Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (142 page)

It was a sign of a serious identity crisis in British Anglicanism that an Oxford sermon of 1833 protesting against this eminently sensible measure became a national sensation. A local High Church clergyman, John Keble, had been invited to give this customary sermon for the opening of the Oxford Assizes, the biannual session of the judges from Westminster. He seized the chance to alarm the assize judges and a large audience of university and local worthies with an attack on 'National Apostasy'. Keble saw the suppression of a crop of Irish Anglican bishoprics as a deliberate attack on the Church by the State, breaking the unity they had formerly enjoyed. The Whig government's disregard for Irish bishops was no less than 'enmity to Him who gave them their commission at first'.
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Clearly many of Keble's fellow clergy agreed. Keble was enthusiastically supported by the vicar of the University Church, John Henry Newman, who had jettisoned the Evangelicalism in which he had been raised and was now embracing Anglican High Churchmanship with the zeal of a convert, to the point of rapidly rethinking its nature, in ways which only gradually became apparent. Newman was himself a preacher of unusual charisma, whose sermons packed his stately church with young admirers. The power of his oratory can still be felt through the very considerable quantities of resonant prose which he produced in his long life.
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Throughout the rest of the 1830s, Keble, Newman and a number of friends mostly associated with Oxford University put forward a new vision of the Church of England in a series of
Tracts for the Times
(hence the activity they inspired has been called either the Oxford Movement or Tractarianism). Their project was to minimize the Church of England's debt to the Reformation which had actually created it as a State Church; to restore a sense of Catholicity to it and to its worldwide offshoots, emphasizing its apostolic succession of bishops across the Reformation divide, its distinctive spirituality and the sacramental beauty of its liturgy. It was thanks to the Tractarians in the 1830s that the word 'Anglican', that casual and unflattering coinage of King James VI (see p. 648), gained its first real currency. 'Anglicanism' had a pleasing echo of that French variant on Catholic identity, 'Gallicanism', and thus suggested a Church which combined a truly Catholic character with a national focus, and which might - just might - acknowledge the primacy of a properly ordered papacy. Tractarians also tried out a new coinage, calling themselves 'Anglo-Catholics'.

