THE
P RTAL
February 2018
Page 18
Book Review
The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement
by Fr Simon Heans
“H ow shall
we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” Those words from Psalm 137 kept
coming back to me as I read through the essays in this superb collection. A very welcome feature
of what is an outstanding volume is its starting point. Forget the old scholarship which made Keble’s Assize
Sermon, National Apostasy, the start of the Movement. This volume begins with an essay by our own Revd Dr
Andrew Starkie on the High Church tradition in the reign of the Stuart monarchs.
Starkie tells us about George Bull ‘whose great work
of patristic scholarship, Defensio Fidei Nicenae’ was a
refutation of the writing of a Jesuit, Petavius, ‘who had
claimed that the Council of Nicaea had defined the
nature of the divinity of Christ against the consensus of
Christian theologians before the council’ and went on
to draw the conclusion that dogma could therefore be
defined ‘against the voice of tradition’. The great Bishop
Bossuet wrote praising Bull’s scholarly demonstration
of the errors of ‘hyperubersuperconciliarism (a
variant of Fr Hunwicke’s ‘hyperubersuperpapalism,
also a Jesuit mistake) and a lively correspondence
between them ensued. During it, Bossuet asked how
Bull writing ‘so advantageously of the Church… can
continue a moment without acknowledging her’. Bull
had his answer: he objected to transubstantiation and
purgatory. However, as Starkie shows, Bull’s Anglican
alternative to Rome came close to eclipse after the
Dutch invasion of 1688 forced the de jure monarch,
James II, from the throne and the High Church
bishops were replaced by men like Gilbert Burnet and
Benjamin Hoadly, who had nothing but contempt for
Christian tradition and the ecclesiastical structures
such as councils by which it had been defended and
expounded in the past. England became a ‘strange
land’ indeed to these godly men. As Starkie pointedly
remarks of the great William Law, who conducted a
doughty defence of sacramental theology against the
egregious Hoadly, the Bishop of Bangor, the fact that
Law did not exercise any ministry in the Church of
England ‘was evidence that the theoretical claims of
the High Church party… had not been matched by the
implementation of those claims’.
claim that “every one is orthodox to himself ”. Anxieties
about the Church of England were expressed by Thomas
Brett: “Can anyone think… that the present Church of
England has not departed from the Communion of the
Catholick Church in rejecting so many Things, which
were always practised by the Catholick Church?”
Sharp goes on to suggest that Henry Hammond’s
dubium of 1645 (in case it be true, that I am actually
convinced that the particular Church wherein I live is
departed from the Catholick Apostolick Church then
it follows that meekness requires my obedience to the
Catholick Apostolick Church, and not the particular
in which I live) haunted that later generation of High
Churchmen.
Professor Nigel Aston, author of the fourth essay
in the book (on the High Church of 1760 to 1811), is
himself a High Churchman and, as we would expect,
he makes the best possible case for the significance of
High Churchmen in this period. He certainly shows
that England under George III was a more hospitable
place for them. However, as he also demonstrates, they
were essentially living on the borrowed spiritual capital
of the High Church exiles, the Non-Jurors. It was
their song they were singing. As Aston remarks, ’the
accession of George III could plausibly be presented
… as the triumph of Jacobite values, albeit without the
Pretender’. Nevertheless that ‘regal church structure’
(Starkie) on which they depended was soon to come
crashing down as, in 1829, Roman Catholics acquired
the civil and political rights denied them following
the usurpation of the throne by William and Mary.
England was soon no longer to be quite such ‘a strange
land’ for ‘the Lord’s song’. But how would those who
The following essay about the High Churchmen of had been singing the Lord’s song in exile react to the
the next generation (c. 1710 – 1760) by Dr Richard prospect of it coming to an end? Would they take the
Sharp takes up this theme of exile, pointing out that chance to depart from their Babylonish captivity and
even those High Churchmen who remained members return to Jerusalem? These were the questions facing
of the Established Church, and did not follow the the High Churchmen of the first half of the nineteenth
Non Jurors in separating themselves from it, were not century.
comfortable with their situation because of the erosion
Sheridan Gilley, in a magisterial survey of the
of ecclesiastical authority resulting from ‘the Lockeian