Chapter 18: Origins of the Oxford Movement
CHAPTER 18
ORIGINS OF THE OXFORD
MOVEMENT
NEWMAN grew up in a fragmented Anglican Church whose origins can be traced to legal and theological developments dating as far back as the thirteenth century. The origin of the Anglican Church had three major influences: anti-papal legislation by the English Crown in the later Middle Ages, Lollardy, and the Lutheran Reformation.1 These influences and the political events of the Anglican Reformation explain why Newman sought a “second reformation.” In his Apologia, Newman wrote: “That ancient religion had well nigh faded away out of the land, through the political changes of the last 150 years, and it must be restored. It would be in fact a second Reformation: a better reformation, for it would return not to the sixteenth century, but to the seventeenth.”2
Between 1351 and 1389, anti-papal legislation, which curtailed papal nominations for vacant benefices, was enacted. In 1353, other statutes known as Praemunire established a punishment for any appeal of legal cases to courts outside England, especially to Rome, and for the publication of papal bulls of excommunication.
Lollardy, the second influence, was a popular movement that followed the teaching of John Wycliffe (1330–1384), a secular priest and Oxford theologian who anticipated much of Luther’s doctrines, except for sola fide.3 The Lollards (from the Dutch word for “mumblers of prayers”) formed congregations of Christians who dissented from various Church doctrines. The Lollards used vernacular translations of the Bible to disseminate Wycliffe’s ideas. This led the English Crown to ban the translation of the Bible into English and to enact capital punishment for heretics. A century later, this popular movement provided an existing base for Lutheranism, the third of the influences leading up to the separation of the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church.
The Lutheran Reform was the immediate precedent for the English Schism. This reform brought significant ecclesial, doctrinal, and religious changes, notably the rejection of papal authority and the sacrament of Holy Orders, abolition of the Mass, reliance on sola scriptura and sola fide and wholesale rejection of Catholic practices of piety.
In 1533, Henry VIII established himself as Head of the Church of England when the Pope refused to declare invalid King Henry’s first marriage, that to Catherine of Aragon. Catherine had borne Henry a daughter, Mary, but she had no surviving male child. The previous year Henry cut off the financial subsidy to the Roman See with the Act in Restraint of Annates. By another law, the Act in Restraint of Appeals, he established that the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of courts was subject to the king. In that same year, Henry secured the consecration of Thomas Cranmer, a Fellow from Jesus College, Cambridge, as Archbishop of Canterbury. Cranmer declared Henry’s first marriage invalid and celebrated the wedding of Henry to his second wife, Anne Boleyn. Anne bore him Elizabeth, who would be Queen after Mary, Catherine’s daughter. Cranmer became the chief architect of the nascent Anglican Church and strove to remove “popery” from the new worship. By forcing worshipers to receive Communion in the hand, he hoped that he could destroy belief in the Real Presence in one generation.
Earlier, Henry had expressed his opposition to Luther’s ideas in the treatise, Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, but after his divorce, the Holy See excommunicated him and declared null his marriage with Anne Boleyn. This and the breakdown of relations with Catherine’s nephew, Emperor Charles V, resulted in a Lutheranizing influence on the new Anglican Church. There was much bloodshed and martyrdom over this splitting of the Church. In 1534, the Act of Supremacy declared the king as the supreme head of the Church in England. The following year, the Treasons Act made it high treason to refuse to acknowledge the king as supreme head of the Church. Sir Thomas More, Bishop John Fisher, and some Carthusian monks were executed for refusing to do so.
In 1536, a profession of faith known as the Ten Articles was drawn up by Thomas Cranmer and approved by Convocation, the general assembly of the clergy. The intent of the Articles was to conciliate both Catholics and Lutherans; later in 1539, another profession, the Six Articles, which was more explicitly Catholic, was promulgated. The Bishop’s Book, a book dictating liturgical reforms, was issued in 1537. This liturgical book was soon replaced by one that was less Lutheran, but despite Henry’s intention to maintain the traditional medieval liturgy, his appointee and chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, led the stripping away of popular devotions, religious holidays, and the dismanthng of shrines. These changes produced religious confusion among the common people, and led to religious persecution under successive monarchs.
In the succeeding reigns of Henry’s children (Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth), both High Anglicans (“Anglo-Catholics”) and Calvinist groups vied to assert the beliefs, texts, rituals, and practices that they thought to be authentically Christian. Under Edward VI (1547–1553), Henry’s son by his third wife, Jane Seymour, England was ruled by a council of regency. During this period Archbishop Cranmer was able to establish Protestantism in England by altering the liturgy through the publication of the Book of Common Prayer, which together with a series of sermons known as the Homilies, introduced significant doctrinal reforms. He was aided by Continental reformers to whom he gave refuge in England.
