One of the challenges of higher education is finding a way to thrive amid significant differences. As part of a major, international, research university we must regularly wrestle through how to participate in a way that is winsome, gracious, prophetic and humble. Some Christian traditions, and some Christians at various times and places, have argued that we should retreat (cf The Benedict Option currently making the rounds in the US), or that we do not have anything to gain from being part of the secular world, or that the secular world is so radically broken, disenfranchised, and evil that we should avoid it at all costs—except for those forays which are specifically and narrowly evangelistic in purpose. Others would see no difference. St Augustine, that most influential of bishops who has profoundly shaped the Western Church, offered another approach that gives place to such secular spaces and calls for considered engagement, while recognizing that ultimately one’s identity lies elsewhere. We’ll look at his thinking on this matter and discuss the implications for the contemporary academy.

This lecture will introduce some of the principles of the Oxford Movement and the thought of Dr Pusey, John Keble, and the young John Henry Newman. We will see how the doctrine of the Incarnation shaped Pusey’s understanding of the Church, the Bible, and the Sacraments in a radical and controversial way, and how their approach addresses both the spiritual needs and theological questions of the present day. The great mosaics of San Clemente, Rome, and Monreale, will illustrate Pusey’s approach. We will also see how Pusey’s radical Incarnationalism led to radical engagement with the social problems and challenges of his time.

The Tractarians inaugurated a significant and enduring Catholic revival in the Church of England. Because Protestantism emphasizes biblical authority, scholars of the Oxford Movement have often focused on other sources of authority to which the founders of the Catholic revival were committed, such as the Church, tradition, and the early fathers. Such an approach, however, can create a false dichotomy. This lecture will uncover how deeply and tenaciously the Tractarians emphasized the authority and centrality of Holy Scripture, with a special emphasis on the life, work, and ministry of E. B. Pusey. This Public Lecture precedes the one-day Colloquium on Dr Pusey and the Bible taking place the following day.

Mascall and Barth shared a common concern with the influence of liberal Protestantism on their churches in England and Germany. They agreed this problem was best addressed through the lens of natural theology. Yet, while for Mascall a Thomistically informed understanding of natural theology was the best way to counteract liberal Protestantism’s influence on the Church, for Barth, natural theology was to blame for the Church’s confusion. Was Barth’s sharp delineation between human reason and divine revelation in the end, complicit with the ontological duality of modernity that was the basis of the liberal Protestantism he was rejecting? Dealing with modernity on its own terms, Barth undermined the capacity of the Church’s ministry of Word and Sacrament to be effective agents of personal transformation. Whereas Mascall’s realistic ontology not only repudiates the idealist foundations of liberal Protestantism, it also offers the Church the necessary ontological foundation for understanding its ministry of Word and Sacrament as effective embodiments of God’s transforming grace.

This lecture will unpack the lay sermon delivered by John Winthrop in 1630 as the first ships in the great Puritan migration from England neared the shores of Massachusetts. The sermon is remembered most for its peroration – “we shall be as a city upon a hill” – which still informs the American Thanksgiving holiday. The interest for a Pusey audience lies in how Winthrop defined Christian Charity and adapted this to the work of building a community in New England. Some aspects of the sermon still resonate – “we must be knit together in this work as one man…we must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality.” In other ways Winthrop’s acute analysis of factors that might lead Puritans away from second commandment duties is of its time and unfamiliar. The lecture, and discussion following it, will branch out from the sermon itself to look at how Winthrop’s vision played itself out on the ground. A theme of the recollection is the peculiarity of the Puritans’ covenant theology and their interest in the then novel concept of a covenant of grace.