THE OXFORD MOVEMENT

It was a movement started by a group of clergymen in support of religion in the 1830’s. The movement was an attempt to recover the tradition of unquestioned faith in Christianity by reconstructing the Church of England in harmony with the Christian Dogma and ideals of medieval times.

One may therefore regard the Oxford Movement as a romantic rebellion against the unorganized and unimaginative routine into which the Church of England had fallen. Since the leaders of the movement desired the true Christians to return to the Catholic Church’s ideals of the middle ages, the Oxford Movement constitutes an effort to carry forward the spirit of romantic revival movement which had been checkmated by the progress of scientific thought.

The immediate causes of the Oxford movement were the three measures of reforms passed by the Parliament:

1.   In 1828 the Tory cabinet under the leadership of Wellington repealed Test and Corporation Act. The repeal of this act made the Christians of the Church of England and other sects equal before the law. The Anglicans opposed such an interference in the House of Commons in the affairs of the Church of England, but the liberals among the Anglicans, the Evangelicals did not support the demand of the orthodox Anglicans, because this autonomy would deprive the Church of England of Government funds and official status.

2.   In 1829, Parliament passed the Catholic Emancipation Act according to which Roman Catholics form Ireland could be members of Parliament. This reform was a second blow to the Anglicans of the Church of England for it would lose the advantages it had enjoyed over other churches.

3.   In 1833, Parliament passed a bill to close down ten Bishoprics (diocese) in Ireland. The measure was reasonable and just, because the Anglican population in Ireland did not require ten Bishoprics. The orthodox Anglicans considered this closure as an attack on the property of the Church of England. The bill created a crisis and the Oxford Movement also called the Tractarian Movement at Oxford began.

Leaders

The initiator of the Movement was John Keble, professor of poetry at Oxford and a clergyman of Cotswold. The other leaders of the movement were R.H. Froude, John Henry Newman, E.B. Pusey, Issac William, Charles Marriott, Richard Church and James Mozley.

Newman always remembered and kept July 14, the day of Keble’s Assize Sermon of 1833, as a starting point of the Tractarian Movement. That sermon was a protest against interference by a secularized parliament and in matters spiritual and the movement has accordingly been regarded as political in its origin. As Fronde pointed out, the House of Commons in Hooker’s time had been a Synod of the Laity of the Church of England and for that reason alone could Hooker tolerate its interference in spiritual concerns. But now after the reform bill and the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, the true situation of the Church became apparent; its liturgy, its articles, and its status could be altered, as its Bishops would be appointed at the will of a Parliamentary majority, which might be non-Anglican or even non-Christian. So, in one sense, the original impulse of the movement might be expressed in Fronde’s explanation, ‘Let us give up a national church and have a real one’.

But the movement was only political and anti-liberal, because it was primarily spiritual; its deepest concern was with the invisible world, not with politics or the obsolete. Its driving power, a hunger and thirst after righteousness, an effort towards true sanctity. Newman’s influence over his Oxford hearers was due to no ritual practices or Popish affectation. He wore a black gown and used no incense and no Eastward position; it was due to the ‘wonderful charm and almost unknow personality’. When men passed him on an Oxford pavement whispered, ‘look that’s Newman!’ it was with reverence towards a ‘Spiritual apparition’ for Newman had the air of one who converse had been in heaven as indeed he had. It is Protestantism which by rejecting Papal authority had subject the Church to the state, it was Protestantism which by exalting scripture and private judgment had opened the way to schism and sect, and finally to infidelity. It was Protestantism, by decrying aestheticism and good works and by rejection so much of ritual, symbolism, and practice that Catholism had held conducive to holiness, had lowered the whole devotional life of the Church of England and left it defenseless and exposed in its hour of greatest need.

Above all, by watering down the doctrines of the Eucharist and of Baptismal regeneration, by minimizing the authority of the priesthood, by turning the bishops into civil servants and by dismissing Romish so many essential means of grace, it had left Christianity unprotected against those forces of unbelief, as the nineteenth century drew on were assembling for the destruction of all religion whatsoever.

The original plan of Oxford men, long before it was borne in upon Newman that ‘The Church of Rome’ will be found right after all, was to Un-Protestantize the Church of England without Romanizing it; ‘we are Catholics without Popery, and Church of England, without the Protestantism’ wrote Hurroll.

As long as Newman retained his Englishman’s suspicion of Rome as corrupt, craft and idolatrous – a ‘stain upon my imagination’, he called it – he continued to believe in the possibility of a via-media; an English Catholic Church like that of Lord, Apostolic yet free from practical abuses and excesses of Rome.

It was to prove justice that a series of ‘tracts’ or sermons were written by the leaders of the Oxford movement between 1833 to 1841 to revive the concept of the Church of England as the English Catholic Church of the great seventeenth century.

The first tract was written by Newman. The tracts which followed led to the climax of the movement when in 1841 Newman issued Tract no XC (90). In this Tract he cogently argues that the 39 articles (39A) of religion in the book of common prayers were essentially Catholic rather than a Protestant formulation against Roman Catholicism as they were usually regarded. This interpretation created a sensation in Anglican quarters as Newman was for them. Many who had till then favored the Oxford Movement withdrew their support. The Bishop of Oxford asked Newman to discontinue publication of the series and ‘Tracts for the Times’ came to an end. The Oxford Movement also fizzled out.

Newman’s autobiography ‘Apologia Pro Vita Sua’ is a landmark in English Literature. Newman wrote his autobiography in seven parts in reply to an attack by Charles Kingsley.