Grace and Incarnation

The Oxford Movement's Shaping of the Character of Modern Anglicanism

Bruce D. Griffith, Jason R. Radcliff

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781532692857
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This volume takes a deep look into the theological underpinnings of the Oxford Movement Tractarians, and the motivations and activities of their inheritors. Was this movement really the most significant single force in the formation of modern Anglicanism, as Eamon Duffy has recently suggested? Is the often-underserved Robert Isaac Wilberforce the great link to Gore and the Liberal Catholics? These and other questions lie beneath the writing of Grace and Incarnation. The Oxford Movement was the beginning of a re-formation of Anglican theology, ministries, congregational and religious life revivals, and ritualism, which was based on a retrieval of the patristic and medieval eras reconstructed around a deep christological incarnationalism. All these were pressed hard up against the rise of what would come to be known as "modernism" with its new canons of authentication. Grace and Incarnation offers not only a mirror in which we can see back into the past but a magnifying glass through which we can understand more of what it means to be Anglican and trinitarian today.

1

Justification, Sanctification, and Regeneration

The Revival of Dispute

Two controversies are generally acknowledged as being at the center of Anglican theology in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Calvinist controversy and the baptismal regeneration controversy. They were not new controversies in the history of Anglican doctrine; both had been issues since the English Reformation. The names of most Churchmen associated with the revival of these disputes have slipped into obscurity. A few are recognized today, but usually for contributions to the social order rather than for their theological positions. William Wilberforce, the great reformer, Charles Simeon, the supporter of the missions to India, John Newton, the hymn writer; all were active Churchmen who contributed to the rise of the Evangelical party in the Church of England. L. E. Binns once wrote of the Evangelical movement that it was “one of the offshoots of the great Methodist revival of the eighteenth century.”1 Binns correctly perceived that the Evangelicals drew their great enthusiasm from the Methodists, but he missed another equally important point: the early Anglican Evangelicals were not Methodist in their theology, they were convinced Calvinists.

The source of the early Evangelicals’ Calvinism remains somewhat mysterious. While there were conforming Calvinists among the clergy of the English Church in the eighteenth century, there are no names that leap to mind as Calvinists of high repute. From the Restoration to the mid-eighteenth century Calvinist theology was hardly evident in Anglicanism. Then, hand in hand with the Methodist movement, Calvinism re-enters the life of the Church of England as the theological stance of the early Evangelicals.

One of the earliest Evangelicals, William Romaine, provides a good example of the style and content of early Evangelical preaching. In a sermon on justification, while attempting to convince his hearers of the depravity of their nature and condition, he wrote:

. . . the greatest part of mankind are not sensible of their guilt, nor apprehensive of their danger. Sin has nothing in it terrible to them. They love it, . . . they see not their want of, and therefore, have no desire for, the gospel salvation. But when one of these persons awakes and opens his eyes, he is then terrified at the sight of his present state. Sin appears to him in a new light: he finds it to be exceedingly sinful, and the wrath of God revealed from heaven against it to be beyond measure dreadful.2

Mankind, asserts Romaine, deserves no justification, nor is there any inherent principle within it that would make it seek God. Only an awakening to a sense of sin, a sense of utter, total depravity, can make man desire God; a desire about which man can do nothing. One must simply cast himself on Christ’s merits. But how, then, is a man to be righteous? Romaine answers:

God imputes righteousness to them who believe, not for a righteousness which is in them, but for a righteousness which he imputes to them. As their iniquities were laid upon Christ, and satisfaction for them required of him, as a debt is of a bondsman, although he had none of the money, so is the righteousness of Christ laid upon them. In like manner, as their sins were made his, so is his righteousness made theirs. He is sin for them, not inherently, but by imputation; they are righteousness through him, not inherently, but by imputation.3

Romaine was one of the first to reintroduce a strong doctrine of forensic justification. Forensic justification, the notion that we are justified through an external imputation of the merits of Christ (an imputation that seems to be best defined as an exchange), had a long history in Anglican theology. It was an obvious feature of the doctrine of justification held by the Reformers. It obviously was the dominant opinion of the Thirty-nine Articles. Yet, it was the early Evangelicals who reintroduced the English Church to the doctrine of forensic justification. Romaine was not alone in this; indeed, the more famous John Newton of Olney was equally insistent on the point.

Little difference in theology can be found between Newton and Romaine, but Newton’s second interest, hymn writing, provides another insight into the early Evangelicals. Second only to preaching Newton viewed hymn singing as a powerful new instrument of evangelization. His greatest production in this area was the “Olney Hymns.” None are now in use, and only a few of his later hymns have survived and are in common use. “Glorious things of thee are spoken” is not a typical Newton hymn, but “Amazing grace” and “How sweet the name of Jesus sounds” are both typical and popular. Newton’s hymns were always theologically explicit, and in one from the “Olney Hymns” we gain a sense of the supreme role of preaching in the Evangelical tradition:

O Thou, at whose almighty word, The glorious light from darkness sprung, Thy quick’ning influence afford, And clothe with power the preacher’s tongue. Thus we would in the means be found, And thus on thee alone depend, To make the gospel’s joyful sound Effectual to the promis’d end.4

It is the spoken word that maintains the contact between man and God. The grace of perseverance is bound to hearing that spoken word.

Perhaps Newton’s greatest contribution to the Evangelical Movement was his careful and patient conversion of Thomas Scott. Scott finally succeeded Newton at Olney, and after an unproductive decade moved to London to become one of the key figures of the Evangelical Movement. The range of his influence is evidenced by the fact that Newman cites Scott as one of the writers who most influenced his early years.5 Scott served as the first secretary of the infant Church Missionary Society, founded a college for missionaries to India at Bedlow, and wrote powerfully in the Evangelical tradition.

Unlike Romaine and Newton, Scott felt that the doctrine of predestination was not central in the exposition of Christian doctrine, but he clung tenaciously to solifidian teaching. In an essay on justification he defended the forensic interpretation of the terms “to justify” and “justification” in St. Paul, but sought to broaden the scope of justification. While there is no reason to believe that Newman was influenced by this tendency in Scott, it is interesting to note that Newman, too, wished to broaden the interpretation of justification.

Scott adroitly separates the term justification from forgiveness of sins (the latter being too restrictive), and then writes:

The justification therefore of a sinner must imply something distinct from a total and final remission of the deserved punishment; namely, a renewed title to the reward of righteousness, as complete and effective as he...