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The Shaking of the Seven Hills

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

P. D. L. Avis
Affiliation:
2 North Road South Molton Devon EX36 3AZ

Extract

The doctrine of justification, for Luther the articulus stantis aut cadentis ecclesiae, was for the authors of the report Doctrine in the Church of England (1938) not worth mentioning. Here, however, the members of the Archbishops' Commission on Christian Doctrine were not representative of the Anglican tradition as a whole which has not been remiss in attending to the matter of justification. The doctrine presents a challenge to the Anglican attempt to find a via media and there are pronounced oscillations of emphasis in the Anglican tradition on this question, represented by Bishop Bull and J. H. Newman on the right and Hooker and F. D. Maurice on the left. Newman's Lectures on Justification provoked further efforts to find a synthesis and led, by the end of the nineteenth century, to a restatement of the doctrine of justification within Anglican theology, which though in certain respects catholic in form, was definitely evangelical in spirit.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1979

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References

page 439 note 1 Hooker, Richard, Works, ed. Keble, John (Oxford, 1845), vol. iii, p. 485Google Scholar. S. T. Coleridge wrote in the margin of his copy of Hooker against this sermon on justification: ‘Nowhere, out of the Holy Scripture, have I found the root and pith of Christian faith so clearly and purely propounded.’ Hooker's doctrine ‘should be written in gold! O may these precious words be written on my heart!’ Brinkley, R. F., ed., Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century (Duke University Press, 1955), pp. 150f.Google Scholar

page 440 note 1 ibid., pp. 693f.

page 440 note 2 Keble in ibid., vol. i, p. xlviii. In the mid-1830s Keble altered his view of the Reformers under pressure from Hurrell Froude. By 1836 he could write: ‘As to the Reformers, I certainly do think that as a set they belonged to the same class with the Puritans and Radicals. … And I think we shall never be able to take our ground against the Romanists or Puritans [sic] till we have separated ourselves and our liturgy from them.’ Keble to Tom Keble, 14. xi. 1836, cited Brendon, Piers, Hurrell Froude and the Oxford Movement (London, 1974), p. 149Google Scholar. Keble dated his preface to Hooker's Works ‘March 1841’ and he had been working on his edition for a number of years, so he must have begun to take it up at about the same time as he came under the influence of Hurrell Froude with respect to the Reformation. See also Battiscombe, Georgina, John Keble: a Study in Limitations (London, 1963).Google Scholar

page 441 note 1 Hooker, vol. ii, pp. 552f (fragments).

page 441 note 2 ibid., vol. ii, p. 254 (Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, V, lvi, II). On Hooker's view of Rome and the Roman doctrine of justification, see also Bauckham, Richard, ‘Hooker, Travers and the Church of Rome in the 1580's’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, XXIX (1978)Google Scholar; my ‘The True Church in Reformation Theology’, S.J.T., vol. 30 (1977); and my forthcoming volume on Reformation ecclesiology in Marshall's Theological Library, The True Church of the Protestant Reformation.

page 441 note 3 Newman, J. H., An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (edn. of 1845, Harmondsworth, 1974, Penguin), p. 72.Google Scholar

page 442 note 1 ibid., p. 136. cf. Keble (ostensibly on Hooker's view of Calvin, but, considered as such, wildly astray): ‘He saw in the writings of… Calvin a disposition to treat irreverently, not only the Creeds, the sacred guards provided by the Church for Christian truth, but also that holiest truth itself, in some of its articles. He knew who had called the Nicene Creed “frigida cantilena”; had treated the doctrine expressed in the words, “God of God, Light of Light”, as a mere dream of Platonizing Greeks. …’ Preface to Hooker, vol. i, p. lxxxi.

page 442 note 2 Newman, op. cit., p. 140.

page 442 note 3 Newman, , Lectures on Justification (2nd edn., London, 1840), p. 386Google Scholar. The Lectures provoked Julius Hare's Cambridge University sermons The Victory of Faith (1840) and his Vindication of Luther (2nd edn., 1855). For an account of the opposing approaches to historical study of the Tractarians on the one hand and Hare and the Liberal Anglicans on the other, see Forbes, Duncan, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge, 1952)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Newman as an historian, see Chadwick, Owen, From Bossuet to Newman (London, 1957)Google Scholar, and Bokenkotter, T. S., Cardinal Newman as an Historian (Louvain, 1959)Google Scholar. Also relevant is Preyer, Robert O., Bentham, Coleridge and the Science of History (West Germany, 1958)Google Scholar.

page 443 note 1 See Baker, W. J., ‘Hurrell Froude and the Reformers’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, XXI (1970)Google Scholar. Baker's Cambridge PhD thesis, ‘The Attitudes of English Churchmen, 1800–1850, towards the Reformation’ (1966), in the Cambridge University Library, is also helpful. In his The Ideal of a Christian Church (London, 1844), W. G. Ward wrote: ‘Of two principles especially which may be considered the distinguishing characteristics of the Reformation, whether here or abroad—I mean the Lutheran doctrine of Justification and the principle of private judgement—I have argued that in their abstract nature and necessary tendency they sink below Atheism itself’ (p. 587). See also Ward, Wilfred, William George Ward and the Oxford Movement (London, 1890)Google Scholar.

page 443 note 2 Ramsey, Michael in Coulson, and Allchin, , eds., The Rediscovery of Newman (London, 1967), p. 7Google Scholar. cf. Brilioth, Y., The Anglican Revival: Studies in the Oxford Movement (London, 1925), pp. 35, 282Google Scholar. Newman's view of protestantism is also to be found extensively in Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, viewed relatively to Romanism and Popular Protestantism (= The Via Media, 3rd edn., London, 1877), vol. i, esp. pp. 16, 26f, 41, 45, 239. Here Newman expounds his view that protestantism is not merely a ‘debased’ form of Catholicism, but ‘lacks its principle entirely’—just as no one would call a miser liberal (p. 41).

