G. The Oxford or Tractarian Movement
G. The Oxford or Tractarian Movement
After describing the conclusion of his Mediterranean journey, Newman opens chapter two of his Apologia with these words: “When I got home from abroad, I found that already a movement had commenced, in opposition to the specific danger which at that time was threatening the religion of the nation and its Church.”589 The threat to which Newman refers was a perceived attack by the new Whig government (after nearly four decades of Tory rule) on the structures and revenues of the Protestant Church of Ireland.590 Newman’s response, in collaboration with such figures as Edward Bouverie Pusey, John Keble, Richard Hurrell Froude, William Palmer, Robert Wilberforce, and Isaac Williams became the context in which his via media emerged. While a great deal can be said about very small parts of this narrative, to say nothing of the overall Oxford Movement, we will focus our attention on those elements that elucidate Newman’s doctrine of justification.591
Following Keble’s assize sermon, “National Apostasy,” from the pulpit of St. Mary’s on July 14, the Oxford Movement initiated its campaign in September of 1833 with brief articles issued under the title, Tracts for the Times. The Tracts had two primary targets: the “High and Dry” establishment which sought to promote the marriage of State and Church, and the non-conformist churches, which, consisting largely of Evangelicals, had grown in membership throughout Britain. Of these two targets, liberalism initially occupied the foreground. So involved in the project did Newman become that he would eventually edit, publish, or contribute to thirty of the ninety tracts. Like Athanasius of old, Newman regarded himself as taking a stand against heresy—the liberal heresy of Erastianism and the subjective heresy of Evangelicals.592
Of all the criticisms leveled against the Tracts, the most common was its agenda to undermine the Protestant character of the Church of England. John Bowden, for example, had warned Newman in a letter dated July 14, 1834, that the Oxford Tracts “will be one day charged with rank Popery,” and recommended that a tract be published to preempt the charge.593 In response to this critique, Newman composed two tracts (numbers 38 and 41) suggesting that the Church of England had become more Protestant than it had previously been. The proper trajectory of Anglicanism, argued Newman, is a via media between Protestantism and the Roman Catholic Church.594 His argument came to a head in 1837 with his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church (first published on March 11, 1837), a work that systematized the teaching of Anglican Divines of the seventeenth century, originally delivered in Adam de Brome chapel of St. Mary’s Church.595
The foundation of Newman’s via media distinguished the so-called “episcopal tradition,” which grew out of the Catholic creeds and was passed through generations by a succession of bishops, from the “prophetical tradition,” which was thought to exist in the broader development of the Church’s theological reflection.596 In his Lectures on the Prophetical Office, Newman emphasizes the vital necessity of this prophetical tradition. In addition to drawing attention to the growth and development of Christian teaching beyond the primitive creeds, this emphasis also had the effect of conceptually moving the range and scope of apostolic faith closer to Roman Catholicism. Statements such as the following illustrate how Newman’s logic drove him in this direction.
What is meant by the Church Catholic at this day? Where is she? What are her local instruments and organs? How does she speak? When and where does she teach, forbid, command, censure? How can she be said to utter one and the same doctrine every where, when we are at war with all the rest of Christendom, and not at peace at home? In the Primitive Church there was no difficulty, and no mistaking; then all Christians every where spoke one and the same doctrine, and if any novelty arose, it was at once denounced and stifled. The case is the same, indeed, with the Roman Church now; but for Anglo-catholics so to speak, is to use words without meaning, to dream of a state of things long past away from this Protestant land.597
It is noteworthy that in this second edition of the Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification (1838), following the above logic, Newman renamed “Anglicanism,” “Anglo-Catholicism.” Through this way of thinking, Newman and his fellow Tractarians were prompted to contend that it was necessary to look back before the sixteenth-century context of Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley in appreciation of the Catholic scope of the early church.598 With such a vision, Newman sought to strengthen the church to withstand the dangers of the moment by inculcating an informed commitment to “Apostolical Succession” and “the Liturgy.”599 The primary vehicles of communication driving this campaign were diverse. In addition to the Lectures on the Prophetical Office, print media included the Tracts for the Times,600 Froude’s Remains,601 and the British Critic, a paper with a circulation of approximately 1,200, which Newman himself edited, starting in 1838.602 Other platforms included the pulpit of St. Mary’s Church, from which Newman preached weekly603 and the Adam De Brome chapel where he lectured.604
The question naturally arises, to what was Newman reacting when he formed his via media? Sheridan, arguing from Newman’s Apologia (1864), asserts that it was primarily the threat of liberalism, so that in The Arians of the Fourth Century, “Newman could not help but compare in his own mind the Church of which he was reading in the writings of the fourth century Fathers and the Church as he knew it in the England of his day.”605 Sheridan is not alone in recognizing this tendency. Rowan Williams, in his volume on Arius, makes a similar point; Williams, however, also highlights the role of Evangelicalism in provoking Newman’s polemic. His argument illuminates the connection between Newman’s writing of The Arians, the Oxford Movement, and Newman’s growing critique of Protestantism.
