In June 2022, Queen Elizabeth II walked a red carpet at Windsor Castle to ignite a towering tree of light that served as the principal beacon to mark the Platinum Jubilee Anniversary of her reign. Following her lead, her grandson led the lighting at Buckingham Palace and then throughout Britain and the Commonwealth, some 3,500 beacons were lit to honor the occasion.1 A sequence of beacons connecting across the nation first served as an ancient form of communication to warn of invasion, but in the modern era has come to serve as a symbol of unity to celebrate major anniversaries and events.2

In this essay, I aim to take this beacon image and apply it as a metaphor to make a historical connection instead of a geographic one. Oxford, home of England’s oldest university, is known as the city of “dreaming spires”3 for its skyline marked by dozens of steeples arising like beacons from college chapels and churches. The spire of spires, or the beacon of beacons, if you will, rests atop the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin.4 The earliest written record of the Church of St. Mary’s in Oxford appears in William the Conqueror’s 11th century Domesday Book.5 Thus, from the University’s founding in the twelfth century until the seventeenth century, the St. Mary’s church and the University were connected, especially in terms of physical property.6 St. Mary’s hosted the meetings of the University’s leadership, housed the University’s library, and hosted the awarding of degrees.7 Yet, St. Mary’s housed more than academics. Within its corridors, and from its pulpit, stood prominent figures from England’s church history, including John Wycliffe, the Marian Martyrs, the Cromwellian Puritans, the Oxford-Movement Tractarians, and 20th century giants D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones and C. S. Lewis. Of course, this does not even begin to recount the many, if not all Monarchs, and global heads of state who have seen St. Mary’s as the place to visit whilst in Oxford.8 These reasons are just part of the reason why St. Mary’s is thought to be the most visited church in Britain.9

For English speaking evangelicals, whether or not Anglican, the history and theology of Christianity in England is our heritage. When we read an English Bible or worship as Protestants in English, we stand on the shoulders of men and women who preserved that heritage in our language. Therefore, my aim in this essay is small and specific: To review the history and theology of evangelicals in England through select evangelical sermons preached in St. Mary’s, Oxford from the 16th century to the 20th. My argument, aside from highlighting a fascinating and helpful part of church history, is that these sermons function as beacons that upheld the light of the gospel from the spire of spires in Oxford. They not only shone as lights in their century, but also transferred the light of the gospel to the next.

In the 21st century, what or who is an evangelical is a question that needs definition given how that term is used and misused. While David Bebbington’s quadrilateral presents a tested grid, for this essay, I will use Thomas Kidd’s compatible but simplified definition: “Evangelicals are born-again Protestants who cherish the Bible as the Word of God and who emphasize a personal relationship with Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.”10 Thus when I refer to “evangelical theology and history” with respect to sermons preached at St. Mary’s, I mean sermons marked by the three characteristics of conversion, Bible, and life lived in relationship to the divine presence of God.

1. A Beacon Morning Star as Medieval Forerunner

Oxford University was the first European university to focus on the liberal arts. Formed officially in 1214, those gathering to teach and learn on the banks of the Thames in Oxfordshire dates at least a century earlier. By the 14th century, medieval Oxford had a system of colleges that welcomed philosophers and scholars, one of whom was John Wycliffe.11

While an Oxford scholar, Wycliffe’s call for the translation of the Bible into English shone like a Morningstar of the Reformation, as it pre-figured William Tyndale’s and Martin Luther’s later bright lights.12 Wycliffe’s beacon from Oxford challenged Rome and the status quo of church life. In an era where all were required to attend church services, but no one understood the Latin used by the priests, Wycliffe’s push for a new Bible threatened the gate keepers of the Scriptures. Like in all churches in England and Rome, the priests of St. Mary’s alone were allowed to read the Bible. When they reached an important part in the reading they would ring a bell to incite the congregation to respond.13 This Pavlovian function of Scripture—and the Priests as Emperors wearing New Clothes as it were, is what moved Wycliffe to action. While the Priest’s bells rung in St. Mary’s, down the High Street Wycliffe risked organizing friends to aid him in an underground translation of the Bible from the Latin Vulgate into English.14 As Melvyn Bragg describes, this enterprise made Oxford “the most dangerous place in England … which challenged the biggest single force in the land and called into the public court the authority of the revealed language of God.”15 As challenging as it might be for contemporary evangelicals to comprehend, to question the Bible in Latin in Medieval England was to question the essence and authority of the Church.

Wycliffe also questioned Rome’s practice of “Simony,” in their offer of spiritual benefit for a price, as well as whether the Pope had the authority to appoint bishops and the general pursuit of political power.16 These agitations resulted in a Papal Bull of excommunication for Wycliffe from Pope Gregory XI. Thus, Wycliffe’s effort would not yet transform the church in England, and it would take another century and a half before the Bible would be read in English from St. Mary’s and other churches. However, that day did come and, thus Wycliffe serves as a fitting preamble, a Morningstar, for later evangelical preaching from St. Mary’s, as, even though he was not honored in Oxford or England, Wycliffe became known as the Evangelical Doctor, Doctor Evangelicus, by the followers of John Hus.17

2. A Beacon Aflame in the 16th Century

William Tyndale, another Oxonian, took up Wycliffe’s mantel in the 16th century. He started preaching the same year (1521) Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, in fear of Luther’s Reformation, burned all “heretical books” outside of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London—including any remaining copies of Wycliffe’s Bible in English.18 Thus, by 1524, Tyndale left England to translate the Bible in English and to send it back covertly, which he did with success as “the noise of the new Bible echoed throughout the country.”19 Further, with the arrival of the King’s new Archbishop, Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556), in 1533, the new Church of England insisted on seeing the Bible read by the people of the church, including in Oxford at St. Mary’s. Though Tyndale’s actions led to his execution in 1536, the politician-King, Henry VIII, saw the need for a change of view and allowed, in 1537, the start of official printing of the Bible in English in England.

