tractarianism
tractarianism was the name applied to the first stage of the Oxford movement, derived from a series of Tracts for the Times written between 1833 and 1841 by a group of Oxford high churchmen, including Hurrell Froude, Keble, Newman, Pusey, and Isaac Williams. Their context, signalled by Keble's Oxford assize sermon on ‘National Apostasy’ (14 July 1833), was alarm at the onslaught of Roman catholicism, dissent, and ‘liberalism’, focused by the Whig government's abolition of ten Irish bishoprics in what appeared to be a revolution in the relations between church and state. Tractarians insisted on the church's authority to teach catholic truth to the English as the divinely commissioned agent of Christ and his apostles, and their exploration of this authority began a movement which decisively affected English Christianity's understanding of sanctity, worship, and religious practice. The furore provoked by Newman's Tract 90, on the Thirty-Nine Articles, ended the series and his reception into the Roman catholic church closed the tractarian phase, but their influence set the Anglican pace for the rest of the century.
Clyde Binfield
More From encyclopedia.com
NEARBY TERMS
tractarianism