that is, from the side of the English nation. The original Tudor and Stuart idea was of a united Christian Commonwealth under a single religious authority. “Civil” and “religious” authority were therefore interlinked and not separate parallel spheres of jurisdiction. Richard Hooker (1554-1600) gave a classical expression of this view in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. This Hookerian ideal was from Restoration times upheld by the Test and Corporation Acts, which, for instance, prevented non-Anglicans from taking State offices — if described from a negative point of view, the positive intention being not to “prevent” anything, but to “provide” the English nation with one unifying religion.

This positive ideal was not only upheld, but, paradoxically, at the same time destroyed by the Test and Corporation Acts, for it divided the English people into Anglicans and non-Anglicans, thus disavowing the ideal that the nation should be united by its religion. The Acts did not work out in the unifying way they were designed for, but to the contrary they strengthened opposition to the Established Church from without, and evoked an attitude of “establishmentism” within.

Changes in the early nineteenth century

The early nineteenth century saw the suppression of the traditional measures which safeguarded the Anglican establishment. In 1828 the Test and Corporation Acts were repealed, and the following year Roman Catholics were allowed to be Members of Parliament. From 1802 onwards, several restrictions were gradually removed from Dissenters and Roman Catholics. Moreover, in 1832 a major reform was carried out respecting the way in which the British Parliament was elected. Traditional electoral corporations or individuals were stripped of their prerogatives, in order to establish a more representative way of electing the national representatives. This reform also weakened traditional High Church and Tory influence upon the government. Moreover, these measures ended the situation in which Parliament could be regarded as, what could be called, a lay synod of the Church of England. ¹

Hylson-Smith, High Churchmanship, pp. 9-17, esp. pp. 15-16. Apart from this religious reason, the political aims of the Test and Corporation Acts are obvious as well.

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¹

Cf. G.l.T. Machin, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain 1832 to 1868, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977, pp. 15-27; E.A. Varley, The Last of the Prince Bishops: William Van Mildert and the High Church Movement of the Early Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 123-148; Owen Chadwick, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement: Tractarian Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 2-3. The official synods, the

Not surprisingly, traditional High Churchmen gravely protested against these changes. The reforms meant a questioning of the identity of the Church of England as the Established Church, and of the identity of England as an Anglican nation. Discontent came to a peak when the new Parliament passed an act which suppressed a considerable number of Irish bishoprics and which decreased the income of the remaining ones. Again, this measure nowadays may seem a moderate one, because before it was passed the Roman Catholic majority of Ireland had to pay for the maintenance of the Established (Anglican) Church which only served a small minority of the population. But in the eyes of contemporary Anglicans, especially High Churchmen with their high valuation of an Anglican England and Wales, established by law, this measure was the death-blow to their patience. A bishops’ appeal to the King had not prevented this measure to be executed, though the King had assured his “Royal favour and protection”, to quote a characteristic formulation used by the High Church bishop of Durham, William Van Mildert (1765-1836). The equally High Church bishop of Exeter, Henry Phillpotts (1778-1869), likewise wished the King to veto the measure, reminding the King of his coronation oath. ’

Here we meet the growing ambivalence in High Church thought about the relationship between Church and State. On the one hand High Churchmen tried to uphold something of their traditional trust in the King; on the other hand this reliance was now rendered out of date because it had become Parliament, and even a not principally Anglican Parliament, that governed the country. This is the reason why this essay starts with a chapter on “Church and State”: one of the clearest discontinuities between traditional High Churchmanship and the Oxford Movement consists in the turning upside down of its thinking on this matter, not only because of a deliberate change of mind, but definitely also because of an external change, the change which the State underwent in the years between 1828 and 1832. Hooker’s ideal of mutual dependency between the Church of England and the English nation, already weakened by the Test and Corporation Acts, had become virtually impossible by the suppression of the classical measures which kept Parliament as primarily an Anglican body.

Convocations of Canterbury and York, which included High Churchmen especially in its Houses of Clergy, were not active until the second half of the nineteenth century.

’ Varley, The Last of the Prince Bishops, p. 185.

Although the Tractarians revered the ‘Martyr King’ Charles II, this became more of a symbolic than of a political value; cf. Peter Nockles, Church and King: Tractarian Politics Reappraised, in: Paul Vaiss (ed.). From Oxford to the People: Reconsidering Newman amp;nbsp;the Orford Movement, Leominster: Gracewing, 1996, pp. 93-123 (esp. pp. 99-103).

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“It is safe to say that the [Oxford] Movement would not have taken the form which it took without the impetus of ecclesiastical and secular politics. ” quot;

One of the High Church protests against the Parliamentary changes, primarily evoked by the Irish Church Bill, was the Oxford Assize Sermon delivered by the Professor of Poetry, John Keble (1792-1866), son of a traditional High Church country parson and for most part of his life to be vicar of a rural parish himself. This quiet though very influential man is one of the links between traditional High Churchmanship, out of which he sprung, and the Oxford Movement, of which he became a founding father. His Assize Sermon, though, shows more what was past than what was to come, as will be clear from the next section.

Nevertheless, his words stirred up a group of Oxonians, Richard Hurrell Froude (1803-1836), William Palmer (1803-1885), and Arthur Philip Perceval (1799-1853) to meet at the rectory of a Cantabrigian, Hugh James Rose (1795-1838), who like Keble stemmed from a traditional High Church family and who had just started the British Magazine as a High Church periodical. Two other Oxford men, Keble and John Henry Newman (1801-1890) corresponded with the others during the days of the meeting (25-29 July 1833). Even this “Hadleigh Conference”, as it was retrospectively dubbed, cannot be regarded as the starting point of the Oxford Movement, because it merely showed the discord between the more traditional outlook of Keble, Rose, Palmer, and Perceval, who wanted to take action traditionally by founding associations and collecting petitions, and the more radical focus of Newman and Froude, who wanted to infuse the Church with a new spirit and did not care so much for the Church’s relationship with the Establishment.

“Living movements do not come of committees, nor are great ideas worked out through the post, even though it had been the penny postquot;,

Newman wrote afterwards. *“ So Newman struck out on his own. In September 1833 he published three short pamphlets, which happened to be the first three of ninety Tracts for the Times. The Oxford or Tractarian Movement had begun. In addition to Newman, Froude, and Keble, the Oxford Professor of Hebrew and Canon of Christ

quot; Chadwick, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement, p. 2. Cf. Paul Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church: Theological Resources in Historical Perspective, Edinburgh: Tamp;T Clark, 1989, pp. 157-163; Machin, Politics and the Churches, pp. 75-89.

Newman, Apologia, p. 46. In Burgon, Lives of Twelve Good Men, vol. I, p. 200, can be found a letter from Newman to Rose in which he tells that he stopped after the first few Tracts ‘at Palmer’s wish, who wanted an Association’, but that Rose's encouragement made Newman go on with them. So Rose approved of the first Tracts; see also Burgon, Lives of Twelve Good Men, vol. I, pp. 196, 198.

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Church, Edward Bouverie Pusey ( 1800-1882) joined the Tractarians in 1836 and became a notable leader amongst them.

Two examples: Kehle’s Assize Sermon and Fronde’s Tract 59

Hooker’s ideal of the unity of nation and religion, or of State and Church, in which the Church can be called “the State at prayer’’, is reflected in Keble’s sermon, preached before the Judges of Assize in the Oxford University Church of St. Mary the Virgin on 14 July 1833. As said above, the High Church interpretation of the union of Church and State was not an Erastian one, but saw Church and State as mutually responsible, rather to the extent of a nation dependent on its Church than a Church dependent on the government of the nation. This approach can be found in Keble’s sermon.

The sermon was based on the text of 1 Samuel 12, 23,

“A.V for me, God forbid that I should sin against the Lord in ceasing to pray for you: but I will teach you the good and the right way”.

These words of Samuel to the people of Israel were part of the quarrelling between God and Israel about the latter’s wish to have a king in order to be “like all the nations” (1 Samuel 8, 5). In his sermon Keble applied this to the secularisation of England in his own days. Like Israel, England wanted to get rid of its tradition as a nation under God. But did the English think that God had “forgotten to be angry with impiety and practical atheism?” What the English nation undertook at the time of this sermon, was — according to the preacher — little less than disavowing God, who had been their King thus far. This act of disobedience Keble called “apostasy”.

Keble’s sermon gives us a clear example of the way in which a High Churchman could interpret the Establishment of the Church: not as the Church’s dependence on the State, but as the State’s dependence on the Church. The English nation is,

“as a Christian nation, ... also a part of Christ's Church, and bound, in all her legislation and policy, by the fundamental rules of that Church ”.

” John Keble, ‘National Apostasy’, in: Eugene R. Fairweather (ed.). The Oxford Movement (A Library of Protestant Thought), New York: Oxford University Press, 1964, pp. 37-47 (quotation: p. 39).

Keble, ‘National Apostasy’, p. 42.

'5 Keble, ‘National Apostasy’, p. 40. In concrete, this position led Keble to a protest against religious tolerance. He disapproved of relationships between Anglicans and people of different religious persuasions, and especially of education by them or marriage to them (p. 41 ).

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Keble reminded his audience, the Judges of Assize,

“of the close amity which must ever subsist between equal justice and true religion; apostolical religion, more precisely”.

And we hear the traditional High Churchman saying that

“it is an amity made still more sacred, if possible, in the case of the Church and law of England, by historical recollections, associations and precedents”.

When these old rights are challenged, the Church has to react in two ways. The first is “intercession”: “praying as we ought for the very enemies of our precious and holy cause”. The second is “remonstrance”, which Keble seems to interpret in two ways: protesting against the wrong developments, but also quietly continuing to perform our “duties, public and private”, especially the religious ones. Only by these means one may hope that the State returns to an obedient attitude towards God and the Church.

Nearly two years later, on the “Feast of St. Mark” (25 April) 1835, Froude published his Tract 59. Compared to Keble’s sermon, this Tract was little less than a call for disestablishment. It opened, however, with a complaint about Dissenters trying to separate Church and State. In Froude’s eyes this was equal to robbery, because it implied confiscation of Church property. So on the one hand there was a group that tried to abolish “State Protection ”, which seemed to be a threat to the Church of England. On the other hand, however, not everyone who was in favour of State Protection meant the best for the Church of England. According to Froude, the actual consequence of State Protection was “State Interference”. So Froude came to a comparison of State Protection and State Interference; the former being in decrease, the latter being the disadvantage which accompanied the former.

Keble, ‘National Apostasy’, pp. 45-46.

Keble, ‘National Apostasy’, p. 45.

'* Keble, ‘National Apostasy’, 45-47 (quotation: p. 46).

Two slightly different lists of assumed authors of the Tracts, most of which were published anonymously, can be found in Burgon, Lives of Twelve Good Men, vol. I, pp. 491-492, and in Henry Parry Liddon, Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey (ed. J.O. Johnston and R.J. Wilson), London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1893-1894 (4 vols.), vol. Ill, pp. 473-480.

Tracts for the Times by Members of the University of Oxford, London: J.G. amp;nbsp;F. Rivington, 1834 and later (5 vols.), vol. II, Tract 59, p. 1.

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In a rather cynical way, Fronde described four components of State Protection. The first was the protection by law of the endowments which belonged to the Church. According to Froude, the sum involved in these endowments was nearly half of the amount of money which traditionally was destined to accrue to the Church. The second form of State Protection consisted of a tax to be paid to the Church, which “amounts to about as many thousands a year as the other taxes amount to millions”. This led Froude to the conclusion that

“in the eye of the State the importance of the Church is to the importance of civil government as a thousand to a million, or as one to a thousandquot;.

The third was the possibility of thirty bishops to be members of the House of Lords, which should have been all bishops and a considerable number of other clergy, as was Fronde’s interpretation of the Magna Charta. Lastly, Froude mentioned the law — since long fallen into disuse — according to which any excommunicated Anglican could be arrested and imprisoned by the civil magistrate, “a bad useless law, which cannot be done away with too soon. ” To modem readers, all this actually appears to be a fair amount of protection. To Froude, however, it was little more than a last remnant of what Church-State relations once had been, namely the complete upholding of the English Church by the English nation.

After having explained “how little they [Churchmen] gain on the one handquot;, Froude proceeded to describe “how much they sacrifice on the other His complaints about State Interference in ecclesiastical matters were most of all concerned with the patronage of benefices, and particularly bishoprics. Froude expounds that bishops are appointed by the Prime Minister, “who, since the repeal of the Test Act, may be an avowed Socinian, or even Atheistquot;. The real problem is not this appointment, but the absence of any real possibility for Church dignitaries or bodies to control or veto such an appointment. In the twelfth century, there existed a procedure in which a number of laymen, clergy, and the archbishop of the province took part, thus securing a proper ecclesiastical confirmation to the secular appointment. In Froude’s times, on the contrary, dean, chapter, and bishop had to accept the person presented; only grave crimes or very clear heresies could be a reason to resist him, and the accuracy of this claim had to be confirmed by a secular court. ’’

Tracts for the Times, vol. Il, Tract 59, pp. 2-3.

Tracts for the Times, vol. II, Tract 59, p. 2.

Tracts for the Times, vol. II, Tract 59, pp. 3-7.

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In Tract 59 Froude did not draw the conclusion of disestablishment. Actually, he concluded with the remark that by that time he did not want to pursue any “immediate practical object”. Nevertheless, this Tract is a clear sign that the Tractarians, or at least some of them, were developing an attitude towards the State which differed to a considerable amount from the traditional High Church attitude.

Tracts for the Times, vol. II, Tract 59, p. 8.

Even when Froude is considered the most extreme of the Tractarians, it has to be bom in mind that his views, on this subject as well as on other ones, bore great weight to people like Newman and Kehle. Cf. Piers Brendon, Hurrell Froude and the Oxford Movement, London: Paul Elek, 1974, pp. 141-149. For the Tractarian dilemma regarding (dis-)establishment, see Machin, Politics and the Churches, p. 86.

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High Church continuity

Historiographical introduction

In the previous chapter a discontinuity appeared between older High Churchmanship and the Oxford Movement. The two are not the same. There does exist, nevertheless, a continuity between them which is not so often recognised, because some of the Oxford Movement leaders and reminiscencers tried to fade it out. This continuity consists in the fact that the Oxford Movement carried on the spiritual tradition of High Churchmanship, which in the eighteenth century had not fallen asleep as much as the Oxford fathers wished their adherents to believe. Modem authors try to reassess the High Church tradition in the century before 1833, and claim it to be much more alive than epithets like “High and Dry”, “Erastian”, “two-bottle High Churchmanship”, or “Zs” tend to suggest.

It is interesting that recent research is inclined to turn the familiar views on continuity and discontinuity upside down. What used to be seen as a continuity between classical High Churchmanship and the Oxford Movement, such as the theology on sacraments and ministry, turns out to be a development of the Oxford Movement itself — as will be shown in the next chapter; and what used to be seen as a discontinuity, such as the “revival” of High Churchmanship by the Oxford fathers, turns out to be much more of a continuity — as is the subject of the present chapter.

How to explain this historiographic change of opinion? The reason is to be found with the Oxford fathers themselves. Both their efforts, on the one hand to place themselves theologically within the High Church tradition, on the other hand to disconnect themselves from their immediate forebears, are understandable if seen from a “tactical” point of view. They were discontented with their High Church foreruimers because they thought them not going far enough, so they tried to picture them as too moderate, too much fallen asleep spiritually. On the other hand, they had to defend their own theological emphases against the charge of theologizing in an un-Anglican way. Therefore they tried to trace their own theology back to the acknowledged High Church tradition. It is part of their greatness that the Oxford fathers were successful in not only creating this historical picture, but also in getting it widely received into Anglican historical self-understanding.

Peter Nockles is in the forefront of those who carry out this reassessment; see The Oxford Movement in Context, and ‘The Oxford Movement: Historical Background 1780-1833’, in: Geoffrey Rowell (ed. ), Tradition Renewed: The Oxford Movement Conference Papers, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1986, pp. 24-50. An early attempt to do more right to the older High Church tradition is to be found with Yngve Brilioth, The Anglican Revival: Studies in the Oxford Movement, London: Longmans Green amp;nbsp;Co, 1925.

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According to recent historiography, the eighteenth century Church of England can be done more justice when it is measured by its own standards. When compared to the standards of Church Reform in the nineteenth century, the eighteenth century must fall short indeed. But historical periods perhaps have not to be measured by the extent to which they are compatible to the ideals of later ages. The eighteenth century Church did have its inadequacies. Most notorious were the phenomenons of pluralism and non-residence. Although pluralism sometimes could be justified because of the poverty of clergy holding only one benefice, more often it was a consequence of an uneven system of patronage and an ancient way for clergymen to increase their income. But although the eighteenth century saw an increasing number of pluralists, it should not be forgotten that the phenomenon of pluralism was as old as the middle ages and had been practised on a large scale even by respected seventeenth century divines such as Andrewes. In liturgical and pastoral matters the eighteenth century Church did not fall short of the standards of its own time. The pastoral ideal centred around the task of preaching and catechising, which took place regularly. The same was true of the administration of Holy Communion — again, if seen from the perspective of the time.

Tensions between Tractarians and older High Churchmen

The Tractarians, however, measured the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by their own Tractarian standards. This led them to a depreciating attitude towards their High Church predecessors. Newman, for instance, in his very personal Apologia Pro Vita Sua: Being a History of His Religious Opinions of 1864, dissociated himself and the movement of which he once was a leader sharply from the generation before them. He denounced them as

“high Church dignitaries, Archdeacons, London Rectors, and the like, who belonged to what was commonly called the high-and-dry school ”,

Cf. Clark, English Society, pp. 1-7.

Peter Virgin, The Church in an Age of Negligence: Ecclesiastical Structure and Problems of Church Reform 1700-1840, Cambridge: James Clarke amp;nbsp;Co, 1989, pp. 191-214.

John Walsh amp;nbsp;Stephen Taylor, ‘Introduction; The Church and Anglicanism in the ‘Long’ Eighteenth Century’, in: John Walsh, Colin Haydon, Stephen Taylor (eds.). The Church of England c.1689 - c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism, Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 1-64 (esp. 2, 7-8).

Walsh amp;nbsp;Taylor, ‘Introduction’, pp. 12, 14, 23, 64.

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though he also admitted many of them to be “of the highest principle, and far from influenced by what we used to call Erastianism”. Though he admitted the latter, the former bore more weight to him, as we read in a following passage, where he is speaking about the seventeenth eentury High Church tradition, “That ancient religion had well nigh faded away out of the landquot;.

Another important author who settled the picture of a dull pre-Tractarian High Churchmanship was Richard William Church (1815-1890). In his book. The Oxford Movement: Twelve Years: 1833-1845, posthumously published in 1891, he dubbed the older High Churchmen to be “afraid of principles: the one thing they most shrank from was the suspicion of enthusiasm”. After a description which contains both compliment and disapproval. Church summarises negatively,

“These were the orthodox Churchmen, whom their rivals, and not their rivals only, denounced as dry, un-spiritual, formal, unevangelical, self-righteous; teachers of mere morality at their best, allies and servants of the world at their worst. ”

Another misunderstanding for which Church bears much of the responsibility is the usual dating of the Oxford Movement to the years between 1833 and 1845. In the latter year Newman seceded to the Roman Catholic Church. To R.W. Church, this must have been a “catastrophe ” — as is the name of the last chapter of his book. But there should be no confusion between a biography of Newman and a historiography of the Oxford Movement. Newman’s theological, ecclesiological, and spiritual stance increasingly slipped out of Tractarian ground as the years went on. Especially after his famous Tract 90 (1841), in which he explained some of the 39 Articles in a Roman Catholic (Tridentine) way — rather to secure himself than to convince others — and which evoked so much criticism that the Bishop of Oxford saw himself urged to stop the publication of the Tract series, Newman’s mind had ceased to be representative of the Oxford Movement. As he himself admitted in his Apologia,

” Newman, Apologia, p. 50; cf. pp. 48-50. Cf. Varley, The Last of the Prince Bishops, p. 2; Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, pp. 2-3.

R.W. Church, The Oxford Movement: Twelve Years: 1833-1845, London: Macmillan and Co., 1891, p. 3.

’’ Church, The Oxford Movement, p. 11. Cf. Chadwick, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement, pp. 144-152; Varley, The Last of the Prince Bishops, p. 1; Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, p. 6.

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“From the end of 1841, I was on my death-bed, as regards my membership with the Anglican Church

For the sake of clarity, we better should date the Oxford Movement between 1833 and 1841, being the period of the Tracts. This initial period bore an outspokenly academical, theological character. It was centred around Newman, Froude, Pusey, and Keble. Later stages of the development, such as Ritualism and Anglo-Catholicism, which were much more practical and had a broad influence, should be distinguished clearly from the more theoretical beginnings in Oxford.

Again, some criticism of eighteenth century High Churchmanship can be found in the classic biography of Pusey by his pupil Henry Parry Liddon (1829-1890). The emphases laid in this book, which like Church’s book was published posthumously (1893-1894), are very much a creation of Liddon, who became an important second-generation heir and defender of the Tractarians. Although Liddon did not make as many deprecating comments on the High Church tradition as Newman and Church had done, and even gives short descriptions of life and work of some of the Hackney fathers, he overall regarded the eighteenth century to be “the dreary interval” between seventeenth century High Churchmanship and the Oxford Movement.

The older High Churchmen themselves of course did not appreciate their tradition being labelled this way. The most well-known protest came from John William Bur-gon (1813-1888), who interspersed his life of Rose, which was published in 1888, with criticisms like, “Churchmanship (it deserves to be repeated) was evoked — not created — by these appealsquot;, i.e. by the Oxford Movement. Newman’s remark that “the religious movement of 1833” started with Keble’s Assize Sermon is corrected by Burgon as follows,

“For “religious”, read Tractarian in the foregoing sentence, and the statement is historically correct. But the religious movement... had made its beginning ... several years before. ”

Newman, Apologia, p. 137.

But see Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, pp. 33-43, on the complexity and ambiguity of all nomenclature related to this subject.

Liddon, Life of Pusey, vol. I, p. 256; cf. pp. 256-264; Chadwick, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement, pp. 38, 171; Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, p. 6.

’’ Burgon, Lives of Twelve Good Men, vol. I, pp. 178, 173. Cf. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, XI. 11.

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Burgon tried to interpret the Oxford Movement as an intrinsically Anglican phenomenon that set forth already existing High Churchmanship. In Burgon’s view, the later and more extreme tendencies did not belong to the original intention of the Oxford Movement.

Despite discontinuity between the older High Churchmen and the Tractarians, of which one example is shown in the first chapter and some more will be treated in the next, there was much continuity as well. Perhaps it is most near to the truth to say that the Oxford Movement was nothing less and nothing more than one stage in the history of Anglican High Churchmanship. The Oxford Movement was not the invention of High Churchmanship (even not the re-invention), because it continued High Church thought and practice already existing and still alive; neither was it — as important stages of any historical development rarely are — a mere repeating of traditional statements. It was a taking over and carrying forth of High Churchmanship.

Cf. Chadwick, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement, pp. 144-145.

