Book Review: Edward Bouverie Pusey and the Oxford Movement

Abstract

Edward Bouverie Pusey and Oxford Movement. Edited by Rowan Strong and Carol Engelhardt Herringer. Anthem NineteenthCentury Series. London: Anthem Press, 2012. x + 164 pp. $99.00 (cloth).Edward Bouverie Pusey [1800-82] and Oxford Movement is a collection of essays examining and work of of most prominent and influential Victorians (p. 1). The editors argue it will correct misconceptions and reveal Pusey as a serious theologian (p. 9).The essays by Ian McCormack and Kenneth Macnab address historiographical challenges generated by tension between H. P. Liddon's reverent account of his mentor and critical approaches. McCormack argues caricature of Pusey as life denying and joyless is result of circular and self-referencing scholarship (p. 14). Rather, Pusey's correspondence and his sermons show a person capable of encouraging joy at home and through his writing. Pusey's sermons on divine indwelling through Holy Spirit display systematic theological and an ecstatic apprehension of nearness of God (p. 19). Casting light on another problem, Macnab argues Liddons posthumous editors transformed his work from biography to hagiography, omitting Pusey's admiration for Luther, his flexible views about church government, and his 1828 description of Calvinists as those who agree in doctrine of Lord's Supper with ourselves (p. 42). At least some of late-twentieth-century debate about Puseys theological and spiritual development would have been allayed Liddon's original words reached printed page intact (p. 34).In an essay which helpfully considers Puseys contact with German scholarship in 1820s, Albrecht Geek describes a revolution of Puseys theology in years prior to publication of his tracts on Holy Baptism in 1835. Geek characterizes Puseys position not as liberal protestantism but rather as modem orthodoxy, a via media that blended faith and science without compromise (pp. 50, 55). Unfortunately, this account could obscure aspects of young Puseys thought which Geek associates with Anglo-Catholicism. For example, while in his 1828 Enquiry into Theology of Germany (TG) Pusey wrote hopefully of the already commenced blending of belief and science, he also argued historical interpretation, through misuse by some German scholars, had become the most extensive instrument of degradation of Christianity (TG, pp. 176, 142). Furthermore, whereas for Geek, the Tractarian approach clearly was and rather than religious and (p. 61), already in his Enquiry Pusey insisted on a necessary link between moral and intellectual elements of understanding (TG, pp. 26-27, 136, 143). However one explains ways in which Puseys study of church fathers modified his view of intellectual, moral, and affective aspects of faith, it is important to see trajectories of continuity also.In her essay on eucharistie doctrine, Carol Engelhardt Herringer presents Puseys understanding of Real Presence: I believe consecrated elements to become, by virtue of His consecrating Words, tmly and really, yet spiritually and in an ineffable way, His Body and His Blood (p. 93). More controversially, Herringer rejects as disingenuous and unsustainable Puseys arguments this understanding was traditionally Anglican (p. 98). Herringer points to Puseys anxiety to demonstrate catholicity of Church of England and his personal sense of need to explain his persistent advocacy of a presence both real and spiritual. …