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The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760-1857, by Peter B. Nockles; pp. xvi + 342. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, L40.00, $59.95.
One of the most prominent growth areas in English religious historical scholarship in the past decade or so has been in the exploration of topics and issues in the eighteenth century, an area long ignored except for Methodist studies. The present work is certainly a product of that interest, with the impact of it having implications for the understanding of nineteenth-century issues. The title is in part misleading, obscuring the force of a clear argument, for Peter Nockles aims to explore only the context of the movement's relation to Anglican High Churchmanship before, during, and after the years 1833-45. This complex entity, sometimes called "Orthodox," sometimes "old High Churchmen," to distinguish them from the High Churchmanship of the Oxford Movement, contained a number of sub-groups, including the "Hutchinsonians," the "Hackney Phalanx," and the "Z's," the latter so named by Hurrell Froude in the critical years of the 1830s. If many scholars over the years have explored the movement's emergence in relation to liberalizing forces in church and state and to Evangelical thought, the murky associations, reactions, and debates among High Churchmen as part of the movement's context has clearly not been studied in detail, making Nockles's effort a very substantial contribution indeed. In the course of his exposition, Nockles contends that the movement often dealt unfairly with its High Church antecedents, playing down the force of its theological positions in part for the effect of trying to show how much its own positions were needed; this has been exacerbated by a Tractarian historiography that assumed the Oxford Movement to be the only true heir of the High Church tradition in the Church of England.
In his introductory chapter, Nockles provides a definition of pre-Tractarian High Church views, including belief in the doctrine of apostolic succession as a manifestation of the Church's catholicity and apostolicity as a branch of the universal church catholic; the supremacy of Holy Scripture and support for the standards given in the Creeds, Prayer Book, and Catechism; the value of the writings of the early Fathers; the doctrine of sacramental grace and a practical spirituality based on good...