Download The title of this 146th episode is Push

The title of this 146th episode is Push-Back
[Tour]
As we move to wind up this season of CS, we’ve entered into the modern era in our review
of Church history and the emergence of Theological Liberalism. Many historians view The
French Revolution as a turning point in the social development of Europe and the Western
Civilization. The French Revolution was in many ways, the result of the Enlightenment,
and a harbinger of things to come in the Modern & Post Modern Eras.
For convenience sake, but in what is probably a gross simplifying, let’s chop up the history
Western Civilization into these eras, in regards to Church History.
First is the Roman Era, when Christianity was officially opposed & persecuted. That was
followed by Constantinian Era, when it was at first tolerated, then institutionalized. With
the Fall of the Roman Empire, Europe entered the Middle Ages and the Church was led
from Rome in the West and Constantinople in the East.
The Middle Ages ended in the Renaissance which swiftly split into two streams, the
Reformation and the Enlightenment. While many Europeans broke from the hegemony of
the Roman Church to launch Protestant movements, others went further & broke from
religious faith altogether in an exaltation of reason. They purposefully stepped away from
spirituality toward a hard-boiled materialism.
This then gave birth to the Modern Era, marked by an on-going tension between
Materialistic Rationalism and Philosophical Theism that birthed an entire rainbow of
intellectual & faith options.
Carrying on this over-simplified review a bit from where our CS episodes have been, the
Modern Era then turned into the Post-Modern Era with its full-flowering & widespread
academic acceptance of the radical skepticism birthed during the Enlightenment. The
promises of the perfection of the human race through technology suggested by the Modern
Era were shattered by two World Wars and the repeated cases of genocide in the 20th &
21st Cs. Post-Moderns traded in the bright Modernist expectation of an emerging Golden
Age for a dystopian vision of technology run amuck, controlled by mad men and tyrants. In
a classic post-modern rant, the author George Orwell said, “If you want a vision of the
future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
In our last episode, we embarked on our foray into the roots of Theological Liberalism.
The themes of the new era were found in the motto of the French Revolution: “Liberty,
Equality and Fraternity.”
Liberty was conceived as individual freedom in both the political & economic realms. As Al
Mohler aptly identified recently in his excellent weekday The Briefing podcast, “liberalism”
originally referred to this idea of personal liberty in regard to economics and politics. It’s
come to mean something very different today. Libertarian connects better with the original
idea of liberalism than the modern term liberalism.
In the early 19th C, liberals promoted the political rights of the middle class. They advocated
suffrage and middle class influence through representative government. In economic
terms, liberals agitated for a laissez faire marketplace where individual enterprise
determined one’s wealth, rather than class.
Equality, 2nd term in the French Revolution’s trio, stood for individual rights regardless of
legacy. If liberty was a predominantly middle class virtue, equality appealed to rural
peasants, the urban working class, & the universally disenfranchised. While the middle
class & hold-over nobility advocated a laissez faire economy, the working class began to
agitate for equality through a rival philosophy called socialism. Workers inveighed for
equality either through the long route via evolution within a democratic system or the
shorter path of revolution via Marxism.
Fraternity, the 3rd idea in the trinity, was the Enlightenment reaction against all the war &
turmoil that marked history till then; especially the trauma that had rocked Europe due to
endless political, economic and religious struggle. Fraternity represented a strong sense of
brotherhood that rolled across Europe in the 19th C. And while it held the promise of
uniting people in the concept of the universal brotherhood of man under the universal
Fatherhood of God, it quickly devolved into Nationalism that would opnly lead to even
bloodier conflicts since they were now accompanied by modern weapons and their bloodletting devices. unleashed in the nineteenth century.
These social currents swirled around the Christian Faith during the first decades of the Age
of Progress, but no one predicted the ruination they’d bring to the Church of Rome, steeped
as it was in an inviolable tradition. For over a thousand years she’d presided over feudal
Europe. She enthroned dozens of monarchs and ensconced countless nobles. And like them,
the Church gave little thought to the power of peasants and the growing middle class. In
regards to social standing, in 18th C European society, noble birth and holy calling were
everything. Intelligence or achievement meant little.
