Page 31 - THE CHURCH BEFORE THE MOCKING WORLD

CHAPTER TEN
Two Bottle Orthodoxy
Sometimes it is good to look back and find in both recent and ancient history, markers and sign-posts to help us press on in our spiritual journeys. History is littered with such markers.
One that may be helpful within the context of these reflections is the extraordinary movement in the Anglican Church in Britain in the 1800?s.
In the mid 1800?s a violent battle for the soul of the Anglican Church was raging in Great Britain. It was, in essence, an academic battle. Seemingly out of nowhere there was an explosion of written works, a series of tracts, essays and pamphlets which were primarily centred at Oxford University. It was a tempest of polemics concerning the life of the Church in the coming new ere of the Modern. This exchange of views in written form has gone on to be known as the Oxford Movement or the Tractarian Society.
To be honest, this short book of reflections functions within the tension created by this movement. I say that as the current struggles between the Church and the Spirit of the Age are very similar now to what the Oxford Movement was wrestling with in the mid 1800?s
There were two very powerful forces at work. The Liberal Movement and the Reform Movement. The Liberal movement to some extent can be summed up in the term used as both a pejorative and a boast, ?Two Bottle Orthodoxy?.
This was the name given to those who would drink two bottles of Port wine each day in conscious opposition to the Puritans whose asceticism, though to be honest is over-rated, was a central part of their spiritual philosophy of denying self and taking up the Cross and following Jesus.
The other movement, a dynamic movement for reform was known as the Oxford or Tractarian movement.
The Oxford Movement was calling the Church back to its roots in the midst of an upheaval, in common culture, that would go on to seek to destroy and vaporize historic orthodoxy.
This movement itself broke down into two basic groups. One party within the Oxford movement leaned towards Rome, the other saw its roots in pre Roman Catholic British Christianity. One must remember there was an organised Celtic Church functioning for at least 450 years before Rome sent Augustine of Canterbury to colonialise the British Isles, on June 2, 597AD.