Henry VIII’s death gave Cranmer architectural freedom when it came to advancing reforms within the Church of England. The nine-year-old Edward VI received guidance by Cranmer and others who produced a Book of Common Prayer (1549), a significant liturgical first for the English language that would shape England’s political, social, and religious history.20 Indeed, C. S. Lewis later noted that “Cranmer’s great achievements as a translator are sunk in the corporate anonymity of the Book of Common Prayer.”21 However, Edward VI’s death in 1553 brought the return of the influence of Rome via Mary I. More than just influence, Mary I sought eradication of all those who aided her father’s Reformation in England. This led to the imprisonment of Cranmer in Oxford along with bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicolas Ridley. Leslie Williams explains that “Mary had singled out this trio to represent everything the new regime hated.”22

Starting in April 1554, the Reformers were tried in St. Mary’s through a series of exhausting disputations that sought to document their heresy against Rome for the day when Roman church authority was reestablished.23 While the trio were imprisoned the authorities gathered a crowd to receive and worship the Eucharist from a priest outside their window, a visible sign of the end of the Reformation movement.24 Months of imprisonment continued until Mary I appointed her cousin, Cardinal Pole, as papal legate to restore official connection to Rome and to permit them to execute heretics. Nearly eighteen months from the start of their imprisonment, the trio were tried again in St. Mary’s. Today, there are still holes in the chancel’s wooden stalls thought to have held the nails used to build the platform on which they stood.25 Refusing to state their allegiance to the pope and recant, Latimer and Ridley were sentenced to death. In October 1555, the two were marched in front of Cranmer’s cell on their way to the place of execution outside Balliol College.26 Cranmer looked on in anguish as Latimer cried out, “Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.” In the months that followed, scholars in sympathy to Rome came to persuade Cranmer to recant. They promised such would save his life as there was no hope for a pardon. Cranmer held his ground until January 1556 when, after months of physical trial and loneliness, he sought to find a way to sign the recantation documents and did. Mary and Pole did not relent, rather they sent other papal commissioners to strip Cranmer of all his dignity, forcing him to recant five more times, taking away all his property and further degrading his health and mental state, all the while counting down the days to his execution on March 21, 1556.

Cranmer made his way to St. Mary’s and a large crowd watched his disheveled and weakened body climb to a new platform installed near the pulpit. The workers who erected the platform in St. Mary’s butchered the stone at the base of one of the columns so as to anchor the wooden structure, and today, the cut stone remains, a monument all its own.27 Cranmer endured a sermon from Cardinal Pole that explained to the masses why Cranmer faced execution at the hands of the Queen, even though he recanted. Pole recounted Cranmer’s heretical beliefs and made the case for the need for justice. Throughout the sermon Cranmer displayed visible anguish and grief. At the conclusion, Pole invited Cranmer to speak and make his recantation public so that “men may understand that you are a catholic indeed.”28

Cranmer’s address to the crowd is not a sermon in the traditional sense, but there in St. Mary’s, Cranmer would recant his recantations and testify to his evangelical Protestant faith to the awe and anger of those gathered. As Cranmer accepted Pole’s invitation to respond, he first knelt and prayed aloud. In his prayer, he addressed God the Trinity, and recounted the gospel of the Bible: “You did not give your Son, O heavenly Father, unto death for small sins only, but for all the greatest sins of the world, so that the sinner return to you with his whole heart, as I do here at this present.”29 Concluding with a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer from Matthew 6, Cranmer stood and spoke to those gathered stating that he hoped to speak something “whereby God may be glorified, and you edified.”30 Both his prayer and his initial remarks reveal something of his relationship with the divine presence of God—an evangelical distinctive.

Cranmer then gave four exhortations to the crowd for godly living in church and society after his passing. In these exhortations, he cited passages from the Bible conveying his belief that the Bible has authority to guide the Christian life. Cranmer then explained that there was one matter he needed to address that had vexed him, “more than anything I ever did or said in my whole life,” that is, a clear word about what he believes.31 Cranmer recited the Apostle’s Creed concluding that he believed “every word and sentence taught by our Saviour Jesus Christ, his apostles and prophets, in the New and Old Testaments.”32 Following his affirmation of the gospel and the Scriptures, Cranmer then listed all the things he renounced explaining that though he had recanted what he had taught, he did so contrary to what was in his heart for fear of death.33 Thus, afraid no longer, he then repudiated papal authority, referring to the pope as “Christ’s enemy, and antichrist, with all his false doctrine.”34 Finally, Cranmer rejected the Roman Catholic view of the sacraments, affirming the Protestant views he had published, stating with boldness that at the day of judgment, the papal view “shall be ashamed to show her face.”35

At this dramatic turn of events, Cranmer was pulled down from the platform and taken outside to the execution site of Latimer and Ridley. As he prepared for death, Cranmer put his right hand, the one that signed the recantations, into the flame first, and held it there until he died. Cranmer’s sermon in St. Mary’s represents his life lived for the truth of the Bible, its gospel-message of conversion, and call to a life lived in relationship with God. This beacon aflame from St. Mary’s fulfilled the words of Latimer that, like a candle, the truths for which these martyrs died had not been snuffed out.

3. A Beacon for Piety in the 17th Century

For evangelicals who have learned of the Puritans in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the Puritans are revered more for their doctrinal purity and piety rather than for their engagement in England’s Civil War.36 Yet, to tell of their contribution to the development of England’s religious history, one must do so in Cromwellian fashion, that is, “warts and all.”37 Some of the warts include the various ways in which these purifiers participated in the defacing of many longstanding edifices, or what Eamon Duffy calls the “stripping of the altars.” With the stabilizing and compromising reign of Elizabeth I, churches renovated their architecture and practice to remove Catholic iconography, sometimes with the violence likened to a modern reciprocating saw. Duffy laments this makeover as he observes that the “Reformation was a stripping away of familiar and beloved observances, the destruction of a vast and resonant world of symbols which [the people] understood and controlled.”38 Regardless of whether the people preferred the Reformation, by the 1570s and 1580s a new generation, steeped in the language of Cranmer, Duffy notes, “believed the Pope to be Antichrist, the Mass a mummery, [and] did not look back to the Catholic past as their own, but another country, another world.”39

