Digging Out the Embedded Church - The Maranatha Community

the Church of England‟s doctrinal position. Pusey replied with a series of Eirenicons
contending that there was much in the Roman Church which was unofficial and added on to
doctrines which both the Anglican and Roman Churches held in common; if the Church of
England needed to put its house in order, so did the Roman. Anglican apologists now spoke
of two Romes; the Rome which held to classical Biblical and Patristic doctrines and the
Rome which demanded allegiance to a whole range of new and alien doctrines not held by
Christendom at large.
The convening of the first Vatican Council in 1870, with its passing of the dogma of the
infallibility of the Pope when speaking as the Teacher of all Christians, „ex cathedra‟, was a
severe setback to any hopes of drawing the two communions closer together. Later, in 1896,
Pope Leo Xlll‟s Bull Apostolicae Curae condemned Anglican orders as defective and invalid.
It was a sharp rebuttal of any overtures towards unity from the Anglicans.
The effect of the Oxford Movement on furthering the cause of Christian Unity was to make
the divisions in the Church seem more acute. The Tractarians wrote about the Church of
England as the Via Media but the many Anglicans who defected to Rome under the
influence of the Tractarians and the many who did not defect but stayed in the Church
with decidedly Catholic views and practices were proof to many Dissenters and
Evangelicals that the Church of England was being drawn steadily to Rome rather than
being a middle way between Rome and Protestantism.
J A Froude (1818-1894), brother of Hurrel Froude, who was one of the earliest supporters of
the Tractarians, wrote in his Short Studies on Great Subjects 99 that the Oxford Movement
seriously damaged the Evangelical party in the Church of England. The Church of England,
after the Tractarians, had a clearly Anglo-Catholic party within it, the „ritualists‟ of a few
years later, which it had not had before, even among those of „High Church‟ views.
THE PLYMOUTH BRETHREN MOVEMENT
The Brethren had their beginning in Dublin in 1829, but were later, in the 1840s, associated
with Plymouth in Devon. They were not taken up with the charismata of the Early Church as
the Irvingites were and, unlike them, had little interest in rituals as a means of bringing the
Church back to its roots in the Primitive Church. The Brethren generally believed that the
organised Church was corrupt in doctrine and practice and was beyond remedy. It was a
Church in ruins and there was no point in trying to purify any of the many existing
denominations. They felt that the only course open to them was to separate from all
denominations and welcome all Christians into their fellowships, solely as brethren and
sisters in Christ. Their cry was for Christians to gather only to the name of the Lord Jesus,
not to any other name.
Sadly, they themselves soon became fragmented into several schismatic groups on a whole
range of issues. They became divided over interpretations of prophecy, and whether or not
Jesus became sinful in order to bear our sins on the Cross; whether there ought to be clearly
designated officers to rule in the church; whether worship should be under the spontaneous
99 Froude, James Anthony, Short Studies on Great Subjects, Green & Co, Longmans, Vol iii, 1893, p
172.
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