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High Church discontinuity

Remains of traditional High Churchmanship during and after the Oxford Movement

In general, the Oxford Movement took up and carried on High Churchmanship so that it partly changed, as much as the later developments of Ritualism and Anglo-Catholicism changed the face of Anglican High Churchmanship once more. But to what extent did there remain something of the older kind of High Churchmanship during and after the Oxford Movement? As we have seen in the previous chapter, some older High Churchmen criticised the Tractarians both for claiming too much originality as well as for innovating too much. So there appears to have remained a more traditional form of High Churchmanship contemporary with the Oxford fathers and even contemporary with the later phase called Ritualism. These remains of older High Churchmanship are often overlooked, not only because of historical negligence, but also because they eventually became virtually absorbed by the developments of Ritualism and Anglo-Catholicism. ’’ Nevertheless, they did exist. Froude, Newman, and Pusey even gave up the epithet “High Church” to call themselves “Apostolicals” by 1836, which is another indication of a certain form of High Churchmanship existing apart from the Oxford fathers.

What was the general “ethos” of those High Churchmen who tried to ^'stare super an-tiquas viasquot;? ■*' Such a general characterisation of older High Churchmen who clung to their tradition during and after the Oxford Movement without sharing the new developments of Tractarianism, is perhaps best estimated by a saying addressed to Bur-gon, “you are quite a primitive Tractarian”. ■*' They do not seem to have had a par-

” I think this might be upheld (cf. Hylson-Smith, High Churchmanship, pp. 169-173), even when their importance and perhaps their pacifying role compared to Ritualistic or Anglo-Catholic extravagances is acknowledged (cf. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, pp. 22-23). Hylson-Smith’s book is an example of a general overview of High Church history in which the Oxford Movement is nothing less and nothing more than a stage in the continuing and changing history of High Churchmanship. As a consequence, he is inclined virtually to overlook the remnants of traditional High Churchmanship during and after the Oxford Movement.

Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, p. 35.

■*' Burgon, Lives of Twelve Good Men, vol. I, p. 281.

From E.M. Goulbum’s life of Burgon (1892), cited in Reginald H. Fuller, ‘The Classical High Church Reaction to the Tractarians’, in: Geoffrey Rowell (ed.). Tradition Renewed: The Oxford Movement Conference Papers, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1986, pp. 51-63 (quotation: p. 52).

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ticular set of characteristics which divided them from the Tractarians otherwise than that they denied its more advanced developments. They generally approved of the first Tractarian utterances; only after a few years they became aware of the changing spirit within the Oxford Movement which they were not prepared to accept. Particularly offensive to traditional High Churchmen was the Tractarians’ challenge to the Anglican consensus as a Church both Catholic and Reformed. By denying the legitimacy of the role which the Reformation played in the history and self-understanding of the Church of England, the Oxford Movement destroyed an Anglican way of life which for centuries had been able to keep the different styles of Churchmanship together.

An important representative of nineteenth century moderate High Churchmanship was William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898). His political career included being a Member of Parliament from 1833, leader of the Liberal Party from the 1860s, and Prime Minister for several times. Of moderately Evangelical upbringing, Gladstone had become a High Churchman in the eighteen thirties. When the Tracts appeared, he appreciated them at first, but he became increasingly suspicious of Tractarianism as years went on. Although Gladstone can be regarded as a genuine Tractarian, he strongly disapproved of the Romeward tendency, which he saw as an estrangement from “the original object of the movement, the revival of Church principles”. An interesting shift in Gladstone’s thought concerns his view on the relation between Church and State. In 1838 he wrote The State in its Relations with the Church, a book in which he favoured the Establishment of the Church of England as a means to Christianise the English nation. His early approval of Tractarianism can be seen in the same light: Gladstone considered the renewal of Church principles as a means to win back the English people for the English Church. Remarkably, the same Oxford Movement

Burgon, Lives of Twelve Good Men, vol. I, p. 207, dates this change in 1836. After enthusiastic approvals of the earlier Tracts (pp. 196-201), Rose became more and more critical towards what Burgon calls ‘to exaggerate sacred Truth’ (p. 224).

** This is the main thesis of Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church, and will be treated in the next section.

F.L. Cross (ed.). The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Third Edition edited by E.A. Livingstone, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, s.v. ‘Gladstone’.

H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone: 1809-1874, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, pp. 28-29, 54, 71, 90, 156, 247.

Perry Butler, Gladstone: Church, State, and Tractarianism: A Study of his Religious Ideas and Attitudes, 1809-1859 (Oxford Historical Monographs), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982, pp. 59, 102-103, 168-169, 173, 184-185.

Butler, Gladstone, p. 165; Matthew, Gladstone, pp. 63-65.

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helped to make Gladstone aware of the impossibility of this ideal; for him the final breaking point came with the government’s decision to make a grant to the Maynooth Seminary in 1844. The secular State was not prepared to uphold the Church of England, so that Gladstone saw himself compelled to change his opinion. A renewal of religious life could be expected rather from greater freedom for the Church than from a strict alliance with the State. Gladstone kept his high expectations of the Church of England as a national Church, but abandoned his defence of the “confessional State” towards a de facto view of government as obliged to be neutral in religious matters. Gladstone can be seen as a High Churchman who was proud of the Catholic and Reformed character of the Church of England, who welcomed the Trac-tarians’ emphasis on High Church principles, but who dissociated himself from what he perceived to be their exaggerations, such as the non-recognition of non-episcopal churches, the stress on sacramental confession, and its Romeward tendency in general.

Other traditional High Churchmen did not follow Gladstone in his relativisation of the principle of Establishment. Although the eighteen forties saw two important cases of negative State involvement in Church matters, not all High Churchmen were convinced that a mutually useful Church-State relationship had come to an end. Their main argument was that the Tractarians acted upon an idealised picture of the past: it was not true that the difficulties of the nineteenth century were greater threats to the Church of England than ever before, for the preceding centuries had had to cope with the same kind of problems. ’’ Another reason for traditional High Churchmen to pro-

Keble, in a review of Gladstone's book, made clear that Gladstone's trust in the Establishment was alien to the more sceptical Tractarian view as expressed, for instance, in Froude's Tract 59 (see above); cf. Brendon, Hurrell Froude, pp. 145-146; Matthew, Gladstone, p. 65. On Maynooth, see note 51 below.

” Butler, Gladstone, pp. 103-105, 130, 137-138; Matthew, Gladstone, pp. 40-41.

Butler, Gladstone, pp. 130, 210, 231.

Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church, pp. 184-186; Butler, Gladstone, pp. 162-163.

Noctdes, The Oxford Movement in Context, pp. 86-95. The examples were the ‘Maynooth affair' and the ‘Gorham judgment’. On the former: in 1844 the government increased its grant to a Roman Catholic seminary at Maynooth near Dublin, thus threatening the priviledged position of the Anglican Church. On the latter: in 1850 the highest court of appeal for ecclesiastical matters, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, denied bishop Phillpott’s right to refuse the institution of the Evangelical G.C. Gorham to an incumbency in his diocese because Gorham denied the doctrine of baptismal regeneration. This verdict contributed to lessen High Church confidence in the relationship of Church and State, for the court was a secular one, and High Churchmen interpreted the verdict as a strong example of State interference in inner-ecclesiastical and even doctrinal matters.

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test against disestablishment tendencies within the Oxford Movement was the Trac-tarian reverence of the Non-jurors. In this, older High Churchmen saw a danger of sectarianism and rnarginalization. Nevertheless, even to traditional High Churchmen it became apparent that the time of an uncritical acceptance and defence of State protection and intervention was over. Both Tractarians and traditional High Churchmen in their relation to the State seem to have acted upon a mere pragmatical rule, fighting the spiritual independence of the Church and claiming State protection for the Established Church alternately.

Catholic and/or Reformed?

In the next sections attention will be drawn to some examples of Tractarian theology in which continuity and change between traditional High Churchmanship and the Oxford Movement can be shown. In a first attempt at discovering these (dis-)continuities we will look at reactions from older High Churchmen to Tractarian teaching.

As already shown in the previous chapter, Rose was an important critic of later Tractarian developments. The reason why Rose protested against some teachings is summarised in his words,

“All that is in Antiquity is not good; and much that was good for Antiquity would not be good for us. ”

Rose wanted to stay within the limits of traditional Anglicanism with its Catholic and Reformed character, and felt no temptation to rely on new research, not even on research into the patristic period. On the contrary, the Tractarians felt obliged to go beyond the historical border of the Reformation, in order to “improve” the Reformation as far as the restoration of (what they thought to be) the primitive Church was concerned. Many of the divergences between traditional Anglican High Church thought and the theology of the Oxford Movement can be traced back to this difference of principle. For instance, the already mentioned refusal of Gladstone to make a sacramental confession and to accept the “unchurching” of non-episcopal churches, shows that he took the limits of the Reformation for granted and was not prepared to accept innovations, however “patristic” they might have been.

Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, p. 90.

55 Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, pp. 102-103.

55 Roseto Newman (1836), in: Burgon, Lives of Twelve Good Men, p. 210.

5^ Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, pp. 113-118; Fuller, ‘The Classical High Church Reaction’, pp. 51-52.

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The same moderate High Church stance was taken by Walter Farquhar Hook (1798-1875). He regretted that the Tractarians considered

“Protestantism ...as the antithesis, not as is the case, to Romanism, but to Catholicism quot;,

a saying which makes clear that the traditional High Churchman saw his Church as both Catholic and Protestant, and that the latter epithet was primarily intended to mean “non-Roman”.

Hook was vicar of Leeds at the time when Pusey paid for a second church to be built there. Initially, Hook welcomed the idea, because of the acute need for more churches and clergy in Leeds, and because of his friendship with Pusey as well. Very soon after the consecration of St Saviour’s (1854), however, the new clergy introduced novelties such as the use of parts of the Roman Catholic breviary in addition to the daily services in the Book of Common Prayer, and their doctrinal soundness was doubted when they seemed to propagate the invocation of the saints. Hook complained to Pusey, but Pusey defended the clergy of St Saviour’s. Liddon, Pusey’s biographer, interprets their discord as follows,

“Pusey desired to know exactly what they [the Fathers of the Church] meant and to follow it; Hook was willing to agree with the Fathers so far as they were in agreement with the Reformers of the sixteenth century”.

In 1847 part of St Saviour’s clergy seceded to Rome and the clergy who replaced them followed their example in 1851, which to Hook was nothing more than the consequence of their opinions.

The older High Churchmen’s complaint that the Oxford Movement went too far in their approval of the ancient Church and was too little prepared to be corrected by the English Reformers, found a focus in the Tractarian use of the Anglican tradition. What did the Oxford fathers actually mean when they spoke about their great forebears? Since the Restoration, Calvinism and later Evangelicalism tended to be regarded by High Churchmen as not genuinely Anglican. The Restoration had brought forth a different kind of Anglicanism than had existed before the Civil War and Cromwell’s Calvinistic Commonwealth.

Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church, p. 182.

5’ Liddon, Life of Pusey, vol. Ill, pp. 113-114.

Liddon, Life of Pusey, vol. Ill, p. 121,

Hylson-Smith, High Churchmanship, p. 210.

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“The ‘Anglican tradition' had come to be conceived as a tradition which did not include Calvinism. ”

This was especially true of the selection made by the Tractarians to defend their own position. They were most likely to refer to the so-called Caroline Divines. This group consisted not only of theologians under Charles 1 or II, but of all who taught High Church principles in the seventeenth century. In a broad sense, the Tractarian appeal to the Carolines included Hooker, Andrewes, Laud, and more specifically bishops or divines such as Nicholas Ferrar (1593-1637), John Cosin (1594-1672), Herbert Thorndike (1598-1672), and Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667). As we shall see, the Tractarians differed from these theologians to a considerable extent, as was noticed by the older High Churchmen, who “asserted that they themselves represented the genuine ‘Laudian party”’. The variance was noticed by the Oxford fathers themselves as well, because they thought, “our divines do not go far enough ’’ compared to patristic writers. Here, again, the question seems to be whether the Oxford Movement wished to stay within the limits of the classical Anglican “Catholic and Reformed” self-understanding, or preferred to base itself on what they saw as the catholicity of the primitive Church. The latter was true — hence their departure both from the Caroline Divines and from their more traditional High Church contemporaries.

Apostolical succession

A well-known feature of High Churchmanship is its “high” estimate of the Church, the ministry, and the sacraments. As for the Church, we already noticed a change from the traditional High Church emphasis on the Establishment to the Tractarian emphasis on the independence of the Church. According to the Tractarians, the Church has her own raison d’etre-, her “apostolical descent”. The emphasis laid by the Oxford Movement on the doctrine of apostolical succession can be interpreted from a political and

Chadwick, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement, p. 10.

Cross, The Osford Dictionary, s.v. ‘Caroline Divines’; Hylson-Smith, High Churchmanship, pp. 54-65.

Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, pp. 127-128; cf. pp. 127-136.

Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, pp. 109-113, 122-127. Cf. the sixth paragraph of Pusey's 1840 definition of ‘What is Puseyism?’: ‘reference to the Ancient Church, instead of the Reformers, as the ultimate expounder of the meaning of our Church’ (Liddon, Life of Pusey, vol. II, p. 140); cf. Chadwick, The Spirit of the O.ford Movement, p. 42.

Tracts for the Times, vol. I, Tract 1, p. 2.

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tactical point of view, namely as a way of coping with the new phenomenon of the secular State. It happened to be no temporary tactic, though. The apprehension of the apostolical succession as constitutive for the Church has influenced Anglican selfunderstanding to an impressive extent.

The Oxford Movement taught this doctrine in a massive, mechanical way. The bishops are the apostles’ successors, because there exists an unbroken chain between Jesus, the twelve apostles, and the bishops of the Catholic Church up to the contemporary Anglican bishops. ® In Tractarian thought, only churches which retained the apostolical succession could be regarded as parts of the Catholic Church. Not episcopal government in itself was sufficient, but the intention to maintain an historical succession back to the apostles. ’° Keble defended this point by referring to the theory of probability: whoever wants to have the highest amount of certainty about the efficacy of ministry and sacraments takes quot;the Safest Course ” when he trusts in the apostolical succession. And the apostolical succession was not the only doctrine to which the Tractarians applied their rule of thumb that one could better believe too much than too little.’* In the

This context, which will not further be discussed here, is clear from the first chapter of this essay.

On the importance of this doctrine for the birth of the worldwide Anglican Communion, as well as for a critical reappraisal of the doctrine, see S.W. Sykes amp;nbsp;S.W. Gilley, “No Bishop, No Church!’ The Tractarian Impact on Anglicanism’, in: Geoffrey Rowell fed.). Tradition Renewed: The Oxford Movement Conference Papers, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1986, pp. 120-139. Avis’s book, Anglicanism and the Christian Church, is devoted to the discovery of several ‘paradigms’ within Anglican history, of which the ‘apostolic paradigm’ is one. In Avis's view, the apostolic paradigm was absolutized too much by the Tractarians, thus challenging the fundamental consensus within Anglicanism (pp. 167-172 and passim}; cf. his decisive remarks, ‘The erastian paradigm is dead’ and, ‘The apostolic paradigm is divisive and, moreover, takes an aspect of catholicity for the whole’ (p. 303).

Tracts for the Times, vol. 1, Tract 1, p. 3; vol. I, Tract 7, passim. According to Brilioth, The Anglican Revival, this ‘somewhat violent simplification ... was made possible by the absence of all disposition to a critical view of history’ (p. 183). When the historical untenability of the automatical ‘pipe line’ theory became recognized a bit more, the doctrine remained, in Brilioth’s famous words, ‘the shibboleth of Neo-Anglicanism [Tractananism], which sometimes the lips cannot cease to repeat, even after the brain has become aware of the limits of its importance’ (p. 184).

Tracts for the Times, vol. I, Tract 7, p. 1.

’* Tracts for the Times, vol. I, Tract 4, p. 1; cf. p. 5. Cf. Brilioth, TIte Anglican Revival. The methodical use of probability, which Newman would develop further in his life, derived from typically English philosophy, especially from Joseph Butler (1692-1752). The argument runs, that absolute certainty is never acquainted in religious matters — as in so many quarters of human life —, and that we have to rely on what appears to as us the most ‘probable’. Cf. Owen Chadwick,

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same Tract, however, Keble warned against the other extreme. According to him, Christians within non-episcopal Churches were not eternally lost.

“ ‘Necessary to Salvation, ’ and ‘Necessary to Church Communion, ’ are not to be used as convertible terms ”.

A concrete political controversy arose as a consequence of this strict understanding of the apostolical succession. In 1841 the King of Prussia launched the plan for a cooperative Lutheran-Anglican bishopric in Jerusalem, in order to establish Protestant presence in the Holy Land.

“The Bishop was to get his orders from the English Church, but subscribe to the Augsburg confession and observe the order of the German Evangelical Church. ... A Bishop was to be appointed alternately by the English and Prussian Governments, but in any case was to have Anglican ordination. ”

Although there seem to have been hopes thus to catholicize the German Church, Tractarians in general vehemently opposed this plan. The strongest protest came from Newman. He saw non-episcopal Christians in general, and German Lutherans in particular, as heretics. That “Protestants” could “put themselves under an Anglican Bishop, without any renunciation of their errors”, to Newman was the “blow, which finally shattered my faith in the Anglican Churchquot;. The possibility of co-operation between a continental Protestant Church and the Anglican Church was a denial of the Tractarians’ claim that the Church of England was not Protestant, but a branch of the Catholic Church.

From Bossuet to Newman: The Idea of Doctrinal Development, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957, pp. 74-95 andpaüiw.

Tracts for the Times, vol. I, Tract 4, p. 6. For a Caroline Divine such as Taylor, to the contrary, the (wide) ‘terms of cormnunion’ were the same as the ‘terms of salvation’, cf. Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church, p. 125.

Brilioth, The Anglican Revival, pp. 161-162.

Newman, Apologia, p. 133.

The other branches were the Eastern Orthodox Churches and the Roman Catholic Church. Cf. Brilioth, The Anglican Revival, pp. 194, 200; Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, pp. 161-162 (the other William Palmer, of Magdalen College, must have experienced a threat to his branch theory when he was asked to recall 44 heretical statements in the 39 Articles before being admitted to Communion in the Russian Orthodox Church in St Petersburg).

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Besides other possible criticisms, such as the historical difficulties of the “pipe line” theory, a remarkable paradox can be observed between Tractarian thought and practice in regard to the doctrine of apostolical succession. Most of the bishops did not accept this theory in its strict sense. A famous quotation from Newman runs,

“I was amused to hear of one of the Bishops, who, on reading an early Tract on the Apostolical Succession, could not make up his mind whether he held the doctrine or not. ”

The strange ambiguity appeared of Tractarians protesting against their bishops because these bishops did not esteem their own office as highly as the Tractarians did.

The Tractarian understanding of the apostolical succession is an example of what Burgon would have called the “exaggeration of sacred truth”. Although the Anglican High Church tradition always had laid great emphasis on the outward form of Church government, especially episcopacy, few High Churchmen had made it an article of faith. Hooker, for instance, upheld the Church’s dependence on episcopacy as the complement to the Church’s dependence on the Crown. What Hooker did not claim, was the apostolical succession being the articulus stands cadentisque ecclesiae, as the Oxford Movement saw it. For Hooker, episcopacy was part of the “well being” {bene esse) of the Church, not of her “being” as such {esse). This implies a via media between abolition of, or absolute indifference to, episcopacy on the one hand and the Tractarian view on the other. Hooker was proud of the preservation of episcopacy and thought it more than “indifferent”, rather “accessory” to Word and Sacraments, but did not “unchurch” the Reformed churches on the continent, which had lost the succession due to practical circumstances. The difference between Hooker and the Oxford Movement to a large extent originates from the differing political situation. For the Tractarians, the Church no longer was the State at prayer. Not surprisingly, they wholly clung to the other side of Hooker’s constitution, episcopacy, of course without emphasizing the difference.

The Tractarian doctrine of apostolical succession was prefigured by the Non-jurors at the end of the seventeenth century. Unlike the conforming High Churchmen, the Nonjurors developed a focus on apostolical succession which made it a distinguished mark of any true Church. Especially the continental Calvinist and Lutheran Churches were

Newman, Apologia, p. 51.

’’ Cf. W.S.F. Pickering, Anglo-Catholicism: A Study in Religious Ambiguity, London/New York: Routledge, 1989, pp. 148-156.

Sykes amp;nbsp;Gilley, ‘No Bishop, No Church!’, pp. 122-125; Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church, pp. 33-35, 57-60.

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declared not to possess ministry nor sacraments. ™ This cannot be said of Caroline Divines such as Taylor, Laud, and Thorndike. However vehemently they defended episcopacy as necessary to the bene esse of the Church, their allegiance to the Reformation was too strong for them not to recognize the esse of continental Protestant Churches. The same is true for the High Churchmen who preceded the Oxford Movement. Moreover, one does not get the impression that these divines dwelt specifically on the doctrine of apostolical succession. To them, episcopacy was mainly the ancient and legitimate way of Church government, as much sustained by the Establishment as by its apostolic origin. Likewise, references to the apostolical succession such as can be found in the Ordinal do not radiate the same power as the Oxford Movement gave to the doctrine. ** The older High Churchmen upheld episcopacy merely “for order’s sake’’, where the Tractarians gave it a “high sacramental understandingquot;.

Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church, pp. 89-92.

Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church, pp. 122, 124, 140-141, 147; Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, pp. 156-157. Moreover, High Churchmen were inclined to distinguish between the continental Protestant Churches, which necessarily lost episcopacy when they restored sound doctrine, from English Dissenters, who deliberately forsook the bishops of the Reformed-and-Catholic Church.

’* Ordinal, appended to the Book of Common Prayer. In the bishops’ consecration rite no explicit reference to the doctrine is to be found. Even for Christ’s institution of the apostles a language is used which more reminds of an ‘orderly’ act than of, e.g., a transmission of grace so that they may represent him (see the archbishop’s address ‘Brethren, it is written...’). All prayers emphasise the task of preaching and governing rather than representing. The alternative gospel reading (St John 20, 19-23) comes the nearest with Christ's words, ‘as my Father hath sent me, even so sent I you’. The priests’ ordination rite contains an episcopal address in which things are stated more clearly, for the priesthood is called ‘a Dignity, and ... weighty an Office’. Nevertheless, there is no need to interpret the address otherwise than as an exhortation to leadership and service in the community of Christ. The rite for the ‘making of deacons’ adds nothing to these observations. The Ordinal and its Preface certainly advocate the divine institution of the threefold ministry and the sending of ministers by Christ. To that extent the Anglican tradition continues the apostolical succession and can be regarded in that sense. This is emphasized by the laying-on of hands, which in the case of a bishop or priest is accompanied by the words, ‘Receive the holy Ghost’. The formulations, however, do not stress the representation of Christ by the ordained ministers in a way usually advocated by champions of the apostolical succession. Nevertheless, the Tractarian interpretation of the Ordinal seemed to be right or at least possible, even to those who rejected Tractarian theology. Therefore, the pressure to revise the Ordinal increased considerably after 1833. Cf. Paul F. Bradshaw, The Anglican Ordinal: Its History and Development from the Reformation to the Present Day (Alcuin Club Collections 53), London: SPCK, 1971, pp. 112-117.

Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, p. 151.

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Baptism

The same line of thought is to be found in the Tractarian view of the sacraments. Here, too, the Oxford Movement deviated from traditional High Churchmanship in order to advocate a “high sacramental understanding” of baptism and the eucharist. Again, this nuance — which happened to be not so much of a discontinuity regarding baptism as it did regarding the eucharist — can be described as a pushing of already existing High Church thought in a more “Catholic” and less “Reformed” direction. The reasons are obvious. Given the crisis of authority in which the Church of England found itself at the time of the Oxford Movement because of the decrease of her established prerogatives, the Tractarians did everything they could to grant the Church an authority of her own. The strict doctrine of the apostolical commission and succession was the basis of this independent ecclesiastical identity; an objective and realistic interpretation of the sacraments was the logical consequence of this strategy.

