Editor’s Note: Yesterday and today we feature essays on Evangelicalism and Anglo-Catholicism, not as old party lines but as contributions, opportunities, and invitations to deeper discipleship and commitment to mission.
Critics of Anglo-Catholicism usually see this movement that began in the 19th century as limited to aesthetics or perhaps as a conservative rejection of modernity. Others see it as an opportunity for dressing up. Yet the movement begun by such lights as John Keble and Edward Bouverie Pusey and sustained by poets and priests like Evelyn Underhill and Michael Ramsey is a profound theological and spiritual vision originating not in the sacristy, but in the soul. It is a deep-rooted sense of the Church’s continuity with the life of God and his cruciform love for his creation in Christ.
This is a balanced tradition that seeks to live by the Catholic, creedal, and sacramental faith in the Anglican household and in the world. It is rooted in the Incarnation, nourished by the Eucharist, and open to renewal in the Holy Spirit.
For Pusey and Underhill, for example, the emphasis on sacrament, beauty, and costly life within the Church wasn’t about exclusivity—it was about coherence and continuity. They placed as much weight on the inner life, on retreats and silence, as they did on candles and vestments. They remind us that Anglo-Catholicism is not just a matter of doing things the “right” way at the altar, but of letting the life of the Church form the whole person: prayer, study, service, and worship, held in balance.
John Mason Neale (1818-66) is a model. Translator of ancient hymns like “Sing, My Tongue, the Glorious Battle,” Neale opened the riches of early Christian poetry to the modern church. His work wasn’t a novelty act. He translated these hymns because he believed they contained a theological and spiritual significance worth preserving. He lived and worked under constant resistance—sometimes even riots—but he persevered because he felt that recovering the still living ancient Church’s witness and life wasn’t about going backward but going deeper.
The same vision that inspired the original Oxford movement—a vision of marrying study of the early Fathers, especially their passing on the witness of Scripture, within the life of prayer and sacrament in an organic apostolic unity—animates our ecumenical instincts today. Whether we chant a cappella in a side chapel or sing a spiritual at a vigil, we stand in solidarity not only with our tradition, but also with Methodists, Pentecostals, and freedom marchers. Our spirituality is inclusive, drawing from a variety of traditions without being trapped in the past.
This is the core of Anglo-Catholic spirituality: anamnesis. Not memory, but remembering. Not nostalgia, but presence. In the Eucharist, we do not recall Christ like a faded photograph; we encounter him. The past is not gone—it is made present. As Hebrews reminds us, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” And as Christ himself promises at the end of Matthew: “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
Michael Ramsey, perhaps the most beloved of modern archbishops of Canterbury among Anglo-Catholics, referred to this as the “living past.” In his book Jesus and the Living Past, he writes:
Through the centuries, the living past has been realized in Christian experience, for it is the work of the Holy Spirit to reproduce it in its dynamic power. … The Church is not merely a series of generations of Christians, each confined to its setting of time and culture.
That line dismantles the tidy view of the Church as a historical institution with little more than continuity of governance. The Church, rightly understood, is the vessel of divine life moving through history. It is not preserved in amber. It breathes. It sings. It proclaims.
For Anglican Christianity, the Catholic Church is the universal Church of which the Anglican Communion is a part. The Church is itself a reality of, a manifestation of, the gospel, not a human add-on. Thus Anglicanism holds within itself not multiple in-fighting streams, but an authentically evangelical and authentically Catholic witness in life, mission, word, and sacrament.
Perhaps one of the signal commitments of the Anglo-Catholic tradition, one reflected in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer and similar alternative service books across the Anglian Communion, is the claim that the Church lives at the intersection of the Eucharist and the communion of saints. Here we find the things of God’s creation—people, bread, wine—being gathered into God’s life and love for the world. And so we join and harmonize our earthly voices with the unending song around the heavenly throne. Likewise the Eucharist draws us into Christ’s body, the living communion of the faithful across time and space. It is where the saints are present—not metaphorically, but mystically. The Church is apostolic not because we have good records, but because we still hear the voices of the apostles in Scripture, still live under their teachings, and still drink from the chalice that was once passed in the Upper Room.
In an era when many Christians are drifting toward either shallow individualism or rigid institutionalism, the Anglo-Catholic tradition offers another path: a Church that is structured yet alive; historical yet Spirit-filled; sacramental yet personal. In one sense, what Anglican Christians mean by Catholic is what many Christians mean by biblical. Consider Edward Selwyn’s perspective, written in 1929:
By Catholicism, we mean … a presentation of Christian thought, worship, and life to which no one Church—Anglican, Roman, or Eastern—has any exclusive title; and which yet permeates all these bodies with a thoroughness and tenacity …
That is a bold but necessary claim. Catholicism is not the proprietary identity of one episcopal see or another, nor a “style guide” from boutique aesthetes. It is a vision of the Christian faith in its fullness: sacramental, creedal, historical, communal. And this fullness, Selwyn insists, runs deeply through Anglicanism—not by accident, but by vocation.
This is where the Oxford Movement’s deepest commitments emerge—not just in ritual, but in doctrine and ecclesiology. The movement was not a protest against Protestantism alone, but against forgetfulness. It challenged a version of the Church that had lost its grip on what it meant to be part of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. It reminded Anglicans that we cannot thrive as a halfway house between Rome and Geneva, but rather as fully planted branch of the Universal Church, again, through time, space, and culture. That claim is not arrogance. It is stewardship.
The challenge now is not to revive the Oxford Movement in its 19th-century form. We are not living in 1833. However, we are living in an age just as confused, just as fragmented, and just as hungry for clarity, beauty, and transcendence. And the Anglo-Catholic tradition, rightly understood, is more than capable of meeting that hunger—not by retreating into fetishized past forms, but by inhabiting the presence of Christ and the presence of his saints.
In this Real Present:
-
- We pray in the power of the saints, not merely in their memory.
- We celebrate Eucharist not as a reenactment, but as participation.
- We look to tradition not as a museum, but as a stream, flowing from the apostles to us, into the in-breaking kingdom of God.
Anamnesis means that God’s grace is not confined to a specific time. Baptismal grace can be revived. Smoldering lives can be fanned into flame. The Church is not simply a timeline, but rather is the body of Christ, alive now, drawing strength from what came before and giving life to what will come next.
The Rev. Omar Cisneros is a Guest Writer. He is rector of Grace Church, Muskogee, Oklahoma.
The Rev. Dr. Clyde Glandon is a retired priest of the Episcopal Diocese of Oklahoma. Previously he served as director of the Center for Counseling and Education in Tulsa.
