On the Oxford Movement

Dear N.,

Thank you so very much for your incisive and insightful reflections on John Keble's Assize Sermon, and your excellent general thoughts on the genesis of the Oxford Movement. They are simply wonderful, and show with great power how very applicable, timely and practical the concerns of the Catholic Revival of the nineteenth century are for today's Church. The underlying moral and spiritual malady that motivated the Oxford Fathers into action from 1833 forward was what they called 'liberalism' - today we would call it revisionism or post-modernism, the same exact phenomenon with exactly the same theological, spiritual and moral errors which characterise it.

The cultural and institutional indifferentism to claims of divine truth and revelation, the elevation of perceived social justice and social virtues of a subjective kind over the authority of the Church to teach and proclaim a divinely-revealed Gospel, the denial of the supernatural and the transcendent reality of religion, and the reduction of spiritual claims to relativism and pluralism, all of these symptoms of modernism plagued the Church of England in the nineteenth century and certainly impact the Church of our own day, even more so in fact!

All these problems the Oxford Movement sought to address and correct, through a restoration of belief in the divine authority and commission of the Church of England as the Catholic Church of the English-speaking world, through a recapturing of the sense of the sacramental and of God's presence in the created order through the Incarnation of the Word, through a call to recover a sense of holiness and of personal conversion and sanctification in the lives of Christian believers, through a summons once again to see the Anglican Church as a divinely-given and grace-filled Society, the Body of Christ, in which and through the sacraments convey the life of God and sanctify us, conforming us the image and likeness of Christ in the Holy Spirit.

The objective character of authentic religion, its salvific grace and glory, its moral demands and commandments, its divine origin and revelatory nature, its delight in the good, the true and the beautiful, worship in the beauty of holiness and reverence, the transformation of society and the healing of social ills through mission work and service in the Name of the One who condescended to become Man, these are the hallmarks of the Tractarians' renewal. The religion of the Oxford Movement is the religion of God With Us, God Within Us, of the God Who became Man so that men may become God...

For the Catholic Revival, the Church of England was not merely a department of the state, an agency or wing of the government, it was the living manifestation of Christ in the world, the sacramental fellowship by which the individual and society would be transfigured by grace, 'our one channel to Christ' as Alexander Heriot Mackonochie described it. And in the midst of this call to reclaim the Church as the Church was the clarion call to personal holiness of life, to prayer, fasting and almsgiving, to a deeper commitment to the teaching and preaching of the Church in her Tradition and a more frequent recourse to the sacraments, to the centrality of the Mass as Sacrifice and Real Presence and to the Apostolic Priesthood and Succession as the sure means by which we are made one with Our Lord and each other, because they are the mystic extensions of the Incarnation in space and time.

My, how we need the Oxford Movement in our day! Never has there been a time when the Oxford Movement was more needed than now. For all of its internal divisions, difficulties and weakness, the Continuing Church offers all men the continuation, not only of Anglicanism itself, but of the Oxford Movement which once brought Anglicanism back to life and can do so again.