William Laud (1573–1645) served as Chancellor of Oxford during the 1630s, and his actions proved to enhance the anti-Puritan sentiment. Long thought to have “popish sympathies,” Laud served Charles I as Archbishop from 1633 and sought to bring ceremonial conformity to all Puritan Nonconformists.40 At Oxford, Laud led the implementation of a return to Romish ceremony, in part, through architectural enhancements, including St. Mary’s. Robin Usher classified it as “a showcase for ecclesiastical innovation.”41 St. Mary’s continued to serve as the center of worship at Oxford, a sentiment underscored by James I wherein he issued “a demand that junior members worship in St Mary’s rather than the city parishes, wherein Puritan influence was rumored to be strong.”42 These actions, and others43 including the 1637 expansion of St. Mary’s porch, complete with a Madonna and Child statue—the first externally placed sculpture since the Reformation, created tension.44 Of note, chronicler Anthony Wood, explained that in September 1642, near the start of the English Civil War, the statue endured rifle fire by Parliamentary soldiers, a strong reaction by those who feared the porch signaled a return of papal authority.45 In response, Laud claimed he did not have knowledge of the statue’s origins, though there is credible reason to doubt this claim. As Nathaniel Brent, a Puritan leader in Oxford’s Merton College noted, “there were no Altars in [Oxford] Until the Archbishop came to be Chancellor. That of late, crucifixes & Images have been lately set up in colledges.”46 Laud’s influence in Oxford and England diminished as the Civil War ensued and the removal of Laud in addition to the removal of the head (literally) of state.47 Congregations were then permitted to “determine their forms of Christian teaching and worship.”48 This interregnum era, wherein Oliver Cromwell served as Lord Protector, gave rise to Presbyterian discussions of “the settlement of the Government and Liturgy of England” as well as the propagation of Independent Congregationalist and Baptist churches.49

Chaplain to Cromwell, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, Independent minister and theologian, John Owen (1616–1683) is termed the “the leading proponent of high Calvinism in England in the late seventeenth century.”50 John Owen’s relationship with Oxford University began during his days as a bachelor’s and master’s student, starting from the age of twelve in 1628 (which was not uncommon), until 1637. Thus, Owen matured during the Laudian era at Oxford, and Laud’s theological and structural changes likely did not sit well with Owen’s Puritan upbringing.51 Indeed, Owen’s likely first experience in St. Mary’s consisted of listening to sermons in Latin.52 Not long after the time of the monarch’s visit in 1636, signaling the high point of Laud’s influence, and Laud’s publication of the new Statues in June 1637, Owen left Oxford to serve as a family chaplain.53 The tumultuous 1640s saw Owen’s reputation as a preacher and theologian of Independency grow. Following the execution of Charles I, Owen preached before Parliament, which led Oliver Cromwell to enlist Owen as a personal chaplain. In 1651, Cromwell then appointed Owen as dean of Christ’s Church College in Oxford.54 Owen would serve as dean, receive an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree (1653), then vice-chancellor until 1657, and during this era had influence over the teaching of undergraduate students.

Owen and his colleague, fellow Independent Puritan and President of Magdalen College, Thomas Goodwin, would each preach in the local colleges on Sunday morning and then preach a regular schedule of Sunday afternoon sermons to undergraduate students in St. Mary’s from 1652 until 1657. Crawford Gribben notes, “These sermons, directed at the undergraduate population of the city, combined the theological mode with the devotional.”55 Owen’s propensity to challenge formality, no doubt, gained following among the students. He wore large ribbons around his knees with Spanish leather boots, and atop his powdered hair, he wore a hat cocked to one side.56 Yet, it was Owen’s homiletical approach that had a lasting effect. Anthony Wood recounted that Owen’s “graceful behaviour in the pulpit … could, by the persuasion of his oratory … move … the affections of his admiring auditory almost as he pleased.”57 Following the death of Oliver Cromwell, Owen and Goodwin were replaced by Presbyterian leaders, having fallen out of favor with Cromwell’s son, and no longer preached in St. Mary’s.58 Nonetheless, Owen’s St. Mary’s sermons, while not extant, served as the basis for Owen’s later works including Of the Mortification of Sin (1656), Of Communion with God (1657), and Of Temptation (1658).59

Owen’s sermons on communion with God serve as a prime example of Owen as an evangelical beacon preaching from the St. Mary’s pulpit for piety, especially as they emphasized the believer’s relationship with the Triune God.60 This practical emphasis was done for edification, in contrast to the politicization of theology in the world around Owen and the pressures he felt “to govern a restless and uneasy university community and to manage its affairs under a government in political turmoil.”61 As Gribben explains, Owen saw that “the scholastic bent of much mid-seventeenth century preaching and writing was not producing the godliness that [he] believed it should.”62 Thus, as Beeke and Jones explain, in his sermons “Owen embraced the idea of enjoying the Trinity and amplified it through the concept of distinct communion with each divine person,” though two-thirds of the material focuses on communion with the Son, “for without Christ no communion between God and man can exist.”63 This is seen right at the start of Of Communion with God where Owen cited 1 John 1:3 to show his student audience that fellowship of believers is with God himself.64 Owen continued to show how “this distinct communion, then, of the saints with the Father, Son, and Spirit, is very plain in the Scripture.”65 This is remarkable, for Owen explained that “since the entrance of sin, no man hath any communion with God,” yet, through the “manifestation of grace and pardoning mercy … in Christ we have boldness and access with confidence to God.”66 Owen explained in a later sermon that “Because Christ was God and man in one person, he was able to suffer and to bear whatever punishment was due to us…. There was room enough in Christ’s breast to receive the points of all the swords that were sharpened by the law against us. And there was strength enough in Christ’s shoulders to bear the burden of that curse that was due us.”67 In response Owen exhorted,

Let us, then, receive Christ in all his excellences and glories as he gives himself to us. Frequently think of him by faith, comparing him with other beloveds, such as sin, the world and legal righteousness. Then you will more and more prefer him above them all, and you will count them as all rubbish in comparison to him.68

Communion with God, then, is both “perfect and complete” and “initial and incomplete.” It is perfect and complete, Owen explained, “in the full fruition of his glory,” and initial and incomplete “in the first fruits and dawnings of that perfection which we have here in grace.”69

Owen’s sermons from St. Mary’s functioned as beacons of piety during an era of confusion and distraction for students living in Oxford during the interregnum. His emphasis on the relationship a believer can have with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit is just one example of his evangelical preaching, and pointed to a way of living in an era of uncertainty.70

4. A Beacon Warning in the 18th Century

John Wesley studied at Oxford first in 1720. As the primary output of graduates from Oxford at that time was ministry in the Church of England, Wesley prepared for a ministry career. Following his education at Oxford, Wesley served as a tutor from 1729 and there joined with his brother, Charles, and three others, to meet to pursue a methodical form of piety. Their self-discipline earned the name the Holy Club, at first, and eventually the Methodists.71 George Whitefield joined the Holy Club not long after he matriculated and heard John Wesley preach in St. Mary’s on “The Circumcision of the Heart.” Thomas Kidd explains that this sermon showed Whitefield that “true holiness was available through the Holy Spirit,” which would aid in his own conversion in the months that followed.72 Yet, though a leader in the Oxford “Holy Club,” and a preacher at St. Mary’s, Wesley’s impact on the history of Christianity in England did not land with full force until his conversion, which took place after a missionary journey to America. Iain Murray explains that “despite his high ambitions for work among the Indians, [Wesley] was inwardly a dissatisfied man … he had sought inward holiness of life and not found it.”73