Things began to heat up in Europe when Enlightenment thinkers began to question the old
order. In the 1760s, several places around the world began to feel the heat of political
unrest. There had always been Radicals who challenged the status quo. But it usually ended
badly for them; being forced to drink hemlock or such. But in the mid & late 18th C, they
became popular advocates for the middle-class & poor. Their demands were similar: The
right to participate in politics, the right to vote, the right to greater freedom of expression.
The success of the American Revolution inspired European radicals. They regarded
Americans as true heirs of Enlightenment ideals. They were passionate about equality; &
desired peace, yet ready to fight for freedom. In gaining independence from the world’s
most formidable power, Americans proved Enlightenment ideals worked.
Then, in the last decade of the 18th C, France executed its king, became a republic, formed a
revolutionary regime, & crawled through a period of brutality into the Imperialism of
Napoleon Bonaparte.
As we saw in an earlier episode, the Roman Catholic church was so much a part of the old
order that revolutionaries often made it an object of their wrath. In the early 1790s the
French National Assembly sought to reform the Church along rationalist lines. But when it
eliminated the Pope’s control & required an oath of loyalty on the clergy, it split the Church.
The 2 camps faced off against each other in every village. Between 30 & 40,000 priests
were forced into exile or hiding. Atheists recognized that the cultural wind was at their
back now and pressed for more. Why stop at reforming the Church when you could pry its
grip from all society? Radicals moved to remove any and all traces of Christianity’s
influence. They adopted a new calendar & elevated the cult of “Reason.” Some churches
were converted to “Temples of Reason.”
But by 1794 this farce had spent itself. The following year a statute was passed affirming
the free exercise of religion. & loyal Catholics, who’d kept a low profile during the silliness,
returned. But Rome never forgot. For now, Liberty meant the worship of the goddess of
Reason.
When Napoleon took control he struck an agreement with the pope; the 1801 Concordat. It
restored Roman Catholicism as the quasi-official religion of France. But the Church had lost
much of its prestige and power. Europe would never again be a society held together by an
alliance of throne and altar. On the other side of things, Rome never welcomed liberalism.
But then, as Bruce Shelley aptly remarks, Jesus and the apostles spent little time talking
about political freedom, personal liberty, or a person’s right to their opinions. Valuable
and important as those things are, they simply do not come into view as values in the
appeal of the Gospel. The freedom Christ offers comes through salvation, which places a
necessary safeguard on liberty to keep it from becoming a dangerous license.
But during the 19th C, it became popular to think of liberty ITSELF as being free! Free of any
and all restraint. Any restriction on freedom was met with a knee-jerk opposition.
Everyone ought to be as free as possible. The question then became; just what does that
mean. How far does “possible” go?
John Stuart Mill suggested this guideline, “The liberty of each, limited by the like liberty of
all.” Liberty meant the right to your opinions, the freedom to express & act upon them, but
not to the degree that in doing so, you impinge other’s ability to do so with theirs.
Politically & civilly, this was best made possible by a constitutional government that
guaranteed universal civil liberty, including the freedom to worship according to one’s
choice. The Popes didn’t like that.
After Napoleon, in the political and economic vacuum that followed, several monarchs tried
to re-establish the old systems of Europe. They were resisted by a new and empowered
wave of liberals. The first of these liberal uprisings were quickly suppressed in Spain &
Italy. But the liberals kept at it & in 1848, revolution temporarily triumphed in most
European capitals.
The mid 18th C papacies of Leo XII, Pius VIII, & Gregory XVI were held by decent men. The
problem is that they steadfastly refused to join the 19th C by clinging to the past. They
simply failed to engage the time by ignoring what was taking place around them.
This early form of Liberalism wanted to address historic evils that have plagued humanity.
But it refused to allow the Catholic Church a role in that work as it related to morality and
public life. Liberals said politics ought to be independent from Christian ethics. Catholics
had rights as private citizens, but their Faith wasn’t welcome in the public arena. This is
part of the creeping secularism we talked about in the last episode.
