CHURCH OR PROTESTANT SECT? THE CHURCH OF IRELAND, HIGH CHURCHMANSHIP, AND THE OXFORD MOVEMENT, 1822–1869

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 457-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER NOCKLES

The Church of Ireland has been regarded as almost devoid of a high church element and as unreservedly hostile to Tractarian claims. This article questions these assumptions. It considers the evidence for an influential, if minority, high church tradition within the Church of Ireland and shows how far its adherents during the 1830s and early 1840s looked to English Tractarians for support. The very raison d'être of the Irish church was questioned under the reforming and erastian pressures unleashed by a whig ministry in the early 1830s. Tractarian rhetoric stressing apostolical descent and continuity was echoed by Irish high churchmen in their concern to demonstrate that they belonged to a church that was not a creature of the state and was no mere Protestant sect; Irish high churchmen held many theological and spiritual ideals in common with the early Tractarians, but guarded their independence. Irish high churchmen and English Tractarians nevertheless became estranged: the Protestant credentials of Irish high churchmen were suspect as a result of the low church and Evangelical backlash against ‘Puseyism’; Irish high church attempts to put church principles into practice, notably over the foundation of St Columba's as an establishment to educate Roman Catholic converts in high church teaching, were cold-shouldered by English Tractarians. The Irish high church tradition survived but was weakened by Roman Catholic undermining of its assumption of apostolical continuity as well as by ultra-Protestant critiques. Disestablishment in 1869 paved the way not for a high church ‘restoration’ on the Caroline model, as Irish high churchmen wished and as early Tractarian rhetoric assumed, but for the completion of an Evangelical ascendancy rooted in the Irish Articles of 1615 and the church of James Ussher.

Author(s):  
Sheridan Gilley

The Oxford Movement, influenced by Romanticism, was rooted in the inheritance both of an older High Church tradition and of the Evangelical Revival. The Movement was characterized by an effort to recover the Catholic character of the Church of England. Its genius was John Henry Newman, who redefined Anglicanism as a via media between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. John Keble had earlier opened the way to a new Anglican sensibility through his poetry in The Christian Year. The Oxford Professor of Hebrew, Edward Bouverie Pusey, brought to the Tracts his massive scholarship. Newman’s dearest friend, Hurrell Froude, gave the Movement a radical edge, which continued despite his premature death in 1836.


2010 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 307-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Smith

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century a new wind could be felt rustling in the branches of the Church of England. The transforming effect of the Oxford Movement on the High Church tradition is the most prominent example of this phenomenon but also well established in the literature are the transformations in contemporary Anglican Evangelicalism. David Bebbington in particular has stressed the impact of Romanticism as a cultural mood within the movement, tracing its effects in a heightened supernaturalism, a preoccupation with the Second Advent and with holiness which converged at Keswick, and also an emphasis on the discernment of spiritual significance in nature. But how did this emphasis play out in the lives of Evangelicals in the second half of the century and how might it have served their mission to society? This paper seeks to address the evangelical understanding of both the power and potential of nature through the example of one prominent Anglican clergyman, William Pennefather, and one little-known evangelical initiative, the Bible Flower Mission.


1984 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 343-355
Author(s):  
S. Peter Kerr

It is surely ironic that while the ‘spoiliation’ of the Irish Church in 1833 provided the initial rallying cry for the Oxford Movement, neither Tractarian spirituality, theology nor its later liturgical innovations ever really took any serious hold on that Church. It is perhaps even more paradoxical to note that though Alexander Knox, one of the forerunners of the movement was a lay member of the Church of Ireland, other sons of that Church, notably Robert Dolling, the notorious ritualist slum-priest; Dowden, the high-church bishop of Edinburgh; and Tyrell, the Catholic modernist, all made their careers outside Ireland. As Bishop Alexander was to comment, perhaps with the more colourful ritualists like Dolling in mind, the Church of Ireland had never to bear the cost of discovering that the liturgy had ‘lips of fire’; though perhaps that is not quite accurate, for, as I hope to show, fear of the heat from those ‘lips of fire’ was to be a major disruptive influence in the life of the Established, and disestablished Church in Ulster.


1993 ◽  
Vol 28 (112) ◽  
pp. 352-358
Author(s):  
Alan Ford

There is a marked difference between the history of the Church of Ireland in the sixteenth century and in the early seventeenth century. The historian of the early Reformation in Ireland has to deal with shifting religious divides and, in the Church of Ireland, with a complex and ambiguous religious entity, established but not necessarily Protestant, culturally unsure, politically weak, and theologically unselfconscious. By contrast, the first part of the seventeenth century is marked by the creation of a distinct Protestant church, clearly distinguished in structural, racial, theological and political terms from its Roman Catholic counterpart. The history of the Church of Ireland in the first four decades of the seventeenth century is therefore primarily about the creation of this church and the way in which its new structures and exclusive identity were shaped.