Wesley wrestled with assurance until reading Martin Luther on Galatians in 1738, wherein he felt his heart “strangely warmed.” From that moment, Wesley preached a warm-hearted gospel all over Britain and, often, in the face of opposition and ridicule. This served to light a fire that Mark Noll marks as a turning point in the history of Christianity. Noll states, “The Wesleys’ work of [gospel] revitalization, in effect, created modern evangelicalism out of the legacy of Reformation Protestantism.”74 Thus, when given the opportunity to return to Oxford to preach at St. Mary’s, Wesley focused on the gospel and the state of Christianity in the city. He preached in St. Mary’s in 1738 giving a sermon from Ephesians 2 that explained salvation “implies a deliverance from guilt and punishment, by the atonement of Christ…. So that he who is thus justified, or saved by faith, is indeed born again.”75 Increasingly, Wesley grew uneasy with the status quo he observed in the church and concluded that many preachers were not born again.

Preaching on a Friday and St. Bartholomew’s Day, Wesley entered St. Mary’s with a procession that included, in full regalia, the Vice-Chancellor, Proctors, and the Doctors of Divinity.76 Given Wesley’s new-found zeal since 1738, Jim Coleman observes that Wesley entered the pulpit not “as a foe, rather as an interventionist.”77 Using Acts 4:31, “And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost,” Wesley introduced his topic slowly and then began to raise his voice.78 His brother, Charles, later noted, “Never have I seen a more attentive congregation. They did not let a word slip.”79

Wesley accelerated to his main points and explained that he would use the word, Christianity, not as a “system of doctrines, but as it refers to men’s hearts and lives.”80 In three parts, Wesley considered the beginning of Christianity, its spread from one to another, and then to the ends of the earth. He concluded with practical application, asking where does this Christianity now exist, and then “in tender love,” asked “Is this a Christian city? Is Christianity, scriptural Christianity, found here? … Are all the Magistrates, all Heads and Governors of Colleges and Halls … of one heart and soul?”81 Probing further, he asked the professors tasked to “form the tender minds of the youth … are you filled with the Holy Ghost? … Do you continually remind those under your care, that the one rational end of all our studies is to know, love, and serve ‘the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom he hath sent?’”82 To these rhetorical questions, Wesley responded that he fears this is not the case and that the University’s leaders were rather characterized by pride, sloth, and “even a proverbial uselessness.”83 To the students, Wesley asked the same types of questions, implying their commiserate unfaithfulness. He attested that, at one time, he too swore “to observe all those customs which I then knew nothing of” and concluded that it was nothing less than perjury.84 To question those who had taken oaths of lying caused significant unease, and if that were not enough, he chided his audience for “Even the talk of Christianity, ye cannot, will not bear.”85

A student in attendance, Benjamin Kennicott, later wrote that Wesley’s sermon “gave a universal shock.”86 Wesley knew his sermon had its intended effect and later wrote in his journal, “I preached, I suppose the last time, at St. Mary’s [Oxford]. Be it so. I am now clear of the blood of these men. I have fully delivered my own soul.”87 He noted that the Vice-Chancellor asked for his notes, which meant likely that “every man of eminence in the University” would read it—a thought that caused Wesley to admire “the wise providence of God.”88 Wesley set out to use the Methodists within the Church of England to combat apathy. Yet, increased criticism, theological differences, and limited access to the churches, led him to an increasing separation of the Methodists.89 Wesley’s sermon at St. Mary’s started this exodus and functioned as a beacon of evangelical preaching in that, from the Bible, it called his listeners to pursue genuine conversion that resulted in a true relationship with God.

5. A Beacon Underground in the 19th Century

Throughout the 19th century, evangelicals flourished within the Church of England under the preaching influence of Charles Simeon in Cambridge and in Liverpool with J. C. Ryle.90 However, despite a strong evangelical presence, Oxford grew consumed by what would become the Anglo-Catholic movement, the debate over Darwin’s theories, the advancement of socialism and, overall, a wrestling with a crisis of faith.91 Simply put, the Bible was questioned and jettisoned in this era by the likes of Darwin, and in Oxford, the agnostic T. H. Huxley.92 As one quip goes, referencing the passage of the south-to-north Turl Street from High Street and St. Mary’s to Broad Street near Jesus College:

“How is the Anglican Church like the Turl?”

Answer: “Because it goes from High to Broad, passing by Jesus.”93

In addition, the Oxford poet in this era, Percy Shelley, and his friend, John Keats, along with the literary critic Matthew Arnold, colored the university with Romantic hues, and desired to point back to a medieval aesthetic. Listen to Arnold’s praise for Oxford:

Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene! … And yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towns the last enchantments of the Middle Ages, who will deny Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection,—to beauty.94

This emphasis on beauty did not contradict evangelical theology, but in its day, and in Oxford, it distracted. The call to return to a romanticized view of the Middle Ages paired well with a new movement that arose among leading Anglican clerics in Oxford—Tractarianism. John Henry Newman, the popular vicar of St. Mary’s, along with John Keble, Edward Pusey, and others, formed what Christopher Snyder called, “a spiritual counterpart to the Romantic movement … that questioned whether any real and significant theological differences divided Anglicanism and Catholicism and called for a return of medieval liturgical elements.”95 The Oxford Movement, as it came to be known, also took on the name Tractarianism following their publication of ninety controversial documents or Tracts from 1833 to 1841.96

The fear of a return of popery existed (and exists) as an ongoing tension for Anglicans. Eamon Duffy observed that, given the history of Roman Catholicism in England the liturgy and architecture function like Jurassic Park’s amber, “vestiges of that past which were to prove astonishingly potent in reshaping the Church of England’s future.”97 Diarmaid MacCulloch anchors the source of the tension in Elizabeth I’s via media of “a Protestant theological system and Protestant programme for national salvation sheltering within a largely pre-Reformation Catholic church structure.”98 One of the reasons there was a nation-wide response to the Tractarians is the traction it gained among students. Heather Ellis explains that the Oxford Movement came “to be feared as the locus of a revolutionary youth movement engaging in crypto-Catholic theological speculations as dangerous to the Anglican establishment as any inspired by the ideology of the French Revolution.”99 Thus, as critique mounted toward the Oxford leaders, many panicked that there would be a fleet of students crossing the Tiber to Rome.