One of the lingering symbols of papal ties to the Medieval world were the Papal States
where the Pope was both spiritual leader & civil ruler. In the mid 19th C, a movement for
Italian unity began that aimed to turn the entire peninsula into a single nation. Such a
revolution wouldn’t tolerate the Papal States. Liberals welcomed Pope Pius IX, who ruled
frm 1846–78, because he seemed to be a reforming Pope who’d listen to their counsel. And
indeed, in 1848, he installed a new constitution for the Papal States granting moderate
participation in government. This movement toward liberal ideals moved some to even
suggest the Pope as leader over a unified Italy. But when Pius’ appointed Prime Minister of
the Papal States was assassinated by revolutionaries, Pius rescinded the new constitution.
Instead of putting the revolution out, it simply broke out in Rome itself and Pius had to
flee. With French assistance, he returned & returned the Papal states to an absolutist
regime. Opposition grew under the leadership of King Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia. In
1859&60 large sections of the Papal States were carved away by nationalists. Then in
March of 1861, Victor Emmanuel was proclaimed King of Italy in Florence.
But the city of Rome was protected by a French garrison. When the Franco-Prussian War
forced the withdrawal of French troops, Italian nationalists invaded. After a short
engagement in September of 1870, Rome surrendered. After lasting for a millennium, the
Papal States were no more.
Pius IX holed up in the Vatican. Then in June, 1871, King Victor Emmanuel transferred his
residence to Rome, ignoring the protests and threatened excommunications by the pope.
The new government offered Pius an annual salary together with the free and unhindered
exercise of his religious roles. But the Pope rejected the offer and continued his protests. He
forbade Italy’s Catholics to participate in political affairs. That just left the field open to
more radicals. The result was an growing anticlerical course in Italian civil affairs. This
condition, became known as the “Roman Question.” It had no resolution until Benito
Mussolini concluded the Lateran Treaty in February 1929. The treaty stipulated that the
pope must renounce all claim to the Papal States, but received full sovereignty in the tiny
Vatican State. This condition exists to this day.
1870 not only marks the end of the rule of the pope of civil affairs in Italy, it also saw the
declaration of his supreme authority as the Bishop of Rome in a doctrine called “Papal
Infallibility.” The First Vatican Council, which hammered out the doctrine, represented the
culmination of a movement called “ultramontanism.” The word means “across the
mountains” meaning the Alps. Ultramontanism refers to devotion to Rome.
It came about thus . . .
Following the French Revolution (and here we are yet again, recognizing the importance of
that revolution in European and world affairs) an especially storng sense of loyalty to the
Pope developed there. After the nightmare of the guillotine & the cultural trauma of
Napoleon’s reign, many Catholics came to regard the papacy as the only source of civil
order and public morality. They believed only popes were capable of restoring society to
sanity. Only the papacy had the power to guide the clergy to protect religion form political
coercion.
Infallibility, was suggested as a necessary prerequisite for an effective papacy. The Church
had to become a monarchy adjudicating God’s will. As Shelley says it, as sovereignty was to
secular kings, infallibility would be to popes. Infallibility was Church’s version of
sovereignty.
By the mid-19th C this thinking attracted a many Catholics. Popes encouraged it in every
possible way. One publication said when the pope meditated, God was thinking in him.
Hymns appeared that were addressed, not to God, but to Pius IX. Some even spoke of the
Pope as the vice-God of humanity.
In December 1854, Pius IX declared as dogma of The Immaculate Conception; a belief that
had been traditional but not official; that Mary was conceived without original sin. Now, the
subject of the decision wasn’t new. What was, was the way it was announced. This wasn’t
dogma defined by a creed produced by a council. It was an ex cathedra proclamation by the
Pope. Ex Cathedra means “from the chair,” & defines an official doctrine issued by the
teaching magisterium of the Holy Church.
Ten years after unilaterally announcing the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, Pius
sent out an encyclical to all bishops of the Church. He attached a Syllabus of Errors, a
compilation of 80 evils then in place in society. He declared war on socialism, rationalism,
freedom of the press, freedom of religion, public schools, Bible societies, separation of
church and state, and a host of other errors of the Modern Era. He ended by denying that
“the Roman pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself and reach agreement with progress,
liberalism, and modern civilization.”
It was a hunker down and rally round an infallible pope mentality that aimed to enter a
kind of spiritual hibernation, only emerging when Modernity had impaled itself on its own
deadly horns and bled to death.
Pius saw the need for a massive council in order to address the Church’s posture toward
Modernity & its philosophical partner, Liberalism. He began planning in 1865, & called the
First Vatican Council to convene at the end of 1869.
