Oxford’s Protestant Spy
REVIEW:
Oxford’s Protestant Spy: The Controversial Career of Charles Golightly, Andrew Atherstone
Most of the books I have read since Seminary have been to fill in the gaps of what I missed in my formal training. The best seminary can do is wet an appetite for lifelong learning. This is what took me to Atherstone’s remarkable biography of Charles Golightly. I have carried with me all these years many unanswered questions about the 1830s and 1840s Oxford Movement. Questions like: how did a single university in a very few years completely change the theological landscape of the Church of England? How was it permitted that those Oxford professors were allowed to challenge and then shatter the doctrinal consensus of earlier High Church Anglicanism and destroy the Protestant agreement? And, how was it that prior to the Oxford revival there was significant, settled unity around Anglican‘s historic formularies (the Thirty-nine Articles, 1662 Book of Common Prayer, and the Homilies) while the church that emerged from the fog of Oxford was polarized and fractured into “parties” that stay with us today (high church and low church; Anglo-catholic and evangelical; conservative and broad/liberal)?
My search led me first to two important books for a bird’s eye view: Peter Toon’s Evangelical Theology 1833-1856: A Response to Tractarianism, and The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship 1760-1856 by Peter Nockles. Both are outstanding introductions that explore the 19th century Oxford phenomenon. Both, of course, mention Golightly’s role as a Protestant provocateur. But Atherston’s monograph, Oxford’s Protestant Spy, gives us an in-the-room perspective of John Henry Newman (whom Golightly calls “the grand engine of mischief”), Edward Pusey, John Keble, and the other revivers of popery (as Golightly described them).
Charles Golightly (1807-1885) was an ordained Anglican priest who, after serving a short curacy in Kent, had enough inherited wealth to settle in Oxford, England where he was formerly a student. He remained in the same home for the rest of his life. He devoted the entirety of his unmarried life to defending the cause of conservative Protestantism in the University of Oxford and Oxford Diocese, and in the Church of England. After his early friendships with Newman and Pusey, Golightly became progressively critical of Tractarianism. He was especially effective in his attack of the infamous Tract 90 (1841) in which Newman tried to bend and twist the Articles of Religion to fit his Roman Catholic theology. Golightly’s whole life was given to upholding the Protestant face of Anglicanism, even at the expense of losing most of his friends along the way. He engaged in organizing meetings and orchestrating massive letter writing campaigns (theological essays, each of them), to challenge the rise of Romanism in the Church of England. Many of these letters were anonymous, signed “Master of Arts of Oxford.” His detractors called him all kinds of names (busybody, eavesdropper who was unable to mind his own business, zealot, clerical gadfly, militant antipapist, the sergeant-sniper of the established church, and the notorious skirmisher of the age). Atherstone calls him, “Oxford’s home-grown and most notorious ecclesiastical agitator.” Historians are unanimous in their negative assessment of Golightly’s extreme methods, but none of them can deny the strong effect he had mitigating the deleterious impact of the Oxford Movement. In the 1850s-70s Golightly went on with equal passion to attack the ritualism movement that sprang from the Oxford Movement, and after that the advancement of liberal theology in the Church of England, what came to be called the Broad Church Movement.
Atherstone goes to great pains to discuss how Golightly defies normal theological categories. Even though he first came to prominence as the lead promoter of the Martyrs Memorial to commemorate the Evangelical bishops burned at the stake in Oxford (Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer), he resolutely refused to be identified as an “evangelical.” Different categories were made up for him (notably: Evangelical High-churchman), but this he also refused. Atherstone concludes with: “If a theological label must be given to Golightly, it is perhaps best to adopt his own choice - not ‘evangelical’ or ‘high church’ or even ‘evangelical high church’, but simply ‘Protestant’.”
My big takeaway from reading Andrew Atherstone’s Oxford Protestant Spy is that true Anglicanism, historic Anglican identity, is not as confused and distracted as it is sometimes made out to be. Prior to the Oxford Movement there was a general consensus around the historic formularies that this church is, above all else, thoroughly biblical, pastorally generous, and liturgically beautiful. Reformation Anglicanism is the key to understanding Anglican identity and it holds the hope for our future.