Beyond the scope of this essay is an analysis of the work and theology of Newman, Pusey, and Keble, but needless to say, their movement generated widespread interest and critique.100 At one level, the critique is theological. Wherein the Tractarians stated their emphasis was in the adiaphora of liturgy and ceremonial experience, it became clear there were significant doctrinal modifications.101 As Carl Trueman notes, the theological drift in the Church of England “is, by and large, a history of failure to apply the Thirty-Nine Articles and to carry forward the theology they contain.”102

In the nineteenth century, the London Baptist pastor, Charles Spurgeon, monitored the Oxford Movement and voiced concern in a series of four sermons beginning with “Baptismal Regeneration” in June 1864. Spurgeon stated, “I see this coming up everywhere—a belief in ceremony, a resting in ceremony, a veneration for altars, fonts, and Churches…. Here is the essence and soul of Popery, peeping up under the garb of a decent respect for sacred things.”103 Geoffrey Chang explains, “Spurgeon’s concern was not merely for the growth in ceremony and ritual, but for what those things represented, namely, a ‘resting in ceremony’ rather than a resting in Christ.”104

Nevertheless, Oxford also saw the positive effect these challenges had in strengthening the faith of many, and even seeing skeptics return to faith after seeing the faith of their parents diminished, evidence of what Timothy Larsen called, “the Victorian crisis of doubt.”105 Christianity in the Victorian era, and thus in Oxford, is complex for, on the one hand as Larsen says, “the Bible was a dominant presence in Victorian thought and culture” and functioned at the center of dialogue, preaching, and missionary advance.106 Yet, on the other, nascent modernism, Romanticism, and Tractarianism combined, in Oxford, needless to say, to the minimization of the types of preaching exemplified by Owen and Wesley in previous centuries. To put it another way, in the 19^th century evangelical preaching at St. Mary’s went underground, even while, in Oxford, there arose a specific and coordinated response to the Oxford Movement.

Kenneth Stewart observes that the rise of Tractarianism “had the unintended effect of generating tremendous renewed interest across the English-speaking world in the leading personalities and writings of the Reformation.”107 In 1843, nearly 300 years after the martyrdom of Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer, the Anglican Low Church erected a memorial spire near the site of their execution in direct response to the Tractarian Movement to remind the nation that these bore “witness to the sacred truths which they had affirmed and maintained against the errors of the Church of Rome.”108 While a response to a movement within Oxford, the monument represented the widespread views of the rest of the Church of England that Andrew Atherstone argues was as much anti-Catholic as it was anti-Tractarian.109 Edmund Ffoulkes (1819–1894), the vicar and historian of St. Mary’s and one who left Anglicanism for Rome in the 1850s, only to return after a change of heart in the 1870s, remarked how the nation applauded the Martyr’s Memorial, “For England still feels at her core that the Reformation, whatever its blemishes when it was seething, at length set her free to develop steadily through the three hundred years that are past since then, and to become what she now is.”110

As the memorial resembles a grounded spire without a church building, there is a legend that some Oxford tour guides will tell guests that the spire is the top to a church building buried beneath the ground, only to point them down adjacent stairs that lead to public bathrooms. Thus, for the 19th century, it is fitting to say that evangelical preaching in Oxford did not take place with regularity, if at all, in St. Mary’s, but though underground, and represented by a new memorial to evangelical martyrs, it would resurface.111

6. A Beacon of Hope in the 20th Century

The early 20th century also endured the fruit born by the rise of higher criticism of the Bible in the 19th century. Faced with that challenge, as well as the pull of the claims of science from without, evangelicals were divided within on eschatology and cultural engagement. David Bebbington describes evangelicalism in this period as “walking apart,” for by “the Second World War, Evangelicalism had become much more fragmented than it had a century before.”112 Further, Diarmaid MacCulloch argues that the advent of the World Wars of the 20th century brought to death Christendom itself. He says, “By the end of the 1960s, the alliance between emperors and bishops which Constantine had first generated was a ghost; a fifteen-hundred-year-old adventure was at an end.”113 Nevertheless, throughout the tumultuous 20th century evangelicalism thrived in many churches and a new generation of students were looking for answers. As one example, the influential London former medical doctor, now evangelical pastor, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, preached to a full congregation of students on a Sunday evening at St. Mary’s in 1941.114 Yet, in Oxford, more influence for evangelicals would come through Lloyd-Jones’s lunch partner during that visit, C. S. Lewis.

During World War II, Lewis remained busy, if not more than usual. His efforts to complete his survey of 16th century English Literature remained on the back burner as he spoke to several Royal Air Force bases and recorded “Right and Wrong: A Clue to Meaning in the Universe,” a series of four radio addresses for the BBC in London. Received to wide acclaim, Lewis’s talks became Mere Christianity. Prior to this in June 1941, Lewis preached a Sunday evening sermon at St. Mary’s titled, “The Weight of Glory.”115 Justin Taylor documents that in the months leading up to Lewis’s sermon: “British cities were on the receiving end of 100 tons of explosives dropped during air raids, including 71 attacks upon London, some 60 miles to the southeast.”116 Yet, despite the war, one of the largest crowds in St. Mary’s history gathered that evening.117 Lewis gained a hearing in the war years, in part, because of his clarity.118 As Jason Baxter notes, “one of Lewis’s chief concerns was finding ways to transpose, translate, and re-create the atmosphere of the ancient world in a modern vernacular.”119 Alister McGrath comments on the reasonableness of faith that Lewis conveys in his sermon. He states, “The starting point for Lewis’s approach is an experience—a longing for something undefined and possibly undefinable, that is as insatiable as it is elusive…. The university sermon ‘The Weight of Glory’ … is the most elegant statement of [this] argument.”120 Though considered a sermon, Lewis did not follow common homiletical practice. The referenced text is from Revelation 2, but he does not address it directly and only at the end. Instead, Lewis’s sermon is more like an address, but nevertheless it resonated then as it still does today in the way it inspires hope in and knowledge of God.

