In the
previous posting on this subject — John Henry Newman and what later
became known as “the act of social justice” — we saw that the controversy at
Oxford University in the 1830s at the height of the Oxford Movement was
starting to heat up. Although not
clearly defined, the battle lines were beginning to be drawn between the more
or less orthodox “High Church” Anglicans centered (more or less) around Newman,
and the less or more unorthodox “Broad Church” Anglicans who started coalescing
(less or more) around the Reverend Renn Dickson Hampden.
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| John Henry Newman |
Adherence of the “Low Church/Evangelicals” was the prize
for which both sides contended. This was
because as the main body of believers in the Church of England they would
determine the future course of that institution and possibly Christianity
itself by giving one group a clear majority of members of the Anglican
Communion.
Political maneuvering of this sort was deprecated by virtually
all members of the Church of England except those of the Broad Church
party. It was, in fact, the original
inspiration for the Movement and the main reason for its initial popularity in
reaction against the suppression of a number of Irish bishoprics for political
reasons.
For its part, the Broad Church party as the advance guard
of the New Christianity and socialism actively sought government control of
religion, especially since at the same time they sought control of
government. By controlling a government
that controlled a religion, adherents of “the democratic religion” of
socialism, modernism, and the New Age would be in the position to redefine not
merely politics to suit themselves, but religious doctrine, even to the point
of defining God out of existence in the name of democracy or political
expedience.
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| Saint Robert Bellarmine |
Obviously, the “democracy” or liberalism espoused by the
Broad Church New Christians bears only a superficial resemblance to the
democracy of Saint Robert Bellarmine, Pope Pius VII, or Alexis de
Tocqueville. Broad Church democracy,
“democratic socialism” (as Pope Pius XI would point out a century later) “is based nevertheless on a theory of human society peculiar
to itself and irreconcilable with true Christianity. Religious socialism, Christian
socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good
Catholic and a true socialist.” (Quadragesimo
Anno, § 120.) And that “theory of
human society” is?
The theory of democracy
acceptable to orthodox Christianity is that God builds natural rights into each
human person. Every child, woman, and
man is therefore a sovereign being under the highest sovereignty of God. The socialist theory is that humanity in
general — the collective — is sovereign, not individual human beings.
The implications of the
socialist theory are profound, to say the least. To be brief, the most significant problem is
that the socialist theory requires that God deals in abstractions such as
“humanity,” “the collective,” and so on.
God, however, is omniscient, and does not abstract, which is an
imperfection; abstractions have no existence apart from the human mind which
creates them.
Instead of a democracy in which
individuals delegate rights to the collective (whatever form it takes) — which
is perfectly acceptable to the Catholic Church — the collective delegates
rights to human beings. The whole
concept of natural right is turned on its head and redefined. Natural rights such as life, liberty, and
private property are no longer natural in the sense of being inherent aspects
of human nature but become expedient because it is “natural” to have rights
under conditions determined by those who control the collective and not
otherwise.
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| Rev. Renn Dickson Hampden |
The socialist theory, then, puts
the collective created by man over man created by God, thereby making man
greater than God! That is why the
socialist theory of democracy is completely unacceptable to the Catholic Church
or any other form of Christianity with a claim to orthodoxy.
The immediate trigger of the conflict between Broad Church
adherents and the High Church Oxford Movement was Hampden’s appointment as
Regius professor of Divinity at Oxford University. This was clearly a political appointment by
the Whig (liberal) prime minister, William Lamb, Second Viscount Melbourne. It may even have been a move to punish the
University for its conservative (Tory) position and the fact that Sir Robert
Peel, the preceding Tory prime minister, had been the Member of Parliament for
Oxford.
Hampden’s innovative, Broad Church view of Christianity
was that all doctrinal positions are equally valid . . . which logically meant
that all were equally invalid, a fact that Newman and others were quick to
point out. Thus (for example), under
Hampden’s theory Jesus could be both God Incarnate and the Second Person of the
Trinity, and just an ordinary human being, albeit especially inspired by
God. God, in turn, was a sense of the
divine about which nothing could be known for certain except that there was
Something there.
