scholarly journals The Church and Ecumenism in the Thought of John Henry Newman

2021 ◽  
Vol 68 (7) ◽  
pp. 59-78
Author(s):  
Hector Scerri
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Opinion Leader ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
People Of God ◽  
Long Life ◽  
The Church

This article explores the development of Newman’s thought on the Church, throughout different phases of his long life. The article focuses, among other themes, on the nature of the Church, the important introduction to his Via Media (1877), the charismatic dimension of the ekklesia, and the respective roles of the pope, the bishops and the laity, in particular what the latter can contribute to the whole People of God. The article also seeks to delve into the question whether one can talk about ecumenism in the writings of the influential nineteenth-century English man of letters and opinion leader. The conclusion offers some final considerations on what Newman underwent during his long and meandering journey with regard to some basic tenets of his ecclesiology.

The Anglican Origins of Newman's Celibacy

1996 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. W. Young
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The Church ◽  
As If

In his historical defense of the doctrines of the Church of England, published in 1826, Robert Southey assumed that “the question concerning the celibacy of the clergy had been set at rest throughout Protestant Europe.” The conclusion that Anglicanism necessarily entailed the rejection of celibacy was, in early-nineteenth-century England, decidedly premature, and the ambiguity over celibacy in the Church of England is starkly and exceptionally exposed in the life and work of John Henry Newman. Recent assessments of Newman's peculiar standing in Victorian society have often emphasized the sexual—or rather, the seemingly sexless—dimension of his image, as if to concur with Sydney Smith's celebrated witticism: “Don't you know, as the French say, there are three sexes—men, women, and clergymen?” The nature of specifically clerical celibacy, however, and its influence on the young Newman, have tended to be overlooked in favor of a general psychosexual understanding of his own unwillingness to marry. As an antidote to such readings, this essay will explore the distinctively Anglican and firmly intellectual tradition behind Newman's decision, and will thereby argue that his celibacy was not as “perverse”—a word which, in Victorian England, connoted conversion to Catholicism as well as sexual peculiarity—as it has sometimes been made to seem.

A Tale of Two Cities: John Henry Newman and the Church of the Catacombs

2010 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 746-763
Author(s):  
WENDEL W. MEYER
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Spring ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
The Church

John Henry Newman made two formative trips to Rome, the first as an Anglican priest in the early spring of 1833 when he spent five weeks in the Eternal City accompanied by his friend and colleague Hurrell Froude. The second trip was made shortly after he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1846. On both these journeys, Newman visited the Roman catacombs, which were certainly part of the standard tour of the day but which had become in the nineteenth century sites that were enveloped in considerable ecclesiastical and theological polemical debate. Looking at Newman's reactions to these sites, at these two very important junctures of his life and career, gives a very provocative and enlightening glimpse into the inner workings of his mind and heart. On a different but equally interesting historical plane, such an investigative lens highlights the significant number of people who were part of Newman's life during this period and who were devotionally drawn to these primitive burial sites.

The Oxford Movement, Marriage and Domestic Life: John Keble, Isaac Williams and Edward King

2014 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 366-377
Author(s):  
John Boneham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Social Importance ◽  
The Church

While a number of studies have highlighted the theological and social importance of the household in nineteenth-century Protestant Britain, the significance of domestic life for the leaders of the Oxford, or Tractarian, Movement remains almost completely unexplored. In a sense this is unsurprising, since the movement, which began in the 1830s, emphasized the importance of recalling the Church of England to its pre-Reformation heritage and consequently tended to stress the spiritual value of celibacy and asceticism. Whilst B.W. Young has highlighted the importance of celibacy for John Henry Newman, the movement’s main figurehead until his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1845, and other works have reflected upon the Tractarian emphasis on celibacy and tried to explain its origins, historians of the Oxford Movement have paid very little attention to the Tractarian attitude towards marriage and domestic life.

The Library of the Fathers

2002 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 294-306
Author(s):  
Austin Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Church

The Oxford Movement in the nineteenth century sought to emphasise the nature of the Church of England as “Catholic”, continuing the work of the Incarnation throughout all times and places. Part of this theological and historical polemic involved being in harmony with the writers of the early Christian centuries, the Fathers of the Church. John Henry Newman, John Keble, Richard Hurrell Froude, and (later) Edward Bouverie Pusey, appealed to the Fathers of the Church from the beginning of the Movement. This eventually blossomed into an ambitious programme for translating the works of the Fathers into English, many of them for the first time. “The Library of the Fathers”, as it was called, was a major contribution to historical and theological studies. It had an influence well beyond the narrow confines of a church “party” or movement.

The Township, the Pregnant Girl and the Church: Community Dynamics, Gender and Social Control in Early Nineteenth-century Scotland

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-67
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Ritchie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Community Dynamics ◽  
Church Discipline ◽  
Sexual Offences ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Community ◽  
The Church ◽  
Unmarried Girl

In 1814 in a small Highland township an unmarried girl, ostracised by her neighbours, gave birth. The baby died. The legal precognition permits a forensic, gendered examination of the internal dynamics of rural communities and how they responded to threats to social cohesion. In the Scottish ‘parish state’ disciplining sexual offences was a matter for church discipline. This case is situated in the early nineteenth-century Gàidhealtachd where and when church institutions were less powerful than in the post-Reformation Lowlands, the focus of most previous research. The article shows that the formal social control of kirk discipline was only part of a complex of behavioural controls, most of which were deployed within and by communities. Indeed, Scottish communities and churches were deeply entwined in terms of personnel; shared sexual prohibitions; and in the use of shaming as a primary method of social control. While there was something of a ‘female community’, this was not unconditionally supportive of all women nor was it ranged against men or patriarchal structures.

