As we saw in the
previous posting on this subject, the victory of orthodoxy (more or
less) in the matter of the appointment of the Reverend Renn Dickson Hampden,
while the high water mark of the Oxford Movement, came at what eventually
proved to be a high price. Although the
members of the Movement were not the only ones objecting to Hampden, they were
the only ones singled out as having “persecuted” him.
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| Rev. John Keble |
What turned the tide, so to speak, and drove a wedge
between the Movement and the rest of the coalition that worked to defend the
Church of England against encroachment of “Broad Church” doctrines (Liberals,
orthodox Low Church, and Evangelicals) was that accusations of “Romanism”
changed from a suspicion, to what amounted to an all-out campaign. What made it successful, of course, and
allowed latitudinarian, Broad Church beliefs to become entrenched in the Church
of England was the fact that the intellectual center of the effort to return
the Anglican communion to traditional Christian beliefs and practices was
concentrated in the Movement — so the effort was focused on neutralizing people
such as John Henry Newman, John Keble, and Edward Pusey.
In an effort to scotch the rumors, Newman began a series
of lectures in 1836 intended to calm the fears of creeping Romanism which, from
an intellectual point of view and taking into consideration Anglican
assumptions, were nothing short of brilliant.
The lectures, “Romanism and Popular Protestantism” (later a book with
the same title) were, however, a tactical mistake.
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| John Henry Newman |
Painstakingly honest, Newman — who had never surrendered
his belief that the “Roman” Catholic Church, while admirable in many respects,
was seriously in error and of necessity condemned — also insisted on giving the
Devil his due, and admitted errors in the Church of England, especially the
ones that had inspired the Movement in the first place. While condemning the “Church of Rome,” then, at
the same time Newman also made of point of mentioning what he considered its
“magnificent virtues.” As R.W. Church
described Newman’s position at this time,
What now presented itself to Mr. Newman’s thoughts, instead
of the old notion of a pure Church on one side, and a corrupt Church on the
other, sharply opposed to one another, was the more reasonable supposition of
two great portions of the Divided Church, each with its realities of history
and fact and character, each with its special claims and excellences, each with
its special sins and corruptions, and neither realising in practice and fact
all it professed to be on paper; each of which further, in the conflicts of
past days, had deeply, almost unpardonably, wronged the other. (Church, The
Oxford Movement, op. cit., 143-144.)
Fuel was added to the fire when Newman, Keble, and Pusey
began a project to translate the Early Church Fathers into English. While a tremendous scholarly effort and
successful from that standpoint (although taking many decades to complete), the
material was initially used to support the theory that orthodox Christianity
prior to the schism with the Oriental churches in the eleventh century and the
Reformation in the sixteenth century was in agreement with the modern (i.e., early nineteenth century) position
of the Oxford Movement.
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| Richard Hurrell Froude |
To do that, of course, required that the commentators,
notably Newman, demonstrate that a particular doctrine held by the Early
Fathers, the Catholic Church, and the Church of England were in full
agreement. At the same time, it was also
necessary to show that a doctrine that the Church of England did not currently
hold was either not really a doctrine but a discipline (i.e., an application of a doctrine) and therefore subject to legitimate
change and differences, or that apparent agreement between the Early Church
Fathers and the Catholic Church on a point with which the Church of England disagreed
was not really agreement, but a profound difference. The type of theological and historical
hairsplitting this required convinced many that Newman and other leaders of the
Movement were being “Jesuitical” and Romanists in disguise.
Another blow came with the death of Richard Hurrell Froude
and the subsequent publication of his papers by Newman and Keble. Froude had been possibly the strongest
supporter of the Catholic-but-not-Roman position, even to the point of adopting
many specifically Catholic practices as well as doctrine, but also being
equally strong on rejecting papal supremacy and “everything” that came after
the Council of Trent held from 1545 to 1563.
This was a fine distinction many people were not prepared
to make. To the majority of people in
England, you were either Church of England or Catholic if you were
Christian. The Orthodox Churches were
not considered by anyone except theologians, and “Catholic” meant the Church
headed by the pope. When people adopted
Catholic usages, they tended to go virtually the whole way, stopping only at
papal supremacy. As Froude exclaimed at
one point, “There are wretched Tridentines everywhere!”
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| R.H., Froude |
Thus, when Newman and Keble edited and published Froude’s
papers in two volumes, many people were honestly shocked at the degree to which
Froude seemed to have gone “papistical,” despite his constant and firm
declarations to the contrary. It also
did not help that Froude’s diaries were candid, to say the least, and extremely
frank in their treatment of popular figures.
That Froude was found to have expressed many religious
difficulties in his journals also undermined the image the public had of a man
so rock-solid in his faith that nothing could shake him. To this day discussion continues as to whether
the publication of Froude’s Remains
was all part of a Machiavellian plot by Newman to undermine the Church of
England or a foolish act undertaken without consideration of the damage it
could (and did) do.
It was probably not the latter, although authorities
friendly to Newman attribute it to Newman’s presumed unworldliness, and it was
certainly not the former, although to this day that is the standard line by
those who view Newman as a traitor to the Church of England. In all probability, it was an example of
Newman’s painstaking honesty in everything he did, but most of all in religion. It probably never even occurred to Newman
that anyone could be confused over the difference between Anglo-Catholic and
Roman Catholic, offended by the fact that someone expressed himself frankly
about other people and his own religious difficulties, or outraged about the
fact of their publication.
#30#