Search Results

John Henry Newman was plagued with doubts given the state of the Church of England. The “misery” of the lack of a Catholic ethos in the Church remained and made him “despondent” and sluggish. He later wrote about this despondency which extended beyond Tractarian problems to the larger religious crisis of the time in the midst of all his preoccupations with the Movement's progress. He doubted whether Anglo-Catholicism and Roman Catholicism were strong enough to have a foundation, a consistency to stand up for the clamor of the times. Will the religions hold true for the times and for the people? Will they stand up to facts” or mere theories? For Newman, reality was the ultimate test.

It was becoming more obvious that John Henry Newman's overall authority was no longer acknowledged and that his view of the Oratory was specifically rejected. Newman concluded that there was a “similitude between the dead records of the past and the feverish chronicle of the present”. He asserted that the argument from analogy plays a continuous and crucial role in his critique of Anglo-Catholicism for identities are discovered and realities revealed through the recognition of analogies. The argument from analogy is deployed effectively and at length in ‘Mysteries of Nature and of Grace’ to show that the difficulties of belief in God are parallel to those of believing in the Catholic Church. Newman would later set up the English Congregation of the Oratory and admitted nine members “five priests, one novice, three lay brothers, and the St. Wilfrid's community. Immediately a problem arose” a foretaste of things to come.

This chapter provides a detailed examination of the Church’s involvement in three intertwined marriage law reform campaigns: divorce, polygamy, and the Deceased Wife’s Sister Act, and also considers the significance of the introduction of equal marriage vows in the 1927 Prayer Book. It reveals the influence of Anglo-Catholic sacramentalism on Anglican understandings of the marriage bond, and on the Church’s increased resistance to marriage law reform in the late nineteenth century.

This chapter discusses the reversal of the Church of England’s position on birth control between 1908 and 1930. It explores the formation of social policy around contraception to show how Anglican understandings of the purpose of marriage and sex shifted. It argues that the decision of the 1930 Lambeth Conference to cautiously approve of the use of birth control within marriage marks a subtle but significant recalibration of Anglican understandings of gender, power, and pleasure.

The conclusion discusses the key discursive technologies of sex and gender that emerged in the previous chapters. It highlights the importance of the gendering of political space, the rise of Anglo-Catholic sacramentality, and the dialogic relationship between theology, feminism, and new sexual sciences. It concludes that debates about marriage, suffrage, ordination, and homosexuality in the first half of the twentieth century resulted in a substantial reorganization of Anglican understandings of sex, power, and pleasure.

This chapter deals with views of the Chinese language as morally deficient or spiritually impotent. An example of spiritual importance is the mantras. The chapter explains that the repetition of these apparently meaningless sounds reminded missionaries of their heritage of polemics against Catholicism, Anglo-Catholicism, and the trend of ritualism. It analyzes how Protestant anti-Catholicism manifested itself in missionary accounts of China.

The world of the Episcopal Church between the Civil War and the Great Depression was one of considerable complexity and ferment, with consequences far beyond the internecine struggles among High, Low, and Broad Church factions as portrayed in traditional history. Episcopalians were also emerging at this time as a distinctive social configuration—a national elite. The question of whether Episcopalians were essentially Evangelical Protestants or Reformed Catholics reemerged after the Civil War, leading to the development of the Reformed Episcopal Church in 1871. Alternatively, the Broad Church movement essentially was an attempt to adapt the best from modern thought and culture to the purposes of the church. Most generally, the major contribution of the Episcopal Church to American life was a religious legitimization of the material realm, not only as a not fatally contaminated by sinfulness but as an authentic means for the experience of divine grace. Another major theme in American Episcopal life was philanthropy, a subject intimately involved with money.

Within the Episcopal Church—unlike some other denominations—there was considerable room for argument on matters of social and economic issues as well as those of “churchmanship.” During this era, many Episcopalians, both clergy and laity, remained attached to the laissez-faire economics that had dominated American thought during much of the nineteenth century. Others, however, grew highly critical of this economic system in the American social and political context. Many Episcopal parishes became pioneers in the institutional church movement, devising a whole new mixture of physical plant and programming that could provide a wide variety of services to poorer parishioners. Although many of their ideas and practices were shared with other denominations and secular agencies, Episcopalian “Social Gospellers” often differed from their counterparts in their association with the thought and experience of the Church of England, with which American Anglicans maintained a lively relationship during this era.

This chapter looks at a little-known episode in church history to think about how ritual became such a market force. In the nineteenth century, the Anglophone world was caught up in a crisis defined by a debate about right ritualization. In this elite squabble, the label “Ritualist” was deployed as an epithet to describe a revival of interest in church sacraments. Anglican and Episcopalian Ritualists advocated “High Church” ceremonialism to counter what they perceived as secularization. This secularization was not an irreligious force as much as it was—to the Ritualists—a diminished ritual force. The term scientia ritus is coined to describe the way in which the literature produced in the crisis offered a certain exacting diagnostic technology for right ritual behavior and ritual analysis. This chapter focuses on the depiction of these debates about ritual as indicative of a broader pattern of religious life in the emergent modern American consumer culture. This is not to suggest that rituals vacated their content to become commodities; rather, it is to argue that the debates about ritual became articulated through the mediated marketplace that formats religion.

