Reconsidering the Movement after the 1845 Crisis

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Macnab
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Parish Ministry ◽  
Private Correspondence ◽  
Rapid Changes ◽  
The Church

The conversions to Roman Catholicism of Newman and others close to the heart of the Oxford Movement in the 1840s required responses at many levels from those Tractarians who remained in the Church of England. This coincided with rapid changes in Tractarian forms of parish ministry and the earliest days of a restored Religious Life. From their prominent positions among the remaining Tractarians, E. B. Pusey, John Keble, and Charles Marriott gave spiritual counsel through their private correspondence, and offered philosophical and ecclesiological arguments in their published sermons and writings. They defended the theological basis of the Movement in general, and of Tract 90 in particular, against both Anglican and Roman Catholic critics.

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.

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.

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.

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.

William John Butler and the revival of the Ascetic Tradition

1985 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 365-376
Author(s):  
Ann Frances
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Monastic Life ◽  
The Church

William John Butler, sometime vicar of Wantage in Berkshire and founder of the Community of St Mary the Virgin, gave a concrete and contemporary expression to an aspect of the ascetic idea current among followers of the Oxford Movement, which was revealed in their desire to restore monastic life in the Church in England. The Community founded by Butler was one of the earliest of the indigenous Anglican communities for women. In no way could the desert ideal or the later pre-Reformation models of religious life be reconstructed, nor would they have been appropriate in the climate of the time. However Butler believed, as had Newman, Pusey and others, that the basic principles of monastic life remained valid and they could and should find their place in the contemporary Church of England. It was believed that the Church had the grace and the resources of devotion within itself to give birth to the religious life anew, to continue its nurture and promote its development. Certainly the enhanced spirituality resulting from the example of deep devotion of the Tractarians themselves and that of their followers engendered a religious atmosphere in which new spiritual adventures were made possible.

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.

Afterword

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Podmore
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Ordination Of Women ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Church

The primary legacy of the Oxford Movement was the Catholic Movement within the Church of England. Between 1900 and 1960 that Movement grew and diversified, but remained undivided. However, the upheavals of the 1960s proved destabilizing, and from the 1970s debates over the ordination of women caused division. Some heirs of the Oxford Movement rejected the ecclesiological principles that had brought the Movement into being, but continued to identify with Anglo-Catholicism’s liturgical, spiritual, and theological traditions. Others became Roman Catholic or Orthodox or joined Continuing Anglican churches. However, within the Church of England (and to an extent in the Church in Wales), a strong and well-organized Catholic Movement continues.

Newman’s ‘Anglican Deathbed’

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheridan Gilley
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
The Church

In Tract 90 (1841) John Henry Newman attempted to reconcile the Thirty-Nine Articles with Catholic teaching. Severely attacked by the bishops of the Church of England, Tract 90 brought the series of Tracts to an end. Newman then let the leadership of the Movement pass to radicals like William George Ward, whose insistence that he rejected not one Roman doctrine led to his degradation from his degrees. Newman resigned his parish of St Mary the Virgin in 1843 and his orders in 1845, when he became a Roman Catholic. His submission to Rome became the ‘type’ of such Anglican conversions, which became part of the controversial pattern of English religious life.

Decadent Rituals

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Bradley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Religious Ritual ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

Anglo-Catholicism, the nineteenth-century movement within the Church of England that sought to reassert many of the forms and rituals of Roman Catholicism, exerted a significant shaping influence upon the religious aesthetics of English decadent writing. While the space that Anglo-Catholicism offered for a decadent performance of sexual difference has been examined before, this article offers a complementary argument, emphasizing a strand within decadence arising from the role of personality in reconceptualizing, and possibly distorting, religious orthodoxy. The first part provides a history of the discourse of degeneracy around the early Oxford Movement and the mediation of Anglo-Catholic ideas into English decadence through the writings of Walter Pater. It then discusses the ways in which decadent writing in England explored a distorting excess of personality through the aesthetics of religious ritual and asceticism.

Prisms of Expectation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Michael Shea
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Networks ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Doctrinal Development ◽  
The Church ◽  
Transnational Social Networks

Chapter 1 examines the various types of hopes and expectations that Roman Catholic authorities nourished for the Church of England as a potential missionary opportunity, with a special focus on Newman and the Oxford Movement. The chapter examines transnational social networks between Rome and England, and published and unpublished materials relating to Vatican-supported missionary initiatives in Oxford, as well as the depth of learning that certain figures in Rome displayed in Tractarian theology. The chapter considers adumbrations of the idea of doctrinal development in publication venues associated with Roman authorities, and offers an assessment of the degree to which Newman’s Essay on Development might have been considered novel or heterodox in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

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