Edward was succeeded by his half-sister Queen Mary I (1553–1558), who attempted to return England to Catholicism and reconciled her country with Rome through Cardinal Reginald Pole. Queen Mary had Cranmer tried for treason and heresy. He was imprisoned for two years and afterward executed. Queen Mary named Pole, her close adviser, Archbishop of Canterbury, and her first Parliament repealed Protestant religious laws passed by Henry VIII and Edward VI. She authorized the execution of close to three hundred Protestant leaders who threatened the re-establishment of Roman Catholicism in England. A larger number chose exile to Europe.
After an early death from cancer, Mary was succeeded by her half-sister, Elizabeth I. The new Queen began her reign (1558–1603) with a liking for pomp and ritual bereft of principal Catholic beliefs such as the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Then in 1559, she reached a religious settlement with Parliament, which had proposed a Reformation Bill that banned images from churches, forbade the use of the surplice or Catholic vestments, allowed ministers to marry, and called for abuse of the Pope in the liturgy. The settlement consisted in two acts of Parliament, the Act of Uniformity and the Act of Supremacy. The Act of Uniformity replaced the Latin Mass with the Book of Common Prayer and Communion Service. The Act of Supremacy declared the Queen to be the supreme governor of the Church of England. A royal commission administered an Oath of Supremacy; all the bishops except for one refused to take the Oath and were removed from their dioceses. This so-called Elizabethan Settlement thus resulted in the elimination of the Catholic hierarchy in England. The settlement was enshrined in three important texts: the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1571, the Book of Common Prayer of 1559, and the Ordinal for consecrating bishops, priests, and deacons.
Elizabeth I chose England’s new bishops from the English exiles of Mary’s reign who had returned from Geneva with Calvinist ideas and practices. She adopted confessional articles that were acceptable to Calvinists. During the decade of 1580, Elizabeth faced serious political threats, both internal and foreign. Under pressure from Puritan merchants and gentry, she allowed Calvinist principles to take a firm hold of the Anglican Church.
At this time Catholic priests were considered a threat and were executed for celebrating the Mass. Some priests bravely continued to do so in people’s homes at great risk of being found out by spies. St. Edmund Campion was one of these priests. In 1581, he was captured and accused of sedition. Campion was sentenced to death, tortured, and executed for this supposed crime and his writings against the Anglican Church.
While Roman Catholics were persecuted under Elizabeth’s reign, no one party in the Anglican Church enjoyed full favor with the Crown. The Queen’s ecclesiastical appointments continued to favor Calvinists, but at the end of her reign she took vigorous measures against Puritans. The Stuart Successors to Elizabeth aligned themselves wholeheartedly with the High Church party.4 They held the doctrines of the divine right of kings and of hierarchy in church government.
Under the rule of King Charles I (1625–1649) and the interregnum before Charles II (1660–1685), a school of preachers and theologians developed which was later collectively called the Caroline Divines. These men tried to defend the early Anglican Church prior to the Protestant Reformation, based on their extensive patristic and scriptural learning. In particular, these Divines upheld the Episcopal form of church government against the Calvinist claims; they taught the Real Presence, the use of auricular Confession, and the observance of fast and feast days of the Church year.
William Laud was one of the most notable Caroline Divines. In 1633, Laud, who was Chancellor of the University of Oxford, was made Archbishop of Canterbury. He attempted to impose liturgical uniformity with a modest revival of Catholic liturgy and traditions within the Anglican Church and instituted new canons that proclaimed the divine right of kings and defended the Episcopal order of the Church. These changes angered the Puritans, and in 1640, the Parliament issued an order for the arrest of Laud and twelve other Anglican bishops. Laud was tried on the charge of secret “popery” and executed in 1645. This triggered the outbreak of a civil war and the abolition of Anglicanism by Oliver Cromwell.
The seventeenth century was considered by some a sort of golden age for the Church of England, as reflected in its theology, devotional literature, and Church music. Other well-known Caroline Divines were Lancelot Andrewes, Jeremy Taylor, and Thomas Wilson. The members of the Oxford Movement referred often to these theologians and began an Anglo-Catholic Library to reprint their works. During this golden period, however, there was a simultaneous growth in Low Church practice in English society, which was followed by an eighteenth-century Evangelical Revival.
