Turbulent Priests: The Guilty Pleasure I
Turbulent Priests: The Guilty Pleasure I
September 15, 2010
Most of us have guilty pleasures which we enjoy, which are not in themselves particularly immoral, but of which might still be ashamed in certain contexts. My musical GP for example, is Meatloaf. That will be incomprehensible to anyone older than 45 or younger than 41. This is because I suspect it has something to do with the video for `Dead Ringer for Love.' In said video, the love interest is played by Cher who would appear to be precisely the kind of girl of whom my mother warned me to steer well clear, thus guaranteeing that she would be the untouchable, distant infatuation of myself and, I suppose, countless other maternally protected schoolboys in 1981. Indeed, even today, I am sure that I am only one of many early-forty-somethings who work out in the gym while secretly listening to the sounds of `Two Out of Three Ain't Bad,' `Midnight at the Lost and Found,' and `Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through.'
Theologically, my guilty pleasure is John Henry Newman. Indeed, on the back wall of my office at WTS hangs a picture of him, a copy of a sketch in the National Portrait Gallery. The date of composition is 1841, a watershed year for JHN: he is still an Anglican priest, some four years away from being received into the Church of Rome, but likely already the author of the infamous Tract XC, published in February of this same year. I chose the sketch because, hey, a picture of a fully fledged cardinal could have been a difficult sell in the dean's office at a Presbyterian seminary; but also because it captures, I think, the studious demeanour of the man who was certainly, by outward appearance, an unlikely candidate for becoming, as Cardinal Manning would one day describe him, `the most dangerous man in England.'.
Newman was born in 1801 and grew up an Anglican, under evangelical influence. Early on he was impressed by the writings of Thomas Scott, and would retain an evangelical zeal for holiness and religious experience throughout his life. He studied at Trinity College, Oxford, before becoming a Fellow of Oriel in 1822. he was ordained Deacon in 1824 and, in 1828, Vicar of St. Mary's, Oxford. A trip to Europe in 1832-33 transformed him -- he was particularly impressed with Rome and with the kindness extended to him by many Catholics -- and, on his return, he became a -- or, rather, the -- leading light in the Oxford Movement, a group committed to high church reform of Anglicanism.
This period was an interesting one for the Church of England. The lengthy process of Catholic emancipation had culminated in the Catholic Relief Act (1829); and then the Reform Act (1832) had enfranchised non-Anglican sections of the British population, creating for the first time the possibility of a Parliament dominated by non-Anglican interests. Debates about disestablishment filled the air, and Newman and his friends were increasingly repulsed by the Erastian nature of the English religious settlement. These were indeed tumultuous years for the church in many countries; and, if one looks at the wider European context, as post-Napoleonic Europe modernised and industrialised, many state churches were undergoing convulsions and divisions -- for example the Disruption of the Church of Scotland (1843) and the Dutch Afscheiding (1834).
In this turbulent time when Christians were wrestling with whether a state church was a good thing, and what that church should look like, the men of the Oxford Movement advocated a view of Anglicanism which accented its catholic, patristic roots, emphasised ceremonial, and wrestled with the doctrine of the visible church in a way that evangelicals typically did (and indeed, do) not. For the evangelicals, churches were typically preaching posts, as they can often be in the large evangelical churches of today; for the Oxford Movement the church was more than that, and they gradually developed an ecclesiology closer to that of Catholicism, emphasising historical continuity. There was something of a romantic, poetic edge to this vision, one that exhibited a yearning for something beautiful and transcendent amidst the utilitarian and urban culture of the Industrial Revolution, a culture so ruthlessly exposed by novelists such as Charles Dickens; and, indeed, it was surely no coincidence that a number of the key Oxford Movement men, such as Newman and Keble, were also accomplished poets.
It was in this context that Newman wrote the controversial Tract XC, one of a series of `Tracts for the Times' which Newman and OM colleagues, John Keble and E. B. Pusey, had produced to make their case for a more catholic Church of England. Tract XC took things all the way to `11', as Spinal Tap might have said, by arguing, in a brilliant but highly contrived manner, that the 39 Articles of the C of E were susceptible to being understood as being broadly in line with catholic doctrine as expressed in the Decrees and Canons of the Council of Trent. Not surprisingly, in a world where the Papacy was regarded as an untrustworthy foreign power, and Irish immigration was helping to fuel what would become full-blown popular `No Popery!' movements -- as much to do with xenophobia as to do with any religious difference -- the tract was highly contentious and inflammatory. Indeed, the Bishop of Oxford moved swiftly to impose a ban of silence on the author. The donnish Newman was already emerging as a remarkably effective and fearless theological polemicist.
