The Mountain and the Flower: The Power and Potential of Nature in the World of Victorian Evangelicalism

2010 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 307-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The World ◽  
High Church ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Tradition

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.

‘Our Brethren of the North’: The Scottish Episcopal Church and the Oxford Movement

1996 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 655-682 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Nockles
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Negative Influence ◽  
Episcopal Church ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
The North ◽  
The Subject ◽  
High Church ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church

Studies of the Oxford or Tractarian Movement in Britain have almost exclusively focused on the Church of England. The impact of the Catholic revival within Scotland has been accorded little attention. This neglect partly reflects the small size of the Episcopal Church in Scotland. Yet the subject deserves fuller consideration precisely because the minority Scottish Episcopal Church was, by the nineteenth century, more uniformly High Church in its theology and outlook than the Church of England, a fact which predisposed it to be peculiarly receptive to Tractarianism, which in turn exacerbated its relations with the dominant Presbyterian Kirk. The few serious studies of the question, however, have been coloured by an uncritical assumption that the movement's impact on the Episcopal Church was altogether positive and benign. The differences between the Tractarians and nonjuring episcopalians of the north have been overlooked or understated. While according due weight to the affinities and continuities between the two traditions, this article will question the standard Anglo-Catholic historiography and reveal the tensions within the Episcopal Church sharpened by the often negative influence of the Catholic revival when transported north of the border.

Keble, Froude, Newman, and Pusey

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheridan Gilley
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Premature Death ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
High Church ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Tradition ◽  
The Way

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.

The Myth of the English Reformation

1991 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diarmaid MacCulloch
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
High Church ◽  
Two Stages ◽  
The Church

The myth of the English Reformation is that it did not happen, or that it happened by accident rather than design, or that it was halfhearted and sought a middle way between Catholicism and Protestantism; the point at issue is the identity of the Church of England. The myth was created in two stages, first in the middle years of the seventeenth century, and then from the third decade of the nineteenth century; and in either case it was created by one party within the church, largely consisting of clergy, with a particular motive in mind. This was to emphasize the Catholic continuity of the church over the break of the Reformation, in order to claim that the true representative of the Catholic church within the borders of England and Wales was not the minority loyal to the bishop of Rome, but the church as by law established in 1559 and 1662. In the seventeenth century the group involved was called Arminian by contemporaries, and in later days it came to be labeled High Church, or Laudian, after its chief early representative William Laud. In the nineteenth century the same party revived was known variously as Tractarian, Oxford Movement, High Church, Ritualist, and, most commonly in the twentieth century, Anglo-Catholic. Here are two characteristic quotations from one of the most distinguished of this nineteenth-century group, John Henry Newman, before his departure for Rome and a cardinal's hat. First, when defending himself against the charge of innovation: “We are a ‘Reformed’ Church, not a ‘Protestant’ … the Puritanic spirit spread in Elizabeth's and James's time, and … has been succeeded by the Methodistic. …We, the while, children of the Holy Church, whencesoever brought into it, whether by early training or after thought, have had one voice, that one voice which the Church has had from the beginning." Second, introducing the characteristic Anglican expression of the idea of continuity, the notion of the via media: “A number of distinct notions are included in the notion of Protestantism; and as to all these our Church has taken a Via Media between it and Popery.

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.

Episcopalian Theology 1689–c.1900

2019 ◽  
pp. 265-283
Author(s):  
Rowan Strong
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Episcopal Church ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Theological Influences ◽  
High Church ◽  
Theological Differences ◽  
The Church

The chapter examines the principal developments in the emergence of the Scottish Episcopal Church from the end of the Stuart monarchy in 1689, when Episcopalians began to be ejected as non-jurors from the Church of Scotland to the end of the nineteenth century. It concentrates on those aspects of theology which particularly marked out these Scots as Episcopalians, especially in liturgy, the Eucharist and sacraments, episcopacy, and Jacobitism. While reviewing the development of a separate ecclesiastical and theological identity in these two centuries, the chapter also explores some of the internal theological differences between Episcopalians. External theological influences and connections from England over this period, principally from High Church, Oxford Movement Anglicanism, and Evangelicalism, are also examined.

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.

Benthamism in England and America

1941 ◽  
Vol 35 (5) ◽  
pp. 855-871 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul A. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
American Political Thought ◽  
Christian Religion ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church ◽  
Direct Attack ◽  
Cross Current

The main purpose of this paper is not so much to measure the impact of utilitarianism on American political thought as to explain why utilitarian influence was so slight. The question I am seeking to answer may be phrased as follows: How did it come about that utilitarianism, the main current in English thought for two or three generations, was little more than a series of ripples, or at most a weak cross-current, on this side of the Atlantic? The problem becomes more puzzling when one reflects that the period of the rise and growth of utilitarianism in England (the first three or four decades of the nineteenth century) was an era in which intellectual relations between the two countries were especially close and one in which movements of political and social reform ran parallel courses. Quite reasonably, too, one might suppose that the qualities of Bentham's thought which contributed to its spread in England would have insured its enthusiastic reception here. A doctrine which contemptuously rejected tradition, preached hard-headed, calculating practicality, conceived of the individual as an isolated atomistic unit, and which in all its aspects and phases appealed to the virtues and limitations of the middle-class man of affairs—such a doctrine, one might think, would have flourished on nineteenth-century American soil.As preliminary to a direct attack on the problem, some definitions or distinctions are in order. “When I mention religion,” said Parson Thwackum, “I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England.”

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
Keyword(s):  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The State ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Church Of Ireland ◽  
High Church ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Teaching ◽  
Church Tradition ◽  
The Way

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.

The Oxford Movement, Marriage and Domestic Life: John Keble, Isaac Williams and Edward King

2014 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 366-377
Author(s):  
John Boneham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Social Importance ◽  
The Church

While a number of studies have highlighted the theological and social importance of the household in nineteenth-century Protestant Britain, the significance of domestic life for the leaders of the Oxford, or Tractarian, Movement remains almost completely unexplored. In a sense this is unsurprising, since the movement, which began in the 1830s, emphasized the importance of recalling the Church of England to its pre-Reformation heritage and consequently tended to stress the spiritual value of celibacy and asceticism. Whilst B.W. Young has highlighted the importance of celibacy for John Henry Newman, the movement’s main figurehead until his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1845, and other works have reflected upon the Tractarian emphasis on celibacy and tried to explain its origins, historians of the Oxford Movement have paid very little attention to the Tractarian attitude towards marriage and domestic life.

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