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The Oxford Movement and the Legacy of Anglican Evangelicalism 53 The Oxford Movement and the Legacy of Anglican Evangelicalism Peter Nockles The previous chapter referred to the contribution of the Evangelical Revival to reform in the nineteenth century. The literature on ‘evangelical revival’, especially in regard to its origins and genesis, is vast. It is matched by a no less substantial literature on the subject of organic and institutional church reform in the long eighteenth century. However, the treatment of church reform has been primarily in institutional or structural rather than theological or spiritual terms. This essay will focus on the Oxford Movement, the High Church religious movement within the Church of England that emerged in the 1830s. The Oxford Movement (1833-1845), led by a coterie of individuals from within the University of Oxford including John Henry Newman (1801-1890), John Keble (17921866 ), Richard Hurrell Froude (1803-1836) and later Edward Bouverie Pusey (18001882 ), was a religious and intellectual revival in defence of the Church of England as a divine institution, a branch of the wider Catholic Church and a repository of the apostolical succession and of sacramental grace. It aimed to reassert the doctrine of the authority and independence of the church in the face of interference by the state. In its appeal to ‘first principles’, the movement aimed to restore the faith and practice of the Early Church and the High Church ideals of seventeenth-century Anglicanism. The term ‘Tractarian’ or ‘Tractarianism’ soon became shorthand for followers of the Oxford Movement and to describe the principles enshrined in a series of publications called the Tracts for the Times. This chapter will seek to highlight the Oxford Movement’s ‘reformist’ credentials in theological, ecclesiological, liturgical, and devotional terms. Comparisons will also be drawn with the earlier Evangelical Revival, discussed in the previous chapter, and with its nineteenth-century adherents within the Church of England. Peter Nockles 54 1 Wilson, The Revival of Spiritual Religion, 4-5. Daniel Wilson was the son of Daniel Wilson, bishop of Calcutta, whom he had succeeded as vicar of Islington in 1832. Evangelical and Tractarian Movements Religious revival has been mainly studied with a focus on ‘evangelical’ individual spiritual conversions for which certain criteria were laid down. However, an ‘evangelical’ revival could also manifest itself in institutional terms. One dimension of an ‘evangelical ’ revival, that of renewal of the church as a whole after a period of neglect or decline, can be applied to the Oxford Movement. A key criterion for “a genuine revival of religion” laid down in 1851 by Daniel Wilson (1805-1886), vicar of Islington, was that of “a return to vigour and energy after a state of torpor and inactivity”. Another criterion was the raising up of individuals as agents of revival endowed with special gifts.1 The early Tractarian leaders were conscious of the need for another criterion, not normally found in the evangelical understanding of revival - a renewal and reform of the church’s corporate practical life as well as of her theological resources. The idea of a ‘church’ or ‘catholic’ institutional revival was to become a commonplace in the literature on Tractarianism from at least the 1860s onwards. This broader understanding of revival was arguably more akin to the notions of religious reform which characterise the theme of this series. The language and terminology of reform in the so-called Age of Reform has been explored in recent scholarship, notably by Joanna Innes and Arthur Burns.2 Drawing on their insights, I will argue that the term ‘reform’ might be used interchangeably with that of ‘revival’ in a certain sense. The Swedish Lutheran author, Yngve Brilioth’s masterly Anglican Revival: Studies in the Oxford Movement, published in 1925, has been one of the few studies to treat the Oxford Movement in terms of a theological and religious revival (in both individualist and corporate terms) that can accommodate the term ‘reform’. For the Tractarian reinvigoration of the Church of England as a whole after 1833 to a large extent was nourished on a preceding renewal of the individual interior life of its leading participants, a renewal sometimes fostered as much by the influence of Evangelicalism as by traditional High Churchmanship. However, the ‘church revival’ not only depended on a preceding individual religious revival in a sense recognisable to writers of ‘revival’ literature, but Brilioth’s approach also enables us to see the Oxford Movement more clearly as one of ‘reform’ in theological terms. It is possible, however...

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