Daily Reading for September 18 • Edward Bouverie Pusey, Priest, 1882
The Oxford Movement called on people to look more deeply into the institutional life of the established Church to discover its inner mystery as the Body of Christ. In reading the Tracts one discovers beneath the concern for institutional structures a deep piety and spirituality, and even more a sense that the Tractarians’ concern about institutions and their outward forms arose from what they believed about Jesus Christ as Lord of the Church. The immediate situation called for a defence of the Church against those who would, as they thought, destroy it. As the Movement gathered strength they were more and more nourished by a sacramental spirituality and devotion which had much wider implications. . . .
The Church is sacramental not simply because it was founded by Jesus but because it is his graceful presence in the lives of human beings. It was this vision of the Church which became so central to the Oxford Movement, first as it was expressed in the Tracts and later in sermons, manuals of devotion and theological treatises. The Church was seen as the community of grace, the means through which we share in the life of God in Christ, and as the present embodiment of Christ himself by his Spirit in the world. Therefore, it could be nothing less than sacramental: the visible presence of the invisible God; his redeeming act towards his people in their history, working through people, institutional structures, and the things of creation—water and bread and wine.
Nowhere, perhaps, is such a view better expressed than in Dr. Pusey’s Tract on baptism (Tract 67) and in his several writings on the eucharist (Tract 81 and his sermon ‘The Holy Eucharist a Comfort to the Penitent’). In those writings Pusey draws upon the scriptures, the writings of the Fathers (especially Cyril of Alexandria) and a host of earlier Anglican divines, to show that in those two sacramental acts of the Church our redemption in Christ is made real and present to us through God’s use of the things of creation, and that through them we are truly incorporated into and participate in the real humanity of Christ himself. In the sacraments a new principle of life is imparted to us as we are united to Christ in the Church.
From Church, Ministry and Unity: A Divine Commission by James E. Griffiss, a volume in the Faith and the Future series, edited by David Nicholls (Basil Blackwell, 1983).