The Tractarian interpretation of the sacraments owes much to both a patristic and a romantic mysticism. What we see is not the only truth, because it represents a higher truth. This is obviously true of the sacraments, but also of a whole “mystical” world surrounding them. Nature has to be considered as reflecting its Creator, Scripture has to be interpreted according to the patristic tradition of allegorical exegesis, the Church has to be seen as the mystical Body of Christ.

Another part of this romantic focus on patristic mysticism is the anti-rationalism of the Tractarians. They were more concerned about “moral” truths than about intellectual and argumentative reasoning. Here we meet an obvious protest against the immediately preceding age with its rationalistic character, which was also reflected by warnings from older High Churchmen, such as Rose, against quot;making Religion mysteriousquot;. 8*

Whether for the political or for the theological reasons just mentioned, the Oxford Movement argued for an objective understanding of the sacraments. In the case of baptism, this implied the doctrine of baptismal regeneration, that is, the conviction

’’ Cf. Brilioth, The Anglican Revival, pp. 56-76, 295-304; David Newsome, Two Classes of Men: Platonism and English Romantic Thought (The Birkbeck Lectures in the University of Cambridge 1972), London: John Murray, 1974, pp. 69-71; Alf H’rdelin, ‘The Sacraments in the Tractarian Spiritual Universe’, in: Geoffrey Rowell (ed.), Tradition Renewed: The Oxford Movement Conference Papers, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1986, pp. 78-95. A combination of patristic mysticism and Romanticism is also to be found in the poetry of Keble, as is described by Geoffrey Rowell, The Vision Glorious: Themes and Personalities of the Catholic Revival in Anglicanism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 21-42.

Rose to Newman (1838 ), in: Burgon, Lifes of Twelve Good Men, vol. I, P- 262.

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that the conversion of an individual from her pagan past to her new Christian life not only was a matter of individual experience of God’s grace, but was accompanied, or even accomplished (that amounts to the same thing, since the two were supposed to take place at the same moment), by the sacramental act of baptism. The doctrine of baptismal regeneration, of course, divided High Churchmen from Evangelicals, who counted the persuasion of personal faith “directly through Jesus Christ the Mediatorquot; among their characteristics, thus denying the necessity of

“a detour through the visible Church with her apostolic ministry' and efficacious sacraments

Contrary to Evangelicals, traditional High Churchmen were used to the doctrine of baptismal regeneration. Their most important argument was the baptismal rite in the Book of Common Prayer, which clearly implies the doctrine. That this was no idiosyncratic exegesis by High Churchmen only, is proved by the wish of some Evangelicals to change the Prayer Book on this issue. As a reaction to the Evangelicals, some older High Churchmen seem to have clung to a very objective interpretation of the doctrine, whereas the Tractarians tried to combine the conviction of baptismal regeneration with an emphasis on the quest for post-baptismal purity of life. Here we meet another feature of the Oxford Movement: its call for constant holiness and awe in a Christian’s life.

Peter Toon, Evangelical Theology 1833-1856: A Response to Tractarianism (Marshall’s Theological Library), London: Marshall, Morgan, amp;nbsp;Scott, 1979, pp. 209-210.

^^Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, p. 235. The BCP rite includes phrases like, ‘the mystical washing away of sin’ (first prayer and prayer before rhe actual baptism) and ‘spiritual regeneration’ (second prayer) immediately connected to the act of baptism. The strongest expression is to be found after the act of baptism: ‘Seeing now, dearly beloved brethren, that this Child is (or, these persons are) regenerate’. There also occur phrases that can be explained both in a strict sacramental way and in a broader way, namely where regeneration is mentioned without a direct reference to the baptismal act (although advocates of the doctrine would say that their mere occurrance in the baptismal service is enough evidence).

Tracts for tire Times, vol. II, Tract 67, p. 13. This is a point of agreement between the Oxford Movement and Evangelicalism. Cf. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, pp. 231-232; Brilioth, The Anglican Revival, p. 308. But see also the emphasis laid by Van Mildert — an older High Churchman — on the necessity of post-baptismal commitment as a complement to baptismal regeneration; Varley, The Last of the Prince Bishops, p. 38.

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Justification

When baptism is the bestowal of graee upon the baptised who henceforth is a member of the Body of Christ, but at the same time the exhortation is made that the baptised has to confirm baptism by a holy life, what then is the relationship between the two? This is to ask for the relationship between justification and sanctification, a theological topic which has divided Christian confessions since the Early Church and especially since the Reformation. The Anglican High Church tradition and the Oxford Movement had their specific way of thinking about this subject.

In order to explain the High Church conception, the traditional difference between the Roman Catholic and the Reformed views has to be mentioned. This difference is somewhat more sophisticated than the popular conviction that Rome teaches the doctrine of good works whereas the Reformation teaches grace. Constitutive for both the Roman Catholic and the Reformed views are the three ideas that, first, a human being itself is not able to please God (to be righteous before God), and that, second, the only one who pleased God (was righteous before God) was Jesus Christ, and that, third, the righteousness of Christ can be applied to human beings by a gracious act of God’s love (justification). In Roman Catholic theology justification is understood as a process, which starts when God “infuses” a portion of grace into the human being, by which act the human being inherits Christ’s righteousness as its own possession (“inherent” righteousness). From this moment, the human being can work out its own justification by acting righteously. For this, the human being only needs the assistance of portions of grace, at due time infused by, for example, the sacraments (gratia infusa'). According to the Reformed view, there is only one decisive moment in which God bestows — not a portion of, but the abundance of — his grace on the human being, namely at the moment at which God decides to consider the sinful human being righteous, not by planting Christ’s righteousness into the human being (internally), but by counting the human being righteous (externally), only on account of Christ’s righteousness (gratia imputata). In this Reformed view justification is not a process consisting of an initial moment of grace and subsequent good works, but the moment of grace itself. The goods works of a Christian (sanctification) are “only” the mark of her justification, not a part of the process of justification.

English post-Reformation theologians, including Hooker, but most of the Caroline Divines as well, found each other in their Reformed doctrine of justification, even when they went separate ways respecting most other theological questions. ” Only shortly

Cf. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, pp. 256, 262; Alister E. McGrath, lustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986 (2 vols.), vol. II, p. 104.

” Gmther Gassmann, ‘Die Lehrentwicklung im Anglikanismus. Von Heinrich VIII. bis zu William Temple’, in: Bernhard Lohse et.al.. Die Lehrentwicklung im Rahmen der Konfessionalint

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after the Puritan interval of Civil War and Commonwealth, High Church theologians reacted against what they saw as an over-emphasis on faith at the expense of the importance of good works. During approximately three decades between 1660 and 1688 these later Carolines, especially Taylor, developed a conception of justification which starts with the Reformed concept of imputation, but which continues with the Roman Catholic concept of infusion. That is, they did not consider the first act of God as the input of a righteous qualitas iiihaerens in the human being (which would be the Roman Catholic view), but as the external imputation of Christ’s righteousness unto the human being; however, after that they taught a continuation of the process of justification by means of good works which were provided by gratia infiisa. Without the latter, the former had no value and could even be lost.

In the nineteenth century this historical pattern seemed to repeat itself. In the eighteenth century, the Evangelical awakening had emphasised the Reformed concept of justification by faith and grace alone, without satisfactory good works. As in postReformation times, this doctrine united most Anglican theologians in their anti-Roman identity. When in the nineteenth century opponents to the alleged anti-nomianism of this “solifidianism” occurred, of whom the Tractarians and particularly Newman were the most dominant, they met with strong resistance, even from High Church quarters. Newman followed the small number of post-Restoration divines who had taught a middle way between imputation and infusion. His way of dealing with the relationship between grace and works consists in his principle of God’s indwelling in the believer. What could have been called the initial moment of impution is to Newman the moment when God enters the soul of a human being. Newman connected the process which could have been called a life of sanctification to the initial moment, by claiming that the indwelling God works out in the believer a life of good works. In this way Newman meant to have found a via media between justification by faith or by works — the unarticulated popular difference between Roman Catholics and Protestants which Newman, indeed, took as a starting point.

(Handbuch der Dogmen- und Theologiegeschichte 2), G'ttingen: Vandenhoeck amp;nbsp;Ruprecht, 1980, pp. 353-409 (esp. pp. 375-383); Peter Toon, Justification and Sanctification (Foundations for Faith), London: Marshall Morgan amp;nbsp;Scott, 1983, pp. 89-97.

McGrath, lustitia Dei, pp. 105-111; Toon, Justification and Sanctification, pp. 97-99.

” Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, pp. 258-261.

For this reason McGrath, lustitia Dei, pp. 121-134, condemns Newman's theory because it is built upon an ‘irredeemably inaccurate’ basis: ‘a fallacious interpretation of both the extremes to which he was opposed’ (p. 122). Cf. Toon, Justification and Sanctification, pp. 113-119.

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Older High Churchmen protested against what they saw as a betrayal of the Reformation principle of the Church of England. Hook, for instance, complained about the later Tractarian tendencies — and as we have seen, he is not incorrect in his assessment:

“Our Romanizing young men repudiate the doctrine of justification by Faith because they think it is not reconcilable with sacramental religion. But who was a greater supporter of sacramental religion than Hooker, and where can we find a stronger advocate for the Protestant view of justification by Faith?” ”

Eucharist

Tractarian eucharistie theology revealed more of a discontinuity to traditional High Churchmanship than was the case with their baptismal theology. Varieties of eucharistie opinions were possible since the ambiguous formulations in the first Book of Common Prayer (1549). To keep the largest possible number of bishops, clergy, and laity within the Church of England, the formularies owed much to the pre-Reformation liturgies, although the changes clearly placed the Prayer Book on Reformed ground, particularly since the eucharistie liturgy could be interpreted in a “receptionist” way. “Receptionism” assumes that the believer is fed with Christ’s body and blood spiritually at the moment of receiving communion, in contrast to the assumption that Christ’s body and blood are present in the elements of bread and wine from the moment of consecration. The second Book of Common Prayer (1552) emphasised the Reformed interpretation by abolishing most of the traditional accompaniments like vestments and the sign of the cross. The “Black Rubric” ensured that no reverence was paid to the elements of bread and wine, but only to Christ in heaven.

As we have seen before, as a reaction to Puritan dominance in part of the seventeenth century a new type of Anglican divinity arose, which excluded Calvinism from what it saw as genuine Anglicanism and which tried to steer a middle way between what Newman two centuries later called “Romanism and Popular Protestantismquot;. These Caroline Divines are largely responsible for the fact that the Prayer Book became a much more emphasised standard of Anglicanism than the Articles, which they pushed into the background. Moreover, by slight alterations the fifth (and present) Book of

” Cited in Fuller, ‘The Classical High Church Reaction’, p. 53; cf. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, pp. 265-266.

Gassmann, ‘Die Lehrentwicklung im Anglikanismus’, pp. 361-366. This Calvinistic approach of eucharistie theology can be found in the 39 Articles as well (pp. 370-371 ).

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Common Prayer (1662) can more easily be interpreted in a High Church manner than the second one.

That this opportunity was embraced can be shown from Caroline eucharistie teaching, especially regarding the sacrificial character of the eucharist. Authors like Andrewes, Cosin, and Thorndike did not hesitate to describe the celebration of the eucharist as a propitiatory sacrifice, because it makes the one sacrifice of Calvary a living and present reality. Unlike Cranmer, who had been anxious to call the eucharistie sacrifice “gratulatory” not “propitiatory”, the Carolines stressed the reality of the eucharistie representation of Calvary, even to the extent of its atoning, meritorious character. ’’ Interestingly, they located the actual moment of the sacrificial act at different liturgical moments. Some considered the words of institution as such, whereas others gave sacrificial character to phrases of oblation occurring in the eucharistie prayer, sometimes even after communion. The latter is an indication of their interpretation of the eucharistie service as a single act: the prayers, the words of institution, and the communion were considered to be elements which made up one single sacrificial act.

The Oxford Movement took up this same doctrine of the eucharistie sacrifice. They were right in claiming that they owed it to the High Church tradition, which is confirmed by the fact that their more traditional High Church contemporaries, such as Van Mildert, Phillpotts, and Hook agreed with them on this subject. ’’

’5 E.g., by the substitution of ‘priest’ for ‘minister’, and ‘church’ for ‘congregation’; Gassmann, ‘Die Lehrentwicklung im Anglikanismus’, pp. 384-385. The Tractarians went even further in their disapproval of the Articles and their arguing solely upon the Prayer Book, cf. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, pp. 246-247.

G.W.O. Addleshaw, The High Church Tradition: A Study in the Liturgical Thought of the Seventeenth Century, London: Faber and Faber, 1941, pp. 104, 121-122. Nevertheless, ‘making real’ is not the same as ‘répété’, which was understood as the Roman Catholic doctrine (p. 178). Another difference between Rome and the Carolines, according to the same Addleshaw, was the Caroline’s emphasis on the corporate, communal celebration, whereas Rome was supposed to understand the eucharist as merely an act of the priest (p. 178).

’’ Addleshaw, The High Church Tradition, pp. 178-183.

Addleshaw, The High Church Tradition, pp. 106-107.

” Van Mildert: cf. Varley The Last of the Prince Bishops, p. 50. Phillpotts: cf. Addleshaw, The High Church Tradition, p. 54. Hook: cf. Liddon, Life of Pusey, vol. II, pp. 349-350. Protest against the idea that the doctrine of the eucharistie sacrifice was forgotten in the century preceding the Oxford Movement: cf. Nockles, The Oxford Movement m Context, pp. 235-236.

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More of a discontinuity arose concerning the doctrine of the real presence of Christ at the eucharist. Although the High Church tradition had always upheld a “high” view of Christ’s presence at the eucharistie celebration, they did not locate this presence in the elements of bread and wine. How “real” their conception of the eucharistie presence was, can for instance be concluded from Andrewes’s comparison between the incarnation and the eucharist: Christ descends from heaven as really into the sacrament as he did into the manger. This could go along with a complete absence of any meaning given to the elements of bread and wine remaining at the altar after the act of communion, as is reported of Thorndike. ’®’

This traditional High Church notion of the real presence can be described by the two theories, “Virtualism” and “Receptionism”. The former saw the elements as unchanged bread and wine, but as filled with the redeeming power (virtue) of Christ’s body and blood. The latter became more and more accepted, by Evangelicals as well as by High Churchmen. It saw the real presence of Christ as a spiritual presence at the moment of communicating bread and wine. Receptionism lacked the “objectivity” of Virtualism, which granted to the elements a certain value apart from the consciousness of the communicant. In a receptionist view, partaking in Christ’s body and blood depended on the state of the communicant.

The Oxford Movement, which initially only emphasised the reality of Christ’s sacramental presence anyway, as time went on introduced the notion of Christ’s presence in the elements. Christ is present not only when the elements are being consumed (Receptionism), nor is it only his powerful grace which is, as it were, contained in the elements (Virtualism), but his body and blood are really present where the elements are present.

In Pusey’s words,

“I believe that after Consecration the Holy Elements are in their natural substances bread and wine, and yet are also the Body and Blood of Christ. ... I do not attempt to explain the ‘how’ which seems to me to have been the error of the R.C.s and the Swiss Reformers, the one holding that because it was

Brilioth, The Anglican Revival, pp. 314-315.

'®’ Addleshaw, The High Church Tradition, p. 107.

Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, pp. 236-238.

Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, pp. 238-239.

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the Body of Christ, it was not bread; the other that because it was bread, therefore it was not His Body. ”

These thoughts were not in concordance with Anglican teaching before the Oxford Movement, as was acknowledged by the Tractarians themselves, as well as by their more traditional High Church contemporaries. The latter, however, generally defended the Tractarians against the assaults of “lower” Churchmen. For this attitude perhaps the most logical and consequent reason was,

“If High Churchmen could accept objective sacramental efficacy in the case of baptism, why not in the case of the eucharist?”

In any case, the Evangelical attacks on the reality of the sacraments helped to close the ranks of Tractarians and older High Churchmen on this subject, in spite of their differ-

Assessment of continuity and discontinuity

The examples of Tractarian teaching given in the preceding sections substantiate the criticism of older High Churchmen that Tractarians valued the Early Church more than the Reformation. The Tractarians did not feel obliged to remain within the boundaries of the Reformers; they wanted to work out the Catholic identity of the Church of England. This emphasis on Anglican Catholicity did not separate the Tractarians from their High Church forebears, but the fact that they interpreted Catholicity as incompatible with Protestantism did. Another discontinuity, the one concerning the relationship between Church and State as referred to in the first chapter, was mainly due to changed political and societal circumstances.

By these two alterations, the political independence of the Church and the emphasis on Catholic doctrine at the expense of the “Catholic and Reformed” character of the Church of England, the Tractarians changed the meaning of Anglican High Churchmanship. By doing so, the Oxford Movement brought about much controversy about the nature of the Church of England in relation to other Churches. To some extent this can be deplored, because it weakened the corporate self-understanding of Anglicans by intensifying party spirit and sharpening the divisions between the various kinds of

'®* Pusey to the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, 22 May 1843, in; Liddon, Life of Pusey, vol. II, p. 313.

Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, p. 242; cf. pp. 240-248.

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Anglican Churchmanship. In this regard, Tractarian doctrine and practice worked in a divisive rather than in a uniting way. '°®

Perhaps to a larger extent, however, the Tractarian shifts can be welcomed, because they contributed to a new Anglican self-understanding which gave Anglicanism the ecumenical prominence which it happened to achieve in the twentieth century. It may be true that later Anglo-Catholic heirs of the Tractarians did not approve of the Anglican self-understanding as a “bridge church” between Rome and the Reformation, because they saw themselves exclusively as Catholic, nevertheless the central position of Anglicanism in the present ecumenical world is largely an effect of the via media of the Oxford Movement, or at least an effect of the melting together of this Tractarian via media with other strands of Anglicanism. Even the restricted attitude towards non-episcopal ministry, which characterises twentieth century Anglicanism and which stems from the Tractarians, is not to be considered only as a negative, limitative feature. To a not unimportant amount, this understanding of and practice concerning episcopacy contributes to the modem Anglican role of an ecumenical “bridge church”.

Therefore, when critics of the Oxford Movement express their unease with this specific Anglican way of dealing with ministry by saying, for example,

“Not only has this insistence [on episcopal succession] proved a perennial stumbling block to hopes of reunion with other Protestant Churches, but it contains a supreme irony in that Anglican orders are not recognized by Rome”,

I suspect them of failing to recognise the ecumenical impact of precisely this peculiarity, which is one of the origins of the Anglican “bridge” character. Modem Anglican-

This is one of the main focuses of Avis’s book Anglicanism and the Christian Church. See also Peter Nockles, ‘Church parties in the pre-Tractarian Church of England 1750-1833: the ‘Orthodox’ — some problems of definition and identity’, in: John Walsh, Colin Haydon, Stephen Taylor (eds.). The Church of England c.1689 - c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism, Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 334-359, with his concluding remark, ‘The Tractarians sharpened a sense of party identity in the Church of England but they did not create it’ (p. 358).

”” Pickering, Anglo-Catholicism, pp. 141-147.

'08 ‘view that has come to prevail in modem Anglicanism, though without receiving canonical formulation’, Paul Avis, ‘What is ‘Anglicanism’?’, in: Stephen Sykes and John Booty (eds.). The Study of Anglicanism, London/Minneapolis: SPCK/Fortress Press, 1988, pp. 405-424 (quotation: p. 416).

Avis, ‘What is ‘Anglicanism’?’, p. 419.

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ism does neither evidently belong to Protestantism nor to Roman Catholicism, but at the same time has much in common with both. This is a situation which in my view must not be valued as weakness or insularity, but as a challenge to both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, and therefore as ecumenically promising.

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The emergence of Ritualism

“Again as the century’ wore on and the theological battles of the ‘thirties and ‘forties sank into ancient history, attention began to concentrate upon the supeificial characteristics of the high and the low parties within the Church, until to call a man a high churchman was often to say no more than that he was a ritualist, while a low churchman was one who pared ceremony down to a minimum. ” ' The emphasis on ritual, which eventually has changed the form and understanding of Anglican worship to a large extent, was not a feature of the initial Oxford Movement, but a development out of it, which was partly encouraged and partly regretted by the Oxford fathers themselves. That it concentrated merely on superficialities, however, can be earnestly disputed. In this essay the emergence of the movement commonly called “Ritualism ” will be explored. This allows us to discover more discontinuities within the Anglican High Church tradition, in addition to the discontinuity between traditional High Churchmanship and the Oxford Movement, which was discussed in the first of these essays.

Early liturgical renewal in High Church circles

Introduction

In the first essay we saw that the Oxford Movement emphasised Catholic doctrines which were at the time already being stressed by older High Churchmen. The Trac-tarians, therefore, were not the sole advocates of these principles. On the other hand, we saw that the Oxford Movement “exaggerated” Catholic principles in the eyes of their High Church forebears. The same nuanced picture of continuity and discontinuity is true of the ritual outcomes of Tractarian teaching. An attempt at liturgical renewal can be signalled in High Church circles about the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. Moderate ritual consequences of the Oxford Movement were, therefore, not exceptional at the time. ‘ A real discontinuity only appeared when followers of the Tractarians started to introduce not traditional High Church, but medieval and contemporary Roman Catholic ceremonial.

’ Geoffrey Faber, Oxford Apostles: A Character Study of the Oxford Movement, London: Faber and Faber, 1936^ (1st ed. 1933), p. 84.

See section below; cf. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, pp. 209-217.

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A Georgian “auditory” church, on the eve of the Victorian reforms in liturgy and furnishings. The interior is dominated by the huge three decker pulpit. From its top, the rector preaches the sermon, while in descending order below him the curate and parish clerk keep an eye on the congregation, seated in high box pews. People are seated facing away from the east, and the font is used to hold the worshippers’ hats.

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The arrangement of churches before the Oxford Movement

The character of Anglican liturgy throughout the centuries can be approached by looking at the way in which Anglicans arranged their church buildings. After the Reformation, and particularly after the Restoration Settlement, two ways of dealing with church buildings were dominant. The first of these can be described as “conservative”, for it tried to maintain or re-introduce the pre-Reformation arrangement of churches, with the altar at the east end of the chancel, and the pulpit and a reading desk aside the entry to the chancel, at the east end of the nave. Most seats were facing east. ’ Over the centuries, this type of church arrangement was preferred by High Churchmen, Archbishop Laud having been one of the clergy who strongly advocated this type of arrangement against the Puritan preference for a pulpit-centred nave and a chancel in which the communion table could be placed east-west, so that communicants could take seats at all sides of the table.

After the Restoration, this Puritan alternative had virtually disappeared from the Anglican scene. This did not imply, however, that the Laudian type was not challenged by a more Protestant way of arranging the interior of churches. A common principle of both the traditional and the alternative arrangement was the division within the building between a place for the eucharistie service — usually a chancel of any form and size — and a place for non-eucharistic services, which made up the vast majority of Anglican services in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The traditional type more or less kept the two together by retaining the eastward direction. On the contrary, the alternative type emphasised the distinction between the place for communion and the place for preaching, by arranging all seats around the “three decker pulpit”, consisting of the clerk’s desk for the parish clerk who led the responses, the reading desk for the minister when conducting the liturgy, and the pulpit for the minister when preaching. Especially in larger churches with aisles and transepts it was worthwhile to move the “three decker” to a place where its occupants could be seen and heard by as many of the congregation as possible, and to surround it with seats rather than place the seats in one (eastward) direction. As a result, some or many of the congregation had to turn their back to the altar. ®

Nigel Yates, Buildings, Faith, and Worship: The Liturgical Arrangement of Anglican Churches 1600-1900, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991, pp. 66-76. Objection can be made against Yates’s use of the term ‘conservative’ as it is not always clear whether he uses it in a descriptive or in a — at least implicitly — pejorative way. The ‘radical’ and ‘Reformed’ church arrangement seems to be more satisfying in Yates’s own eyes.