page 443 note 3 Brilioth, op. cit., p. 282; Reardon, B. M. G., From Coleridge to Gore: a Century of Religious Thought in Britain (London, 1971), p. 116Google Scholar. Voll, D., Catholic Evangelicalism (Hochkirchlicher Pietismus; ET London, 1963), p. 25Google Scholar, contrasts the Tractarian concern for theology with the later ritualistic preoccupation with externals. A contemporary observation is to be found in Mark Pattison, ‘Learning in the Church of England’, National Review (1863) = Essays, ed. Henry Nettleship (Oxford, 1889), vol. ii. Pattison predicted the imminent clash of knowledge and ecclesiastical opinion and feared that ignorance and prejudice would triumph. Here he was, to some extent at least, too gloomy; this was the very problem to which Gore and his colleagues in the ‘Holy Party’ had become alerted, leading to the publication of Lux Mundi in 1889. Pattison, however, took an equally jaundiced view of the alliance being forged in the Oxford of the 1880's between catholic theology and Hegelian philosophy which was to open a new era in Anglican theology. See his Memoirs (1885, reprinted Fontwell, Sussex, 1969), pp. 242f.

page 444 note 1 Newman, , Apologia Pro Vita Sua (London, 1959, Fontana), p. 150.Google Scholar

page 444 note 2 ibid.

page 444 note 3 Newman, , Lectures on Justification, pp. 1f.Google Scholar

page 444 note 4 ibid., p. 4.

page 445 note 1 Cited in More, and Cross, , eds., Anglicanism: the Thought and Practice of the Church of England Illustrated from the Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1935). pp. 301ff.Google Scholar

page 445 note 2 Newman, , Lectures on Justification, p. 17.Google Scholar

page 445 note 3 ibid., pp. 44f.

page 445 note 4 ibid., pp. 62f.

page 446 note 1 ibid., pp. 71f.

page 446 note 2 ibid., pp. 80f.

page 447 note 1 ibid., p. 86.

page 447 note 2 ibid., p. 95.

page 447 note 3 ibid., pp. 316, 344f.

page 448 note 1 For the above see Newman, , Parochial Sermons, vol. vi (London, 1842), pp. 166ff.Google Scholar

page 449 note 1 Newsome, D., ‘Justification and Sanctification: Newman and the Evangelicals’, Journal of Theological Studies, NS XV (1964), ad fin.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 449 note 2 Maurice, F. D., Life, ed. Maurice, F. (London, 1844), vol. i, pp. 262f.Google Scholar

page 450 note 1 Maurice, , The Kingdom of Christ, ed. Vidler, A. R. (London, 1958), vol. i, pp. 92fGoogle Scholar. Ramsey, Michael remarks that ‘Maurice (like Julius Hare) is one of the few exceptions to the almost constant failure of Anglican theologians to understand Luther.’ F. D. Maurice and the Conflicts of Modem Theology (Cambridge, 1951), p. 28nGoogle Scholar. Brose, Olive, Frederick Denison Maurice: Rebellious Conformist 1805–1872 (Ohio, 1971), p. 138Google Scholar, comments on The Kingdom of Christ: ‘Probably the book's most significant and lasting contribution was the rediscovery of the Reformation in an age when its Evangelical heirs had distorted it, and its Tractarian enemies pronounced it dead.’

page 450 note 2 Maurice, , The Kingdom of Christ, vol. i, p. 94Google Scholar.

page 450 note 3 ibid., p. 273.

page 451 note 1 ibid., p. 272.

page 451 note 2 Maurice, , Theological Essays (London, 1957), p. 145Google Scholar. For Maurice as the critic of Victorian religiosity, see O. Brose, op. cit. Maurice believed that his was a radically different concept of God from the one which underlay much nineteenth-century religion and theology, and he felt that Luther's importance lay in the fact that he referred every question back to what is to be believed about the nature of God. ‘It was the steadiness with which Luther kept his mind fixed upon this issue; it was his happy indifference to many points, which the mere Protestant of later days would put most prominently forward—that entitles Luther to our everlasting gratitude. It is this which makes his name more precious to moral and meta-physical students than the names of nearly all the formal writers on morals and metaphysics.’ Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy (London, 1872), vol. ii, p. 116.

page 452 note 1 ibid., p. 117.

page 452 note 2 Gore's view of justification is touched on in my article ‘Gore and Theological Synthesis’, S.J.T., vol. 28 (1975) and a full account is given in my London University PhD thesis Charles Gore and the Christian Polarities: a Study in Theological Construction and Conflict (1976).

page 453 note 1 MacKinnon, D. M., Borderlands of Theology and Other Essays (London, 1968), p. 105Google Scholar. On Holland there is also Henry Scott Holland: Memoir and Letters, ed. Paget, S. (London, 1921)Google Scholar and Reardon, B. M. G., ed., Henry Scott Holland: a Selection from his Writings (London, 1962Google Scholar)—particularly valuable is the selection of Holland's writings on faith.

page 453 note 2 Holland, in Lux Mundi, ed. Gore, (1889, 15th edn., London, 1904), pp. 6, 11f, 23.Google Scholar

page 453 note 3 For what follows, see Holland, , Creed and Character (London, 1897), pp. 220225.Google Scholar

page 455 note 1 Ramsey, Michael, The Gospel and the Catholic Church (London, 1936, new and revised 1956). The quotation that follows is from p. 180.Google Scholar