The Making of a Convert: John Henry Newman's Oriel and Littlemore Experience

2011 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 461-483
Author(s):  
Peter Nockles
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Place ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Revival ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
The Church

‘The flood is round thee, but thy towers as yetAre safe, and clear as by a summer’s sea…Lo! On the top of each aerial spireWhat seems a star by day, so high and brightIt quivers from afar in golden light.But ‘tis a form of earth, though touched with fireCelestial, raised in other days, to tellHow, when they tired of prayer, Apostles fell’.John Henry Newman's poem ‘On Oxford’ published within a section called ‘Champions of the Truth’ in the verse collection, Lyra Apostolica, which he edited in 1836, encapsulates Newman's vision of Oxford and its colleges. Oxford was portrayed in the poem as an embattled but triumphant ‘city on a hill’ (in spite of its valley location surrounded by hills); a bulwark against contemporary forces, religious, and political, which for Newman, seemed to threaten it in the 1830s. The poem reminds us that the Oxford Movement, the great movement of religious revival within the Church of England commonly dated from 1833, the movement which Newman famously led and inspired, was rooted in Newman's keen and abiding sense of place (genius loci, as he put it), of memory, tradition, ethos, and association.

Oriel and the Making of John Henry Newman—His Mission as College Tutor

2009 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nockles Peter
Keyword(s):  
Turning Point ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Divine Providence ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Religious Revival ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Church

From 12 April 1822 when John Henry Newman was elected a Fellow until 3 October 1845 when he tendered his resignation to Provost Hawkins, Oriel College was to be the centre of Newman's life. As Newman later recorded:he ever felt this twelfth of April, 1822 to be the turning point of his life, and of all days most memorable. It raised him from obscurity and need to competency and reputation. He never wished anything better or higher than, in the words of the epitaph, 'to live and die a fellow of Oriel'. Henceforth his way was clear before him; and he was constant all through his life, as his intimate friends knew, in his thankful remembrance year after year of this great mercy of Divine Providence, and of his electors, by whom it was brought about.Newman went on to assert that but for Oriel, he would have been nobody, entirely lacking in influence. It was through Oriel (and the pulpit of the Oriel living of St. Mary the Virgin) that he was able to exert such a dominant religious and pastoral influence on his academic generation and those that followed. It was through Oriel that he would be in a position to emerge by 1833 as the well-known leader of that great movement of religious revival in the Church of England known as the ‘Oxford Movement’ or ‘Tractarianism’ (the name being coined in consequence of the series of Tracts for the Times published by Newman and his cohorts).

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan Hepburn
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Freedom Of Conscience ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
The Right To Privacy ◽  
The Right ◽  
Race And Religion ◽  
The Church

In the 1940s and 1950s, Britain was relatively uniform in terms of race and religion. The majority of Britons adhered to the Church of England, although Anglo-Catholic leanings—the last gasp of the Oxford Movement—prompted some people to convert to Roman Catholicism. Although the secularization thesis has had a tenacious grip on twentieth-century literary studies, it does not account for the flare-up of interest in religion in mid-century Britain. The ecumenical movement, which began in the 1930s in Europe, went into suspension during the war, and returned with vigour after 1945, advocated international collaboration among Christian denominations and consequently overlapped with the promotion of human rights, especially the defence of freedom of worship, the right to privacy, freedom of conscience, and freedom of expression.

Eucharistic Ecclesiology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Handschy
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Episcopal Church ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Constitutional Reforms ◽  
The Church

As the constitutional reforms of the 1820s and 1830s called into question the nature of the establishment of the Church of England, leaders of the Oxford Movement looked to the American Episcopal Church as an example of a Church not dependent on state establishment. Bishops Samuel Seabury and John Henry Hobart had constructed a constitution for the American Episcopal Church based on a ‘purely spiritual’ episcopacy and a doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice. Their example influenced Hugh James Rose, John Henry Newman, E. B. Pusey, and John Keble in the course of the Oxford Movement, and this in turn influenced the course of the Ritualist movement within the American Episcopal Church.

The Oxford Movement in Europe

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albrecht Geck
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
Western European ◽  
Roman Catholics ◽  
The Church

During the period between 1833 and 1845 the Oxford Movement was widely discussed in Western European countries. The via media, as Newman understood it, was received with great suspicion. Roman Catholics continued to consider Anglicanism as a heresy, but hailed the Oxford Movement as a means to lead the Church of England back to the mother Church in Rome. Continental Protestants feared that the Oxford Movement might destroy the essence of the Protestant churches. Although the criticism was not universal, it was brought forward by a variety of schools and the nature of the debate served as a mirror of the theological pluralism of the time.

Protestant Reactions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Atherstone
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
University Of Oxford ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The University ◽  
The Church

Protestantism was a major rallying cry during the Tractarian controversies. It was anathematized by some Oxford Movement radicals as a ‘heresy’, and held tenaciously by evangelical campaigners as ‘the pure Gospel of Christ’. Protestant polemicists decried Tractarianism as a revival of Roman Catholicism in an Anglican disguise and called their brothers-in-arms to fight the theological battles of the Reformation over again. Focusing on the events in Oxford itself between 1838 and 1846, this chapter surveys the rhetoric which surrounded three overlapping themes—Protestant Reformers, Protestant Formularies, and Protestant Truth. It shows how these loomed large in the speeches and writings of those who wanted to defend the Protestant hegemony of the Church of England and the University of Oxford.

