Wonky Legacy of Charles Gore
When the first bricks are badly laid, the wall in the end will be wonky. When we leave the doctrinal formularies of Reformation Anglicanism and wander the roads of innovation, the result will eventually be the 1830s Tractarian Movement; and if allowed to continue, it becomes ritualized with Catholic-like ceremonial and understandings; and if tractarianism continues its progression for a third generation, the result is Charles Gore, liberal catholicism, and Lux Mundi. Charles Gore (1853-1932), the popular bishop and Principal of Pusey House Oxford, brought together the high churchmanship of Anglo-Catholicism with the Broad Church endorsement of a liberal understandings of biblical inspiration and interpretation. He called it “liberal catholicism.” He advocated for a faith that is less tied to tradition and the church fathers than his Oxford mentors were, and more open to human reasoning: “I could never endure to be otherwise than a free thinker. . . I mean by that whatever obligation I may have inherited or contracted to any traditional system of belief or thought, I could never allow it to blind me to anything which might seem to be truth, whatever its origin, or to shackle me so that I could not follow the light of reason whithersoever it should lead.” The Liberal Catholic Movement wanted to "preserve the best of the past in the light of the best of the present so as to build for the best future" (Frank Gavin, professor at General Theological Seminary), but instead it was a shaky wall of feel-good progressivism unanchored to anything permanent that continues prominent in Anglicanism today.
Gore edited and wrote an essay in the influential book "Lux Mundi" (1889, 12 essays, all by liberal Anglo-Catholic scholars). The book’s subtitle says it all: "a series of studies in the religion of the Incarnation." These influential leaders and this book helped shift the emphasis in the Church of England away from the centrality of the Cross to the Incarnation - from the atonement (for our salvation) to the life and teaching of Christ (for us to imitate) - and from a focus on the Bible as God's divinely inspired word to the Bible subject to the authority of science and reason. In his own essay, “The Holy Spirit and Inspiration,” Gore urged a much looser view of biblical inspiration especially of the Old Testament, and arguing that Jesus “willed so to restrain the beams of Divinity as to observe the limits of the science of his age. . .” He thought of the Bible as God’s revelation for its time, but since then it has been superseded by the Spirit’s continuing work that is evident in the advances of science and reason.
Whenever the church moves away from the centrality of the cross of Christ, Christianity is made to be about what “we” do rather than what “God” has done for us. Lux Mundi represents a tectonic shift from Christus Redemptor to Christus Consummator, moving us away from God's righteousness imputed to undeserving sinners to an earned infused righteousness, and towards social progress based on human obedience and following Jesus' example. St. Paul reminds us not to lose sight of the cross of our Lord: "Far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world" (Gal 6:14).
Charles Gore and the wonky-wall influence of Liberal Catholicism is just down the street alive and well. If you walk into an Anglican Church and hear the preacher fussing at his congregation to “do more” and to “try harder,” you can thank Bishop Gore. And if the ceremonial and vestiture is its own end and fails to shout “Look to Christ!” it's because of the influence of Liberal Catholicism. And if the Sunday school offering that Sunday is a class on the seven sacraments or apostolic succession of bishops traceable on a chart back to Peter the rock (without a mention of the succession of apostolic and catholic teaching from the apostles to our own day), Charles Gore has surely visited that church. In fact, human reasoning and science have not rendered God’s unique revelation irrelevant; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever (Isa 40:8). Anglicanism, divorced from the primary authority of Holy Scripture as seen and upheld by our defining formularies, is not Anglican, and it may not even be “Christian.”
The History of Christianity in Britain and Ireland: From the First Century to the Twenty-first, Gerald Bray
Men and Movements in the American Episcopal Church, E. Clowes Chorley
The Spirit of the Oxford Movement: Tractarian Essays, Owen Chadwick
The Anglican Spiritual Tradition, John R. H. Moorman
The Vision Glorious: Themes and personalities of the Catholic Revival in Anglicanism, Geoffrey Rowell