Episode 19 - The Oxford Movement

Who were the Tractarians? What was the Oxford Movement? Was this a good, necessary, and salutary development for the Anglican Church? Or not?

C. Jay is away today, but Jared is joined by Dr. Charles Erlandson, his former professor and mentor at Cranmer Theological House to discuss the Oxford Movement of the nineteenth century.

For some new to Anglicanism (like Jared in his early days), the first impression of the Oxford Movement is that it was the source of all evils in modern Anglicanism: liberalism, pride flags, and everything else. And why? Because it was an Anglo-Catholic movement! But Jared began to read and learn, over time, that there’s more nuance than he had suspected. Was the Oxford Movement truly an Anglo-Catholic movement? Did it open the door to liberalism in the church? What can we learn from the Tractarians today?

Join us on Canterbury Trails today as Jared and Dr. Erlandson discuss all this and much more, including the Oxford Movement as a catholic revival and reaction against the excesses of Evangelicalism; the Oxford Triumvirate of John Keble, John Henry Newman, and Edward Pusey; Keble’s poetic works and links to Romanticism; Newman’s infamous Tract 90 and eventual conversion to the Roman Catholic Church; the Oxford Movement and the Thirty-Nine Articles; et cetera.

Our guest, the Rev. Dr. Charles Erlandson, is head of the department of church history at Cranmer Theological House and assistant rector at Good Shepherd Reformed Episcopal Church in Tyler, TX. He is the author of Orthodox Anglican Identity: The Complexity of Religious Identities in a Post-Modern World, among other books, and is working on a new book on English history. Visit him online at:

https://gsrec.org/ (Good Shepherd Reformed Episcopal Church)

https://www.cranmerhouse.org/ (Cranmer Theological House)

Image of Anglo-Saxon map by Hel-hama - Own work using:InkscapeSource: England and Wales at the time of the Treaty of Chippenham (AD 878). From the Atlas of European History, Earle W Dowe (d. 1946), G Bell and Sons, London, 1910 (see: File:England-878ad.jpg), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19885072