Grace and Incarnation
The Oxford Movement’s Shaping of the Character of Modern Anglicanism
by Bruce D. Griffith and Jason R. Radcliff
Imprint: Pickwick Publications
This volume takes a deep look into the theological underpinnings of the Oxford Movement Tractarians, and the motivations and activities of their inheritors. Was this movement really the most significant single force in the formation of modern Anglicanism, as Eamon Duffy has recently suggested? Is the often-underserved Robert Isaac Wilberforce the great link to Gore and the Liberal Catholics? These and other questions lie beneath the writing of Grace and Incarnation.
The Oxford Movement was the beginning of a re-formation of Anglican theology, ministries, congregational and religious life revivals, and ritualism, which was based on a retrieval of the patristic and medieval eras reconstructed around a deep christological incarnationalism. All these were pressed hard up against the rise of what would come to be known as "modernism" with its new canons of authentication. Grace and Incarnation offers not only a mirror in which we can see back into the past but a magnifying glass through which we can understand more of what it means to be Anglican and trinitarian today.
Bruce D. Griffith (ThD) is Honorary Canon in Residence, Cathedral of the Incarnation, Episcopal Diocese of Long Island, and Rector Emeritus of Christ Church, Oyster Bay, New York. He has served as Senior Tutor and Professor of Systematic Theology at The George Mercer Jr. Memorial School of Theology.
Jason R. Radcliff (PhD), author of Thomas F. Torrance and the Church Fathers (2014) and Thomas F. Torrance and the Orthodox-Reformed Dialogue (2018), teaches at The Stony Brook School in New York. Jason serves as an assistant editor of Participatio: The Journal of the Thomas F. Torrance Theological Fellowship.
“This careful and well-researched tracing of the struggle and conflict surrounding the Oxford Movement and the theological questions it raised makes Grace and Incarnation an invaluable resource not only for insight into the past, but for an informed appreciation of contemporary Anglican thought. The tension between ‘Catholic’ and ‘Reformed’ belongs not only to Anglicanism, but to the ecumenical world as well. This book belongs in that larger context.”
—Frank T. Griswold, Twenty-Fifth Presiding Bishop, The Episcopal Church
“Publication of this important engagement with Tractarian theology is long overdue. The Tractarians’ views on grace are shown to be the basis for changes they instigated in the Church of England and worldwide Anglican Communion with respect to the theology and use of the sacraments, as well as in ceremonial matters that were, to the Tractarians themselves, less important. The authors show the error of many in retrojecting the incarnational optimism of later generations of Anglicans onto the Tractarians themselves.”
—Benjamin King, Professor of Christian History, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, The University of the South
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