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

to portray their advocacy of apostolical succession as the recovery of an
ancient truth lost sight of in the “deadness” of eighteenth-century Anglicanism’.
4 In fact, and unsurprisingly to anyone who knows anything about
the history of the Church of England, there were diverse views, even
among high church Anglican clergy who might have appeared outwardly
of similar mind on ecclesiological issues. There were some, including the
future prime minister and Anglo-Catholic W. E. Gladstone, and the influential
Bishop C. J. Blomfield of London, who regarded the Tractarian teaching
on apostolic succession as novel. It was something that they thought
had not surfaced since the time of the non-juror William Law over one
hundred years earlier. But there were others, including the high church
wine merchant Joshua Watson, who asserted, somewhat vaguely, that
those who believed the doctrine could be numbered in the thousands.
This seems grossly exaggerated, and Nockles, who is admired for his thoroughness
in these matters, provides evidence of only ten clerical authors
in the period from 1770–1820 who expressed support for this version of
the apostolic paradigm. One was John Oxlee, who in 1820 provided ‘a
continued and uninterrupted list of Christian bishops from the Blessed
Apostles Peter, Paul and John, down to the present prelates of Canterbury,
York and London.’ 5
Kaye seems to have had little sympathy for this kind of episcopal genealogy,
which to any serious student of church history was likely to stretch
credibility beyond the bounds of possibility. In his book on Tertullian, he
noted that Tertullian had tried to confound the heretics with just this kind
of thing, but then rapidly moved on to criticise him for being apparently
unable to distinguish adequately between bishops and presbyters. 6 The
conclusion he wished to draw was that Tertullian believed that the Apostolic
Churches were independent of each other but equal in rank and authority.
7 It seemed that Kaye was trying to find an ancient precedent for
the branch theory, that Roman, Orthodox and Anglican Churches were
branches of the Catholic Church, the Anglicans a pure branch, and the
Hammond (eds.,) Religion in Britain, 1660–1900: Essays in Honour of Peter
B. Nockles. Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 97:1 (Spring, 2021).
4
Peter B. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship
1760–1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994), 146.
5
Nockles, Oxford Movement, 148–9.
6
John Kaye, The Ecclesiastical of the Second and Third Centuries, Illustrated from
the Writings of Tertullian (Cambridge, 1826), 233–4.
7
Kaye, Tertullian, 236.
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