The opening section of “The Weight of Glory,” is, perhaps, the most familiar when he suggests to his student audience, living in war time, that self-denial is not the highest of virtues, but rather love. He then admonished that “it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak…. We are … like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.”121 Lewis proceeded to paint a hopeful picture of heaven with Jesus Christ based upon the authority of Scripture, that is a “transtemporal, transfinite good” and, thus any desire of ours placed on anything other than God will not satisfy. Yet, we are far too easily pleased and are asleep under the evil enchantment of worldliness—the modern philosophies that promise satisfaction from things on earth. On this point George Marsden notes, “In weaving his various spells to break the blinding enchantment of modern disenchantment, Lewis does not denigrate the role of reason. Rather, he uses all his rational powers to expand his audience’s abilities to recognize other dimensions of reality beyond those known by instrumental reason alone.”122

To break this enchantment, to see what is true reality Lewis argues that the use of story, or fantastical imagery, is useful “to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness” that keeps us from hearing the “news from a country we have never yet visited.” These symbols do not have, nor are meant to have, the authority of Scripture, Lewis said, but can be helpful to awaken us and put us on the path of searching Scripture.123 As Kevin Vanhoozer comments, “Lewis’s imagination is not the opiate of the people but a dose of caffeine that snaps us awake.”124 Lewis explained that our conception of heaven is symbolic, but the difference between that and what we might conceive on our own, is that it comes to us via scriptural authority and promises that we will be with Christ and be like him.

Lewis was doing far more in his sermon, but for our purposes, he was tying his argument to the Bible and using biblical arguments to show his audience that not only is knowing God in relationship possible, but also it is to be desired above any other thing. This idea, when one considers it in full, is burdensome and carries a weight of glory “which our thoughts can hardly sustain.” Baxter argues that “it was Dante more than any other author who taught Lewis about how to ‘build’ images of weight that could allude to the dynamic truth of spiritual realities.”125 This is the case here, as Baxter shows that Lewis has in mind Dante’s illustration of a poet gazing at nearby mountains, “which do not just seem high, but dizzying, as if they were exerting weight merely by being so high.”126 This idea of weight connects to 2 Corinthians 4:17, of course, and conveys, as Dante did, the idea of a “‘heavy’ holiness, as weighty as the mass of mountains.”127 Yet, despite the weight, Lewis showed that following 1 Corinthians 8:3, those who love God will know God, and be known by him. This is the upward hope to which he pointed his audience in the midst of an uncertain earthly future during the days of the Second World War and the destructive effects of modernity on Christian theology and biblical truth.

Thanks to Lewis, and others at Oxford in the later part of the 20th century, pockets of evangelicalism began to fill and the effects of two World Wars drew many to find answers from evangelical theology. One student, James Packer, converted to Christ in 1943, and the next year was invited to serve as the junior librarian at Oxford’s Christian Union student organization. An octogenarian clergyman had recently donated his library and Packer was given the job of sorting through them in the basement of North Gate Hall. Situated in Oxford, the basement sat just a few yards from the site where Cranmer was imprisoned, and not far from where Wesley ministered, Packer discovered a set of the works of John Owen. At the time of this discovery, Packer would later relate his life “was all over the place” emotionally and thus “God used [Owen] to save my sanity.”128 More than just sorting out Packer, his literal “recovery” of the Puritans, a few blocks away from St. Mary’s, would start a new movement that not only would bring great and good revived interest in these evangelical forebears, but also would help provide an anchor to the Word of God during the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s in the United Kingdom and abroad.129

7. Conclusion: Beacons from the Spire

When visiting the University Church of St. Mary, perhaps the best vantage point the church gives is looking out from the spire to Oxford. After ascending several flights of stairs, the tourist nears the summit only after 60 final spiral stone steps. The arduous climb is rewarded by postcard worthy views of the entirety of the core of the University. For all of the history and theology that has transpired within St. Mary’s, it is the from the spire that one can see to where the beacon shines.

The evangelical sermons reviewed in this essay shone, like beacons, from St. Mary’s. They were preached by evangelicals to specific contexts in the history of Christianity in Oxford and England and they articulated evangelical theology, in most cases, to an audience of students. Returning to Thomas Kidd’s definition, we see that they all share common belief in the need for believers to be born-again following the preaching of the gospel recovered in the Protestant Reformation. Further, they all stand upon the belief that the Bible is the Word of God and are preached from confidence in its authority. Finally, they are aimed to inspire or challenge growth in a personal relationship with God, recognizing the vital nature of his divine presence in living the Christian life.

When Queen Elizabeth II set alight the jubilee beacons, she captivated a nation and caused them to pause their busy and distracted lives and look upward toward the burning and shining lights for a time of celebration. Similarly, the examination of evangelical theology and history through sermons preached in Oxford’s university church serves to point the reader to discover the shared message of gospel hope for a new century from these beacons from the spire.

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[1] Randy Pennell, “The Queen and Prince William Lead Beacon Lightings as Communities in Britain and Beyond Honor Her,” New York Times, 2 June 2022; William Booth, “‘Beacon Masters’ Light the U.K. on Fire for Queen’s Platinum Jubilee,” Washington Post, 2 June 2022.

[2] “The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Beacons,” 19 November 2022, https://www.queensjubileebeacons.com/about.

[3] A phrase first used by Matthew Arnold observing Oxford from nearby Boars Hill. See “Thyrsis,” in MacMillan’s Magazine 13.78 (April 1866): 449.

[4] Not to be confused with Great St. Mary’s, the University Church in Cambridge, a comparable site of historic significance where Martin Bucer is buried, that witnessed the Elizabethan Puritan movement, and hosted a Billy Graham Crusade.

[5] Edmund S. Ffoulkes, A History of the Church of S. Mary the Virgin, Oxford, the University Church: From Domesday to the Installation of the Late Duke of Wellington, Chancellor of the University (London: Longman’s, Green, and Co., 1892), 3. Following the Battle of Hastings, the two volumes of the Domesday Book report the land conquest of the Normans, which points to the church existing at least as early as the 11th century. See Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English (New York: Arcade, 2003), 37–38.

[6] R. W. Southern, “From Schools to University,” and M. B. Hackett, “The University as Corporate Body,” in The History of the University of Oxford, ed. J. I. Catto (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 28, 62–63.

[7] When touring there, one could give an hour-long lecture on the events of each century from the 14th to 21st, pointing to architecture, which architect Ian Davis describes as “packed with curious features,” and its rich history. See Ian Davis, Experiencing Oxford (Wheatley: Aveton, 2020), 81. Davis’s entire chapter gives a helpful overview of key architectural features of St. Mary’s and intended symbolism. As the central feature, St. Mary’s spire dates to the 14th century.