■* Yates, Buildings, Faith, and Worship, pp. 30-32.

5 Yates, Buildings, Faith, and Worship, p. 77; cf. pp. 47-65.

* Yates, Buildings, Faith, and Worship, pp. 77-107.

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Besides these two types of church arrangement, another type came into being at the end of the eighteenth century and grew in importance at the beginning of the nineteenth. Characteristic for this type was the equality and unity of Word and Sacrament, reflected in the position of pulpit, reading desk, and altar in an interrelated way, sustained by the position of the seating, which had to face all these liturgical furniture rather than one part of it. This type of arrangement could take the form of a “collegiate” interior, in which the seating was arranged as in a college chapel, with two groups of seating facing each other. Another form was traditionally eastward facing, with the pulpit and the reading desk at the north and south sides of the entrance to the shallow chancel, in which the altar was placed. Sometimes even the font and the organ were drawn into the “liturgical centre” where all relevant furniture was placed together to stress its equality and interdependence. Therefore, when the Oxford Movement entered the scene, a certain kind of liturgical awareness was already growing, with a purpose which can easily be compared to that of the early Tractarians.

The relationship between Tractarianism and Ritualism

When searching for High Church continuity and change with regard to ceremonial, two exclusive interpretations have to be avoided. As these essays try to show, the assumption that High Churchmanship, Oxford Movement, Ritualism, and Anglo-Catholicism are all the same, cannot be maintained. But the other extreme, being the view that the Oxford fathers disliked any liturgical innovation, and that the later Ritualists invented their ceremonial without precedence, seems to be equally untrue. ®

Continuity between Tractarianism and Ritualism can be advocated on, for instance, the following grounds. Firstly, there may have been something of apology and defence in dichotomising the Tractarian from the Ritualist attitude towards liturgy. Ritualism has often had a bad name for the majority of the Church of England, so historians of the Oxford Movement may have had a strategic aim in dissociating the “original” meaning of their Movement from “later” unpopular connotations. Secondly, the Tractarians themselves were not as hostile towards Ritualism as a strict separation of the two would suggest. Thirdly, the more advanced Ritualists sometimes defended their cause by an appeal to Laudian ceremonial, that is, by the same appeal Tractarians used for their liturgical reinventions. Finally, Ritualism emerged as early as in the eighteen

’ Yates, Buildings, Faith, and Worship, pp. 108-123. In some places the beginnings of the ‘Gothic Revival’ in and outside Britain went along with this type of church arrangement.

* Cf. Jeremy Morris, ‘The Regional Growth of Tractarianism: Some Reflections’, in: Paul Vaiss (ed. ), From Oxford to the People: Reconsidering Newman amp;nbsp;the Oxford Movement, Leominster: Gracewing, 1996, pp. 141-159 (esp. pp. 144-146).

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forties, when the period of the Tracts was nearly over. Therefore, also chronologically no clear dividing line can be drawn between Tractarianism and Ritualism.

Nevertheless, without denying that Ritualism was a natural development out of the Oxford Movement, it was a development into a movement which laid other emphases and radiated another ethos. When we try to discover the nuances within nineteenth century High Churchmanship, we have to be aware of these changes, even when they emerge from already existing origins. Therefore it seems to be accurate to draw a line between the ceremonial views of the Tractarians in the 1830s and early 1840s, and those of the Rimalists from the 1840s onwards, not in order to deny the relationship between the two, but in order to indicate their different outlooks. Both the continuity and the change within this development will be shown in the next chapters.

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High Church and early Tractarian attitudes towards ritual

“Origines Liturgicae”

William Palmer (1803-1885), of Worcester College, Oxford, belonged to the more conservative Tractarians. Although he took part in the meeting at Hadleigh Rectory in the summer of 1833, which formed the seedbed out of which the Tracts sprung forth, and although he wrote one of the early Tracts (15), he was a critic of the more advanced direction which the Movement took. He was as much a traditional High Churchman as a Tractarian. ’

In 1832, Palmer published his book, Origines Liturgicae, or Antiquities of the English Ritual, and a Dissertation on Primitive Liturgies. In this book. Palmer showed himself to be a traditional High Churchman, who was completely content with the Church of England and its liturgy. The Origines Liturgicae can be seen as a thorough defence of the Book of Common Prayer as containing all essentials of the liturgies of the early and medieval Church. In order to achieve this goal, every detail of the Prayer Book services is traced back to ancient sources, even when the likeness is only slight. From a perspective of modem historians of the liturgy. Palmer’s book must be seriously wanting. But perhaps his aim was more apologetic than historical.

In his Origines Liturgicae, Palmer was not concerned with ceremonial. The only subject under discussion is the text of the Book of Common Prayer. Therefore, from this book we do not learn very much about the way in which traditional High Chuchmen and moderate Tractarians wished the liturgy to be celebrated. There are no references such as to the appearance of the altar, the custom of bowing towards it, the use of incense, and the like. A surprising exception is an appendix “On Ecclesiastical Vestures ”, which informs the reader about the shape and the appropriate use of chasuble (“vestment”), cope, tunicle, dalmatic, alb, stole, surplice, hood, and the episcopal dress. This appendix seems to be the only place where Palmer allows Anglican clergy to do anything not explicitly prescribed by the Prayer Book. quot;

’ Cf. Chadwick, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement, pp. 19-20.

Cf. Alf H'rdelin, The Tractarian Understanding of the Eucharist (Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Studia Historico-Ecclesiastica Upsaliensia 8), Uppsala: Almqvist amp;nbsp;Wiksells, 1965, pp. 249-252.

quot; William Palmer, Origines Liturgicae, or Antiquities of the English Ritual, and a Dissertation on Primitive Liturgies, London: Francis amp;nbsp;John Rivington, 1845’* (1832*) (2 vols.), e.g. vol. II, p. 406, where it is said about the stole, that it ‘is not mentioned in the rubric of the English ritual [i.e., the BCP]; but as it is often used in the church during the performance of divine service, I think it

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This exception proves the rule, for in the rest of the Origines every deviation from ancient or medieval custom which the Prayer Book allows itself is defended by either an alleged ancient or medieval precedence, or the statement that the deviation relates to an “indifferent” matter. An insertion into the fourth edition (1845) makes this strict outlook explicit. It has to do with the mixture of water and wine at the offertory, which does not occur in the Book of Common Prayer. Palmer admitted this custom to be ancient, and even

“In the English [church] it has never been actually prohibited; for the rubric which enjoins the priest to place bread and wine on the table, does not prohibit him from mingling water with that wine; and accordingly we find that bishop Andrewes, archbishop Laud, and others have practised it. ”

In the fourth edition Palmer nevertheless thought it necessary to add,

“But as this rite was removed from the ritual of the English church by authority, together with several other rites, probably from a wish to simplify the administration of the sacraments, and not from any intention to condemn the practice, and as it undoubtedly does not affect the validity of the sacrament, its revival by individuals cannot be recommended”.

merits consideration in this place’. I am not sure whether Palmer has in mind the ‘Catholic’ stole or the Anglican scarf.

The most telling example of this is probably the fact that even the exhortations and explanatory addresses, although they cannot be traced back to other liturgies immediately, are said to be ‘not without parallel in very ancient rites’ (Palmer, Origines Liturgicae, vol. II, p. 99; cf. vol. I, pp. 238-239, 281; vol. II, p. 104). The same is said to be true of the ‘sentences’ from Scripture (vol. I, pp. 236-237, 281; vol. II, p. 110).

” Cf. Palmer, Origines Liturgicae, vol. II, pp. 3-19, where fourteen ‘Romanist’ objections against the BCP are reftited; pp. 46-49, where the antiquity and worth of the gradual psalm is explained, without any reference to its absence from the BCP other than ‘In the Churches of Gaul and Spain the graduale was not used, and the Church of England at the revision of her liturgy omitted it likewise’ (p. 46); even the termination of the eucharistie prayer immediately after the words of institution is not allowed to be criticized as ‘too abruptly’, because ‘this is merely a matter of taste’ (vol. II, p. 148).

Palmer, Origines Liturgicae, vol. II, pp. 76-77; cf. vol. I, p. x, where Palmer explains that he added this ‘to obviate any impression that it was intended to suggest or recommend the introduction of rites not prescribed by the English Ritual, on the authority of individuals’. Palmer was clearly alarmed by the direction Tractarianism was taking and from which he wanted to dissociate himself.

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Palmer, in short, wanted to prove that

quot;the Anglican system of worship was satisfactory in itself if rightly carried out: there was no need to look to the ancient Church for what was more perfect. What the English Reformers had given to their Church was sufficient; and the things they had abrogated they had had a perfect right to abrogate. ”

Here we encounter the liturgical side of the traditional High Church position, which tried to remain within the bounds of the Anglican post-Reformation tradition.

The “Laudian ” altar

When traditional High Church and early Tractarian ceremonial went beyond the explicit statements of the rubrics, it was mainly based on a rediscovery of Anglican ceremonial as it had been advocated by the Caroline Divines and by Laud. The most remarkable feature of this liturgical style was the erection of an altar of considerable size at the east end of the chancel, covered with an altar frontal and separated from the rest of the chancel by communion rails. In the middle of the altar a cross (in most cases not a crucifix) had to be placed, flanked by two candlesticks. An alms basin and an elaborately bound Bible and Prayer Book completed this arrangement. In this setting, the officiating priest had to wear cassock, surplice, and black scarf. In the present age, it is hardly imaginable that these things were to be fought for. Yet this was the fact, as is shown, for example, by the “surplice riots” in the dioceses of London

H’rdelin, The Tractarian Understanding of the Eucharist, p. 238.

The doctrinal side of this position was discussed in the previous essay. From the Origines Liturgicae it is clear that Palmer kept the doctrine of Receptionism (Palmer, Origines Liturgicae, vol. II, p. 16 where ‘corporal presence’ is equated — and abolished — with ‘transubstantiation’, p. 140 where ‘consecration of the elements’ is a — in a certain sense indifferent — ‘means’ in order ‘that we may partake of Christ’s body and blood in a sacramental manner, by receiving the bread and wine’; cf. H«rdelin, The Tractarian Understanding of the Eucharist, p. 128), whereas he regarded the offertory to express the sacrificial character of the Eucharist, without any reference to the old prayer of oblation/thanksgiving (Palmer, Origines Liturgicae, vol. II, pp. 86, 157; cf. H'rdelin, The Tractarian Understanding of the Eucharist, pp. 199, 254).

” Cf. Harry Boone Porter, Jeremy Taylor: Liturgist (1613-1667) (Alcuin Club Collections 61), London; Alcuin Club / SPCK, 1979, pp. 138-153; L.E. Ellsworth, Charles Lowder and the Ritualist Movement, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1982, pp. 5-6.

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and Exeter in the 1840s, which originated from the episcopal charge to wear the surplice while preaching,

One of the first to carry out this kind of visible renewal was John Rouse Bloxam (1807-1891), who from 1837 to 1840 was one of Newman’s curates in the parish of St Mary’s, Oxford. He was in charge of the nearby village of Littlemore, where Newman had built a chapel in 1836. Bloxam provided this chapel with a Laudian interior and reintroduced the black scarf, both of which “Popish” innovations were seriously criticised at the time. Nevertheless, in view of the more elaborate ceremonial which was about to develop, these changes in High Church and early Tractarian circles can be regarded as thoroughly moderate.

” Cf. Ellsworth, Charles Lowder, p. 8.

” R.D. Middleton, Newman amp;nbsp;Bloxam: An Oxford Friendship, London: Geoffrey Cumberlege/ Oxford University Press, 1947, pp. 31-61.

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A changing attitude amongst Tractarians

Their conservative public strategy

As we saw in the previous essay, the Tractarians were not prepared to confine themselves to the post-Reformation period, but rather judged post-Reformation teaching on the basis of what they thought to be patristic teaching. It is clear that their liturgical attitude was more restricted to traditional High Churchmanship than their theological attitude was. Nevertheless, in matters of liturgy, too, most of the Tractarians became more critical of the Anglican tradition than Palmer had been.

A curious position between Palmer’s traditional defence and a more critical attitude of some of the other Tractarians was taken by Isaac Williams (1802-1865), a pupil of Keble and for some time Newman’s curate at St Mary’s, Oxford. In Tract 86, called Indications of a Superintending Providence in the Presen’ation of the Prayer Book and in the Changes which it has undergone (1839), Williams analyzed the Prayer Book in a much more critical way than Palmer had done, but without drawing a critical conclusion. In order to explain the various ways in which the Book of Common Prayer differed from ancient liturgies, Williams used the idea of

“a presiding Hand, not only controlling the tide of popular changes which have come over the Church, so as to have preserved to us that dispensation under which we now live, but also regulating and directing those changes to meet the wants of succeeding ages”.

Newman was not prepared to adopt such a forced justification. On the day he wrote the first three Tracts, 9 September 1833, he could still write that the Book of Common Prayer, although criticised by different groups within the Church of England, was good enough not to be altered.

quot;Tell me, are the present imperfections (as they seem to each) of such a nature, and so many, that their removal will compensate for the recasting of much which each thinks to be no imperfection, or rather an excellence?quot; **

Tracts for the Times, vol. V, Tract 86, p. 3; cf. H’rdelin, The Tractarian Understanding of the Eucharist, pp. 256-258: ‘While Palmer was satisfied with accidental similarities, Williams looked into details, and consequently found dissimilarities and novelties where Palmer had only found similarities and continuity’ (p. 257).

Tracts for the Times, vol. I, Tract 3, p. 1.

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But half a year later, 1 May 1834, he struck another note. The Book of Common Prayer lacks so many ancient liturgical customs, implied by Scripture and witnessed by the Fathers of the Church, that

“it is a serious question whether we are not like men who recover from some grievous illness [Popery] with the loss or injuiy of their sight or hearing [important parts of the liturgy]”. ~

Nevertheless, even when the “imperfections” of the Prayer Book began to be regarded as important indeed, the Tractarians opposed alteration of the Prayer Book on the ground that any alteration would make things worse, not better. Therefore, it became the liturgical strategy of the Oxford Movement to oppose changes in the text of the Prayer Book, and to achieve their goals by interpreting them as a strict observance of the rubrics. Most important to the early Tractarians were the saying of the Daily Office, and the keeping of fasts and feasts.

This conservative strategy towards the Prayer Book was combined by a moderate ceremonial. As we have seen, some of the Tractarians advocated the réintroduction of the traditional High Church arrangements in the chancel. Wearing surplice and stole, the priest had to say the prayers eastward facing, from the steps of the altar or from a faldstool before the altar. Moreover, he had to bow towards the altar and when the name of Jesus occurred in the liturgy. For the Tractarians, the practice of facing the east applied only to the Daily Office and the Litany. Newman, afterwards, proved his “moderate” liturgical attitude by mentioning the fact that during his Anglican ministry he always celebrated the Lord’s Supper from the north end of the table, which was the general custom at the time. quot;

Tracts for the Times, vol. I, Tract 34, p. 7.

H’rdelin, The Tractarian Understanding of the Eucharist, p. 260.

S.L. Ollard, A Short History of the Oxford Movement, London etc.: A.R. Mowbray amp;nbsp;Co., 1932“ ( 1915'), p. 158. This custom meant that the position of the celebrant was at the left short end of the altar, if seen from the nave of the church. The rubric which was interpreted in this way, had originally been composed in the context of a communion table which stood in the middle of the chancel from east to west, with all communicants sitting at it. The north side of such a communion table, again left if seen from the nave of the church, was a long side and not the short side which it became when the altars were replaced into their medieval position without the rubric being changed accordingly. Later, the Ritualists interpreted the rubrical ‘north side’ as the left part of the altar, again if seen from the nave of the church. According to this interpretation, the priest commenced the service eastward facing (his back turned to the congregation), not in the middle of the altar but a bit to the left. To secure this interpretation. Ritualists developed the terminological distinction between the north ‘side’, which the rubric used, and the north ‘end’, which their opponents ‘abusively’ adopted.

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Their progressive private opinions

This moderate outward liturgical “policy”, however, was not the only way in which the Tractarians thought about liturgy. Their private opinions were much more advanced, of which we have a set of examples from the years 1838 and 1839.

In Tract 81, published on 1 November 1838, Pusey advocated the doctrine of the eucharistie sacrifice. In order to give expression to this doctrine, Pusey wrote,

“we subjoin a form wherewith the oblation was of old accompanied. This the priest may say silently, (for the Church places no restraint upon silent prayer,) while he is reverently placing the bread and wine upon the altar”.

As an example, he gave a fragment of a Gallican prayer, containing the oblation prayer and the consecration epiclesis, but referred to other traditions as well, including the canon romanus. For this practice, Pusey claimed the authority of Thomas Wilson (1663-1735), bishop of Sodor and Man, one of the High Church forebears to whom the Tractarians were likely to refer. Unlike Wilson, who inserted a prayer of the same kind after the words of consecration, Pusey placed the insertion at the offertory, thus reflecting the frequently occurring failure to make a distinction between offertorium and sacrificium. Here we meet with a strange combination of the conservative strategy on the one hand, and a definitely “Romeward” tendency on the other, for whereas the celebrant who followed Pusey’s proposal outwardly seemed to perform the Communion Service according to the Book of Common Prayer, he privately celebrated the Eucharist according to a medieval rite.

The combination of publicly using the Prayer Book and privately adding material from Roman Catholic liturgies could not only be applied to the Eucharist, but to the Daily Office as well. By 1839, both Newman and Pusey used the minor offices of the Breviary alongside Morning and Evening Prayer of the Book of Common Prayer. Liddon informs us,

“Pusey himself used to use it [the Breviary], when time permitted, as supplementary to the Prayer-book: that is to say, he said prime, terce, sext, none, and compline, omitting matins, lauds, and vespers, which are already provided for in the Prayer-book. ’’

Tracts for the Times, vol. IV, Tract 81, p. 55. Froude, who was more anti-Protestant and proRoman than the other Oxford fathers, even wished the Communion Service replaced by an English version of the Roman canon of the Mass; cf. H’rdelin, The Tractarian Understanding of the Eucharist, p. 264.

Liddon, Life of Pusey, vol. II, pp. 145-146; cf. H’rdelin, The Tractarian Understanding of the Eucharist, pp. 264-265. That Pusey used the Sarum Breviary and Newman the Roman one, does

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At a later stage, when Pusey effectively advised the use of Breviary offices to the sisterhood he established in 1845, he considerably adapted the Breviary for use by loyal Anglicans. In his own words, in his version

quot;There are not even prayers for the departed, nor any legends, much less any mention of the intercession of the saints, nor the Black-letter days in the calendar ... Nor is there anything to draw people off from the English Prayer-book. ” ’’

Newman may have been proud of his moderation in celebrating from the north end of the table while being Vicar of St Mary’s, but at the same time (1838) he was able to defend a passage in Froude’s Remains, where the latter had expressed his preference for a translation of the “Liturgy of St Peter” instead of the Communion Service in the Book of Common Prayer. In Newman’s words,

“The Canon of the Mass, or St Peter’s Liturgy ... as distinguished from the Ordinary, is, as there is every reason for believing, from the Apostles, as are the Liturgies of St James, St Mark, and St John; — our Service contains a part of it— to restore St Peter’s Liturgy, i.e. the said Canon, would not take out one word of our Service — It would merely put together the separate portions, part of which are scattered about the Service, part left out. —(I beg to add that I am decidedly against any alteration myself— I am sure we do not deser\gt;e it

These examples only refer to “textual” matters. On “ceremonial” matters the Tractari-ans seem to have clung to the old ways. For instance, Newman’s ceremonial remained within the “Laudian” tradition when he preached in a surplice, lighted two candles on the altar, and used wine to which he had added water. Nevertheless, in the second

not change the point, for both are medieval and in that sense ‘Roman Catholic’ liturgies. The preference for Sarum material may be interpreted as a strategy, because it gave the user the opportunity to deny the charge of Romanizing. That Newman used the Roman Breviary originated from the fact that he had been given the opportunity to choose a book out of Froude's library after the latter’s death, on which occasion Newman choose Froude’s (Roman) Breviary; cf. Newman, Apologia, p. 76. Moreover, unlike the Roman Breviary, the Sarum one was hard to find at that time; cf. Liddon, Life of Pusey, vol. II, pp. 146-147.

Pusey to A.J.B. Hope, in: Liddon, Life of Pusey, vol. Ill, p. 25.

Newman to Th. Henderson, in: The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Edited at the Birmingham Oratory with notes and an introduction by Gerard Tracey, vol. VI, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984, p. 226.

Ollard, A Short History of the Oxford Movement, pp. 157-158; Middleton, Newman amp;nbsp;Bloxam, p. 15.

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half of the century, exactly these practices were among those which came to be regarded as “Ritualist” peculiarities. The same is true of the use of eucharistie vestments. Although Newman never wore them while an Anglican (Pusey, in his later years, sometimes did, notably in private chapels), he wrote, “Give us more sen’ices, more vestments and decorations in worship. ”

Some of the Tractarians, it can be concluded, were much more progressive and innovative in their private liturgical views than in their “official” attitude towards public liturgy. This ambivalence partly originated from the fear that any change in the public liturgy of the Church of England would be in a more Protestant or Liberal, not in a more “Catholic” direction. Moreover, the Oxford fathers were simply much more interested in theological principles than in liturgical expressions of these principles. That this was particularly true of Pusey will be shown in the next section.

Did the Tractarians disapprove of Ritualism?

Keeping in mind this Tractarian ambivalence between private liturgical opinion and public liturgical behaviour, the traditional idea of the Tractarians as disapproving of the more elaborate Ritualist ceremonial, has to be questioned. For whose opinion is reflected by this proposition?

It cannot be that of Froude’s, because he had died before Ritualism emerged (1836). From the utterances during his life it can be presumed that he probably would have sympathised with the Ritualists.

Although less outspokenly than Froude, Newman, too, privately advocated liturgical innovations. The idea that he opposed Ritualism, seems to depend mainly on hindsight remarks like the well-known phrase that Newman used

“no pomp, no ritualism; for it was characteristic of the leading men of the movement that they left these things to the weaker brethren

Peter G. Cobb, ‘Leader of the Anglo-Catholics?’, in: Perry Butler (ed.), Pusey Rediscovered, London: SPCK, 1983, pp. 349-365 (esp. p. 358).

’’ Quoted from: James Bentley, Ritualism and Politics in Victorian Britain: The Attempt to Legislate for Belief, Oxford etc.: Oxford University Press, 1978, p. 26.

Cf. Ollard, A Short History of the Oxford Movement, p. 165; Nigel Yates, The Oxford Movement and Anglican Ritualism (General Series 105), London: The Historical Association, 1983, p. 22.

’’ A remark by Principal Shairp, quoted from: Church, The Oxford Movement, p. 123.

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Moreover, by the time Ritualism matured, Newman had left the Church of England (1845) — a fact which, in spite of its obvious character, must not be overlooked as far as Newman’s relation to Ritualism is concerned.

