Mark Chapman | Matthias Grebe | Friederike Nüssel | Frank-Dieter Fischbach (Eds.): Towards Interchangeability (Leseprobe)

What did a bishop think he was doing?
Episcopal oversight in practice in England’s age of reform (c. 1830–1850)
Frances Knight
Introduction
This paper builds on Mark Chapman’s article, ‘The Politics of Episcopacy’
which was originally written for the Meissen conference in 1999. 1 It provides
a further interrogation of the novelty of the Anglo-Catholic emphasis
on the idea of apostolic succession in the episcopal ministry as providing
a basis for authority in the Church, an idea famously set out by John Henry
Newman in the first of the Tracts for the Times in 1833. I shall do this by
means of a brief summary of some salient points from Peter Nockles’ influential
1994 study The Oxford Movement in Context in which he ana -
lyses the roots of the apostolic paradigm, and follow that with a case study
of Bishop John Kaye (1793–1853), bishop of Lincoln from 1827–53. Kaye
was a bishop throughout the Oxford Movement era, and reacted publicly
to its pronouncements mainly through his episcopal charges, which he
delivered to the clergy of his diocese at three yearly intervals. I will then
consider some of the practical ways in which he exercised oversight in his
vast diocese – at the time the largest in the Church of England – in order
to try to answer the question what did he think he was doing, and how
did he do it?
Kaye is an appropriate subject for more detailed investigation, not
least because he was regarded as one of the most learned churchmen of
his day. A bishop first of Bristol from 1820 to 1827, and then Lincoln,
from 1827 to 1853, he had plenty of time to consider the manner in
1
Mark D. Chapman, ‘The Politics of Episcopacy’ Anglican and Episcopal History
69:4 (December 2000): 474–503. Also in in Ingolf U. Dalferth and Paul Oppenheim
(eds), Einheit bezeugen / Witnessing to Unity: Ten Years after the Meissen
Declaration (Frankfurt am Main: Lembeck, 2004), 150–69.
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