[8] A. S. Hargreaves, “Oxford, St Mary the Virgin,” in The Oxford Companion to British History, ed. Robert Crowcroft and John Cannon, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

[9] Davis, Experiencing Oxford, 82. And today, the cafe that exists in the original site of the university, serves an exceptional full English Breakfast. See also, Brian Mountford, The University Church of St Mary the Virgin (Hampshire: Pitkin, 1992).

[10] Thomas S. Kidd, Who is an Evangelical? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 4. See David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1989), 2–3: conversionism, activism, biblicism, and crucicentrism. See other similar definitions in Alister McGrath, Evangelicalism and the Future of Christianity (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995), 55–56; Douglas A. Sweeney, The American Evangelical Story (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 24.

[11] Christopher A. Snyder, Gatsby’s Oxford (New York: Pegasus, 2019), 18–19. Though Wycliffe was seen as “the university’s recognized leading philosopher” and “his dramatic career plunged the university into the hottest controversy she would experience until the reformation,” I have not been able to document an appearance by Wycliffe in the pulpit at St. Mary’s. See J. I. Catto, “Wyclif and Wycliffism at Oxford 1356–1430,” in The History of the University of Oxford, ed. J. I. Catto and Ralph Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 2:186–87. Ffoulkes, A History, 193, surmises that one sermon he lists “may be thought to have preached” in St. Mary’s.

[12] The reference to Wycliffe as a “morning star” first appeared in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, ed. George Townsend (London: G. Seeley, 1870), 2:792, but Daniel Neal coined the phrase “Morning Star of the Reformation” in 1732 in his The History of the Puritans (London: R. Hett, 1732), 1:3. See James Crompton, “John Wyclif: A Study in Mythology,” in Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society 42 (1966–1967): 6–34.

[13] There is some connection between Chaucer and Wycliffe, the former taught by the latter at Oxford and, perhaps, depicted Wycliffe in his Canterbury Tales story of the “Parson’s Tale.” See “The Parson,” Christianity Today, 19 November 2022, https://www.christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-3/parson.html.

[14] There remains some debate and ambiguity as to the certainty of Wycliffe’s direct participation in translation. Anne Hudson and Anthony Kenny conclude that “Whether Wyclif himself participated at an early stage seems irretrievable,” yet, “The association of biblical translation with his followers … confirms Wyclif’s inspiration as a crucial factor in the collaborative labours,” see “Wyclif [Wycliffe], John [called Doctor Evangelicus] (d. 1384), theologian, philosopher, and religious reformer,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. David Cannadine [ODNB], 23 September 2004. However, Mary Dove’s extensive linguistic analysis led her to conclude that “Wyclif instigated the project, that the work began in the early 1370s in the Queen’s College, Oxford, and that Wyclif, [Nicholas] Hereford, and [John] Trevisa all played a part in the translation,” The First English Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 2.

[15] Bragg, Adventure, 81. See also Catto, “Wyclif and Wyclifism at Oxford 1356–1430,” 2:175–262.

[16] John Wycliffe, On Simony, trans. Terrence A. McVeigh (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992). 84. See also Jason G. Duesing, “A Cousin of Catholicism,” in Shepherding God’s Flock, ed. Benjamin Merkle and Thomas Schreiner (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2014), 229.

[17] Hudson and Kenny, “Wyclif.”

[18] Bragg, Adventure, 99. See also Sybil M. Jack, “Wolsey, Thomas (1470/71–1530), royal minister, archbishop of York, and cardinal,” in ODNB, 23 September 2004.

[19] Bragg, Adventure, 104.

[20] Carl Trueman, Creedal Imperative (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), 111. See also Duesing, “A Cousin of Catholicism,” 232. In 1549, Cranmer appointed Peter Martyr Vermigli as Regius Professor of Divinity in Oxford. A regular preacher at St. Mary’s Vermigli would influence Cranmer’s writing of the Book of Common Prayer.

[21] C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama), reprint ed. (San Francisco: Harper One, 2022), 229. This is fitting with what he terms the Drab Age of English literature (p. 73): “The Drab Age begins before the Late Medieval has ended, towards the end of Henry VIII’s reign, and lasts into the late seventies. Drab is not a dyslogistic term. It marks a period, for good or ill, poetry has little richness either of sound or images. The good is neat and temperate, the bad is flat and dry. There is more bad than good.”

[22] Leslie Williams, Emblem of Faith Untouched (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 129.

[23] For the accounts of the trials and martyrdoms see J. E. Cox, ed., The Works of Thomas Cranmer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844–1846), 1:391–427; Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 8:3–100; Lord Houghton, ed. Bishop Cranmer’s Recantacyons (London: n.p., 1885).

[24] Williams, Emblem, 131. This paragraph is a summary of Williams, Emblem, 129–45. See also Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 554–605.

[25] Davis, Experiencing Oxford, 84.

[26] This site is marked today by a cross in the pavement in the middle of Broad Street.

[27] Davis, Experiencing Oxford, 84.

[28] Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 8:86. This paragraph is a summary of Williams, Emblem, 146–51.

[29] Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 8:87.

[30] Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 8:87.

[31] Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 8:88.

[32] Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 8:88.

[33] Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 8:88.

[34] Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 8:88.

[35] Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 8:88.

[36] As a helpful working definition of Puritanism, B. R. White indicated that it “seems right to define the period of true Puritanism as 1570–1640 and a Puritan as an earnest Protestant, his understanding of the Bible shaped by a theology which was broadly Calvinist in type, who, while remaining a member of the established Church of England, sought its further reformation often, though not always in the direction of Presbyterianism,” in “Introduction,” in The English Puritan Tradition (Nashville: Broadman, 1980), 12. For further discussion of the complexities within the English Puritan movement see David D. Hall, The Puritans: A Transatlantic History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).

[37] Bragg, Adventure, 272. This phrase is attributed to the Lord Protector who when, during the interregnum, sat for his portrait by an artist famous for the way he enhanced the features of his subjects, said, “I require you to paint me as I am, warts and all.”

[38] Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 591.

[39] Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 593.

[40] Anthony Milton, “Laud, William (1573–1645), Archbishop of Canterbury,” in ODNB, 23 September 2004.

[41] Robin Usher, “William Laud, the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, and Biblical Architecture in Early Stuart Oxford,” The British Art Journal 16.1 (Summer 2015): 16.

[42] Usher, “William Laud,” 17. Further, “Members of the university as a whole were expected to gather in the nave of the church for the weekly Latin sermon,” 18.