Perhaps the only one who really did not bother about ceremonial was Keble. He seems to have adopted the eastward position at some time, but at the same time he could boast “that I do not even know what constitutes the difference between High and Low Massquot;. ”

Who, then, created the idea of an anti-Ritualist Oxford Movement? The conclusion seems to be that it was Pusey. In 1837 he defended the early developments at Lit-tlemore, such as saying the prayers from a faldstool turned to the east and the reading of the lectures from an eagle instead of a reading desk, against popular charges of “Popery”. But at the same time he declared himself against the revival of liturgical vestments of even a moderate kind like embroidered crosses on a stole. The reason of his opposition is telling:

“we have too much to do to keep sound doctrine and the privileges of the Church to be able to afford to go into the question about dresses ”.

Two years later, Pusey warned an enthusiastic advocate of vestments with the much quoted words,

“I should deprecate seeking to restore the richer style of vestments used in Edward the Sixth’s reign: contemptible as personal vanity appears in the abstract, it has probably much more root than people are aware of and has the firmer hold because disregarded. It seems beginning at the wrong end for the ministers to deck their own persons: our own plain dresses are more in keeping with the state of our Church, which is one of humiliation: it does not

5’' Bentley, Ritualism and Politics, p. 126.

Georgina Battiscombe, John Keble: A Study in Limitations, London: Constable, 1963, p. 350.

Liddon’s account of Pusey might be partial, but there is no reason to suspect Liddon of describing Pusey less Ritualist than he actually had been, because Liddon himself was a (albeit moderate) Ritualist; cf. Chadwick, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement, pp. 234-246; John Octavius Johnston, Life and Letters of Henry Parry Liddon, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1905, p. 177.

Liddon, Life of Pusey, vol. II, p. 15.

Pusey to R. Bagot, in: Liddon, Life of Pusey, vol. II, p. 16.

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seem in character to revive gorgeous or even in any degree handsome dresses in a day of reproach and rebuke and blasphemy: these are not holyday times

The contents of this quotation is not foreign to Pusey’s overall character, which showed disinterest in anything other than religious or theological matters, and which was heavily impressed by a feeling of personal guilt and unworthiness. Pusey preferred “painted windows, rich altar-cloths, or Communion platequot; to a dressed-up priest. But this kind of embellishments, too, was only admitted on the condition that they reminded people of, for instance in the case of an altar cross, their necessity to bear the cross: “It must come as the expression of that which is within”.

It was this emphasis on the internal and doctrinal, not the thought that external ceremonial was wrong in itself, which led Pusey to his negative attitude towards it. When Liddon tells us that Pusey used the majority of the Breviary hours in addition to the Prayer Book offices, as we saw above, we are not likely to believe Liddon when he adds that Pusey

“himself never felt, a dissatisfaction with the more limited range of the daily offices of the Anglican Prayer-bookquot;. ■*quot;

Pusey definitely must have felt a dissatisfaction with the Prayer Book, but his fear for exaggeration or Romeward unsteadiness kept him from recommending the Breviary to many others. The primary aim of the Tractarians was to protect High Church principles at a time when they were vulnerable to accusation of covert Romanism, not to expose their principles unnecessarily to damaging criticism.

One of the famous early Ritualist churches was St Saviour’s, Leeds. Its building was anonymously financed by Pusey, who was a friend of the vicar of Leeds, W.F. Hook, to whom he proposed the plan for the first time in August 1839. Hook had already started pastoral work in a poor district of his parish, and it was there that the church was to be erected as the core of a separate parish. Pusey’s attitude towards the

” Pusey to J.F. Russell, in: Liddon, Life of Pusey, vol. II, p. 142.

Cf. David W.F. Forrester, ‘Dr Pusey's Marriage’, in: Perry Butler (ed. ), Pusey Rediscovered, London: SPCK, 1983, pp. 119-138 (esp. p. 135), where also another side of Pusey is unveiled: his more joyful character before 1835.

'** Pusey to J.F. Russell, in: Liddon, Life of Pusey, vol. II, p. 143.

Liddon, Life of Pusey, vol. II, p. 146.

Liddon, Life of Pusey, vol. II, pp. 466-472; cf. vol. Ill, p. 121.

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building of this church and the liturgy within it, sheds light upon his ambiguous position towards Ritualism. Regarding the interior of the new church, Pusey wrote in 1843,

“I should be very sorry to go against any decided feeling of those who are doing so much for Church architecture; yet I cannot but think that, however it may have been brought about that we have the Commandments, Creed, and our Lord's Prayer near the altar, there is much good in it. You will feel that in reviving what is old we are not to disregard the actual position of the Church. Needs may have arisen and have been providentially provided for, even by uncatholic means. I thought there was much deep thought and reverence in Williams’s tract ‘On the Providential Superintendence over our Liturgy,’ ... As different Churches have their different usages, so I thought this might have grown up, as of special value to us. ”

When it came to the laying of the foundation stone in September 1842 and the consecration of the church in October 1845, Pusey was prepared to take a moderate stance. Both dates were marked by considerable publicity about Newman — his Tract 90 and his secession — so that Pusey, a professed associate of Newman, “agreed to keep out of the way’’, after Hook had expressed his fears that Pusey’s presence at the occasions would cause trouble with objecting parishioners. This did not, however, prevent Pusey from defending St Saviour’s church arrangements, ritual, and celibate clergy. In 1851 he upheld these peculiarities of St Saviour’s against the criticisms of the diocesan bishop.

The ambivalence occurs when we compare this defence to the fact that Pusey in the same period discouraged younger clergy from innovations in ritual. Again, he opposed sudden changes in the liturgy with the argument that it was more important to improve doctrine than to enrich ritual. This time he used the image of putting flowers into the earth in order that they might grow, instead of preparing the earth in order that flowers might appear themselves. In the same year (1849) he wrote about bowing to the altar.

• ** Pusey to B. Webb, in: Liddon, Life of Pusey, vol. II, pp. 476-478. The phrase, ‘those who are doing so much for Church architecture’ refers to the Cambridge Camden Society, of which Webb was a co-founder; the next chapter is devoted to this Society.

• ■*5 Liddon, Life of Pusey, vol. II, pp. 473. Eventually, Pusey was present at the consecration; cf. pp. 489-497.

Liddon, Life of Pusey, vol. Ill, pp. 366-367.

Pusey to G.R. Prynne, 1849, in: Liddon, Life of Pusey, vol. Ill, p. 369.

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“Where people do not bow, I do not. I think it a matter in which I had best conform to the practice. ”

Another example from this same period (1851), if not of his dislike of Ritualism, then of his indifference towards it, runs,

“One most grievous offence seems to be turning your back to the people. 1 was not ritualist enough to know, until the other day, that the act of turning had any special meaning in the Consecration. ... Dear Newman consecrated to the last of his Consecrations at the North end of the altar. Everything may have a meaning. It was, as you know, in some old Roman Churches, the custom to consecrate behind the altar. This too might have its meaning; and the eyes of the people might be more directed to the Oblation. ”

In 1866 Pusey publicly changed his mind and started to defend the Ritualists. Remarkably, this took place at the moment Ritualism became an issue under fire, and Pusey was aware that the opponents of Ritualism sought to condemn Catholic teaching alongside with Catholic ritual. It was the time of the famous Ritualist cases before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and ( later) before a new court set up in accordance to the Worship Regulation Act (1874). Against this background, Pusey chose the Ritualist side by joining the English Church Union in 1866. On that occasion he delivered a speech in which he mentioned his doctrinal principle again, but in which he also draw a practical conclusion from the doctrinal principle: if Catholic doctrine is preached, the congregations will ask at last for Catholic ritual by themselves. Pusey was opposed to liturgical changes imposed upon congregations by zealous priests, but he was in favour of changes asked for by congregations as a result of Catholic preaching. In 1866, Pusey believed that this moment had come.

“The clergy have taught it the people, and the people have asked it of the clergy. We taught it them; they felt it to be true; and they said, ‘Set it before our eyes. ’ There is no danger of superficialness now. ”

Pusey to E.T. Richards, in: Liddon, Life of Pusey, vol. Ill, p. 370.

Pusey to W. Scott, in: Liddon, Life of Pusey, vol. IV, pp. 210-211. The last remark might be interesting in the light of liturgical changes after Vatican II and Anglo-Catholic responses to these changes.

5’ Liddon, Life of Pusey, vol. IV, p. 213. On pp. 278-279 Liddon summarizes Pusey’s doctrinal and ‘congregational’ arguments, and indicates that Pusey insisted on ‘the Eastward Position and the Eucharistic Vestments’, whereas he ‘desired that some of the less significant ceremonial might be dropped’ (p. 279). To the latter category Pusey himself reckoned incense, the word ‘Mass’, and non-communicating attendance (p. 280).

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But even as a member of the English Church Union, which in those times kept itself busy mainly by giving financial support to Ritualists in court, Pusey was not an unrestricted adherent of Ritualism. Especially the introduction of ritual against the will of a congregation met with his resistance. He also became a critic of another development: the increasingly positive attitude of some Ritualists towards “modem”, “liberal” issues, as initiated by the publication of Essays and Reviews (1860). This strengthened his suspicion towards the doctrinal stance of some of the Ritualists.

The conclusion seems to be that it was Pusey who is the author of the idea that the Tractarians disliked Ritualism. It is clear that Pusey simply had no interest in “externals”, and that he distrusted the doctrinal soundness of those who kept themselves busy with them. He considered the demand of a congregation to be the clearest indication of whether Catholic doctrine had taken root or not. Because after Newman had left the Church of England, Pusey became the most influential of the original Tractarians, and the one who lived long enough to see the development of Ritualism, Pusey became also the most important interpreter of Tractarian thought in the Ritualist period. In his battle to preserve the primacy of doctrine, he certainly continued Tractarian thought. And as a tactic to save the High Church movement from the damaging effect of exaggerations, the line he adopted was certainly not without effect. The idea, however, that original Tractarianism was alien to the later development of Ritualism, must be discarded as a side effect of Pusey’s tactic. This side effect has sometimes acted as a smoke screen, hiding the more positive Tractarian valuation of ritual which we encountered earlier in this chapter.

Liddon, Life of Pusey, vol. IV, p. 216; cf. p. 277.

Cf. Cobb, ‘Leader of the Anglo-Catholics?’, pp. 356-357 and passim.

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Christ celebrating the sacrifice on the heavenly altar like the priest below, at the north end. From the frontispiece to Charles Wheatly’s Rationale of the Book of Common Prayer, first published in 1710.

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The “Cambridge Movement”

The Cambridge Camden Society

In 1854 the Ritualist priest John Mason Neale (1818-1866) visited the Netherlands, He attended the Sunday High Mass at St Gertrude’s, the Old Catholic Cathedral of Utrecht. About this service he wrote to a friend,

“It is a very curious Office... I cannot give you a better idea of it than by saying that it struck me as the same thing that it would be if a set of Pusey-ites went through Mass — a great deal of stiffness or awkwardness, and slowness. ”

This quotation not only reveals something about Old Catholic liturgy in the midnineteenth century, but also about Neale’s attitude towards the liturgical practice of the founding fathers of the Oxford Movement. Neale apparently wished to dissociate himself from their liturgical stance. Nevertheless, Neale considered himself to be an heir of the Tractarians. In sermons and lectures, for instance, he taught the same sacramental principle as the Tractarians did. But he differed from them in “ethos”. Although he was a learned theologian, historian and hymn translator, he was also a practical man with the wish and the ability to translate Tractarian theology into the area of liturgy and church architecture.

In 1837, while in his undergraduate years at Trinity College, Cambridge, Neale formed “A High Church Club” together with Edward Jacob Boyce and Benjamin Webb, also students at Trinity. This informal club visited churches because of interest in church architecture (“ecclesiology”). Two years later the club had become so large that rules were to be established. The club, which in the meantime had been named

Letters of John Mason Neale D.D.: Selected and Edited by His Daughter, London etc.: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1910, p. 228.

This can be shown, for example, from his lecture ‘The Providential Direction of the Movement of 1833 Not Towards Rome’ (in: J.M. Neale, Lectures Principally on the Church Difficulties of the Present Time, London: Cleaver, 1852, pp. 35-51 ), in which Neale considers himself to be part of ‘the Movement of 1833’. His letters show that Neale was close to the Tractarians, but that he maintained an independent position (e.g. concerning Newman’s secession: Letters of John Mason Neale, pp. 76-94).

Cf. Michael Chandler, The Life and Work of John Mason Neale 1818-1866, Leominster: Gracewing, 1995, pp. 99-124.

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“Cambridge Camden Societyquot;, was properly established in May 1839. In 1845 it moved its headquarters from Cambridge to London and was renamed “Ecclesiological Late Cambridge Camden Societyquot;, under which name it continued to exist until 1868.5’

It is hard to overestimate the role played by the Cambridge Camden Society in the building and restoration of churches throughout Victorian England, and even throughout the Anglican Communion as a whole. Its preference for Gothic, its strict rules for details of the building and for even more details of its inner arrangement, went alongside with the Ritualist movement and did not fail to influence greatly the understanding of Anglican worship and especially eucharistie worship. Whereas the Oxford Movement laid the doctrinal foundation of the “Catholic” revival within Anglicanism, the “Cambridge Movement” was able to diffuse it by ways of architecture and liturgy. The same is expressed in the well-known words of an opponent who wished

“to show that as Romanism is taught Analytically at Oxford, it is taught Artistically at Cambridge — that it is inculcated theoretically, in tracts, at one University, and it is sculptured, painted, and graven at the otherquot;.

The distinction between theology and ecclesiology, however, can easily be exaggerated. There existed a connecting link between Oxford theology in the eighteen thirties and Cambridge ecclesiology from the eighteen forties onwards. This link was an overall movement towards the centrality of the Eucharist. This movement started during the time of the Tracts, but went on during the eighteen forties and fifties. It linked theological reflection on the Eucharist to practical changes in the frequency and ritual of eucharistie services. In 1853 a book was published which has been called one of the few “systematic theological” books in the Tractarian tradition; Robert Wilberforce’s The Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist. Four years later, Keble published his On Eucharistical Adoration. Moreover, the eighteen fifties were the period of the first ritualistic lawsuits, such as the Denison case, which had to do rather with eucharistie

James F. White, The Cambridge Movement: The Ecclesiologists and the Gothic Revival, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962, pp. 36-37; Chandler, Neale, p. 10.

White, The Cambridge Movement, pp. 198, 223.

Francis Close, Tlte Restoration of Churches is the Restoration of Popery ( 1844), quoted from: White, The Cambridge Movement, p. 142.

5’ H»rdelin, The Tractarian Understanding of the Eucharist, pp. 268-280.

H*rdelin, The Tractarian Understanding of the Eucharist, pp. 21, 165-166, and passim.

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doctrine than with ceremonial. Therefore, the Oxford Movement certainly formed the theological basis of emerging Ritualism, but in its maturing state Ritualism was also part of a larger movement towards a central conception of the Eucharist, both in theology and parish practice.

“Hierurgia Anglicana ”

From 1843 to 1848 the Cambridge Camden Society edited a series of publications which in 1848 were published together as the Hierurgia Anglicana; or Documents and Extracts Illustrative of the Ritual of the Church of England after the Reformation. This book can be seen as a stage in the development of Ritualism out of Tractarian-ism. It was based on a “traditionalist”, defensive principle as far as it tried to show that many ritualist practices in the Church of England could be defended by pointing to authoritative Anglican forebears who had practised the same things. In this respect the Hierurgia simply followed the classical Tractarian strategy of giving numerous examples from, predominantly, the Caroline Divines. The difference from Tractarianism, however, consisted in the subject. The Tracts were concerned about dogmatic teaching, whereas the Hierurgia was concerned about ritual practice. So we do, for instance, not hear about Bishop Cosin’s eucharistie views, but that he wore copes, bowed to altars, lighted candles, and made the sign of the cross.

In the preface to the Hierurgia, its editors made clear that it was their aim to prove,

“that although Puritanical laxity, shabbiness, and irreverence may have been in the Reformed Church of England, they were never of her: nay that, in truth, she has authorised or allowed a very high degree of splendour m the decoration of her consecrated fa bricks, and of rich and stately ceremonial in the celebration of publick worship. quot;

The difference in “ethos” between this early Ritualist publication and Tractarian writings is obvious. Without hesitation the editors of the Hierurgia admitted that matters of a ceremonial and aesthetic nature were their primary concern. Only secondary, and

Cf. Bernard Palmer, Reverend Rebels: Five Victorian Clerics and their Fight Against Authority, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1993, pp. 1-62.

Cf. Hierurgia Anglicana; or Documents and Extracts Illustrative of the Ritual of the Church in England afler the Reformation, edited by members of the Ecclesiological Late Cambridge Camden Society, London: J.G.F. amp;nbsp;J. Rivington amp;nbsp;J. Masters, 1848, pp. xiii-?odi.

Hierurgia Anglicana, p. iii.

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in a defensive mode, they indicated the more theological aim of their work. This consisted in their hope that, although rich ornaments are not in themselves leading to faith or holiness of life, they can direct people towards a deeper understanding of matters of faith and holiness. Eucharistic vestments, for example, can indicate the centrality of the Eucharist in the life of the Church. In the same way a well-kept altar can direct towards Christ’s presence upon the altar, and a chancel screen can be an indication of the difference between laity and clergy and can remind people of the doctrine of the apostolical succession. Both continuity and discontinuity are clear; the doctrinal position of the Camdenians is the same as that of the Tractarians, but their means of communicating these doctrines is different.

John Mason Neale (1818-1866)

Hierurgia Anglicana, p. xi. This part of the preface is a quotation from an earlier book by Neale (Hierologus, 1843).

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“Directorium Anglicanum ”

A further stage in the development of Ritualism was the publication in 1858 of the Directorium Anglicanum; Being a Manual of Directions for the Right Celebration of the Holy Communion, for the Saying of Matins and Evensong, and for the Performance of Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church, According to Ancient Uses of the Church of England. The book was edited by John Purchas (1823-1872), a Ritualist priest who later in life would be condemned in one of the Ritualist lawsuits.

Especially the last part of its long title tells something about the character of this book: unlike the Hierurgia, which confined itself to the period “after the Reformation”, the Directorium went back to the practices of the medieval Church. Books like the Directorium are based on the assumption of continuity between pre- and postReformation Christianity in England. In its footnotes, the Directorium referred as easily to old sacramentaries and medieval missals as to the several editions of the Book of Common Prayer and writings of the Caroline Divines.

Another feature of this book, which contributes to its more outspokenly Ritualist character, are the illustrations, all drawn like engravings in a neo-Gothic style. Opposite the title page we see the backs of a priest, deacon and sub-deacon facing a vested altar and assisted by two servers. At the end of the book, numerous drawings can be found of clergy in all possible kinds of vestments, designs of chalices, patens, ciboriums, and the like, and a picture of a chancel not only in the Gothic style preferred by the Cam-denians but also showing all recommended details of fijmiture and arrangement.

A comparison of the frontispiece illustration in the first edition with the one in the second edition of 1865, edited by F.G. Lee, reveals an ongoing development from the traditional High Church ceremonial towards the medieval and sometimes even contemporary Roman Catholic one. For the illustrations in the second edition are not only the work of a different artist, but also show differences in the details of the apparel of the altar. In the first edition we see an “English” altar with curtains at its east, north, and south end. Although there are also two separately placed candlesticks on the floor next to the altar, the altar itself is only furnished with two candlesticks flanking a cross (without corpus). This arrangement can be interpreted within the High Church tradition. In the second edition, however, this is no longer possible. We see an altar without curtains, with many candlesticks upon it, and a crucifix (with corpus) in the middle. Here the inspiration clearly comes from medieval or modem Roman Catholic examples.

The same assumption we encountered when we saw the Tractarians using the Breviary: the Roman, but especially the Sarum one (see section ‘Their progressive private opinions’ above, pp. 52-56).

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Another issue which reveals the difference in “ethos” between traditional High Church ceremonial and maturing Ritualism is the use of incense. The first edition of the Directorium referred to examples given by the Hierurgia in order to supply “proof’ that the use of incense was not alien to post-Reformation Anglicans. The Hierurgia, indeed, referred to incense. The allusions, however, seem not to refer to the activity of “censing” certain objects by the use of a censer, but to the practice of “burning” incense in a pot, in order to “perfume” the building. This was practised, for instance, by such Caroline Divines as Andrewes in his private chapel, and Cosin in Peterhouse Chapel, Cambridge. And this is exactly what the first edition of the Directorium recommended:

“It is a symbolical and cleanly custom to perfume churches with incense previous to Divine Service ... It seems most primitive, where incense is used, to bum it before the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. ”

In the second edition, however, not only the former phrase was altered into,

“It is a symbolical and Catholic custom to use incense during Divine Service ,

but also the way of doing this was minutely explained, for the several censings during the Eucharist as well as for the censing of the altar during the Magnificat in Even-69

song.

Hierurgia Anglicana, pp. 180-184.

John Purchas (ed.), Directorium Anglicanum: Being a Manual of Directions for the Right Celebration of the Holy Communion, for the Saying of Matins and Evensong, and for the Performance of Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church, According to Ancient Uses of the Church of England, London: Joseph Masters, 1858, pp. 10-11. Here the word ‘primitive’ is used as a reference to the Early Church and therefore as a recommendation.

Frederick George Lee (ed.). The Directorium Anglicanum: Being a Manual of Directions for the Right Celebration of the Holy Communion, for the Saying of Matins and Evensong, and for the Performance of Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church, According to Ancient Uses of the Church of England, Second edition, revised, London: Thomas Bosworth, 1865, p. 12.

Lee, The Directorium Anglicanum, pp. 73-75, 143-144. The first edition had a reference to the censing of the altar during the Magnificat, but not in the elaborate way in which the second edition had it; cf. Purchas, Directorium Anglicanum, p. 117.

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Conclusion

These examples regarding the altar arrangement and the use of incense make clear that maturing Ritualism emancipated itself from its beginnings within Tractarian limits. It became a movement in its own right, although theologically it was based on Tractarian thought. In its attempt to “illustrate” this theology by enriching Anglican worship beyond the boundaries of traditional Anglican High Churchmanship, Ritualism followed its own course. This course had its exaggerations, which worked against itself. Nevertheless, Ritualism succeeded in spreading “Catholic” doctrine by ways of “Catholic” worship throughout the Anglican Communion.

It is clear that the movement called “Ritualism” as a whole cannot be discarded as “superficial”. The aim of “popularising” theological ideas by means of ceremonial and architecture is a different way of being concerned about the same theological ideas rather than just a preoccupation with niceties. Moreover, the roots of Ritualism lay with the Tractarians themselves, as became clear in the course of this essay. Therefore, — without denying the different “ethos” of Ritualism, and the different approach of liturgy it has brought forth, — a sharp distinction between profound theological aims of the Oxford Movement and alleged concern about mere externals within the Ritualist Movement, would be a forced antithesis.

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A typical chancel of fully developed English Gothic architecture, showing the arrangement which the Prayer Book rubrics were designed to continue. From a drawing by A. Stratton and G. Lucas (1906).

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Catholic and Liberal

For the Church of England, the second half of the nineteenth century was not only the period of maturing Ritualism. It was also the time in which the Church had to come to terms with challenging changes in scientific knowledge. Particularly the implications which modem science might have for the historicity of the Bible became an ecclesiastical battle-field. Some were prepared to integrate new knowledge into their theological thought, others firmly resisted this influence. These disagreements existed not only between the various kinds of Churchmanship, but also within the “parties” themselves. The “Catholicquot; wing of the Church of England was no exception to this rule. As soon as critical principles were accepted by some and rejected by others, the question of “modernityquot; became a dividing force within Anglican Catholicism. In this essay, attention will be drawn to some characteristics of “Liberal Catholicismquot; at different moments of its existence.

