Anglicanism by Chapman Mark;

Author:Chapman, Mark;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, UK
Published: 2006-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

10. John Henry Newman was the first leader of the Tractarians

If the ministerial commission does not come from government, Newman asked, then where does it come from? The answer was from God himself. No gates of hell, not even a Whig government, could ever prevail against this sort of authority. As Henry Manning put it in 1835: ‘The invisible spiritualities of our apostolical descent, and our ministerial power in the word and sacraments, no prince, no potentate, no apostate nation can sully with a breath of harm.’ This extraordinary emphasis on the authority of the ministry led one outside observer to ask ‘whether at any time in the history of the church the office of bishop has been so immoderately exalted to the clouds as in these early tracts’.

This high doctrine of the ministry led to a new sense of seriousness and a high view of the sacraments. Keble made it clear, on the grounds of apostolic succession, that the Church of England was ‘the only church in this realm which has a right to be quite sure that she has the Lord’s Body to give to his people’. The Tractarians thereby gained the confidence to face up to the threats on the church from both the state and competing forces within the church. They organized opposition to liberals, especially R. D. Hampden on his nomination as Regius Professor in 1836. Liberalism was a slippery slope which would lead to the dismemberment of the church. The church needed to assert its supernatural and divinely founded identity against all comers. Initially there was a great deal of common ground with other churchmen and few direct assaults on the Reformation. By the late 1830s, however, things began to change. Keble wrote in 1836: ‘Anything which separates the present Church from the Reformers I should hail as a great good’, and Hurrell Froude’s (1803–36) posthumously published Remains was notorious for its anti-Reformation polemic.

Some Tractarians compared the nominal Christianity of the state church with the ‘real’ church established on the apostles. As Froude declared in an aphorism: ‘Let us tell the truth and shame the devil; let us give up a national church and have a real one.’

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