The question of the definition of papal infallibility was all the buzz. Catholics had little
doubt that as successor of Peter the Pope possessed a special authority. The only question
was how far that authority went. Could it be exercised independently from councils or the
college of bishops?
After some discussion & politicking, 55 bishops who couldn’t agree to the doctrine as stated
were given permission by the Pope to leave Rome, so as not to create dissension. The final
vote was 533 for the doctrine of infallibility. Only 2 voted against it. The Council asserted 2
fundamentals: 1) The primacy of the pope and 2) His infallibility.
First, as successor of Peter, vicar of Christ, & supreme head of the Church, the pope
exercises full authority over the whole Church and over individual bishops. That authority
extends to all matters of faith and morals as well as to discipline and church administration.
Consequently, bishops owe the pope obedience.
Second, when the pope in his official capacity, that is ex cathedra, makes a final decision
concerning the entire Church in a matter of faith and morals, that decision is infallible and
immutable, and does not require the prior consent by a Council.
The strategy of the ultramontanists, led by Pius IX, shaped the lives of Roman Catholics for
generations. Surrounded by the hostile forces of modernity; liberalism & socialism, Rome
withdrew for behind the walls of an infallible papacy. // [tour]
A NEW SOCIAL FRONTIER
Lead, kindly Light, amid th’ encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home!
Lead Thou me on!
THESE lines, today sung by millions, were written in 1833 by John Henry Newman, while
traveling home to England from Sicily. The somber mood reminds us of the many troubled
souls in nineteenth-century England. A decade later Newman fled to the Church of Rome
for safety, but the same sense of impending gloom appears in the evangelical Henry Francis
Lyte’s popular hymn “Abide with Me”:
Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;
Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away;
Change and decay in all around I see:
O Thou who changest not, abide with me!
No one in nineteenth-century England could ignore the pace of change. But two
outstanding Christian movements helped literally millions of their fellow believers adjust
to “life’s little day” and in the process won for themselves a respected place in Christian
memory.
I speak of the Clapham Sect of evangelicals, and the Oxford movement of Anglican highchurchmen. Neither was, at first, numerically large. They remind us of Professor Gilbert
Murray’s observation that “the uplifting of man has been the work of a chosen few.” Yet, to
this day evangelical Christians regard the Clapham Sect as a model of Christian social
concern, and “High Church” Anglicans look back to the Oxford movement as a well-spring
of devout churchmanship.
A comparison of the two movements creates some interesting insights into the
continuing questions about Christianity’s place in society. How, after all, are Christians to
view the world?
EVANGELICALS IN THE WORLD
We know that the church is under a twofold commission: God has sent his people into the
world to proclaim salvation and to serve the needy. But he has also called his own from the
world to worship and learn of him. Mission without worship can produce empty service,
just as worship without mission can lead to careless religion. Thus, the church’s life in the
world involves a constant conversation, a “yes” here and a “no” there. Protestants in
nineteenth-century England found society changing so rapidly that they were not always
sure whether they were talking to friends or to enemies.
In many ways the nineteenth century belonged to Britain. England was the cradle of the
Industrial Revolution. London became the largest city and the financial center of the world.
British commerce circled the globe; the British navy dominated the seas. By 1914 Britannia
ruled the largest empire in extent and in population ever fashioned by man.
This rapid industrial and commercial growth, however, left many Britains breathless.
Every hallowed institution seemed to be cracking at the foundation. Some men,
remembering the terrifying days of the French Revolution, feared the future. Other men
sang the praises of change and called it progress. To them England was the vanguard of a
new day of prosperity and liberty for all. Thus, fear and hope were curiously mingled.
The dawning of the Age of Progress found English Protestants either in the Established
Church, Anglicanism, or in the Nonconforming denominations, Methodist, Baptists,
Congregationalists, and a few smaller bodies. The striking movements of the nineteenth
century, however, did not surge along traditional denominational lines. The increasing
liberties of the age allowed Christians to form a host of religious societies to minister to
English life in some vital way or to spread the gospel overseas. These societies were not
churches in the traditional sense of sacraments, creeds, and ordained ministers. They were
groups of individual Christians working for some specific objective, the distribution of
Bibles, for example, or the relief of the poor.