Richard Hooker: Invention and Re-invention

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-152
Author(s):  
Diarmaid MacCulloch
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

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.

‘The Difficulties of Protestantism’: Bishop Milner, John Fletcher and Catholic Apologetic against the Church of England in the era from the First Relief Act to Emancipation, 1778–1830

1998 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-236
Author(s):  
Peter B. Nockles
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
John Fletcher ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Catholic Religion ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Church

‘It is an old theory of ours, that there are very few of the positions assumed by the antagonists of the Catholic church, which may not be turned against each other, with far more effect than they carry against the common adversary whom they all seek to assail. A skilful use of the weapons employed against each other by various sects of Protestantism, in their internecine warfare, would supply one of the most curious, and we will venture to say, one of the most solid and convincing arguments of the truth of the Catholic religion to be found in the whole range of polemical literature’.(Dublin Review, 1855).Anti-Catholicism, represented in the era of the eve of Emancipation by a rich genre of polemical literature focusing on the supposed ‘difficulties of Romanism’, has been the subject of much recent study; notably for the eighteenth century by Colin Haydon, and for the nineteenth, by Walter Amstein, Edward Norman, D. G. Paz, Walter Ralls, F. M. Wallis and John Wolffe. In contrast, English Catholic controversial writing against the Church of England, focusing on what one Catholic writer (in a conscious reversal of the stock Anglican polemical title) called the ‘difficulties of Protestantism’, with notable exceptions such as Sheridan Gilley, Leo Gooch and Brian Carter, 5 has been comparatively neglected for the half century prior to the dawn of the Oxford Movement in 1833.

Reserve and Physical Imagery in the Tractarian Poetry of Isaac Williams (1802–65)

2012 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 246-258
Author(s):  
John Boneham
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Cumulative Effect ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Real Presence ◽  
Established Relationship ◽  
Apostolic Succession ◽  
The Church

The Oxford, or Tractarian, Movement began as a conservative reaction to the reforming measures of the 1820s and 1830s and in particular to the Whig government’s passing of the Irish Church Temporalities Bill in 1832. For the Tractarians, the cumulative effect of such legislation was that the authority of the Church was being seriously compromised by interference from the secular government, which could now include those who were not necessarily Anglicans or even Christians. While it was these overtly political concerns that moved John Keble to preach his ‘Assize Sermon’ which has. traditionally been seen as marking the beginning of the movement in July 1833, the Oxford Movement was to develop into a spiritual revival whose concerns went far beyond politics. In rejecting the established relationship between Church and state the Tractarians came to emphasize the Church’s innate spiritual autonomy and appealed increasingly to the authority of tradition as reflected in the writings of the church fathers of the third and fourth centuries. In doing so their emphasis on certain beliefs and practices of the primitive Church, such as baptismal regeneration, the real presence and the apostolic succession, was seen as betraying sympathy for Roman Catholicism and disloyalty towards the Church of England.

The Liturgical Dimension of the Oxford Tracts, 1833-1841

1968 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 92-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence F. Barmann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Population Distribution ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Church Reform ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
National Institutions ◽  
Parliamentary Reform ◽  
The Church

R. W. Church began his classic work on The Oxford Movement with the remark that “What is called the Oxford or Tractarian movement began, without doubt, in a vigorous effort for the immediate defence of the Church against serious dangers, arising from the violent and threatening temper of the days of the Reform Bill.” Historians of the Oxford Movement who, unlike Church, were not participants in the events of which they write need continually to remind themselves that the Oxford Movement was not a premeditated and carefully planned theological campaign. Rather, it was an ad hoc measure to meet a definite and immediate problem.In the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, agitation for reform of all the national institutions swept across England, and included in these national institutions was the Church of England. In 1828 a resolution favoring the repeal of the Test Act was carried in the House of Commons by Lord John Russell, and in 1829 the Relief Bill was carried, allowing Catholics to sit in Parliament and to hold offices under the crown. With the Reform Bill of 1832 the electoral structure for seating men in Parliament was brought into partial conformity with contemporary developments and population distribution. And with the success of parliamentary reform, English churchmen feared that church reform would soon be thrust upon them. The bishops as a group had been hostile to parliamentary reform and to reform in general, with the result that popular pamphlets against churchmen and demand for church reform reached alarming proportions.

The Oxford Movement and Ecumenism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Chapman
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church

This chapter discusses the impact of the Oxford Movement on relationships between the different Churches. It emphasizes the importance to the Oxford Movement of a ‘temporal’ understanding of catholicity which located the authority of the Church in the undivided Church of the first five centuries. During the Tractarian period most authors retained a strong anti-Romanism and regarded the Church of England as the true heir of the patristic Church. In succeeding years a number of enthusiasts inspired by the Oxford Movement within the Church of England, as well as from other churches, sought reunion, even though they met with little success.

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