This chapter has the dual function of surveying the theological background to Anglican historiography and of introducing the leading Anglican historians of the period. Its first section examines the impetus given to the study of the past by the Oxford Movement (Tractarianism), focusing on historians such as E. A. Freeman, William Stubbs, Mandell Creighton, and R. W. Dixon. It argues that Tractarian, High Church, and Anglo-Catholic thought should be taken seriously as an intellectual movement linked to Romanticism and medievalism. It also explores the later phenomenon of Cambridge Anglo-Catholicism (J. N. Figgis and William Cunningham). The second section turns to Broad Church historians (J. R. Green, J. R. Seeley, Arnold Toynbee, W. J. Ashley) and considers the contribution of ‘liberal Anglican’ and idealist thought to historiography. The final section addresses the near-absence of Evangelicals from historical scholarship, both within the Church of England and in Nonconformist denominations.

This chapter examines Anglican historians’ views of the Reformation settlement—a term covering both doctrine and matters of church and state. This remained a subject of polemical and constitutional importance in public debate, and so was hotly contested by different schools of Anglican thought. Moderate High Church scholars, including Mandell Creighton and the prime minister William Gladstone, emphasized the continuity of the English Church across the Reformation: this was crucial to their conception of the post-Reformation Church of England as the true heir of the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages. This was the orthodox view, but specialist archival scholars, particularly the Anglo-Catholics J. S. Brewer, James Gairdner, and Nicholas Pocock, repudiated the Reformation church as a Protestant aberration. Protestant Anglicans, meanwhile, took up a variety of different positions—liberal, Evangelical, Erastian. This is a subject which goes to the heart of Anglican identity in this period.

This chapter explores Rossetti’s radical reading of creation in her earliest poetry as an interconnected body held together by grace in relation to Tractarianism. It discusses her membership of the Christ Church, Albany Street community, and the renewed Anglicanism, or Anglo-Catholicism, she discovered there through figures such as Edward Bouverie Pusey and William Dodsworth. It shows how her vision of a revealed and interconnected cosmos originates in Tractarianism’s promotion of a universal Catholicism founded on a unity of all things as well as its commitment to religious education for women. The chapter also focuses on Rossetti’s engagement with premillennialism and patristics, and introduces her fascination with the Second Advent and the end of time. Rossetti thought that Christ would not return, however, to an internally atomized creation. In response, she followed the Tractarian emphasis on communion and grace to envision a companionable fellowship of divine, human, and nonhuman.

The Anglican Church underwent significant feminization during the nineteenth century, although this was not desired, or planned, by the Church itself. The role of women in nineteenth-century Anglicanism underwent a slow evolution, growing in scope and diversity, while remaining in subjection to clerical oversight. The Church’s slow acceptance of women’s voluntary church work remained conditional on its meeting three criteria: that it be focused on care-giving, that it be supplemental to the work of men, and that it remain under clerical supervision. Women remained excluded from Church governance throughout the period, although self-governing institutions such as sisterhoods sprang up on the margins of Anglicanism.

This chapter traces the evolution of Anglican theology from the liberal synthesis of the years before the First World War, through the 1920s with its major splits between Anglo-Catholics and modernists over the doctrine of the Incarnation (which continued into the 1970s). It goes on to discuss philosophical theology, before addressing the different contextual theologies that have begun to emerge in the wider Anglican Communion. Noting at various points the influence of theologies and ecclesiologies from other Christian traditions, it concludes by suggesting that Anglican theologies will be increasingly fragmented as Anglicans struggle for their own identity among the competing ideologies of the modern world.

This chapter examines the history of Anglicanism in Oceania. In particular, it demonstrates how Anglo-Catholic, High Church, and monastic expressions of Anglicanism were transposed to Melanesian and Polynesian contexts, producing a unique and evolving set of identities and practices. While a missionary posture of accommodation fostered the inculturation of worship rituals, liturgy, institutional structures, and theologies into indigenous forms, an accompanying paternalistic ethos delayed the creation of an indigenous Church and leadership. The chapter also highlights the crucial role of women and indigenous agency. Finally, the period after 1942 marked a decisive shift from colonial dependency to independent nationhood in places where Anglicanism had taken root. How Anglicans in the region negotiated the tension between tradition and modernity—in Church, society, and state—is a further salient theme of this chapter.

The question whether there were modern ways of being religious, or religious ways of being modern, was significant to a variety of writers and artists. Homosexuals were particularly drawn to Catholicism, which is strongly associated with both sacerdotalism and aesthetically rich forms of worship (though baroque and modernist tendencies do not divide straightforwardly down confessional lines). Maurice Child’s Society of Saints Peter and Paul was the principal theorist of baroque Anglicanism, Martin Travers its most distinguished practical exponent. Among Catholics, the most significant in the creation of a modern baroque aesthetic are Canon John Grey, priest and former fin-de-siècle poet, and Fr Martin D’Arcy, who persuaded Lutyens to build Campion Hall as a Jesuit house of study in Oxford and filled it with an astonishingly eclectic accumulation of art.