At the opening of the Age of Progress, the greatest power in English religious life was
the evangelical movement, sparked and spread by John Wesley and George Whitefield. The
chief marks of the movement were its intense personal piety, usually springing from a
conversion experience, and its aggressive concern for Christian service in the world. Both
of these were nourished by devotion to the Bible, and both were directed by the central
themes of the eighteenth-century revival: Gods love revealed in Christ, the necessity of
salvation through faith, and the new birth experience wrought by the Holy Spirit. This
evangelical message echoed from a significant minority of pulpits in the Church of England
and from a majority in the Nonconforming denominations.
The Evangelicals of the Church of England were thoroughly loyal to their church and
approved of its episcopal government. But they were willing to work with Nonconformist
ministers and churches, because their chief interest was not the church and its rites. They
considered the preaching of the gospel more important than the performance of
sacraments or the styles of ritual. Such a position was called “Low Church.”
Impelled by the enthusiasm of the Methodist revival, the Evangelicals viewed the social
ills of British society as a call to dedicated service. They threw themselves into reform
causes for the neglected and the oppressed.
THE CLAPHAM COMMUNITY
The general headquarters for Evangelical crusades was a hamlet then three miles from
London called Clapham. The village was the country residence of a group of wealthy and
ardent Evangelicals who knew what it was to practice “saintliness in daily life” and to live
with eternity in view. A number of them owned their own magnificent houses in the village,
while others in the group visited Clapham often and lived with their co-laborers. Historians
have come to speak of them as the “Clapham Sect,” but they were no sect, they were more
like a closely knit family.
The group found a spiritual guide in the minister of the parish church, John Venn, a man
of culture and sanctified good sense. They often met for Bible study, conversation, and
prayer in the oval library of a wealthy banker, Henry Thornton.
The unquestioned leader of the Sect was William Wilberforce (1759–1833), the
parliamentary statesman. But Wilberforce found a galaxy of talent for Evangelical causes in
his circle of friends: John Shore (Lord Teignmouth), the Governor General of India; Charles
Grant, Chairman of the East India Company; James Stephens, Sr., Under-Secretary for the
Colonies; Zachary Macauley, editor of the Christian Observer; Thomas Clarkson, an
abolitionist leader; and others.
At twenty-five Wilberforce had experienced a striking conversion after reading Philip
Doddridge’s Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul; but he also possessed all the natural
qualities for outstanding leadership: ample wealth, a liberal education, and unusual talents.
Prime Minister William Pitt once said he had the greatest natural eloquence he had ever
known. Some called him “the nightingale of the House of Commons.” Many testified to his
overflowing capacity for friendship and his high moral principles. For many reasons
Wilberforce seemed providentially prepared for the task and the time.
“My walk,” he once said, “is a public one: my business is in the world, and I must mix in
the assemblies of men or quit the part which Providence seems to have assigned me.”
Under Wilberforce’s leadership the Clapham friends were gradually knit together in
intimacy and solidarity. At the Clapham mansions they held what they chose to call their
“Cabinet Councils.” They discussed the wrongs and injustices of their country, and the
battles they would need to fight to establish righteousness. And thereafter, in Parliament
and out, they moved as one body, delegating to each man the work he could do best to
accomplish their common purposes.
“It was a remarkable fraternity,” says Reginald Coupland, the biographer of Wilberforce.
“There has never been anything like it since in British public life.”
EVANGELICALS AND SOCIAL ISSUES
A host of evangelical causes sallied forth from quiet little Clapham: The Church Missionary
Society (1799), the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804), The Society for Bettering the
Condition of the Poor (1796), The Society for the Reformation of Prison Discipline and
many more.
The greatest labor of all, however, centered on the campaign against slavery. The first
battle was for the abolition of the slave trade, that is, the capturing of Negroes in Africa, and
shipping them for sale to the West Indies.
The English had entered this trade in 1562 when Sir John Hawkins took a cargo of
slaves from Sierra Leone and sold them in St. Domingo. Then, after the monarchy was
restored in 1660 King Charles II gave a charter to a company that took 3,000 slaves a year
to the West Indies. From that time the trade grew to enormous proportions. In 1770 out of
a total of 100,000 slaves a year from West Africa, British ships transported more than half.