Given Hampden’s theory, it became clear (at least to the
members of the Oxford Movement) that it was not merely the character of the
University as an Anglican institution that was at stake, nor only the identity
of the Church of England, but the meaning of Christianity itself. This brought the “Low Church/Evangelical”
members of the Church of England over to the side of the High Church Oxford
Movement, despite their earlier suspicions of the Movement’s ritualism and
Romanizing tendencies. The survival of
Christianity was, after all, far more important than a few candles or possible lack
of hostility to the pope.
It was then that the “Broad Church/New Christians” carried
out a political masterstroke. To this
day it is a little puzzling how they were able to pull it off, what with Broad
Churchmen tending to be socialists and often not Christian in the usual meaning
of the term.
The Evangelical, Low Church party, however, was composed
largely of the merchant classes, small farmers, businessmen, and so on. If anything, they tended to what would today
be called “ethical capitalism.”
Religiously, Low Church Evangelicals tended to be much
more vocal in their support for faith in the divinity of Jesus than members of the
High Church Oxford Movement. Movement
members tended to talk and write in more intellectual terms that suggested
faith alone might not be the only thing necessary for salvation. To the Evangelicals, this raised suspicions
of Romish influence.
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| Rev. R.W. Church |
With a little judicious distortion of the facts, Hampden’s
Broad Church/New Christian supporters were able to divert Evangelical attention
away from Hampden’s unorthodox understanding of Christianity. They did this in part by insisting that the
members of the Oxford Movement were persecuting Hampden.
What clinched the matter, however, was that Hampden’s
supporters were then able to get the Evangelicals to become alarmed at the
presumed “Romanizing” by the members of the Oxford Movement. This, of course, was news to the members of
the Movement.
Today’s Catholics and even many of them in the 1830s are
and were baffled by the claim made by a number of High Church Anglicans to be Catholic, but not Roman Catholic. This
bafflement has resulted in a certain degree of acrimony in return, even among
such well-disposed and genuinely charitable Anglicans as R.W. Church.
Members of the church headed by the pope could by their
lights quite reasonably ask, “Well, if you people want to say you’re Catholic,
why don’t you just be Catholic, and
stop all this nonsense about there being a single invisible Church but a number
of visible churches?”
Members of the church headed by the ruler of England
politically and by the Archbishop of Canterbury religiously could in turn equally
reasonably ask, “As long as we all agree on essential doctrines, why do you
people insist on a purely political arrangement that depending on the
interpretation of Scripture is either weakly attested to or not at all?”
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| Pope Gregory XVI, a.k.a. "Antichrist" |
Of course, both sides could then point out that quite a
few people claimed there were serious doctrinal difficulties, others that they
were only disciplinary, and still others that there were not even those. Fortunately, however, that is not something
we need to address in this series.
What we can address is the surprise of people like Newman
who, although they had softened somewhat on their antipathy to all things
Roman, still rejected papal authority, and even regarded the body headed by the
pope as something of a threat to the independence of the Church of
England. Newman, in fact, as an
Evangelical and even during his pre-Movement High Church period had regarded
the pope as Antichrist — and not as a metaphor.
Movement leaders had even gone to the length of inserting
a statement in Tracts for the Times
when collected in book form. This was to
the effect that the Movement’s investigation of the original doctrines of
Christianity as explained by their interpretation of the early Fathers of the
Church, if “faithfully preached . . . [would] repress the extension of Popery,
for which the ever-multiplying divisions of the religious world are too clearly
preparing the way.” (Advertisement to
Vol. I, November 1, 1834, quoted by Church, The
Oxford Movement, op. cit., 141.) As
Newman said in Tract LXXI toward the end of 1835,
The controversy with the Romanists has overtaken us “like a
summer’s cloud.” We find ourselves in
various parts of the country preparing for it, yet, when we look back, we
cannot trace the steps by which we arrived at our present position. We do not recollect what our feelings were this
time last year on the subject; what was the state of our apprehensions and
anticipations. All we know is, that here
we are, from long scrutiny ignorant why we are not Roman Catholics, and they on
the other side are said to be spreading and strengthening on all sides of us,
vaunting of their success, real or apparent, and taunting us with our inability
to argue with them. (Quoted in Church, The
Oxford Movement, op. cit., 141.)
Much to their own surprise, and most assuredly against
their will, Newman and the others in the Movement found themselves castigated
as being the very thing they had been at the greatest of pains to criticize and
reject: “Roman” Catholics.
#30#