I. REVIEW FOR BARNES AND NOBLE.COM  1/19/2002
 

When launched in 1833,  the Oxford Movement (“OM”) said no to Parliament’s micro managing the Church of England (“C of E”). It both woke up Anglicans to dangers to their church and propelled its boldest members into Roman Catholicism. Historian Christopher Dawson sees the OM as part of “an extraordinary flowering of the national genius such as England had not known since the Elizabethan age.”  The OM played down or negated the Protestant aspects of the C of E while rediscovering its universality, truth and catholicity. 
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Dawson finds OM leader John Henry Newman (1801 - 1890) “one of the greatest of English religious thinkers.” Yet Newman became great only after nagging by the movement’s angry young Achilles, Richard Hurrell Froude.  Some regarded the Continental Reformation as overly strong medicine which had crippled the 16th Century C of E. Fortunately, the worst aspects of the Reformation had been sanitized by great Anglican thinkers of the 17th Century. For they knew the Greek and Latin Fathers and ranked them far higher than Luther or Calvin.
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Dawson sketches all the Movement’s leaders, including John Keble who taught a high morality. He gives many pages to Richard Hurrell Froude, the OM’s uncompromising battler for an other-worldly church. Newman thought Froude the most gifted person he ever knew.
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John Henry Newman was born middle class and into a moderate Low Church world of great spiritual revivals and crusades. Inspired by Calvin’s belief in a supernatural order and of the transcendence of God, Newman nonetheless later rejected the harsh ethics of Puritanism, its bare liturgy, arid dogmatism, and its insistence that human nature is utterly depraved.
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Newman sought and proclaimed God both through reason, poetry and carefully crafted novels and sermons. Hurrell Froude despised the Reformation as anti-historical.
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Newman and friends wanted to create a  “via media,” a mean between the 16th Century Reformation which tossed away too much from the Church of the Fathers and a Roman Catholicism which added too many novelties. Newman had to  win over both Oxford University and the bishops. By 1841 he had publicly failed in both arenas.
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In 1845 Newman converted to Rome and the OM within the C of E lost much but not all of its elan. Thanks to Newman and to Continental writers like Lamennais, Western culture did not go completely secular. Indeed the Catholic Church was far stronger and purer at the death of Leo XIII than it had been two hundred years earlier. Some Anglican bishops such as Samuel Wilberforce eventually propagated a C of E via media.
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Almost alone among Catholic thinkers Newman recognized the mortal danger to Christianity from 19th Century  secularism while not wringing his hands over the vanishing Faith of the Fathers. For human nature was reclaimable, and God had sent his Apostles to do just that.  It was gospel to the Oxford Movement that there is a higher reality than anything we see.
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Among historians of the  “back to the Fathers” movement, Dawson notably highlights  and quotes extensively from the lyric poetry of Newman, Keble and Froude. THE SPIRIT OF THE OXFORD MOVEMENT remains the best  short introduction to  the Oxford Movement and especially to Froude and Newman.
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01-19-2002

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 II. REVIEW FOR AMAZON.COM
 

Continental Europe in the 1830s was well on the way to making Christianity irrelevant. Britain’s turn would come and already the Church of England was shocked to find its ancient sources of revenues and its ability to manage its own affairs effectively challenged by a liberal and secularizing Parliament. The Oxford Movement (OM) was created in 1833 to reverse that trend. In the end it did much to revitalize the Church of England as a force for Gospel truth and for a sacramental viewpoint that everything in this world is a kind of language pointing to a higher, holy and transcendent world to attain to which is human destiny.
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Historian Christopher Dawson’s brief overview the OM's first seven or eight years is masterly. It rewards repeated reading. First written a hundred years after the OM began, THE SPIRIT OF THE OXFORD MOVEMENT was almost unique in its day for flagging three facts.
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The first fact is that the driving, almost demonic, force behind the Movement was the young Richard Hurrell Froude. Froude was the most gifted person whom John Henry Newman thought he had ever met. Froude’s unceasing nagging had the effect, over time, of removing every last one of John Henry Newman’s inherited Protestant prejudices, including detestation of the Papacy. Without Froude, said Dawson, one could not have predicted how Newman might have turned out.
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The second fact which Dawson convincingly sketches is the impact of Calvinist theology on the young Newman. This theology he did not imbibe from his moderate non-Evangelistic Low Church  parents. That came later during his eight years at Ealing boarding school and from one or more teachers and from his reading in church history. Till the end of his days Newman, undisputed leader of the OM, firmly embraced Catholic views first learned under Calvinist auspices: the majesty of God, the Incarnation and Predestination of the saints. As today’s Baptists and Presbyterians become aware of Newman’s abiding albeit critical Calvinism, they may join those Anglican/Episcopalians and Roman Catholics who see in the writings of Cardinal Newman a way to stitch up shattered Christian dogmatic unity. Newman is not normally presented as indebted to the thought of John Calvin or of the Geneva divines.
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Thirdly, Dawson illustrates at work within the microcosm of the soul and conscience of Newman an evolutionary ethos which Newman presented in THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. There Newman argued that the one true form of orthodox Christianity, led by the Holy Spirit, will absorb all that is good in the world and cultures around it: Platonism, Aristotelianism, Protestantism while rejecting what is untrue or harmful. Newman also believed that God gives each human person from birth the wherewithal to find God, to transcend the limitations of his or her particular family or time in history, to respond to God’s voice echoing in conscience and to find the true religion or at least move in its direction under guidance from the Holy Spirit. 
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Similarly, John Henry Newman himself is presented by Christopher Dawson as personallyevolving towards God: reading the Bible as a youngster much as he read the Arabian Nights, then at 15 becoming and ever remaining a converted, pro-active Christian. This fervor endured for a time at Oxford but was challenged then fleshed out by Newman’s flirtation with rationalism and liberalism. He then moved into High Church Anglicanism and its belief that it has added nothing to the faith of the Greek and Latin Fathers of the early church. Relentlessly Newman’s conscience moved him toward the detested Rome, fighting every step of the way. Finally, he converted to Roman Catholicism only when sadly convinced that he could no longer save his soul in the Church of England.
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Dawson’s  THE SPIRIT OF THE OXFORD MOVEMENT and its very brief supplement NEWMAN’S PLACE IN HISTORY are unlikely to be unsurpassed as short, brilliant introductions to Hurrell Froude, John Henry Newman and other giants of the early days of the Oxford Movement.

01/21/02