The Oxford Movement: Europe and the Wider World 1830-1930

Description

The Oxford Movement transformed the nineteenth-century Church of England with a renewed conception of itself as a spiritual body. Initiated in the early 1830s by members of the University of Oxford, it was a response to threats to the established Church posed by British Dissenters, Irish Catholics, Whig and Radical politicians, and the predominant evangelical ethos - what Newman called 'the religion of the day'. The Tractarians believed they were not simply addressing difficulties within their national Church, but recovering universal principles of the Christian faith. To what extent were their beliefs and ideals communicated globally? Was missionary activity the product of the movement's distinctive principles? Did their understanding of the Church promote, or inhibit, closer relations among the churches of the global Anglican Communion? This volume addresses these questions and more with a series of case studies involving Europe and the English-speaking world during the first century of the Movement.

Stewart J. Brown is Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author or editor of ten books, including Providence and Empire: Religion, Politics and Society in the United Kingdom 1815-1914 (2008), The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol. VII: Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution 1660-1815 (co-edited with Timothy Tackett, Cambridge University Press, 2006), The National Churches of England, Ireland and Scotland 1801-46 (2001) and Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Commonwealth in Scotland (1982). Dr Peter B. Nockles is curator and librarian in the department of Printed Books, Special Collections, John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester, and Research Fellow in Religions and Theology, University of Manchester. He is the author of The Oxford Movement in Context (Cambridge University Press, 1994).

'This is certainly an important book that casts a good deal of new light on its subjects.' The Church of England Newspaper '... [an] effective collection of essays ... timely and to be welcomed ... It succeeds overall in providing a deeper and more nuanced understanding of an important part of the nineteenth-century Anglican identity.' Iain R. Torrance, The Expository Times