However, setting aside for the moment the distasteful rhetoric of [Newman’s] exposition, it should be possible to see something of what his polemical agenda really is. The Arians of the Fourth Century is, in large part, a tract in defence of what the early Oxford Movement thought of as spiritual religion and spiritual authority. It works with a clear normative definition of Christian faith and practice, in which ascetical discipline goes hand-in-hand with the repudiation of Protestant biblicism (and Protestant rejection of post-scriptural development in teaching and devotion). . . . Newman’s version of the fourth-century crisis, then, rests upon a characterization of Arianism as radically “other” in several respects. It is the forerunner of stolid Evangelicalism, Erastian worldliness (“carnal, self indulgent religion”), and—by 1874 [when he revised his Lectures on Justification], anyway—the new style of university theology.606
Standing beside Williams, on the other side of the spectrum from Sheridan’s interpretation, is the view of Frank Turner, who argues that the structure of the Apologia was purposefully designed to conceal Newman’s antipathy for Evangelicals, “a dislike bordering on hatred that had been the single most energizing force in his thought and theology during the 1830s and early 1840s.”607 Turner provides credible evidence that in the Apologia, “Newman assiduously recast that Tractarian assault on Evangelical religion into a struggle against liberals and liberalism whose victim he claimed to have been.”608 Such a strategy, argues Turner, promised to recast Newman as a champion of dogmatic religious truth during the controversial years of the 1860s when he was persona non grata in most religious circles. The strength of Turner’s case is tarnished, however, by his tendency to subject Newman to psychological analysis, even at the level of his subconscious motives, an approach which has met with a negative reception, not least among some well-established Newman scholars.609 Nevertheless, Turner seems to be on to something when he points out the significance of Evangelicalism as a fundamental force of provocation for Newman during his Tractarian period.
There is a way of reading Newman that can retain the worthwhile element of Turner’s insight—that Evangelicals indeed occupied the foreground with liberals in motivating the via media—without necessitating Turner’s full-blown theory. This fact comes when we recognize that, in Newman’s view, Evangelicalism tended toward liberalism.610 Notice, for instance, how Newman makes this connection in his Lectures on the Prophetical Office.
Before Germany had become rationalistic, and Geneva Socinian, Romanism might be considered as the most dangerous corruption of the gospel. . . . But at this day, when the connexion of Protestantism with infidelity is so evident, what claim has the former upon our sympathy? And to what theology can the serious Protestant, dissatisfied with his system, betake himself but to Romanism, unless we [Anglo-Catholics] display our characteristic principles, and show him that he may be Catholic and Apostolic, yet not Roman?611
In this statement Newman manages to portray contemporary Protestantism as fostering unbelief like the rationalistic Germans (i.e., liberals) and the theologically minimalist Socinians.612 The place where this was most obvious, from Newman’s point of view, was in the Evangelical emphasis upon “private interpretation,”613 a concept that he regarded as open to absurdity.614 For example, Newman, in his sermon entitled, “Unreal Words” (published in 1840), exclaims his frustration with the myriad religious voices claiming to pronounce authoritatively upon issues of doctrine. “Let us avoid talking, of whatever kind; whether mere empty talking, or censorious talking, or idle profession, or descanting upon Gospel doctrines, or the affectation of philosophy, or the pretence of eloquence.”615
As Newman was troubled by the subjective impulse of Evangelicalism, the feeling of suspicion and opposition was eventually reciprocated.616 In its first review of the Tracts in 1833, the Christian Observer described the publication as coming from “a Society formed at Oxford, the members of which, professing themselves to be the most orthodox upholders of the Church, have begun to scatter throughout the land publications which, for bigotry, Popery, and intolerance surpass the writings even of Laud and Sacheverall.”617 This was among the first public shots that would eventually develop into a full-scale doctrinal battle.
In response to opposition from the Christian Observer, specifically after its castigation of Pusey’s tracts on baptismal regeneration,618 Newman promised to publicly address the doctrine of justification in order to demonstrate that the teaching of the Tracts in general and these tracts in particular were in fact consistent with the Articles of Religion.619 After submitting two letters of response for publication,620 Newman decided to deliver a lecture series on the doctrine of justification in Adam de Brome’s chapel at St. Mary’s, Oxford. It was spring of 1837.621
Significant as the attack on Pusey was, there were additional factors motivating Newman to address the doctrine of justification. Evangelical critics of the Tracts proceeded to cast aspersions on what they viewed as the Oxford Movement’s desire to revive the Roman doctrine of infused righteousness.622 An opportunity for Evangelicals to assert this contention came when George Stanley Faber published his work The Primitive Doctrine of Justification Investigated (1837). Faber, a thoroughgoing Evangelical, endeavored to prove against Alexander Knox (an Irish lay theologian), and against Joseph Milner (Newman’s favorite Evangelical church historian), that the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith was rooted in the teaching of the early fathers before it was corrupted by the medieval scholastics. When a review of Faber’s work asserted that “we see no substantial difference between the doctrine of Trent and the doctrines of Mr. Knox and the Oxford Tracts,” a quarrel erupted.623
On account of his appreciation for the writing of Alexander Knox (d. 1831), Newman’s attention was drawn to the dispute.624 Newman’s interest centered on Knox’s essay, “On Justification,” written in 1810, which belonged to a volume of Knox’s letters and papers entitled the Remains. Originally prepared by the Rev. James John Hornby in 1834, Newman edited the updated edition in 1837.625 Scott Murray summarizes the basic thrust and effect of the essay when he writes, “Knox argued that the Church of England no longer held justification as an usus forensis but rather as a moral renovation. This article apparently brought to boiling point a simmering controversy between the High Churchmen and the Evangelicals in the Church of England.”626 Against this backdrop, Newman’s Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification was intended to set the record straight.