The Oxford Movement Unmasked

By Robin G. Jordan

If we believe the propagandists for the Oxford Movement, the English Church had fallen upon dire straights in the eighteenth century and the Oxford Movement came to the rescue. They found a church that had become divorced from its Catholic heritage and inspired a renewal of Catholic doctrine and practice. The truth of the matter is that all these claims are a lie!

The Oxford Movement from the outset conducted an intense propaganda campaign from the pulpit, on the lecture platform, and in its articles, books, pamphlets, and tracts to portray itself as the savior of the Church of England. Rather than being the sole surviving representative of authentic Catholicism in the Church of England, the Oxford Movement, however, was one of several Catholic groups in the English Church. The Oxford Movement sought to discredit these groups while at same time endeavoring to co-opt their members. The movement also played these groups and their members against each other. The leading figures of the Oxford Movement were far from the saintly group of Oxford churchmen that they were portrayed in later years. Modern scholars have documented ample grounds for the veracity of the charges of the Oxford Movement’s nineteenth century critics.

Those whose support the leading figures of the Oxford Movement publicly cultivated, they often privately attacked behind their backs. As the Oxford Movement became more strident in its rhetoric and vociferous in its accusations a number of clergy and prominent laypersons who had initially supported the movement left the movement and joined its critics. Some were forced out of the movement when one or more of its leading figures turned on them.



The Evangelicals were not the only churchmen to oppose the Oxford Movement. The High Church Party of the time was divided into several factions and these factions were, both amongst and within themselves, not of one mind in regards to the Oxford Movement. A number of leading High Churchmen set themselves against the movement.

The leading figures of the Oxford Movement like John Newman and Edward Pusey did not conceal their sympathy for the Church of Rome, the Council of Trent, and Romanism (i.e., Roman Catholic doctrines and practices). Their tendency toward post-Tridentian Roman Catholicism is one of the things that distinguished the Oxford Movement from the other Catholic groups in the Church of England. The latter leaned toward the primitive Catholicism of the Church Fathers of the first five centuries of Christianity, as had the Caroline High Churchmen.

As I have written elsewhere, John Newman and other leading figures of the Oxford Movement were not past making selective use of passages from the Edwardian and Elizabethan Homilies and the works of John Jewel, Richard Hooker, and the Caroline Divines to serve their own purposes. They, like the Jesuits, had no qualms at stretching the truth or even telling an outright lie to advance their cause.

As well as not hiding its sympathy for the Church of Rome and its doctrines and practices, the Oxford Movement was open in its contempt for the English Reformation. It saw itself as the champion of a resurgent Catholicism against what it viewed as a heretical Protestantism. As I have also written elsewhere, the Oxford Movement falsely claimed to be the heir and successor to the Caroline Divines. Interestingly a number of recent Anglo-Catholic scholars have rejected the Caroline Divines as not being true Catholics, as they did not accept the authority of the Pope and had a receptionist view of the sacrament of Holy Communion.



Among the myths that later writers sympathetic to the Oxford Movement have perpetuated are that the Oxford Movement was critical to the spiritual renewal of the Church of England in the nineteenth century. Any spiritual renewal that may have accompanied the Oxford Movement was, as Samuel Leuenberger has shown in Archbishop Cranmer’s Immortal Bequest, a result of the Oxford Movement’s preservation of the Book of Common Prayer in its first phase before 1850. It was effected by the content of the Prayer Book, being “the very pure Word of God, the holy Scripture, or that which is agreeable to the same.” It was not the result of the ceremonial embellishments of the liturgy that occurred in the Oxford Movement’s second phase, in so-called ritualism.

In this second phase, this ritualism, another myth maintains, enabled Anglo-Catholic clergy and parishes to reach the working classes and the poor in London and other English cities. In actuality a large number of those who flocked to Anglo-Catholic churches were upper middle class, attracted by the novelty and “sensual worship” of ritualism—the elaborate ceremonial, the flickering candles, the sumptuous vestments, the clouds of incense, the ringing of bells, and the pageantry. In a nineteenth century cartoon title "Religion A La Mode," a house maid complains:

"I tell you what it is, Parker. I shall be very glad when missus gets tired of this Puseyism. It may be the fashion. But with her comin' home late from parties, and getting up for early service, and then goin' to bed again, we poor servants have double work a'most."