Much of what the Tractarians were saying amounted to a restatement of the rebranding of the Church of England attempted by Archbishop Laud and his associates in the early seventeenth century (see pp. 649- 50), but there were other important elements. If the State was apparently no longer going to support the Church of England, then the Church would have to look to its own devices - and the only English precedent for that was to be found in that group of High Church refuseniks who, in impressively perverse loyalty to an ungrateful James II, had formed the 'Non-Juring' Church in 1689. Freed from the imperatives to discretion which establishment brings, and including in their ranks some formidable intellects, the Non-Jurors had ranged freely in their thoughts about the shape of an authentically Catholic Church of England, possessing an episcopate continuous with the Church of the Apostles, uncorrupted by Roman error and unshackled from the State. A large dose of their radical conclusions in both liturgy and ecclesiology (that is, their theology of the nature of the Church), together with their interest in Eastern Orthodoxy and their frequent open rudeness about the Reformation, now enriched the spiritual explorations of the Tractarians. That separated them from older High Churchmen, who had not shown much sympathy with the eventually expiring Non-Juring Church.
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Tractarianism was thus a movement with a good many opinions, as well as a good opinion of itself - perhaps not surprisingly, given the large number of young and single Oxford dons among its leadership.
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The Tractarians' problem was that this good opinion was not shared by the bishops whose government in the Church they theoretically exalted. In 1841 Newman produced the ninetieth of their tracts, arguing, with more ingenuity than was sensible, that England's Reformed Protestant doctrinal statement, the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563, was not directed against the doctrines which made the Church of Rome distinct from those of the Church of England. He seemed genuinely surprised at the uproar which followed, including his own bishop's urgent requirement that the tract should be withdrawn.
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Later in the year came the hammer blow (as far as Newman and his sympathizers were concerned) of the project for the Anglo-Prussian bishopric of Jerusalem. Their fears for the Catholic integrity of the English Church were blended with a refined disdain for Michael Solomon Alexander, the first bishop appointed under the scheme, and for the fact that Evangelicals celebrated his Jewish ancestry. In retrospect, Newman reflected with not untypical feline sarcasm about the Jerusalem bishopric, 'I never heard of any good or harm it has ever done, except what it has done for me; which many think a great misfortune, and I one of the greatest of mercies. It brought me on to the beginning of the end.'
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What Newman meant was that he could no longer escape the instability of the view of Anglicanism which he had constructed for himself. Behind Laud and the Non-Jurors loomed the far simpler identity of the Roman Catholic Church, towards which Newman was swept by a tide of doubt, which had gathered strength in him for some years as he contemplated the history of the early Church. Lutheranism and Calvinism were heresies, and he denounced them bluntly in a letter of protest about the Jerusalem bishopric, solemnly sent to his bishop and the Archbishop of Canterbury; but two years before that, he had already privately come to see the Church of England as nothing better than the Monophysites of the fifth century: no Church at all.
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His piecemeal withdrawal from Anglicanism was completed in 1845, to general dismay (except among those on all sides who saw it with gloomy relish as the natural result of Tractarianism). A further crisis for many High Churchmen was provoked by a legal judgement from the Privy Council in a case between two exceptionally obstreperous clergy, whose theological clash paralleled their combative personalities: the Evangelical Rev. George Cornelius Gorham and Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter, one of very few High Churchmen then on the episcopal bench. Phillpotts had refused to accept Gorham's promotion to a new parish because he thought Gorham 'Calvinist' in his theology of baptism. Gorham appealed to the Archbishop of Canterbury's highest court, the Court of Arches, which found in favour of the bishop. Gorham then appealed to the Privy Council, which with some hesitation, unsure of its ground in a matter of some theological intricacy, found in his favour.
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There was widespread High Church outrage that a secular court should thus interfere in a strictly ecclesiastical dispute. As a result, Newman was followed to Rome by several like-minded clergy and prominent laity, including the man whom many had regarded as his replacement in leadership of the Oxford Movement, Archdeacon Henry Manning, whose talents were such that he was to end his career as a distinguished Cardinal-Archishop of Westminster.
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This journey, virtually unknown among Laudians and Non-Jurors, has been a recurrent pattern among Anglo-Catholics ever since; yet by no means all followed suit. Newman's background in intense Evangelical religiosity meant that his years as a Tractarian were a staging post on an unstable lurch away from his roots, but the existing High Church party, much caricatured by callow Tractarians as 'High and Dry', was not so easily tipped towards Rome, and beyond the shores of Britain there were other sources of strength.

In the Episcopal Church of the United States of America, High Churchmen had already with a good deal less fuss faced up to the reality of being a disestablished Church whose very existence was centred on a sacramental life and episcopal government. In John Henry Hobart, Bishop of New York from 1811, they had what one of the doyens of American Church history has called 'perhaps the greatest religious leader the American Episcopal Church ever produced'.
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Hobart had a dramatic preaching style worthy of the Methodists, and he was the inspiration in founding in New York the General Theological Seminary, the first Anglican equivalent of the Catholic Tridentine seminary. This was a vital springboard for the world mission which the Episcopal Church launched alongside its English counterpart. Yet what was especially significant about Hobart, besides his exceptional practical abilities, was the reasoning behind his vigorous defence of episcopacy. He saw it as the surest foundation for proper continuity with the earliest Christians: those who had struggled for their faith in a hostile empire before Constantine had favoured the Church. This was an example for the Episcopal Church in his own day, its established status gone, coming to terms with its role as a minority in the new republic. For Hobart, his Episcopal Church had a very different destiny from that of the United Church of England and Ireland as by Law Established.
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What the Americans first experienced and both the Church of England and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland then had to face up to was the discovery that a Church needs to make decisions for itself, whether or not it clings in some form to establishment - something obvious to European Protestant Radicals and English Dissenters from their earliest sixteenth-century stirrings. In that respect, the Oxford Movement could integrate successfully in an initially hostile Church, because it offered a positive answer to a problem more widely felt. With its insistence on the continuity in succession of bishops right back to the Apostles, and the role of the bishop as guardian of the sacraments, it provided a coherent view of what a bishop was and what he should do (although High Churchpeople's view of episcopacy tended to become more nuanced if a bishop forbade them to do what they wanted). Even those who were not High Churchpeople approved of the Church gradually gaining a forum for its own debate, first in the revival of the Convocations of Canterbury and York in 1852 and 1861, and then in the creation of a series of Church assemblies which paid steadily more attention to the opinions of laypeople.