From 1841 onwards, Newman slowly withdrew from public life, living from 1842 with friends in nearby Littlemore, where he established a semi-monastic community. It was at this time that he engaged in intensive study of the writings of Athanasius and also worked on his famous Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Significantly, when this work was published in 1845 the advertisement to this volume, printed at the start of the first edition, was dated October 6. On October 9 of that same year, Newman was received into the Roman Catholic Church by a weird and wonderful Catholic missionary to England, Dominic Barbieri. Newman was exchanging the garb of a turbulent Anglican priest for that of a turbulent Catholic priest
That is where we will take up the story in the next post.
Theologically, my guilty pleasure is John Henry Newman. Indeed, on the back wall of my office at WTS hangs a picture of him, a copy of a sketch in the National Portrait Gallery. The date of composition is 1841, a watershed year for JHN: he is still an Anglican priest, some four years away from being received into the Church of Rome, but likely already the author of the infamous Tract XC, published in February of this same year. I chose the sketch because, hey, a picture of a fully fledged cardinal could have been a difficult sell in the dean's office at a Presbyterian seminary; but also because it captures, I think, the studious demeanour of the man who was certainly, by outward appearance, an unlikely candidate for becoming, as Cardinal Manning would one day describe him, `the most dangerous man in England.'.
Newman was born in 1801 and grew up an Anglican, under evangelical influence. Early on he was impressed by the writings of Thomas Scott, and would retain an evangelical zeal for holiness and religious experience throughout his life. He studied at Trinity College, Oxford, before becoming a Fellow of Oriel in 1822. he was ordained Deacon in 1824 and, in 1828, Vicar of St. Mary's, Oxford. A trip to Europe in 1832-33 transformed him -- he was particularly impressed with Rome and with the kindness extended to him by many Catholics -- and, on his return, he became a -- or, rather, the -- leading light in the Oxford Movement, a group committed to high church reform of Anglicanism.
This period was an interesting one for the Church of England. The lengthy process of Catholic emancipation had culminated in the Catholic Relief Act (1829); and then the Reform Act (1832) had enfranchised non-Anglican sections of the British population, creating for the first time the possibility of a Parliament dominated by non-Anglican interests. Debates about disestablishment filled the air, and Newman and his friends were increasingly repulsed by the Erastian nature of the English religious settlement. These were indeed tumultuous years for the church in many countries; and, if one looks at the wider European context, as post-Napoleonic Europe modernised and industrialised, many state churches were undergoing convulsions and divisions -- for example the Disruption of the Church of Scotland (1843) and the Dutch Afscheiding (1834).
In this turbulent time when Christians were wrestling with whether a state church was a good thing, and what that church should look like, the men of the Oxford Movement advocated a view of Anglicanism which accented its catholic, patristic roots, emphasised ceremonial, and wrestled with the doctrine of the visible church in a way that evangelicals typically did (and indeed, do) not. For the evangelicals, churches were typically preaching posts, as they can often be in the large evangelical churches of today; for the Oxford Movement the church was more than that, and they gradually developed an ecclesiology closer to that of Catholicism, emphasising historical continuity. There was something of a romantic, poetic edge to this vision, one that exhibited a yearning for something beautiful and transcendent amidst the utilitarian and urban culture of the Industrial Revolution, a culture so ruthlessly exposed by novelists such as Charles Dickens; and, indeed, it was surely no coincidence that a number of the key Oxford Movement men, such as Newman and Keble, were also accomplished poets.
It was in this context that Newman wrote the controversial Tract XC, one of a series of `Tracts for the Times' which Newman and OM colleagues, John Keble and E. B. Pusey, had produced to make their case for a more catholic Church of England. Tract XC took things all the way to `11', as Spinal Tap might have said, by arguing, in a brilliant but highly contrived manner, that the 39 Articles of the C of E were susceptible to being understood as being broadly in line with catholic doctrine as expressed in the Decrees and Canons of the Council of Trent. Not surprisingly, in a world where the Papacy was regarded as an untrustworthy foreign power, and Irish immigration was helping to fuel what would become full-blown popular `No Popery!' movements -- as much to do with xenophobia as to do with any religious difference -- the tract was highly contentious and inflammatory. Indeed, the Bishop of Oxford moved swiftly to impose a ban of silence on the author. The donnish Newman was already emerging as a remarkably effective and fearless theological polemicist.
From 1841 onwards, Newman slowly withdrew from public life, living from 1842 with friends in nearby Littlemore, where he established a semi-monastic community. It was at this time that he engaged in intensive study of the writings of Athanasius and also worked on his famous Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Significantly, when this work was published in 1845 the advertisement to this volume, printed at the start of the first edition, was dated October 6. On October 9 of that same year, Newman was received into the Roman Catholic Church by a weird and wonderful Catholic missionary to England, Dominic Barbieri. Newman was exchanging the garb of a turbulent Anglican priest for that of a turbulent Catholic priest
That is where we will take up the story in the next post.