A changing climate

“Essays and Reviews ”

The collection entitled Essays and Reviews ( 1860) is generally seen as the first widely influential British publication in which the outcomes of modem scientiflc and literary research were applied to Christianity in a positive way. The contributors to this volume considered the incorporation of modem knowledge into Christian thought to be a liberation from the predominant orthodox “terrorism ”, to use an expression of one of them, Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893). '

“New knowledge will of itself do no harm; on the contrary, ‘he is guilty of high treason against the faith, who fears the result of any investigation, whether philosophical, or scientific, of historical’quot;.

as another, Frederick Temple, put it.

' Benjamin Jowett to A.P. Stanley, quoted from: Bernard M.G. Reardon, From Coleridge to Gore: A Century of Religious Thought in Britain, London: Longman Group, 1971, p. 322.

■ Quoted from: Reardon, From Coleridge to Gore, p. 323.

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Conclusions drawn from biblical criticism, such as the non-Mosaic authorship of the five “Books of Moses”, a non-Christian interpretation of Isaiah’s “Servant” passages, the non-historicity of the book of Daniel, and the non-Pauline authorship of the letter to the Hebrews were, although familiar to the modem reader, new and therefore disturbing to the readers of Essays and Reviews. Another new idea was the methodological division between the two areas of the physical and the spiritual. Baden Powell advocated this distinction in his contribution to Essays and Reviews. The claim of the new scientific knowledge has to be acknowledged, but on the other hand,

“while it asserts the dominion of science in physical things, [it] confirms that of faith in spiritual”.

By making this distinction, Powell meant to secure a religious area of its own. Many of his contemporaries, however, interpreted his theory as sacrificing the traditional claim of religious truth. Other themes of Essays and Reviews included Henry Bristow Wilson’s quest for dogmatic freedom in a comprehensive Church of England, and Mark Pattison’s plea for critical historical research instead of treating history in a party spirit. ®

The most important essay is generally regarded to be the piece by Jowett called “On the Interpretation of Scripture”. Jowett advocated an exegesis e mente auctoris. The exegete has to be careful not to use “standards of a later age ”, but only standards contemporary with the text.

“Critical procedures must be employed to establish points of date and authorship, and figurative language be taken for what it is and not as if it were that of logical statement. ”

The underlying principle was a different approach to the concept of Scripture’s divine inspiration. It could no longer be considered in a mechanical way. “What inspiration really connotes can be discovered only within the Bible itself”. ¹

’ Reardon, From Coleridge to Gore, p. 325.

'* Quoted from: Reardon, From Coleridge to Gore, p. 326.

5 Reardon, From Coleridge to Gore, p. 327.

Reardon, From Coleridge to Gore, pp. 327-331.

Reardon, From Coleridge to Gore, p. 337.

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¹

Reardon, From Coleridge to Gore, pp. 338-339.

High, Low, and Broad: the response to “Essays and Reviews”

The High Church reaction to Essays and Reviews was devastating. Bishop Wilberforce took the lead in attacking the volume in newspaper articles. He also wrote an open letter in which he and twenty-three other bishops declared their faith in (the traditional understanding of) the divine inspiration of Scripture and some other points allegedly denied by Essays and Reviews. ’ Pusey and Keble supported the judicial prosecution of some of the essayists. Moreover, Pusey found himself in the same camp with Evangelicals — “We shall have the Low Church with us now” — a circumstance of which he made use in a rather opportunistic way. As much as the Puseyite party had to fear from the Evangelicals in lawsuits regarding High Church doctrine or ritual, so much they tried to act corporately now, as far as “matters [such] as Inspiration and the Doctrine of Everlasting Punishmentquot; were concerned. ‘° Liddon, who had been a guest preacher in Westminster Abbey for years, terminated his preaching in the Abbey in 1863, because the new Dean of Westminster, A.P. Stanley, had invited preachers from all shades of Anglicanism, including some of the contributors to Essays and Reviews. For the same reason, Pusey and Keble likewise declined Stanley’s offer to preach in the Abbey. quot;

Remarkably, Newman — as a Roman Catholic — was able to be much more positive about the essayists’ attitude towards Scripture. “Essays and Reviews was, for him, a judgement on the bibliolatry of popular religion in England. ” Even “High Churchmen had descended to an astonishing literalism like most others in the 1850’s, as Newman implied”. When Newman was expected to condemn Essays and Reviews, he was not prepared to do so. In his own words, “All these German theories will come before us and have to be answered. ”

Thus far, Anglican High Churchmen were at one in their remonstrance against the influence of modem knowledge on Bible or Creed. In this respect they were at one with

’ Liddon, Life of Pusey, vol. IV, pp. 38-43; Ieuan Ellis, Seven Against Christ: A Study of ‘Essays and Reviews’ (Studies in the History of Christian Thought 23), Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1980, pp. 106-112.

’° Liddon, Life of Pusey, vol. IV, pp. 44-52 (quotations: pp. 46, 50).

quot; Johnston, Life of Liddon, pp. 71-73. The non-Tractarian, traditional High Churchman, J.W. Burgon, also attacked biblical criticism in his usual, emphatic way; cf. Cross, The Oxford Dictionary, s.v. ‘Burgon’.

Ellis, Seven Against Christ, pp. 141, 149.

Quoted from: Ellis, Seven Against Christ, p. 141.

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the Evangelicals as well, who gradually had come to be identified as “Low Churchmen”. In 1853, W.J. Conybeare published an article on “Church Parties” in The Edinburgh Review. He mentions as one of the features of a more extreme Evangelicalism their

“dogma of ‘Verbal Inspiration The Bible is regarded, not as a collection of books written by men under Divine guidance, but as a single book, dictated in every word and letter by God himself”,

with the consequence that every

“fact of history, geology, or astronomy, however unconnected with religion, must be literally and infallibly accurate *'*

If there has ever been clear meaning of the term “Broad Church”, it must have been in these years. Although the term was used previously by A.H. Clough and A.P. Stanley, it was Conybeare who coined the phrase in his article in The Edinburgh Review. Generally, the epithet “Broad Churchman” is considered to apply to someone who was neither High nor Low, but in these years it had a more positive content, for in this short period Broad Churchmen were the only Anglicans who accepted (some of) the theological implications of science and criticism. According to Conybeare,

“the Broad Church are, to the middle of the nineteenth century, what the Low Church were to its beginning, — the originators of ecclesiastical reform, and the pioneers of moral progress. ... There are in the present day, clergymen who have richly contributed to Classical Philology, to the Mathematical Sciences, to the Physical Sciences, to Secular History, to

*'* [W.J. Conybeare,] ‘Church Parties’, in: Tlie Edinburgh Review 200 (October 1853), pp. 273-342 (esp. pp. 274, 287).

Ellis, Seven Against Christ, pp. 2-3.

Alec R. Vidler, The Church in an Age of Revolution: 1789 to the Present Day (The Pelican History of the Church 5), Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961, p. 129; cf. Conybeare, ‘Church Parties’, p. 334: Broad Churchmen ‘have so little organisation or mutual concert of any kind, that they can scarcely be called a party at all’. Conybeare knows the reason: ‘It is always easier to keep together a body of partisans on a narrow than on a comprehensive basis.’ Interestingly, Conybeare uses the term ‘Catholic party’ as a synonym for the ‘Broad Church party’, obviously because of its comprehensive character (pp. 330, 334, and esp. 335). It should be mentioned that this emphasis on Broad Church ‘vagueness’ does not do justice to the specifically Broad Church ecclesiology which saw the Church of England as the comprehensive national Church, in which all Trinitarian baptized had to be able to find a place for themselves.

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Poetry, and to general literature. But all, with hardly a single exception, are Broad Churchmen. ”

The second half of the nineteenth century saw a strengthening of party spirit, embodied in party organisations and nurtured in theological colleges. Paradoxically, the “unholy alliance” between Pusey and the Evangelical Lord Shaftesbury was at the same time the beginning of more fluidity in party boundaries. In the next chapter we will see that the acceptance of modernity by some within a party and its denial by others within the same party, was to exacerbate this situation. Here we encounter an anticipation of a later twentieth century situation in which differences of opinion over some issues alienate people who find themselves together over other issues. The issue of (non-) acceptance of the implications of science and criticism for one’s interpretation of biblical texts, for one’s Creed, and for one’s ethics, is at the heart of this twentieth century party unsettlement.

A change within Oxford theology

In the years following the publication of Essays and Reviews there was not yet much party unsettlement. The predominantly “Orthodox” theological education at Oxford was little, if at all, influenced by modern exegesis. The theological school, only dating from 1870, was powerfully controlled by Pusey and others of traditional opinion. In the 1870s biblical criticism first entered the examination papers under the heading of “Apologetica”: students had to refute, not to explain, the critical approach. Only in the 1880s did the climate begin to change. The examination papers allowed the students to discuss outcomes of biblical criticism, such as the idea that the fourth gospel and the Apocalypse were written by different authors, and the questioning of the Pauline authorship of some of the epistles. Another ten years later the examination papers showed a more or less complete acceptance of the historical critical method.

Peter Hinchliff suggests

“that one of the most important factors in the change that had taken place in Oxford was the death of Pusey himself in the autumn of 1882 “once he had gone, it was almost as if, with a sigh of relief, even those who had re-

Conybeare, ‘Church Parties’, p. 334. It has to be borne in mind, however, that ‘Conybeare himself was liberally minded’; Ellis, Seven Against Christ, p. 244.

Vidler, The Church in an Age of Revolution, p. 128.

” Peter Hinchliff, God and History: Aspects of British Theology 1875-1914, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992, pp. 100-104; Ellis, Seven Against Christ, pp. 231-232.

El

garded him as their mentor and hero began to relax some of the rigid positions that he had imposed upon them

One of the few exceptions to this rule was Pusey’s most devoted disciple. The day after Pusey’s death, Liddon wrote in his diary, “He Who created and trained Dr. Pusey can train successors, if He willsquot;, — and Liddon himself became Pusey’s successor as guardian of the Tractarian tradition. In the meantime, though, biblical criticism was becoming acceptable within Anglicanism. The Oxford theological examination papers show the gradual increase of respectability gained by the modem approach. Liddon could not turn the tide. quot;

Hinchliff, God and History, p. 104.

Johnston, Life of Liddon, p. 277.

Hinchliff God and History, pp. 105-107. One of the reasons for the gradual acceptance of biblical criticism throughout the Church of England was the emergence of the phenomenon of professional' theologians whose works were read and respected throughout the Church, e.g. the Cambridge New Testament scholars B.F. Westcott (1825-1901) and F.J.A. Hort (1828-1892). The foundation of the Oxford Honour School of Theology in 1870 signifies that theology as a professional specialization was relatively new in the Church of England.

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Charles Gore and “Lux Mundi”

Introduction

In the previous chapter we saw that the 1880s were a period of increasing acceptance of critical research, not only within Broad Church circles but in the wider Church of England. A famous early example of the acceptance of modem scholarship by High Churchmen was the collection of essays called Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation (1889). Its editor, Charles Gore (1853-1932), stood firmly within the Anglo-Catholic tradition, which is witnessed by the fact that through Lid-don’s influence he had been appointed first Principal of Pusey House, Oxford, in 1883. His taking part in the publication of Lux Mundi, however, questioned his soundness as an Anglo-Catholic. Liddon regretted his choice of Gore as Principal and abandoned “all one’s hopes for the Pusey Housequot;. Moreover, Liddon must have spent his last year — he died in 1890 — in a state of loneliness, apparent from expressions like,

“ ‘Lux Mundi. ’ It shows that I could not depend on the sympathy and support of the young High Churchmen, as I could not in any case have that of the Low and Broad; I should be practically without friends. quot;

What was the problem? Gore and the other contributors to Lux Mundi were the first High Churchmen who publicly acknowledged the fact that modem methods had become accepted, and therefore had to be integrated into theological thought. As Gore put it in his explanatory preface,

“We are sure that Jesus Christ is still and will continue to be the ‘Light of the World. ’ We are sure that if men can rid themselves of prejudices and mistakes (for which, it must be said, the Church is often as responsible as they), and will look afresh at what the Christian faith really means, they will find that it is as adequate as ever to interpret life and knowledge in its several departments, and to impart not less intellectual than moral freedom. ”

Johnston, Life of Liddon, p. 367.

Johnston, Life of Liddon, p. 377.

C. G[ore], ‘Preface’, in: Charles Gore (ed. ), Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation, London: John Murray, 1889, pp. vii-x (quotation: p. vii).

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This meaning cannot be discovered without “disencumbering, reinterpreting, explaining” the faith. So far, the aim of the Lux Mundi group does not differ from the average Broad Church point of view. But Gore adds,

“We have written then in this volume not as ‘guessers at truth,’ but as servants of the Catholic Creed and Church, aiming only at interpreting the faith we have received. ”

As we try to focus on the theme of continuity and discontinuity, it will be of central interest to observe how Lux Mundi and the other publications which are to be mentioned below relate their acceptance of critical methods to their place within Anglican Catholicism.

Gore ’s concept of “Liberal Catholicism ”

For Gore, the possibility of combining critical methods and the Catholic faith was exemplified in his concept of “Liberal Catholicism”. It is worthwhile considering how Gore’s original use of this phrase is related to today’s use of the term. Nowadays, the phrase “liberal catholic” seems to serve as one of those epithets with which Anglicans are able to describe their position within Anglicanism. Used in this way, the phrase indicates someone who considers herself to be at the “Catholic” — commonly called “High Church” — side of the Anglican spectrum, but who allows herself to use her private judgement to a greater extent than is true of more conservative representatives. A “liberal catholic” is supposed to be less “strict” than others on the “Catholic” side, be it in dogma, in liturgy, or — probably most frequently — in morals.

Gore’s use of the term “Liberal Catholicism” differs from the present use not so much in essence as in definition. The essence of both the present-day use and Gore’s use is exactly the application of one’s own private judgement to the bulk of dogma, liturgy, and morals which goes with the concept of Catholicism. The difference is, that Gore had his particular way of defining the word “liberal”, as we shall see now.

Gore, ‘Preface’, p. viii.

The relation between the authority of one’s own private judgement (in the history of theology mainly a Protestant phenomenon) and the authority of the Church (traditionally emphasized by Catholic theology), is one of the paradoxes of Anglo-Catholicism. Cf. Paul Avis, Gore: Construction and Conflict: Published to mark the Centenary of the appearance of LUX MUNDI, Worthing: Churchman Publishing, 1988, pp. 27-31; Pickering, Anglo-Catholicism, pp. 148-156.

It is important to add that Gore and some present-day ‘liberal catholics’ differ in the degree of their ‘liberalism’ (i.e., their actual dogmatic, liturgical, and moral positions). What is at issue here is the method, not the actual position.

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In order to discover Gore’s definition of the word “liberal”, we have to consider its function within Gore’s concept of “Liberal Catholicism”. With this phrase he meant nothing else than Anglicanism. In Gore’s view, Anglicanism is Catholicism without

“the constant tendency to exaggerate ecclesiastical authority and to accumulate dogma ”,

which has taken place in the Roman Catholic Church.

Therefore, the word “Liberal” in Gore's concept of “Liberal Catholicism” can be translated as “free”; free from the papal claims of doctrinal authority. Gore did not hesitate to describe Anglicanism as “Catholicism without Romequot;. ’’

As Anglicanism is sometimes interpreted as a “threefold cord” of tradition. Scripture, and reason. Gore’s word “Catholicism” referred to the traditional, and his word “Liberal” to both the scriptural and the rational aspects. Scripture and reason formed a safeguard against an uncontrolled development of tradition. In most of Gore’s own definitions of the phrase “Liberal Catholicism”, he used “liberal” and “scriptural” as synonyms. But for Gore, the “scriptural” aspect of Anglicanism implied its “rational” aspect, because he tried to read Scripture in a critical way. In Gore’s thought, therefore, the components of the “threefold cord” mutually affected each other. Gore could say that Scripture had to be interpreted within the Catholic tradition of the Church, but he also was one of the first Anglican Catholics who allowed Scripture to be treated according to modem critical standards.

James Carpenter, Gore: A Study in Liberal Catholic Thought, London: The Faith Press, 1960, p. 43-44.

” Quoted from: Carpenter, Gore, p. 56.

” Avis, Gore, p. 33.

Carpenter, Gore, pp. 42-44; Avis, Gore, pp. 22, 32.

’’ Avis, Gore, pp. 22-23, 39. On most of his opinions, Gore never changed his mind after the Lux Mundi period. As a result, he was considered a rebel in his younger, and a reactionary in his older years.

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The question of authority

At the heart of the new approach of Lux Mundi and of the controversy it caused, was the question of authority. This was at the centre of what has been called “the Victorian crisis of faith”. The “Victorian quest for certitude” conflicted with the “historical revolution” which made every appeal for certitude impossible. Certitude was not only desired by traditional believers, but also by modem Churchmen, and by atheists who had scientifically “discovered” that their rejection of religion was “true”. The historical revolution relativised these positions, and made any claim of an eternal “truth”, whether religious or not, untenable.

Gore’s way of dealing with the problem of authority has often been criticised for its inconsistency.

“Gore had come to be convinced of the truth of a great many things ... Because he was convinced that they were all true, he must affirm them all even if... he could not reconcile them. ”

Among the things Gore thought to be true, some came from tradition, some from Scripture, and some from his appeal to reason — to refer again to the Anglican “threefold cord”. As a result, some of his theological and practical standpoints were arbitrary in the eyes of his contemporaries, mainly because Gore was not very “liberal” in maintaining his points of view.

Firstly, the most obvious example of Gore’s adherence to the authority of tradition was his view of Church order. Gore never abandoned the Tractarian position with its emphasis on apostolic succession as a conditio sine qua non of ecclesiastical communion. Later in his life, as a bishop. Gore proved to be relentless at this point (as at other points). Secondly, Gore claimed to maintain the superiority of Scripture. As we have seen. Gore’s concept of “Liberal Catholicism” implied an appeal to the authority of Scripture in order to control the authority of tradition. Thirdly, his appeal to reason — in the form of critical exegesis — refined his appeal to Scripture.

On the subject of authority, therefore. Gore’s line of thought started with the authority of the Church. This was criticised by the appeal to Scripture, which in its turn was criticised by reason. Therefore, it seems not inappropriate to say that Gore started with

Avis, Gore, pp. 39-43.

Hinchliff, God and History, pp. 119-120.

“ Cf. Avis, Gore, pp. 109-112.

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tradition and ended up with reason. There was a safeguard, however, whieh protected Gore from abandoning the tradition from which he started. This safeguard was his a priori conviction that, in the end, the outcomes of his critical reading of Scripture would not contradict the ancient Creeds of the Church. This a priori conviction made an hermeneutical circle out of what otherwise had been an uncircular procedure from tradition to modem rationality.

It can be disputed whether such an a priori safeguard has to be condemned on the ground of inconsistency. Peter Hinchliff does so, describing Lux Mundi's, method as

“arriving at an orthodox conclusion merely by [methodological] accident... Once one admits the principles of free critical enquiry, it is illogical to lay down in advance any requirement that its conclusions shall not conflict with orthodoxy. ”

But perhaps Gore’s method can be approached differently, even without denying an amount of inconsistency within his thought. I have tried to indicate such a different approach by borrowing the term “hermeneutical circle”. The acceptance of the rationality of historical criticism does not automatically imply the rejection of the rationality of the mind of the Church throughout the ages, as embodied in Scripture and tradition. The mutual dependence of the three aspects of the Anglican “threefold cord” can be explained quite rationally as commitment to a group of texts which are constituent for one’s cultural background, commitment to the living experience of both history and presence of the inner group in which one lives, and commitment to the wider culture of which this inner group is a part. The outcome of the mutual influence between these various commitments will be different from person to person and from time to time, but can be adjusted by a communal sharing and correcting of each other’s ideas. Charles Gore was just one person who tried to live up to his commitments. Perhaps his weakest point was that he did not live just at one time, but during several “times”, without changing the outcome of the mutual influence of his commitments.

’’ Hinchliff, God and History, pp. 121, 120. Concerning the word ‘illogical’, it has to be said that there will always remain something ‘illogical’ in surrendering oneself to faith, especially when it is not a strictly personal faith, but faith as it can be shared within a community of believers.

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Examples from “Lux Mundi” to the present

Introduction

As these lines are written, hundreds of bishops of the Anglican Communion are gathered for the 1998 Lambeth Conference. They have been engaged in heated debates on the (non) acceptance of homosexuality in their Churches, while they are also supposed to discuss the problem of Third World debt. Whereas the latter is an example of the social issues of which Anglicans are very much aware since the nineteenth century, the former is an example of — in this case moral — diversity caused by the acceptance of a critical approach to tradition by some, and the non-acceptance of it by others.

As far as the “Catholic” wing within Anglicanism is concerned. Lux Mundi was the first instance of an open attitude towards modem criticism. The controversy which followed is still continuing, both within and outside Anglo-Catholicism. Therefore, it seems appropriate not to confine our examples of “Liberal Catholicism” to the period of Lux Mundi, but to trace a line from then to the present time. This is not to say that the actual positions of “Liberal Catholics” were all the same throughout the twentieth century. But perhaps we can detect a common approach to Scripture and the Catholic tradition in their relationship to modernity.

For an overview of the Anglo-Catholic contribution to Anglican awareness of social issues, both in England and elsewhere, see Hylson-Smith, High Churchmanship, pp. 205-236, 277-286.

’’ This is clear when we hear the Bishop of Enugu (Nigeria) shouting that ‘God forbids’ the behaviour of homosexuals, and that ‘they go to hell’ (television news 5/8/1998). According to the Lambeth Conference, homosexual practice is ‘incompatible with Scripture’, and according to the Bishop of Mityana (Uganda) ‘the Bible and the apostolic tradition have authority through all our church’ (The Times 6/8/1998, pp. 1, 2, 19). This reasoning is obviously based either on sola Scriptura or on ‘Bible and tradition’, but without the recognition of the necessity of interpreting both Bible and tradition.

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“Lux Mundi” (1889)

As an example from Lux Mundi we take Charles Gore’s essay “The Holy Spirit and Inspiration”. It was this essay that evoked most of the reactions, probably for three reasons. First, the essay addressed one of the most controversial issues of the time, the impact of biblical criticism for the traditional faith. Second, it was written by someone who was considered as an avowed Anglo-Catholic, the Principal of Pusey House. Third, this essay was the contribution of the editor of the volume. We already saw how the publication of Lux Mundi, and particularly Gore’s contribution to it, shocked Anglo-Catholics of a more conservative persuasion.

Gore’s approach to the problem of biblical criticism was to relativise its problematic character. Modem exegesis had questioned the traditional view of the Bible as more or less literally inspired by the Holy Spirit, but Gore started his article relativising the traditional view of inspiration, and therefore automatically relativising the problems posed by biblical criticism. Gore reached this goal by integrating the inspiration of Scripture into the wider context of inspiration in general, particularly in the Church.

Therefore, his essay started with considerations about the Holy Spirit. Because the Spirit guides the Church, Christians are able to “experience” the Spirit, not primarily in an enthusiastic way, but because the Spirit has changed their life by the very fact that they are members of the Church. And not only in the Church, in creation at large the Spirit is at work. This is especially true of every human being.

“In humanity, made after the Divine Image, it was the original intention of God that the Spirit should find His chiefest joy”.