The religious climate of the age in which Newman went to Oxford was one of rising agnosticism, doctrinal relativism, and growing religious indifference. In the face of vast social changes and political unrest, a growing sector of society turned toward Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism, placing faith in regulations, institutions, new laws, and “useful knowledge.” Still the Established Church had a significant place in society. In the early 1830s, the Church of England consisted of two circumscriptions: the Province of Canterbury and the Province of York, which was composed of 27 dioceses with approximately 11,077 parishes and 11,825 churches and chapels.5 In 1851, Anglican churches at Oxford numbered 19 with seating capacity for 11,300, compared to 13 other places of worship with seating capacity for 4200.6
After the violent political and religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, two peaceful reform movements issued from within the Anglican Church, one in the eighteenth century and another in the nineteenth century. The first was the Evangelical Movement, which was closely associated with the Methodist revival, and the second was the Oxford Movement. According to Dean Church, a member of the Oxford Movement, it was “a determined revolt … (although) not the only one, nor the first” against the state of religion in England.7 It was a renewal of doctrinal principles regarding the nature of the Church, Episcopal authority, the sacraments, and the role of Tradition, which were all exemplified in the liturgy, and practices of piety.
Together with a small group of clergymen, primarily from Oxford University, Newman founded the Oxford Movement, which bears the name of the university where it began. Oxford was virtually a medieval town rich in beauty and tradition that held fast to the religious ideal of an old order being overturned in England. Oxford University was still closed to Dissenters and Papists (Roman Catholics); along with Cambridge, it continued to be the place for the education of English clergy. The threat of liberalism in religion was naturally felt much more at Oxford than in the rest of England. Newman wrote that Oxford, as a center for theological learning and the training of clergy, should be won over to the anti-modern and anti-Liberal reforms and thus become the Geneva of the second Reformation. He thought that “living movements” must arise from universities, which are the natural center for intellectual ideas where there is a connection between personal minds.8 These connections, rather than associations and committees, were the path for renewal.
Evangelical Anglicanism, which antedated the Oxford Movement, was the other reform movement, started in the late eighteenth century under men such as Thomas Scott, whose writings inspired Newman. At the start of the nineteenth century the first generation of Evangelical leaders were a layman, William Wilberforce, and three clergymen: Charles Simeon, Daniel Wilson, Bishop of Calcutta, and C. R. Sumner, Bishop of Winchester. They were followed by a second generation of Evangelical Anglicans, men such as Wilberforce’s sons and George Ryder, an Oriel graduate who eventually became Catholic. This second generation was succeeded by a younger rank of men such as Edward Irving and Henry Drummond, who sustained the premillennialist doctrine that Christ would establish a political reign of a thousand years before His Second Coming.
Some Evangelical preachers and authors were strongly anti-Catholic in their preaching and explicitly considered the Roman Catholic Church to be the harlot described by the Book of Revelation. Even during his first journey to Rome, Newman held these ideas that he had learned from Evangelical writers. Nevertheless, other Evangelical leaders were moderate in their views toward Roman Catholicism, and some backed the Whig Reforms that brought political and economic relief to Irish-Catholics.
William Wilberforce (1759–1833), whose family held strong ties of friendship with Newman, was a wealthy merchant and Member of Parliament. He lived with his friend, Henry Thornton, in Battersea Rise, a mansion located in the Clapham section of London. This home became a meeting point for pious and wealthy Evangelical families, often connected by family ties. The Wilberforces and their friends formed the so-called Clapham Sect, known for the name of the neighborhood in London where they resided. The group consisted mostly of Tories and included various members of Parliament and men with administrative posts. This influential group of families began a renewal of the moral customs and piety of English society. They comprised the Evangelical party within the Anglican Church.
A few of the early members of the Oxford Movement came from the Clapham families. Aside from this fact, the influence of the Evangelicals on the origins of the Oxford Movement was negligible. In fact, Newman claimed that Evangelical beliefs and practices prepared the ground for liberalism in religion. Many Oxford men and the leaders of the Oxford Movement were adamantly opposed to the Evangelicals’ impoverished notion of Church authority and Apostolic Tradition.
The Oxford Movement, which Newman began, was a revival of the seventeenth- century Anglican ecclesiastical practices, doctrine and piety. The Movement was wholly distinct from the Evangelical renewal even though it shared with Evangelicals a sincere devotion and concern for moral life. The primary belief that the Movement sought to defend was the doctrine of Apostolic Succession and Episcopal authority in the Church. Although a few of its members, including young Newman, had once been Evangelical, these members soon left Evangelical Anglicanism and strongly contested its very tenets and practices. The founders of the Oxford Movement were either Anglo-Catholics or inclined to this party of the Anglican Church.
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1Nichols, Panther and the Hind, 1-36.
2Apo., 43-44.
3Nichols, The Panther and the Hind, 6-7.
4Nichols, The Panther and the Hind, 52.
5Hermann Ferdinand Uhden, The Anglican Church in the Nineteenth Century (London: Hatchard, 1844), 60-63.
6History of the County of Oxford, Vol. 4, ed. Alan Crossley and C. L. Elrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 254.
7Church, The Oxford Movement, 5.
8Dawson, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement, 78.