Perichoresis ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 95-113
Author(s):  
Phia Steyn

Abstract The purpose of this article is to explore the religious responses within the Orange Free State republic to the environmental crises in the period c. 1896 to c. 1898. During this time the state was subjected to severe drought, flooding, and the outbreak of various diseases. The article examines the way in which these afflictions where interpreted by the Christian and wider community in terms of God’s wrath for unrepented sins. The persistence of synchronistic elements of folk religion was seen to have brought plagues like those found in Exodus which were visited upon the Pharaoh and his kingdom. This interruptive frame work led to calls for national repentance, but also a resistance to scientific and medical resolutions to the crises. It also reinforced racial divisions. Black Africans were perceived as the carriers of the disease so their movement was prohibited. The article goes on to show how the effect of this biblical frame of reference protected the concept of God as the ever-present active God in every aspect of life against the scientific rationalism of the age, while at the same time ironically hindering the work of mission and the life of the church.


2020 ◽  
pp. 184-208
Author(s):  
D. G. Hart

This chapter investigates the use of Americanism to appropriate Roman Catholicism for the good of a nation. It recounts older Roman Catholic heresy claimed that the American political system was not at odds with church teaching, even though the United States seemed to stand for most of the social and political realities that nineteenth-century popes had condemned. It also talks about the Americanists in the nineteenth-century who argued that Vatican officials misread the United States, stating that the nation was far friendlier to Roman Catholicism than Europeans imagined. The chapter details how Americanists urged the church to update its polity to the nation's political sensibilities, a strategy that would make Roman Catholicism look less odd in the United States. It also highlights ways Americanists adapt Roman Catholicism to life in a secular, constitutional republic.


1948 ◽  
Vol 6 (22) ◽  
pp. 83-100
Author(s):  
Patrick J. Corish

Europe in the seventeenth century was a land of mar and confusion because the great political problems raised by the religious disruption of the preceding century had not yet been solved. Chief among these was the problem of the relations between the Roman catholic church and a protestant state. The teaching of the pope's indirect power in temporal matters in any problem involving a breach of the moral order (ratione peccati) had been strongly re-stated by Bellarmine, and was the official attitude of the church. A protestant prince had committed a grave sin, that of heresy, and so it was the pope's right and duty to depose him and absolve his Catholic subjects from their allegiance. But this political theory was becoming impractical as the seventeenth century progressively demonstrated that Europe was permanently divided. As might be expected, juridical forms lagged behind the development of events; but by the middle of the century the Roman curia, while not prepared to give antecedent approval to a peace with protestants, might be said to be ready to acquiesce once it had been concluded, if the position and rights of the Catholic church could be assured. Yet this assurance was, in the circumstances, almost impossible. The Catholic church could not rest satisfied with toleration as a sect, but demanded recognition as an organised society with a source of jurisdiction illdependent of the state.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-152
Author(s):  
Diarmaid MacCulloch

This study traces the way in which a typical Elizabethan Reformed Protestant became something slightly different during a ministerial career prematurely terminated by death in his forties, and what he became in the centuries that followed. It explains the background of divided theologies in the national Church of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, the emergence of ‘avant-garde conformism’, and the way in which Hooker was used by opposing sides to justify their positions, particularly after the Restoration of 1660, when the term ‘Anglicanism’ first becomes fully appropriate for the life and thought of the Church of England. As the Church moved from national monopoly to established status, Hooker became of use in different ways to both Tories and Whigs, though in the nineteenth century the Oxford Movement largely monopolised his memory. His views on the construction of authority may still help Anglicanism find its theological way forward.


Author(s):  
Ryan J. Marr

This chapter provides a close historical analysis of the development in John Henry Newman’s understanding of infallibility from his days as a leader of the Oxford Movement up through the publication of his 1877 Preface to The Via Media. The essay begins with an overview of Newman’s perspective during the final years of his time as an Anglican, before moving into a discussion of how Newman’s viewpoint developed during the latter half of his life. The examination of Newman’s changing perspective during his Roman Catholic period focuses particularly on his theological struggles with the neo-ultramontanist faction in the Church, contending that Newman’s mature position was intended to counterbalance the maximalist interpretations of papal infallibility being advanced by such figures as Cardinal Manning and William George Ward.


1971 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 284-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Brynn

William Pitt's decision to seek the abolition of the independent Irish parliament and the union of the established churches in Ireland and England ended a quarter century experiment in Irish legislative independence. During this brief period the penal system had been substantially modified, and the traditional Protestant ascendancy partially dismantled by liberal Protestants themselves. The Church of Ireland, however, had not shared in the enthusiasm of this Irish “renaissance”; parliamentary spokesmen had demanded abolition of the tithe, enforcement of clerical residence, endowment of the Roman Catholic clergy and elimination of abuses in ecclesiastical patronage. Anticlericalism had increased, tithe resistance had infected even Protestant tenants, and pamphlets condemning the Church of Ireland as the unholy wonder of Christendom were penned by Protestants themselves. The alarm of Irish churchmen only too aware of the fundamental weaknesses of the established church, the clamor of British peers with large Irish landholdings and the outbreak of rebellion in 1797, finally convinced British statesmen that the crisis could be relieved only by the abolition of the Irish legislature.


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