It was also clear that the High Church commitment to liturgy and episcopal government gave coherence to the worldwide and hitherto unlabelled Church which was emerging from British imperial conquest and American Revolution. In fact it was in New Zealand, under the guidance of a notable High Churchman who later returned to an English diocese, Bishop George Selwyn, that the first Anglican experiments in lay participation in Church government took place, furnishing precedents to the Church of England.
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The term which Tractarians had revived for their own party purposes, 'Anglicanism', was now conveniently appropriated to describe a new beast with a reach across the globe: 'the Anglican Communion'. Its bishops worldwide first met after an informal invitation to Lambeth Palace in 1867, hoping to solve the problem of the South African bishop John William Colenso, who had made the mistake of challenging the comfortable consensus of the English Church on interpreting the Bible.
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The mood of ecclesiastical self-assertion encompassed the other established Church in the British Isles, in Scotland, and there it had far more catastrophic effects than the Tractarians achieved in England. Devout members of the Church of Scotland who valued their Reformed heritage, and the theology of Presbyterian Church order within it, had grown increasingly outraged that, thanks to past compromises with the English government, parish congregations could not choose their own ministers, and were forced to accept the decisions of patrons who treated that right as a piece of property. Evangelicals found this particularly offensive. In protest at the lack of reform of this scandal after years of agitation, in 1843 no fewer than a third of the parish ministers walked out of the Church of Scotland and took most of their congregations with them. Providing one of the most remarkable demonstrations of Protestant energy in nineteenth-century Europe, they founded a complete alternative 'Free Church of Scotland' - not a dissenting Church, but an essay at an alternative established Church in waiting. They covered Scotland with a network of new parish churches, clergy houses and organizations alongside the old ones - a tribute not merely to Scotland's continuing consciousness of its Reformation principles, but to the large amount of surplus wealth which its industrial revolution had generated. The schism was not healed until a reuniting of most of the parties concerned in 1929, by which time the problem of patronage had long been solved in the old established Church. Now it seems incredible that such an issue could have so dominated a major national Church and split it down the middle. Christian preoccupations move on.

In England, the Oxford Movement had aesthetic and emotional advantages to sustain it. The Church of England commanded a heritage of thousands of beautiful medieval church buildings inherited from the pre-Reformation Church, over three centuries much altered in cheerfully miscellaneous ways to adapt them to Protestant use. In a society still saturated with Romantic love of the medieval, the impulse to restore their architectural beauty could combine with a High Church desire to develop a liturgy drawing on the buildings' medieval functions. That endeavour might not lead straight to Rome, but to an enhanced dignity and solemnity in Anglican worship, which even those not styling themselves Anglo-Catholics might savour in moderate measure.

And after initial wide public disapproval - even riots against the 'Popery' of Anglo-Catholic liturgy - there came the realization that High Church clergy genuinely did care for the Church's mission to save souls. One of the most important ways in which the movement gained respect in the Church from the 1860s was to launch public missions, especially in settings of urban squalor: Anglo-Catholics took as their model not the emotionalism of Methodist or Evangelical mission but, appropriately, the dramatic missions conducted by various religious orders in Roman Catholic Europe on the classic Jesuit model (see pp. 682-3). Their strategy proved successful. The urban poor may not have been that impressed by Catholic ritual, but what they did appreciate was being taken seriously, and being shown love and consideration by well-educated Christian gentlemen. Many inner-city strongholds of Anglo-Catholic practice were established as a result, and remain even when their settings are now socially very different: in London, for instance, St Alban's Holborn or St Mary's Somers Town.
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