But this intention was not fulfilled. Most people rejected the ideal of “conscious fellowship with God”. “It is here that the Divine Spirit has found His chiefest disappointment. ” Only in a very limited group of “elect” was the Spirit able to uphold the ideal of humanity, until in Jesus it found its “perfect realisation”. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection were wrought by the Spirit. Since Pentecost, the Church is not the only but the “special and covenantedquot; place where the Spirit continues his “work of human recovery”.

Charles Gore, ‘The Holy Spirit and Inspiration’, in: Charles Gore (ed.), Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation, London: John Murray, 1889, pp. 313-362. Cf. John Muddiman, ‘The Holy Spirit and Inspiration’, in: Robert Morgan (ed.). The Religion of the Incarnation: Anglican Essays in Commemoration of Lux Mundi, Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1989, pp. 119-135 (esp. 119-126).

Gore, ‘The Holy Spirit and Inspiration’, pp. 315-322.

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After thus having sketched a very broad picture of the Spirit’s activity, Gore concentrated on some more systematic aspects of the Spirit’s work in the Church. Gore started with the genuinely “Catholic” observation that the Spirit quot;treats man as a ‘social being’”. The Spirit performs his “work of human recovery” by means of sacraments, that is, by means of “incorporation” and “sharing”. The apostolical succession functions as a “bond of association” within the society of believers, because this society lacks “natural links of race or language of common habitation”.

Paradoxically, at the same time “the Spirit nourishes individuality”. We already saw that in Gore’s thought, and in Anglo-Catholicism in general, commitment to the Catholic Church with its tradition and authority conflicted with the acceptance of private judgement. We also saw that, for Gore, private judgement primarily consisted in the possibility of balancing tradition by the (critical) use of Scripture. This is what made up his conception of “Liberal Catholicism”. And this is exactly why Gore introduced the nourishing of individuality as the second characteristic of the work of the Holy Spirit. In Gore’s words,

“The individual illumination is thus to react as a purifying force upon the common mind of the Christian society. ”

And, as it were to complete his picture of “Liberal Catholicism”, Gore concludes by saying that the Roman Catholic Church is wrong in forbidding free inquiry.

A third characteristic of the Spirit’s work is that he “consecrates the whole of nature”. That is, the whole creation “is in its essence very good”. Human sin has not annihilated this essential goodness. Therefore, the Church has condemned the dualistic opinions of Gnostics and Montanists. Gore not only used this as an argument for the visibility of the Church and its sacraments, but also in order to make sure that

“the fullest action of the Spirit, in the case of her inspired men, intensified and did not supersede their own thought, judgement, and individuality”.

By stating this. Gore secured human influence upon Scripture, without denying that the Spirit was at work in its authors.

As a last characteristic of the work of the Spirit in the Church, Gore mentioned its “gradualness”. There is a gradual progression from the Old Testament to the New,

Gore, ‘The Holy Spirit and Inspiration’, pp. 322-323.

Gore, ‘The Holy Spirit and Inspiration’, pp. 323-327.

Gore, ‘The Holy Spirit and Inspiration’, pp. 327-328.

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and within the Church there is still a process going on from imperfection to perfection. The Church is not perfect, and must not try to make itself perfect, because

“it is the Spirit’s purpose to provide a home for the training and improvement of the imperfect”.

With regard to Gore’s later episcopal strictness it is interesting to read that he tells the Church to be “tolerant”. “She is the mother, not the magistrate.” As we shall see, Gore needed this argument of gradualness in order to be able to accept a considerable amount of Old Testament criticism, but at the same time to reject a too critical approach towards the New Testament.

So, when Gore reached the point at which he started his considerations about biblical inspiration, he had already sketched the context in which the inspiration of the Bible had to be understood. Namely, first of all, not in an isolated way. We cannot make sense of the Bible as if it had just been “unearthed in some way by antiquaries out of the Syrian sand”. To understand it, we need “presuppositions”. It is the Church which provides this “frame of mind”.

“It is, we may perhaps say, becoming more and more difficult to believe in the Bible without believing in the Church. ” The biblical writings “presuppose ... familiarity with its tradition. They are secondary, not primary, instructors; for edification, not for initiation. ”

To illustrate this. Gore referred to the fact that the biblical canon is fixed by the Church, not by the biblical books themselves.

“Thus the [Early] Church taught and the Scripture tested and verified or corrected her teaching

Gore thus made sure that the faith of the Church is not based on Scripture or its infallibility; Scripture rather confirms or corrects the faith of the Church. The basis of faith is the Spirit himself, who worked in a broad context, including the scriptural authors and the living Church.

Nevertheless, there is something called the inspiration of Scripture. But it is not a general notion. Especially in the Old Testament, different genres of writing have their own “degrees of inspiration”. This has to do with Gore’s third characteristic of the work of the Spirit: “the supernatural fertilises and does not annihilate the natural”

“*5 Gore, ‘The Holy Spirit and Inspiration’, pp. 328-332.

Gore, ‘The Holy Spirit and Inspiration’, pp. 337-341.

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— the natural in this case being the various styles of human literature, Including the literature of the various religions. According to Gore, divine inspiration is to be found in those instances where Scripture deviates from general trends. Concerning the creation narrative in Genesis, for example. Gore admitted that it shows similarities to “the Babylonian and Phoenician cosmogoniesquot;. Therefore, for the specific inspiration one has to focus on those aspects of Genesis which deviate from the other cosmogonies.

“The narrative of Genesis has all the fullest wealth of human interest, but it is in the unveiling of the hand of God that its special characteristic lies. ’’

Gore’s method is to admit the human and general character of a large part of the Bible, but to look for its inspiration to those aspects in which the Bible is not general and not simply reflecting human interests.

When one has thus discovered the particularity of divine inspiration in, for example, Genesis, the next step in Gore’s argument is that this applies to all books of the Old Testament. Together they form “an organic whole which postulates a climax not yet reached”, for it is reached in Christ. As well as the Old Testament, the New appears to be inspired because it forms an “organic wholequot;: the different authors vary in their presentation of Christ, but their different messages confirm each other. Therefore, it seems that for Gore the main argument for biblical inspiration is the inner coherence of the biblical narrative, which is, for Gore, synonymous with its gradual development. Both Gore’s trust in the idea that in the end the biblical texts do not contradict each other, and his dependence on a developmental philosophy, weaken his argument in the light of twentieth century biblical and philosophical theology.

We saw that the fact that the “degrees of inspiration” vary from author to author, is exceeded by the fact that the totality of the Bible forms an inspired climax in itself. The practical result of this, is that we “are to put ourselves to school with each in turn of the inspired writers”, in order not to receive a partial impression of biblical teaching.

“We should set ourselves to study what we like less, till that too has had its proper ejfect in moulding our conscience and character. ”

Gore, ‘The Holy Spirit and Inspiration’, pp. 341-348. From this section onwards, Liddon disapproved of Gore’s essay; cf. Johnston, Life of Liddon, p. 363. Newsome, Two Classes of Men, p. 88, describes the unworried, peaceful, and leisurely atmosphere in which Lux Mundi was written, and which contributed to its immanentism and historical optimism. ‘In short, these were not the times, and this was not the world, of a theology of the Cross. When nature appears to be on our side, then God appears to work through men ... In such a way does history shape theology.’

Gore, ‘The Holy Spirit and Inspiration’, pp. 348-351.

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Gore now proceeded to the point of concretely admitting some of the outcomes of biblical criticism. Because the divine inspiration of any Old Testament writer mainly consists “in this, that he sees the hand of God in the history and interprets His purpose ”, there is no reason to fear the criticism of all kind of details in the narrative, especially with regard to historical facts. On the other hand, it is not very probable that the narrative is without any historical basis.

Gore’s relatively relaxed attitude towards the Old Testament changed as soon as the New Testament came under consideration. The

“Old Testament is the record of how God produced a need, or anticipation, or ideal, while the New Testament records how in fact He satisfied it. The absolute coincidence of idea and fact is vital in the realisation, not in the preparation for it. ”

This distinction between Old and New Testament with regard to biblical criticism is often discarded as inconsistent, and it is hard indeed to see it differently. Gore’s reason for suffering this inconsistency lies in his a priori belief that the articles of the Creed had to be historical facts and had to be confirmed by the scriptural records. Both theses could be criticised, but Gore held them to be essential throughout his life. ’°

Gore finished his essay by stating that the Church has never “committed herself to any dogmatic definitions of the meaning of inspiration”. Therefore, the Church has no reason to oppose modem criticism. In the meantime. Gore thought that the most ardent examples of exaggerated criticism already belonged to the past, and that a more careful way of criticism was beginning to prevail amongst scholars. It was in this concluding paragraph, that Gore introduced “kenotic Christology” into Anglican theology. Merely as a footnote. Gore added that Jesus’ pre-critical use of the Old Testament was no reason for condemning criticism. The incarnation implied that Jesus was confined to the standards of knowledge of his time. A real incarnation could not have implied that Jesus retained his divine “prerogatives” such as omniscience. Lid-don was shocked, and said that Jesus could not have been God if he had been stripped of his divine attributes. But Gore was to work out this theory in his later writings, which were to contribute much to the centrality of the incarnation in Anglican theology in the first half of the twentieth century.

Gore, ‘The Holy Spirit and Inspiration’, pp. 351-353, 355-357.

5“ Gore, ‘The Holy Spirit and Inspiration’, p. 354.

Gore, ‘The Holy Spirit and Inspiration’, pp. 357-362. Cf. Arthur Michael Ramsey, From Gore to Temple: The Development of Anglican Theology between Lux Mundi and the Second World

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Gore’s essay in Lux Mundi contains a methodological peculiarity which has to be mentioned. On the one hand, Gore seems to withdraw himself more or less from the authority of Scripture to the authority of the Church. His long introduction seems to point in this direction, because it places the inspiration of Scripture in the wider context of the inspiration of the Church. Jowett seems to have read Lux Mundi in this way, for he wrote about it,

“They feel that as the Bible is seen more and more to be like other books, the greater the need of the Church, an aspect of the question which is not wholly displeasing to them. ’’

Moreover, Gore’s article has a stylistic mark which seems to sustain the impression that he moves from Scripture to the Church: the article is interspersed with references to “Catholic” doctrine and with quotations from the Fathers, and therefore it makes a fairly “High Church” impression. This must have been the reason for Jowett’s comment,

‘7 have read a considerable portion of Lux Mundi, but am a good deal disappointed in it. It has a more friendly and Christian tone than High Church theology used to have, but it is the same old haze or maze — no nearer approach of religion either to morality or to historical truth. ”

Nonetheless, this impression is wrong as far as Gore’s contribution is concerned. Gore does not exchange the authority of Scripture for the authority of the Church. The wider context in which Gore places the phenomenon of biblical inspiration is not primarily the Church as such, but the work of the Spirit in the world. The first part of his essay does not aim to establish the authority of the Spirit’s work in the Church at the cost of the authority of the Spirit’s guidance of the biblical writers, but it places the latter authority in the wider sphere of the Spirit’s work in general. Gore’s aim is not to annihilate the inspiration of the biblical writers, but to relativise the nature of this inspiration: to make it more “normal” and less “extraordinary” in view of the rest of the Spirit’s inspiratory work.

In this essay. Gore is not primarily concerned about anything else than the Bible. Certainly, there are passages in which Gore says that Scripture has to be read inside

War 1S89-1939 (The Hale Memorial Lectures of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, 1959), London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1960, pp. 5-8, 13-14, 30-43.

Quoted from: Ellis, Seven Against Christ, p. 263.

Quoted from: Ellis, Seven Against Christ, p. 263.

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the Church, or at least inside a group of believers. But in the meantime the Bible retains its own place, and remains the focus of Gore’s attention. He only relativises its absolute historical infallibility. That this is the case, is clear from Gore’s restricted approach towards the New Testament. In that respect he even scarcely relativises its historical infallibility. To conclude, in this essay Scripture retains a place of its own; it is not exchanged in favour of any other authority. Scripture is only placed in the wider space of human and divine co-operation, so that modem readers are allowed to accept some of the literary or historical problems raised by biblical criticism. But only as long as the historicity of its overall message — foremost: the Christian Creed — is not questioned.

“Essays Catholic and Critical” (1926)

The volume Essays Catholic and Critical marks a next stage in the history of Anglican Liberal Catholicism. It was published in 1926 under the editorship of Edward Gordon Selwyn (1885-1959), Dean of Winchester and since 1920 editor of Theology. In his preface, Selwyn placed Essays Catholic and Critical consciously in the tradition of Lux Mundi. On the other hand he recognised that a change had taken place in the nearly forty years between the publication of the two books. He described the change as both “a keener discernment of the supernatural element m religion” and an “unabated vigourquot; with which the Bible had continued to be treated by “the critical movementquot;. With these words he indicated the paradoxical growth of both the Catholic and the critical movement in Anglicanism. At least in terms of numbers the decade in which Essays Catholic and Critical appeared were the hey-days of Anglo-Catholicism. 5“* What Selwyn indicated was an increasing tension between a strong Anglo-Catholic movement and an equally strong and growing criticism.

“As the title of this volume implies, it is the writers’ belief that these two movements can be and must be brought into synthesis ”.

Continuing the themes of authority, criticism. Scripture, and the Church, we turn to the article “The Authority of the Churchquot; by Wilfred L. Knox. Compared to Gore’s

The Anglo-Catholic Congresses of 1920, 1923, 1927, 1930, and 1933 were attended by increasing numbers of people, from 13,000 in 1920 to 70,000 in 1933; Hylson-Smith, High Churchmanship, pp. 255-260 (esp. 257).

E.G. S[elwyn], ‘Preface to the First Edition’, in: Edward Gordon Selwyn (ed. ), Essays Catholic and Critical by Members of the Anglican Communion, London: SPCK, 1929^ (1926'), pp. xxvii-xxix (quotation: p. xxvii).

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circumspect treatment of the subject, Knox’s essay is much more straightforward. This mere fact is already an illustration of the twofold change noticed by Selwyn. Knox appears to be much less confident in the Bible than Gore was, and Knox relies much more easily on the Church than Gore did. Jowett’s reaction to Lux Mundi -

“They feel that as the Bible is seen more and more to be like other books, the greater the need of the Church, an aspect of the question which is not wholly displeasing to them ”

— is more adequate if applied to Knox’s article than to Gore’s.

Knox opened his essay by giving short shrift to any kind of biblical infallibility. The Early Church had to harmonise Old and New Testament by using “allegorical interpretations often of a rather desperate character’’. The medieval Church had to harmonise Scripture and tradition by claiming “that the Bible must be interpreted in the light of ecclesiastical tradition’’. The Protestant denominations claimed to rely on Scripture alone, but nevertheless developed their different confessions and “the drawing up of such confessions was really an admission of the inadequacy of the Bible ”. It will be clear that we are reading an essay in a style different from Gore’s.

Nevertheless, if one does not completely deny the divine claim of Christianity, one has to admit an amount of divine guidance in the general record of Scripture, that is, in the development which Old and New Testament show from “mythology and folk-lorequot;, through “a severe monotheismquot;, towards “the full and final revelation of God to man in the person of Jesusquot;. The objects of this divine guidance, however, were not only the law-giver, or the prophet, or Jesus, but also those who heard them. Any authority

“must in some way gain the assent of those whom he addresses, if his work is not to be an absolute failure”.

Therefore, the divinely guided process throughout the Old and New Testaments was not only the work of the main biblical figures, — “it is equally true to say that it was the work of the hearersquot;. In other words, the “experiencequot; of the believers played an essential part in the development of religious tradition and doctrine. In the first three centuries, the Church had no means of dividing true developments from false ones.

Wilfred L. Knox, ‘The Authority of the Church’, in: Edward Gordon Selwyn (ed.). Essays Catholic and Critical by Members of the Anglican Communion, London: SPCK, 1929^ (1926'), pp. 98-119. Cf. Ramsey, From Gore to Temple, pp. 75-76, 101-106.

Quoted from: Ellis, Seven Against Christ, p. 263.

Knox, ‘The Authority of the Church’, pp. 98-100.

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other than “the corporate consciousness of the Christian body as a whole ”. And nevertheless, without any other authority than this one, “the Church overcame the gravest perils that ever faced herquot;, that is, Docetism and Gnosticism.

But the corporate religious experience of the Church is a rather vague kind of authority. Therefore, the Church developed its ways of “expressing its corporate voice”. Both Councils and the Papacy exercised this function, which

“usually aimed rather at excluding some particular doctrinal tendency, which was seen to be fatal to the Christian life, than at promulgating a truth not hitherto generally heldquot;.

Whatever the form of this authority, it has to remain an expression of the “corporate voice ” of the Church.

“The extent to which any pronouncement can claim to be authoritative will depend on the extent to which it can really appeal to a wide consensus of Christian experience representing the infinite variety of the types of man who have found salvation in Christ. ”

There is a lack of honesty in the classical way of dealing with traditional ecclesiastical pronouncements which have run out of date, Knox claimed. The classical treatment is, that they were first regarded as pronouncements of Christian truth, but that their status is opportunistically lowered as soon as they

“have been found in practice to be inadequate, or have been shown to be untenable by the advance of human knowledge”.

Knox suggests that it would be “more reasonable ” to refrain from claiming absolute authority just from the beginning. According to Knox, the question of the authority and truth of ecclesiastical pronouncements should be left to the process of their reception rather than proclaimed at the moment of their pronouncement:

“the test of any individual pronouncement, by which it can be judged whether it possesses the inherent quality of truth or not, will be its power to survive and exercise a living influence on the general consciousness of Christendom over a wide area of space and time”.

Knox, ‘The Authority of the Church’, pp. 101-107.

Knox, ‘The Authority of the Church’, pp. 107-111.

Knox, ‘The Authority of the Church’, pp. 111-113.

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Until now, Knox has confirmed the second part of Selwyn’s statement in the preface. Compared to Gore’s essay in Lux Mundi, Knox’s contribution to Essays and Reviews shows a considerable increase of criticism, or even scepticism. In the end, neither Scripture nor the Church retain their authority over the Christian conscience. The only “authority” remaining is the rather vague corporate experience of all Christians. But how about the first part of Selwyn’s statement? Does Knox’s essay reflect Selwyn’s observation that not only criticism, but also Catholicism, was on the increase?

It does, in its last paragraph. For now Knox turned to the practical side of the matter. What has the Christian to believe? Knox admitted that until now his readers were left with uncertainty because of a lack of authority. Until this point in Knox’s essay,

“the Christian will at any given moment be unable to know precisely what he is bound to believe

Therefore, Knox developed a practical way of dealing with authority. He made a distinction between the initial act of faith and the subsequent belief in the doctrines of the Church. The initial act is the personal decision to believe. It is “necessarily an act of private judgement pure and simple ”. As a result, however, one becomes a member of the Church, in which

“a large body of doctrine and ethical teaching ... is set before him with very varying degrees of authorityquot;.

Knox advised the Christian to believe the large body of the Church’s teaching, but not to bother too much about the details. The theologian is allowed to be somewhat more critical, but has to show the same respect towards every aspect of the Church’s teaching, not because of its truth — which is “not a matter of absolute certainty or of primary importance ” — but because it makes up “so venerable a structure ” and because “it has proved fruitful as an aid to the development of the Christian lifequot;.

Knox carried his argument with great consistency. In his thought there is no room for any religious authority other than the general mind of all believers. However, by linking this vague authority to the Church, Knox was able to recommend the Church — not as a bearer of absolute truth, but all the more as a practical guide in the life of the Christian. Critics of Essays Catholic and Critical did not fail to notice this rather rela-

As to the truth, Knox postulated a relative amount of ‘permanent truth’ in every aspect of the Church’s teaching, exactly as in the realm of science, where every older theory may turn out to be not absolutely true, but nevertheless contributes its bit of‘permanent truth’ to every newer theory.

Knox, ‘The Authority of the Church’, pp. 113-116.

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tivist position. In the preface to the third edition, Selwyn affirmed Knox’s position by defining his view of Anglo-Catholic Churchmanship.

“That claim is not that Anglo-Catholicism gives a final and exclusive expression of the truth, but that it represents the best expression at present available, in thought, worship, and life, of the principles necessary to an ultimate synthesis. ”

As Michael Ramsey comments, “These words disclose the difference of the younger Catholic school from the older. ”

“Catholicity” (1947)

In 1945 the first post-war Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, asked representatives of the Catholic wing in the Church of England to write a report on the conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism. The questions which he posed mainly showed his hope that these schools of thought, both existing within Anglicanism, could be synthesised or at least co-exist. The report was published in 1947. It had been written by a group of fourteen Anglo-Catholics, of whom Dorn Gregory Dix (1901-1952), Arthur Michael Ramsey (1904-1988), and Austin Marsden Farrer (1904-1968) were the most prominent. Compared to the Archbishop’s questions, the report widened its scope both historically and thematically. It took the “primitive unity” of the Church as a starting point, and proceeded from the Early Church, through the schism of 1054, to the separation of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Thematically it introduced from the beginning a third school of thought: Liberalism.

As we focus on themes such as authority, biblical criticism, and their relation to Anglo-Catholicism, the separate introduction of the “liberal” tradition is of immediate interest. Although it was the ultimate aim of the report to synthesise the different shades of Christianity, it nevertheless started with a separate presentation of “Orthodox Protestantism”, “The Renaissance and Liberalism”, and “The Post-Tridentine Pa-

E.G. S[elwyn], ‘Preface to the Third Edition’, in; Edward Gordon Selwyn (ed.). Essays Catholic and Critical by Members of the Anglican Communion, London: SPCK, 1929’ (1926’ ), pp. v-xxvi (quotation: pp. vi-vii); Ramsey, From Gore to Temple, p. 106.

E.S. Abbott et.al., Catholicity: A Study in the Conflict of Christian Traditions in the West: Being a Report presented to His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, London: Dacre Press, 1947, pp. 7, 9-10. This way of dealing with Liberalism reflects particularly Ramsey’s interest. The section of Liberalism in Catholicity concurs with Ramsey’s treatment of this subject in Arthur Michael Ramsey, The Gospel and tire Catholic Church, London etc.: Longmans, Green and Co, 1936, pp. 201-202.

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pal Communion”. Surprisingly, the authors seem to have considered themselves as part of “The Post-Tridentine Papal Communion”, because they postulated that this “type” exists inside the Anglican Church, and because they treated not only the Protestant but also the Liberal tradition as different from their own.

The report admitted that the influence of Liberalism quot;has infiltrated far beyond its avowed adherents ”, but it nevertheless treated Liberalism as a separate “factor in the tripartite division of Western Christianity”. For Liberalism is not, as it is often seen, a “‘broad-minded’ and ‘tolerant’... atmosphere of charity in which Christian re-union can come about. The truth is, however, that Liberalism is fiercely intolerant”

Thus, the report introduced “The Renaissance and Liberalism” as a separate school of thought. In the Renaissance era, its main contribution to Christianity was its emphasis on the good of creation, which led to an interest in the truth about humanity, science, and beauty. But if separated from revelation, this emphasis could easily neglect the seriousness of human sin, the judging power of Christ, and the otherness of God and his Kingdom. The same combination of good and bad influences showed itself in the nineteenth century. The critical study of the Bible, an appreciation of its human elements and of its compatibility with modem theories of evolution were of eminent importance for Christianity. The report admitted that these insights “faced bitter opposition from orthodox Christians ” but now “have come to be accepted far and wide ”. Nevertheless, this nineteenth century part of the Liberal tradition also had its dangers. Exegesis which is reductionistic, especially towards the transcendence of God and the Divinity of Christ, overreaches itself and is destructive for Christianity. Not surprisingly, the report praised the moderately critical scholarship of Lightfoot, Westcott, and Hort as the right approach.