Scottish Missionaries, ‘Protestant Hinduism’ and the Scottish Sense of Empire in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century India

2007 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Constable
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Church

This article examines the Scottish missionary contribution to a Scottish sense of empire in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially, the article reviews general historiographical interpretations which have in recent years been developed to explain the Scottish relationship with British imperial development in India. Subsequently the article analyses in detail the religious contributions of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church Missions to a Scottish sense of empire with a focus on their interaction with Hindu socioreligious thought in nineteenth-century western India. Previous missionary historiography has tended to focus substantially on the emergence of Scottish evangelical missionary activity in India in the early nineteenth century and most notably on Alexander Duff (1806–78). Relatively little has been written on Scottish Presbyterian missions in India in the later nineteenth century, and even less on the significance of their missionary thought to a Scottish sense of Indian empire. Through an analysis of Scottish Presbyterian missionary critiques in both vernacular Marathi and English, this article outlines the orientalist engagement of Scottish Presbyterian missionary thought with late nineteenth-century popular Hinduism. In conclusion this article demonstrates how this intellectual engagement contributed to and helped define a Scottish missionary sense of empire in India.

The “individual” in Johann Friedrich Overbeck’s and Franz Liszt’s Seven Sacraments

2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 339-356
Author(s):  
Dolores Pesce
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Franz Liszt ◽  
Individualized Treatment ◽  
Sacred Art ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Voice ◽  
Emotional Effects ◽  
The Church

In the preface to his Septem sacramenta (1878–1884), Franz Liszt acknowledged its stimulus — drawings completed in 1862 by the German painter J. F. Overbeck (1789–1869). This essay explores what Liszt likely meant by his and Overbeck’s “diametrically opposed” approaches and speculates on why the composer nonetheless acknowledged the artist’s work. Each man adopted an individualized treatment of the sacraments, neither in line with the Church’s neo-Thomistic philosophy. Whereas the Church insisted on the sanctifying effects of the sacraments’ graces, Overbeck emphasized the sacraments as a means for moral edification, and Liszt expressed their emotional effects on the receiver. Furthermore, Overbeck embedded within his work an overt polemical message in response to the contested position of the pope in the latter half of the nineteenth century. For many in Catholic circles, he went too far. Both works experienced a problematic reception. Yet, despite their works’ reception, both Overbeck and Liszt believed they had contributed to the sacred art of their time. The very individuality of Overbeck’s treatment seems to have stimulated Liszt. True to his generous nature, Liszt, whose individual voice often went unappreciated, publicly recognized an equally individual voice in the service of the Church.

Contested Citizenship

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingrid Brühwiler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Education ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Ideal

This article examines public education and the establishment of the nation-state in the first half of the nineteenth century in Switzerland. Textbooks, governmental decisions, and reports are analyzed in order to better understand how citizenship is depicted in school textbooks and whether (federal) political changes affected the image of the “imagined citizen” portrayed in such texts. The “ideal citizen” was, first and foremost, a communal and cantonal member of a twofold society run by the church and the secular government, in which nationality was depicted as a third realm.

Priesthood Ordination

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan A. Stapley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
The Temple ◽  
The Church ◽  
Power And Authority

Early Mormons used the Book of Mormon as the basis for their ecclesiology and understanding of the open heaven. Church leaders edited, harmonized, and published Joseph Smith’s revelation texts, expanding understandings of ecclesiastical priesthood office. Joseph Smith then revealed the Nauvoo Temple liturgy, with its cosmology that equated heaven, kinship, and priesthood. This cosmological priesthood was materialized through sealings at the temple altar and was the context for expansive teachings incorporating women into priesthood. This cosmology was also the basis for polygamy, temple adoption, and restrictions on the participation of black men and women in the church. This framework gave way at the end of the nineteenth century to a new priesthood cosmology introduced by Joseph F. Smith based on male ecclesiastical office. As church leaders expanded the meaning of priesthood to comprise the entire power and authority of God, they struggled to integrate women into church cosmology.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Mason
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Communal Experience ◽  
In Christ ◽  
The Church ◽  
Francis Of Assisi

This chapter locates Rossetti in the context of the book’s ecotheological argument, which traces an ecological love command in her writing through her engagement with Tractarianism, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the Church Fathers, and Francis of Assisi. It establishes her Anglo-Catholic imagining of the cosmos as a fabric of participation and communal experience embodied in Christ. The first section reads Rossetti in the context of current Victorian ecocriticism, which underplays the role of Christianity in the development of nineteenth-century environmentalism. The next sections question critical readings of Rossetti as a reclusive thinker and argue instead for an educated and politicized Christian for whom indifference to the spiritual is complicit with an environmental crisis in which the weak and vulnerable suffer most. This introduction also refers to the wider field of Rossetti studies and introduces her reading of grace and apocalypse as a major contribution to the intradiscipline of Christianity and ecology.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document