It is difficult to see what benefit ritualism was to the lower classes even if they were attracted to it. Lighting votive candles and praying to the blessed Virgin and the saints, carrying images through the streets, and attending Mass does not justify us in the eyes of God. We are justified by only faith in Jesus Christ, the faith that comes from hearing Christ’s word and which ultimately is a gift of God’s grace. The Oxford Movement in its ritualist stage contributed to the “blind superstition" of a segment of English society that was prone to “blind superstition.”

As has been the case in the twenty-first century, ritualism offers a spiritual experience that does not require a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. It is therefore very appealing, both to Anglo-Catholics and liberals. The Cambridge Camden Movement, a spinoff of the Oxford Movement, sought to intensify this spiritual experience by retrofitting English churches to meet its ideas of medieval church architecture and in the process mutilated some of the finest medieval English church buildings.



The mutilation of English church buildings is not the only damage that the Oxford Movement would do. At the time the Oxford Movement came upon the scene, what is now called West Gallery music was enjoying its heyday in English churches. In West Gallery Music Francis Roads provided the historical background to West Gallery music.

“Green, Boyce, the Wesleys such composers spring readily to mind when one thinks of English church music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their music was sung in cathedrals, collegiate chapels, chapel royal and anywhere an organ and a choir of professional standard was available.

But it was not the music of such composers that was typical of that heard in ordinary parish churches of town and country, where usually there was no organ for accompaniment, and the musical forces available were of amateur standard. For such churches a quite different body of sacred music came into being, often referred to a ‘West Gallery’ music. The reason for this name is the fact that the quires which used it often performed from a gallery at the west end of the church, opposite the altar, and not from the chancel. The spelling ‘quire’ is used to denote a body of both instrumentalists and singers. It was music written for, and in many case, by amateur musicians.”

The majority of the West Gallery repertoire was metrical psalm settings. During the West Gallery period, the singing of non-scriptural texts in church was held to be highly questionable, so hymn settings represent a minority of the repertoire. The repertoire also includes anthems, mostly settings of scriptural texts, and the settings of the canticles, both metrical and Prayer Book versions. Among the peculiarities of West Gallery music was a fondness for modal harmony, open fifths, and fugueing.

The Oxford Movement inspired a number of “reforms” in parish church music. The West Gallery quires were replaced by surplice choirs modeled on cathedral practice. The music of these quires was replaced by that of Hymns Ancient and Modern and other music felt to possess a sufficient degree of solemnity for Victorian sensibilities. Church organs were also installed. These changes would have a negative impact that has lasted to this day. Most small membership churches do not have the musical resources or the kind of acoustical setting to provide cathedral music, much less to meet the high standard for that type of music. Many are located in communities where cathedral music is not appreciated. They have not only developed an inferiority complex in the area of church music but struggle to perform church music that is ill suited to their particular locality.

Of course, the greatest damage that the Oxford Movement did was to reintroduce into the Church of England the superstition and the unreformed doctrines and practices of the Church of Rome. Christ’s benefits were darkened and confounded as they were before the English Reformation. The English Church became like the man out of whom an unclean spirit had gone only to return, bringing with him seven other spirits more wicked than he, so that the last state of the man is worse than the first (Matthew 12:43-45). We see the fruits of the Oxford Movement in Suffolk every year in the village of Walsingham where Anglo-Catholics carry the consecrated host in a monstrance through the streets for everyone to gaze upon, bow down to, and to worship. We see the fruits of the Oxford Movement in Anglo-Catholic clergy who take great delight in calling the Holy Communion Mass because they believe that it angers and offends Protestants. They are oblivious to our Lord’s teaching to love even our enemies—those who hate and despise us, and apostle Paul’s teaching to respect the tender consciences of our brothers and sisters in Christ. As our Lord drew to his disciples’ attention, every tree is known by its own fruit. Figs are not gathered from thornbushes, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush (Luke 6:44). A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit. Nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit (Matthew 7:18).