Book Review: The Fantasy of Reunion: Anglicans, Catholics, and Ecumenism, 1833–1882

Abstract

The Fantasy of Reunion: Anglicans, Catholics, and Ecumenism, 18331882. By Mark D. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. ix + 352 pp. $99.00 (cloth).The fantasy of the title is the search for Christian unity. In the nineteenth century, some Anglicans and Roman Catholics began to ask if it was possible to find a common language on which Christian communities, long divided, might reach agreement. Chapman examines how this question was posed by discussing the different understandings of catholicity that emerged in the interactions between the Church of England and the Episcopal Church in the United States and the Roman Catholic Church and the Old Catholic Churches between 1833 and 1882.The great strength of the book is that it places church unity within the context of an even more important question: what should the Christian identity be amid the changing political and social structures created by democratic revolutions, the industrial revolution, rampant nationalism, and imperialism? These two themes, catholic unity and catholic identity, are brought together masterfully through a series of studies of nineteenth-century churchmen and theologians who sought to revive and reconstruct the churches through an encounter with the Christian past. No one questioned that history was key to the future. But could a common language be found in the past?Mark Chapman s background and scholarship prepare him to accomplish this complex task. He is Vice-Principal of Cuddesdon and Reader in Modem Theology at Oxford. He has published numerous articles and books on religion and public policy in Britain, Germany, and the United States, and this work is based on archival research and all the relevant literature, which he evaluates in the extensive and informative footnotes.Fantasy is divided into two parts. Part 1 takes us from the Oxford Movement in 1833 to the First Vatican Council in 1870. Part 2 extends from the Vatican Council to the Second Lambeth Conference in 1888. Part 1 in turn is divided into two topics. First, Chapman defines carefully the distinctive ecelesiology of two of the leaders of the Oxford Movement, E. B. Pusey and J. H. Newman, as their ecelesiology developed from Newmans conversion to the Roman Church in 1845 through the definition of papal infallibility in 1870.The Pusey/Newman exchange was the most important attempt in the nineteenth century to develop a common definition of which could lead to reunion. The conversation reached a climax in the publication of Puseys three Eirenicons in 1865, 1869, and 1870, and Newmans published responses to them. However, the Pusey/Newman dialogue, though based on friendship, led to an impasse. Chapman sums up the failure succinctly: A Catholicism of the Word, based on the explicit teachings of the apostolic past, rubbed up against a Catholicism of devotion (p. …