Catholicity showed a sign of its post-war character in criticising the influence of Hegelian idealism on Christianity. We saw that Gore was influenced by developmental philosophy, and the authors of Catholicity tried to excuse their Anglo-Catholic forefather by saying that idealism had been useful in order to attack a materialistic world view, and that Lux Mundi had been doing so. But generally Hegel’s philosophy had caused a too narrow identification between God and the process of history. As a result, the human part in history had been insufficiently distinguished from God’s guidance, and the problem of evil had been explained away by making it a necessary part of the historical process. We clearly detect influence from Barthian theology.

Cf. ‘orthodox Protestantism, Liberalism, and post-Tridentine Catholicism. These three types are all represented in the Church of England’; Abbott et.al.. Catholicity, p. 19.

Abbott et.al., Catholicity, pp. 28, 32,

Abbott et.al., Catholicity, pp. 29, 31, 51.

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when the report states that people must not concern themselves with the search for God in the process of history, but with “the fear of the Lord, the everlasting I AM THAT I AM

The influence of Karl Barth (1886-1968) can also be traced in, for instance, the work of Michael Ramsey, who in his book The Gospel and the Catholic Church tried to balance the Anglo-Catholic emphasis on the incarnation by a renewed emphasis on Christ’s passion and resurrection. A result of putting the incarnation in this perspective was a decreasing confidence in the power of historical development and an increasing stress on the provisionality of human existence and on the otherness of God. On the other hand, Ramsey criticised Barth,

“since the Barthian teaching on man’s depravity seems to the Catholic to deny the doctrine of creation, and the Catholic sacramental theory seems to the Barthian to make too great a surrender to ‘natural religion ’. ”

Ramsey clearly tried to balance Christus Consummator and Christus Redemptor, not to emphasise the one at the cost of the other. ™

As far as Scripture is concerned, it can be concluded that the writers of Catholicity seem to feel themselves comfortable with a moderately Liberal approach. But for them, this has to be subsumed under their main approach, the Catholic one. They presuppose the principle of the Bible as a document of the Church. The New Testament is

“canonised rather as an authoritative witness to and standard for the maintenance of ‘Tradition’, than as an independent theological authority”.

Therefore, “to oppose ‘Scripture’ and ‘Tradition’ ... is wholly artificial and arbitrary”. The orthodox Protestant approach is clearly foreign to the mind of the authors. Reformed utterances about the Bible in the 39 Articles “were often affected by the lop-sidedness of post-mediaeval controversies”. Moreover, the appeal to Scripture alone is “a defective model” and “grievously misleading”, because one has

“to appeal also to the Tradition of the primitive Church as the context in which the Bible had its origin and meaning ”.

Abbott et.al., Catholicity, p. 30.

™ Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church, p. 203. It was Edwyn Clement Hoskyns (1884-1937), one of the contributors to Essays Catholic and Critical, who mediated this Barthian influence; cf. Owen Chadwick, Michael Ramsey: A Life, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990, pp. 48-49, 66-67.

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The report’s preference for a combination of the Catholic and the moderately Liberal view can be discerned from the phrase,

“there is a wholeness of Scriptural authority, neither Fundamentalist nor Liberal, which sets Scripture in the context of Tradition ’’

In relation to the Archbishop’s questions, the report might have been more satisfying for “Catholics” than for “Protestants”, as the constitution of its group of authors already suggested. Accordingly, it was not without a certain reservation that Archbishop Fisher introduced the report.’^ As a mark of immediate post-war Anglo-Catholic thought, however, it is very useful. It took for granted the outcomes of moderate biblical criticism, it turned the tide of developmental philosophy and, most of all, it confessed its trust in the ability of the Church (and especially the Anglican Church) to overcome party divisions

“not by a mere piecing together of items from the three schools of thought, but by a single appeal to Scripture, Tradition and sound learning, that goes behind the partisan positions

Therefore, the theology of Catholicity could be labelled as a moderately liberal Catholicism.

“Affirming Catholicism” (1992)

As a last example of Liberal Catholicism we refer to the movement called “Affirming Catholicism ”. It came into existence in 1990. Although it holds conferences, publishes a series of booklets, and edits both a newsletter and a theological periodical. Affirming Catholicism

“has never been and is not intended to be yet another ‘party’ within the Church of England or the Anglican Communion”.

Abbott et.al.. Catholicity, pp. 14-15, 27-28,44, 50.

‘Readers may wish to alter some of its proportions and to dissent from some of its judgements’; the report ‘shows perhaps more of anxiety to avoid wrong methods than of ability to elaborate a right method’; Geoffrey Cantu ar:, ‘Foreword’, in: Abbott et.al., Catholicity, p. 5.

Abbott et.al.. Catholicity, p. 51.

Jeffrey John (ed.). Living Tradition: Affirming Catholicism in the Anglican Church, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1992, p. 135.

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Affirming Catholicism originates from a feeling of unease, as felt by some Anglo-Catholics, with the more or less conservative and inward-looking attitude of some of their fellow Anglo-Catholics. In the 1970s this unease led to the formation of the “Jubilee Group”. It was concerned firstly with

“Catholic orthodoxy and an insistence on the importance of revealed truth. Thus Jubilee has naturally been critical of reductionist trends in the theology of the past decade ”,

although it was likewise displeased with “an uncritical orthodoxyquot;. Secondly, the Jubilee Group was interested in “the development of a theological critique of capitalism What Jubilee wanted to change, was

“the trend in the [Anglican] Catholic movement towards a sickly pietism and a right-wing reactionary stance in social and political issues”.

The period between Jubilee and Affirming Catholicism saw a widening of the gap between “the more extreme liberals and the traditionalists”, both within Anglo-Catholicism. As Hylson-Smith summarises,

“Three topics particularly aroused the emotions of Anglican Catholics, highlighted the tension between the two factions, and made public their discord: the whole debate about homosexuality, the question of the remarriage in church of divorced people, and ... the ... matter of the ordination of women to the priesthood and the episcopate. ”

From the mid-1980s, what was to become “Affirming Catholicismquot; started within the city of London. The then bishop of London, Graham Leonard, was a notorious Anglo-Catholic of the conservative persuasion. ’’ In London,

“There was a siege mentality abroad and the leadership of the Church called upon its members to repel hostile invaders, in the form of demanding

Kenneth Leech amp;nbsp;Rowan Williams, ‘Introduction’, in: Kenneth Leech amp;nbsp;Rowan Williams (eds. ), Essays Catholic and Radical: A Jubilee Group Symposium for the 150th Anniversary of the Beginning of the Oxford Movement 1833-1983, London: Bowerdean Press, 1983, pp. 7-10 (quotations: pp. 7-8).

Hylson-Smith, High Churchmanship, p. 352.

Hylson-Smith, High Churchmanship, pp. 341-348.

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women and new ideas about issues of equality in the Church and the status of minorities, including sexual minorities. ”

Rather informally, a group was formed to turn this tide.

In 1990 the group grew into a movement as a result of an article in The Times by Richard Holloway, bishop of Edinburgh, and a subsequent London meeting which attracted 200 people. In his article, Holloway called for criticism towards the traditionalist Anglo-Catholic leaders, for the development of a theology which is “dialectical” between the Catholic tradition and modem culture, and for Anglo-Catholics to give up their attitude of dependence on Rome in order to celebrate “the prophetic autonomy of Anglicanism”.

As an example we take the article “Making Sense of Scripture” by Jeffrey John, then Vicar of Eltham and formerly Fellow and Dean of Magdalen College, Oxford. The article is part of the book Living Tradition, in which the lectures were published from Affirming Catholicism’s 1991 conference. John starts with a lively description of both a fundamentalist and a reductionist interpretation of biblical texts. With the literal explanation at least “you knew where you stood”-, on the other hand the exegesis which explained everything away did not make the impression of “particularly good news ”. John is relentless about both methods. Those who nowadays continue to use the literal approach teach nothing else than

“disastrous nonsense, misrepresenting the Bible to generations of intelligent young people, who in later years will probably jettison the whole thing, or else painfully have to turn round and start again. ”

Those who still use the opposite, reductionist method are “lacking in faith and fire ” and “make it all too easy for the fundamentalists to claim that biblical criticism really means unbelief”.

Richard Holloway, ‘Introduction’, in: Jeffrey John (ed. ), Living Tradition: Affirming Catholicism in the Anglican Church, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1992, pp. 1-16 (quotation: p. 7).

Holloway, ‘Introduction’, p. 9.

Jeffrey John, ‘Making Sense of Scripture’, in: Jeffrey John (ed.). Living Tradition: Affirming Catholicism in the Anglican Church, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1992, pp. 44-65 (quotations: pp. 44-45). John now is Canon Residentiary of Southwark Cathedral.

John, ‘Making Sense of Scripture’, pp. 48-49.

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For John, quot;discovering biblical criticism, so far from undermining or threatening my faith, brought the Bible back from the deadquot;. quot;It is not simply an intellectual excitement, it is a spiritual excitementquot;, because it enriches the faith by a range of meanings and references underlying the biblical texts. Biblical criticism starts with an appropriate kind of relativisation. The Bible is not quot;‘the word of the Lord’, only Jesus isquot;. Therefore, there must be room to laugh about texts which we perceive as hilarious, and most of all there must be room to discriminate between wrong and right ideas in the Bible. Some

quot;parts of scripture are not only scientifically wrong or historically wrong, they are also morally and religiously wrong”.

It is clear that John occupies a “liberal” position towards the authority of Scripture. But how is this position to be connected to John’s place within Anglo-Catholicism? In the second part of his lecture, John tries to answer this question. In unmistakable words, he refutes the position of those Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals who insist on quot;biblical authority without equivocation ”. He gives examples as to the current issues of the ordination of women and tolerance towards practising homosexuals to indicate that there is no unequivocal biblical teaching on these themes.

quot;What these formulaic appeals to biblical authority amount to is a demand that we stop thinking, bolster our prejudices and preserve the status quo. ”

For a positive approach, John turns to the Second Vatican Council and the Roman Catholic development in biblical scholarship since. The Council had stated that

quot;the exegete must look for that meaning which the sacred writer, in a determined situation and given the circumstances of his time and culture, intended to express ”,

and referred to methods of critical scholarship as a means of discovering this intention. The Roman Catholic Church thus encouraged the critical study of the Bible. But at the same time it reserved the authority of defining religious and moral truth for the episcopate and especially the pope. For John, this combination is of importance, not because Anglo-Catholics are bound to accept the pope, but because they have the

John, ‘Making Sense of Scripture’, pp. 46-51 (quotations: pp. 48, 51). The force of John’s examples of ‘wrong’ and ‘right’ is somewhat diminished by his quite straightforward use of the ‘development’ theory. The question is not only whether the history of theological and moral concepts really can be described as a more or less Hegelian development, but also whether the later stage is evidently the better.

John, ‘Making Sense of Scripture’, pp. 54-57.

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same dilemma between the demands of critical scholarship and the demands of the (Anglican) Catholic tradition

As an example of a scholar who tries to act upon both of these commitments, John refers to Raymond E. Brown, an American Roman Catholic priest and New Testament professor. Brown is a respected critical exegete, who claims to do his best to discover just “what the biblical authors meant”. At the same time he acknowledges the role of the Church (pope and bishops) in “determining what the Bible means”. Brown advocates a mutual respect in this matter. Theologians must not behave as if they are the magisterium of the Church, and the inagisterium must not neglect the necessity of informing themselves about the technical details of the questions at stake — in this case, the outcomes of biblical scholarship. John summarises Brown’s convictions as follows,

“he describes the task of the Catholic biblical theologian as ‘moving the Church’, ‘moving all Christians to think’ — trying to promote change and development within the tradition of the Church by recalling it to scripture, and opening up to the Church scripture’s real nature, meaning and challengequot;.

Towards the end of his article, John gives his answer to the question of the relationship between biblical criticism and tradition. Firstly, the phenomenon of modem critical biblical scholarship has to be accepted; “any scholar who bases research on any other considerations is simply a bad scholar”. Secondly, as a result,

“there is no such thing as Catholic exegesis, there is only the Catholic exegete. ... What makes you a Catholic exegete is the context you work in and how you relate it to the Church. ”

You may hope that some time the Church will move towards your scholarly opinions, but you cannot force the Church; therefore the way in which the outcomes of criticism are presented makes all the difference. According to John, this is “nothing new” in the tradition of the Church.

John, ‘Making Sense of Scripture’, pp. 57-59. To prove the importance of these views for Anglicans, John (pp. 62-63) mentions the convergence on this point in the report of the Anglican -Roman Catholic International Commission.

Raymond S. Brown, The Critical Meaning of the Bible, London; Geoffrey Chapman, 1982 (USA; 1981 ), pp. 45-50 (quotation: p. 45).

John, ‘Making Sense of Scripture’, p. 61.

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“It is by the same process that the Church throughout its history has continually adjusted its position after it had been faced with new truths and new insights. ”

One can conclude that John is in the most literal sense of the phrase a “Liberal Catholic”, with emphasis on both words. Reviewing his position amongst the other examples of “Liberal Catholicism” in this chapter, it seems that the pendulum has swung back towards the authority of the Bible. Not because of restrictions towards biblical criticism, far from that. But because John witnesses that a critical approach of the Bible does not lessen but strengthen its evocative and authoritative power. Although theoretically the relation between Scripture and the Church is completely absorbed by the Church, or the living community of Christians, as with Knox above, nevertheless the Bible seems to win back originality, and therefore transforming power.

Finally, attention must be paid to two methodological details in John’s article. The first is that he takes every opportunity to refute the position of his “opponents”, especially the traditional, more or less fundamentalist one. This reminds the reader of Archbishop Fisher’s remark, that the report Catholicity “shows perhaps more of anxiety to avoid wrong methods than of ability to elaborate a right methodquot;. Moreover, it seems to strengthen the conviction of the writers of Catholicity themselves, that “Liberalism is fiercely intolerant”. Although there is some truth in this criticism, particularly regarding the style of writing, John may be excused in view of the subject. It is inherent in a non-fundamentalist approach to the Bible that it is less straightforward and clear than the position for which it tries to be an alternative. Therefore, it is part of the argument to show that the “easier” way is untenable. Selwyn already wrote, in answer to the objection of vagueness,

“But what if the answer be really complex? If the truth lies not in any simple or single formula ...?”^^

The second observation has to do with John’s appeal to the Second Vatican Council and Raymond Brown. In order to treat the problem of how biblical criticism can be combined with Anglo-Catholicism, John turns to Roman Catholicism. This leads to the question whether he does so because Vatican II and Brown are just good examples for his argument — which they are — or whether his choice reveals that for some An-glo-Catholics the “real” standard of Catholicism is still to be found in Roman Catholicism. From John’s other writings it is perfectly clear that he does not mean the latter.

John, ‘Making Sense of Scripture’, pp. 63-64.

See section 'Catholicity’ (1947) above.

” Selwyn, ‘Preface to the Third Edition’, p. vi.

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so the former must be the case. John’s reference to the modem Roman Catholic way of dealing with the Bible makes an outstanding example of how a Church in the Catholic tradition can come to terms with serious biblical scholarship.

Conclusion

This chapter brought together examples from Lux Mundi, Essays Catholic and Critical, Michael Ramsey’s group, and the relatively recent movement of Affirming Catholicism. The authors lived in different periods and therefore they caimot be said to represent exactly the same thought. We saw that Gore’s attitude towards the Bible, particularly towards the New Testament, was much more confident than Knox’s, who discarded the whole notion of biblical authority. We also saw that the report Catholicity was critical of what it considered as too far-reaching biblical criticism, whereas Jeffrey John rejected any reservation towards the critical method as simply bad scholarship.

Even the epithet “Liberal Catholic” would probably not have pleased all authors referred to in this chapter. Certainly the writers of Catholicity were critical of Liberalism. But also a number of participants in Affirming Catholicism would not be happy to be called “liberal”, although they certainly would accept their share in the heritage of “Liberal Catholicism”. As Richard Holloway wrote,

quot;And by ‘we ’ I mean people who might once have called themselves liberal Catholics and who now might be happier to think of themselves as classical Anglicans, who seek to revere scripture, affirm tradition and champion reason in their following of Jesus

There is a twofold reason for this reservation towards the term “liberal”. First of all, the term has many connotations which somewhat reduce its usefulness. Perhaps the term was most “correctly” used by Catholicity, which related it to the Renaissance and to the nineteenth century. It is probably this kind of liberalism, and especially its philosophical and political consequences, from which Holloway wants to dissociate himself. But there is still another reason for Affirming Catholics not to call themselves “Liberal Catholics” as a means of distinguishing themselves from more conservative “Anglo-Catholics”. This reason is that they are tired with defending their legitimacy within the Anglo-Catholic tradition They are grown out of a position of being “spe-

See, for instance, Jeffrey John, What is Affirming Catholicism? (Affirming Catholicism booklets), London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1995, passim.

” Holloway, ‘Introduction’, p. 10.

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cial”, of being specifically “modem” or “liberal”. They rather start to perceive themselves as just the Anglo-Catholics of today. In the words of Jeffrey John, “Our answer to the sort of rhetoric that talks airily about the end of the Catholic movement in the Anglican Church is that we are the Catholic movement in the Church now.”

The different authors who find themselves together in this chapter, fundamentally share an approach to the questions of modernity in relation to Scripture and tradition. They try to apply modern standards of rationality and criticism to both Scripture and tradition, in order to find a connection between the problems of today and the Gospel. For the Catholic faith was not only “once delivered to the saints”, to use an expression favourite with the Tractarians. It was, moreover, by the saints delivered to us, in order to be lived in our particular time and in our particular situations.

John, W/tar is Affirming Catholicism?, p. 28. For more reflections on the theme of (jjg.) continuity see the Epilogue below.

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Epilogue

After these essays, the question of continuity and discontinuity may be even more pressing than before. It is clear that there is continuity throughout the history of Anglican High Churchmanship, as to questions such as the visible Church, the importance of ministry and sacraments, and the reality of liturgical symbolism. At the same time, however, there seems to be an unbridgeable gulf of difference between traditional High Churchmanship, the Oxford Movement, Ritualism, and Liberal Catholicism. How can we come to terms with this paradox?

Perhaps Jeffrey John’s bold claim about “Affirming Catholicism’’, “that we are the Catholic movement in the Church now”, can help us to find a solution. * On the one hand, this claim seems to lay all emphasis on continuity. On the other hand, though, John is very much aware of the discontinuity between Affirming Catholicism and more traditional strands of Anglican Catholicism. The power of his statement consists in the fact that he refuses to surrender the claim of continuity when he becomes convinced that certain changes have to be carried out. The same attitude can be found with the contributors to Lux Mundi, who were convinced of the necessity of putting “the Catholic faith into its right relation to modem intellectual and moral problems quot;, but who at the same time refused to see themselves as mere “guessers at truth ”, for they claimed to remain “servants of the Catholic Creed and Church”.'

In relation to the discontinuity within Anglican High Churchmanship throughout the centuries, attention must be paid to two major cultural shifts to which Anglican Catholicism had to accommodate itself. The first shift was of a political nature. The possibility of considering England as an Anglican nation was definitely lost at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This shift caused a discontinuity between traditional High Churchmanship, which considered the Establishment as an important part of its “high’’ view of the Church of England, and the Oxford Movement, which received an important part of its power from the conviction that the Church had to prove its independence, its own “apostolic” commission.

The second shift was of a scientific and scholarly nature. Evolutionary theories, biblical criticism, and the “historical revolution” divided the history of — amongst everything else — Anglican High Churchmanship into a “pre-critical” and a “critical” part. This shift brought about a discontinuity between those who accepted the decrease of all kinds of authority caused by the acceptance of critical methods, and those who re-

' John, What is Affirming Catholicism?, p. 28.

Gore, ‘Preface’, pp. vii-viii.

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fused to do so (or those who could not do so, because they lived before the age of criticism).

These cultural shifts made changes inevitable. This is not to say that these shifts and the subsequent changes have to be seen in an evolutionary perspective. The observation that it was simply impossible for Anglican High Churchmanship to remain unadapted to the cultural shifts, does not imply that these changes made High Churchmanship to evolve into “higher” phases of its existence. The time of this kind of developmental philosophy lies behind us. The only thing to be said is that changes were inevitable, for better or worse.

“The Catholic revival in Anglicanism must, like all movements, as Newman discerned, change [not in order to become ‘better’, but] in order to remain the same. ’’ ’

Therefore, and in spite of numerous differences of opinion between the more “modem” type of Anglican Catholicism and the traditional types throughout the centuries, John has a certain right in claiming that “we are the Catholic movement in the Church now”. Others will deny this right, because they want to see more continuity and less discontinuity. What these essays try to show is, on the one hand, that nobody can claim an unchanged continuity from traditional High Churchmanship, through the Oxford Movement and Ritualism, to present-day Anglo-Catholicism. On the other hand they hope to indicate that, in spite of all discontinuity, the phenomenon of Anglican Catholicism did exist throughout the ages and does exist today. For, in the words of Rowan Williams,

“Our Christian past is not a boxroom or a cupboard under the stairs or the bedroom of Prince Albert preserved by Queen Victoria exactly as the dear man left it. It is a room for living, a place to spend time learning and reflecting, a place whose inner geography changes subtly and naturally as we ourselves grow. ‘Thou hast set my feet in a large room, ’ says the psalmist to God.quot;

’ Rowell, The Vision Glorious, p. 247 (cf. Newman’s Essay on Development, p. 39).

Rowan Williams, in: ‘Affirming Catholicism: Papers given at the Day Conference at St. Alban’s, Holbom on Saturday 9 June 1990’, p. 6. Quoted from: Hylson-Smith, High Churchmanship, p. 364.

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114

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

High Church varieties

An Old Catholic perspective

The Oxford Movement and traditional High Churchmanship 11

Church and State Introduction

Church and State in traditional High Churchmanship

Changes in the early nineteenth century

Two examples: Keble 's Assize Sermon and Froude 's Tract 59 16

High Church Continuity Historiographical introduction

Tensions between Tractarians and older High Churchmen 21

High Church Discontinuity

Remains of traditional High Churchmanship

during and after the Oxford Movement

Catholic and/or Reformed?

Apostolical succession

Baptism

Justification

Eucharist

Assessment of continuity and discontinuity

The Emergence of Ritualism

Early liturgical renewal in High Church circles Introduction

The arrangement of churches before the Oxford Movement 44

The relationship between Tractarianism and Ritualism

115

High Church and early Tractarian attitudes towards ritual quot;Origines Liturgicae”

The “Laudian ” altar

A changing attitude amongst Tractarians

Their conservative public strategy

Their progressive private opinions

D/J the Tractarians disapprove of Ritualism?

The “Cambridge Movement”

The Cambridge Camden Society

“Hierurgia Anglicana quot;

“Directorium Anglicanum ”

Conclusion

Catholic and Liberal

A changing climate

“Essays and Reviews ”

High, Low, and Broad: the response to “Essays and Reviewsquot; 75

A change within Oxford theology

Charles Gore and “Lux Mundi”

Introduction

Gore's concept of “Liberal Catholicism ”

The question of authority

Examples from “Lux Mundi” to the present

Introduction

“Lux Mundi” (1889)

“Essays Catholic and Critical ” (1926)

“Catholicity” (1947)

“Affirming Catholicism” (1992)

Conclusion

Epilogue

Bibliography

116

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