Many Englishmen considered the slave trade inseparably linked with the commerce and
national security of Great Britain.
In 1789 Wilberforce made his first speech in the House of Commons on the traffic in
slaves. He recognized immediately that eloquence alone would never overthrow the
commercial interests in the sale of human beings. He needed reliable information, so he
called upon his Clapham colleagues for assistance.
Two years later, after exhaustive preparation, Wilberforce delivered another speech to
Commons seeking to introduce a bill to prevent further importing of slaves into the West
Indies. “Never, never,” he said, “will we desist till we have wiped away this scandal from the
Christian name, released ourselves from the load of guilt, and extinguished every trace of
this bloody traffic.”
Once again oratory was inadequate, but support was growing. The workers for
abolition came to see that hopes of success lay in appealing not only to Parliament but to
the English people. “It is on the feeling of the nation we must rely,” said Wilberforce. “So let
the flame be fanned.”
Stage by stage the Clapham Sect learned two basics of politics in a democracy: first, how
to create public opinion; and, second, how to bring the pressure of that opinion on the
government.
The Evangelicals secured petitions; they published quality abolitionist literature; they
lectured on public platforms; they campaigned on billboards. They used all the modern
means of publicity. Nonconformists rallied in support, and for the first time in history
women participated in a political contest. The Evangelicals “fanned the flame,” then they
carried the fire to Parliament where Wilberforce and four colleagues from Clapham—the
“Saints” in Commons—tried to arouse complacent leaders to put a stop to the inhumane
slave trade.
THE END OF SLAVE TRADE
Finally, victory crowned their labors. On 23 February 1807, the back of the opposition was
broken. Enthusiasm in the House mounted with the impassioned speeches of supporters of
abolition. When one member reached a brilliant contrast of Wilberforce and Napoleon, the
staid old House cast off its traditional conventions, rose to its feet, burst into cheers, and
made the roof echo to an ovation seldom heard in Parliament. Wilberforce, overcome with
emotion, sat bent in his chair, his head in his hands, and the tears streaming down his face.
That halted the legal traffic in human lives, but the slaves were still in chains.
Wilberforce continued the battle for complete emancipation until age and poor health
forced him from Parliament. He enlisted the skills, however, of a young evangelical, Thomas
Fowell Buxton, to assume leadership of the “holy enterprise.” Buxton was a wise choice.
The certainty of the passage of the Emancipation Act, freeing the slaves in the sprawling
British Empire, came on 25 July 1833, four days before Wilberforce died.
The significance of this action before the European colonial powers partitioned Africa is
enormous. No one has described the impact better than Professor G. M. Trevelyan in his
British History in the Nineteenth Century: “On the last night of slavery, the negroes in our
West Indian islands went up on the hill-tops to watch the sun rise, bringing them freedom
as its first rays struck the waters. But far away in the forests of Central Africa, in the heart
of darkness yet unexplored, none understood or regarded the day. Yet it was the dark
continent which was most deeply affected of all. Before its exploitation by Europe had well
begun, the most powerful of the nations that were to control its destiny had decided that
slavery should not be the relation of the black man to the white.”
For this reason above all others, the Clapham Sect remains the shining example of how
a society—perhaps the world itself—can be influenced by a few men of ability and
devotion.
THE OXFORD MOVEMENT
The second Christian movement, the Oxford movement, represents a contrasting response
to the social crisis of nineteenth-century England. Like its predecessor, the Evangelical
movement, it was more a movement of the heart than of the head. But unlike the Clapham
group the Oxford men were deeply troubled by the direction of English society. They saw
the reforms of the government as attacks upon the sanctity of the Church of England, and
they determined to resist the intrusions of the world.
“We live in a novel era,” John Henry Newman wrote to his mother in March 1829. “Men
have hitherto depended on others, and especially on the clergy, for religious truth; now
each man attempts to judge for himself.… The talent of the day is against the Church.”
For generations the strength of the Church of England had rested with landed
aristocrats who were strong in Parliament. The Industrial Revolution created rapidly
growing industrial towns, such as Manchester and Birmingham, but these had no
representatives in Parliament. The cry for reform mounted.
The Reform Act of 1832 shifted the balance of power from the landed gentry to the
middle class and signified a new sensitivity to democratic forces. This action meant that
many of the new members of Parliament, though not members of the Church of England,
wielded significant power over the Church. Some devout churchmen recoiled in horror.
Dare profane politicians lay hands on the holy things of God?
One group of gifted and deeply religious men at Oxford University raised a cry against
the thought. John Keble, Fellow of Oriel College, preached in the University Pulpit, 14 July
1833, a sermon titled “National Apostasy.” A nation stands convicted of the denial of God’s
sovereignty, he said, when it shows disrespect for the successors of the apostles, the
bishops of the Church, and appeals only to reasons based on popularity or expediency.
Keble found a staunch supporter in John Henry Newman (1801–1890), vicar of the
University Church and a commanding figure in the academic community. Before long an
older man joined them, Edward Pusey, professor of Hebrew. By their preaching and writing
these three influential men turned their protest into a movement.
The Oxford men felt that the Church of England needed to affirm that its authority did
not rest on authority from the state. It came from God. Bishops of the Church were not
empowered by social position but by an apostolic commission. Even if the Church were
completely separated from the state, the Church of England could still claim the allegiance
of Englishmen because it rested on divine authority.
To spread their views the Oxford men launched, in 1833, a series of “Tracts for the
Times,” a move that gave rise to the label “Tractarians.” In these writings the Oxford
leaders published their convictions on a single article of the creed: belief in “one, holy,
Catholic and apostolic Church.” They emphasized the apostolic succession of bishops
through history and the Church’s God-given authority to teach the truth and rule men’s
lives. They magnified the place of the sacraments, ascribing to them an actual saving power.
As an ideal for the Church of England, they held up the church of the first five Christian
centuries. Then, they said, the Christian church was undivided and truly catholic.
While some of these historical ideas were fanciful, the Tractarians believed them
enthusiastically. They called themselves Catholics, on the ground that they were in
agreement with this early catholic Christianity, and they shunned the name Protestant,
because it referred to a division in the church.
Public worship was vital to the Oxford men. They believed strongly in the religious
value of symbolic actions in worship, such as turning toward the altar, bending the knee
and elevating the cross. The worship of God, they said, demands the total response of man,
so ritual should appeal to the senses: rich clerical garments, incense on the altar, music by
trained voices. In short, Tractarian Christianity was a zealous version of “High Church”
Christianity.
Step by step the Oxford men moved toward the Church of Rome. Then came the
thunderclap. In 1841 John Henry Newman wrote Tract 90 and asserted that the ThirtyNine Articles of the Church of England were not necessarily Protestant. They could be
interpreted in the spirit of the Catholic church. Did Newman really believe that a person
could be a Roman Catholic and remain in the Church of England?
A storm of protest fell upon the Oxford movement. The Bishop of Oxford forbade
Newman to publish other tracts. Newman concluded that the only way to be truly Catholic
was to enter the Roman Catholic church. He converted to Rome in 1845 and during the next
six years hundreds of Anglican clergymen followed him. In time Newman became rector of
the new Catholic University in Dublin, and in 1877 he was made a cardinal in the Church of
Rome.
The great majority of the Tractarians, however, stayed in the Church of England and
saw an increasing number of clergymen adopt their “High Church” views. Religion for many
focused on ritual, priests, and sacraments. The concern for beauty brought improvements
in architecture, music, and art in the churches. Gradually the names “Oxford movement”
and “Tractarian” gave way to “Anglo-Catholic,” which meant Anglicans who valued their
unity with the catholic tradition in Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, but who
refused to accept the supremacy of patriarch or pope.
The Evangelical and Anglo-Catholic views of Christianity’s role in society are alive,
though not always well, in our time. Few generations can claim a Wilberforce or a Newman.
Their convictions survive, however, because they are so basic to Christianity in any age:
mission and worship. Early Christians believed that, amid his encircling gloom, the Lord
Jesus himself prayed for his disciples: “Father,… My prayer is not that you take them out of
the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I
am not of it. Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, I
have sent them into the world” (John 17:15–19, NIV).1
Shelley, B. L. (1995). Church history in plain language (Updated 2nd ed., pp. 364–372).
Dallas, TX: Word Pub.
1