[43] Laud updated the statutes of the University in 1636 at the request of Charles I to “control religious divisions inside the University.” See “Statutes of the University of Oxford, 2020–21,” 19 November 2022, https://tinyurl.com/3bz5ujyc.

[44] Usher, “William Laud,” 16.

[45] Usher, “William Laud,” 19. See also, T. G. Jackson, The Church of St. Mary the Virgin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1897), 163; Anthony Wood, The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, ed. Andrew Clark (Oxford: Clarendon, 1891), 1:63, 444. The statue was restored further in 1852. See Davis, Experiencing Oxford, 85.

[46] Usher, “William Laud,” 20.

[47] One of the evidences cited at Laud’s trial for setting up “popery” was the statue atop the new porch at St. Mary’s. See Davis, Experiencing Oxford, 85.

[48] William P. Haugaard, “From the Reformation to the Eighteenth Century,” in The Study of Anglicanism, ed. Stephen Sykes and John Booty (London: SPCK, 1988), 20.

[49] The Westminster Confession of Faith (Atlanta: Committee for Christian Education & Publications, 1990), xiv.

[50] Richard L. Greaves, “Owen, John (1616–1683), Theologian and Independent Minister,” in ODNB, 23 September 2004. Greaves also calls Owen, “A beacon of nonconformity.”

[51] Crawford Gribben, John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 30.

[52] Peter Toon, ed. The Correspondence of John Owen (1616–1683): With an Account of His Life and Work (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1970), 5.

[53] Peter Toon, God’s Statesman: The Life and Work of John Owen (Exeter: Paternoster, 1971), 123.

[54] Joel R. Beeke and Randall J. Pedersen, Meet the Puritans (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage, 2006), 457–58.

[55] Gribben, John Owen, 130.

[56] Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses (London: F. C. and J. Rivington, 1820), 4:738.

[57] Toon, God’s Statesman, 55; Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 4:741.

[58] Beeke, Meet the Puritans, 459.

[59] Toon, Correspondence, 47.

[60] Philip Henry (1631–1696), father of the Presbyterian leader, Matthew Henry, was a student at this time and reflected on the helps he had “not only for learning, but for religion and piety.” Of the latter, he mentioned the sermons by Owen and Goodwin “on the Lord’s day, in the afternoon.” See Matthew Henry, Life and Times of Rev. Philip Henry, M.A. (London: Thomas Nelson Paternoster Row, 1848), 60.

[61] Gribben, John Owen, 172.

[62] Gribben, John Owen, 173.

[63] Joel Beeke and Mark Jones, A Puritan Theology: Doctrine for Life (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage, 2012), 103, 105, 111.

[64] John Owen, The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold, reprint ed. (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1965), 2:5.

[65] Owen, Works, 2:11.

[66] Owen, Works, 2:6–7.

[67] This text taken from John Owen, Communion with God, abridged by J. K. Law (London: Banner of Truth, 1991), 66. See original in Owen, Works, 2:67.

[68] This text taken from Owen, Communion with God, 60. See original in Owen, Works, 2:59.

[69] Owen, Works, 2:9.

[70] During the reign of Charles II, Baptists in Oxford were forced to hear a sermon at St. Mary’s as punishment for gathering illegally. See Larry J. Kreitzer, “Religion and Dissent in 17th Century Oxford: A Walking Tour,” Angus Library and Archive, 19 November 2022, https://tinyurl.com/krwkcyem.

[71] Douglas A. Sweeney, American Evangelical, 37. As Heather Ellis notes, by the 1760s the “Holy Club succeeded in establishing small groups of supporters in no less than nine colleges including some of the larger societies like Christ Church,” Heather Ellis, Generational Conflict and University Reform: Oxford in the Age of Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 48. Ellis lists Christ Church, Lincoln, Queen’s, Brasenose, Merton, Corpus Christi, Magdalen, Pembroke, and Exeter.

[72] Thomas S. Kidd, George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 27. John Wesley, The Works of John Wesley, ed. Thomas Jackson (London: Wesleyan Conference, 1872; Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2007), 5:202

[73] Iain H. Murray, Wesley and Men Who Followed (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2003), 5.

[74] Mark A. Noll, Turning Points, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 219–22. Wesley, Works, 1:103.

[75] See Edward H. Sugden, ed. Wesley’s Standard Sermons (London: Epworth, 1920), 1:35–36, and Wesley, Works, 3:7, 12.

[76] Sugden, Wesley’s Standard Sermons, 1:87.

[77] Jim R. Coleman, “Text and Performance in John Wesley’s Final Oxford Sermon: Anthesis and Appeal in Scriptural Christianity,” paper presented at the Conference on Sermon Studies (West Virginia, 2018), 3.

[78] Sugden, Wesley’s Standard Sermons, 1:89.

[79] Sugden, Wesley’s Standard Sermons, 1:88.

[80] Wesley, Works, 3:38.

[81] Wesley, Works, 3:48.

[82] Wesley, Works, 3:49.

[83] Wesley, Works, 3:50.

[84] Wesley, Works, 3:51.

[85] Wesley, Works, 3:52.

[86] Sugden, Wesley’s Standard Sermons, 1:90. See also Richard Heitzenrater, Wesley and the People Called Methodists, 2nd ed. (Nashville: Abingdon, 2013), 165–67.

[87] Wesley, Works, 1:470.

[88] Wesley, Works, 1:470.

[89] Albert C. Outler, ed. John Wesley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 20–22. See also Duesing, “A Cousin of Catholicism,” 241, and Henry D. Rack, “Wesley, John (1703–1791), in ODNB, 23 September 2004. Wesley and Whitefield were excluded from many pulpits and took to preaching outdoors, Murray, Wesley, 9–10. Though Wesley did receive an invitation to return to St. Mary’s in Oxford to preach a sermon titled, “Scriptural Christianity” in August 1744.

[90] For more on the Evangelical Anglicans see Perry Butler, “From the Early Eighteenth Century to the Present Day,” in The Study of Anglicanism, ed. Stephen Sykes and John Booty (London: SPCK, 1988), 33; G. R. Balleine, A History of the Evangelical Party in the Church of England (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908); and Duesing, “A Cousin of Catholicism,” 260–61.

[91] Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015), 8. Evangelicals in the early 19th century were strengthened by leaders such as Daniel Watson (1778–1858) at St Edmund Hall and who preached, on occasion, at St. Mary’s. See Sir Marcus Loane, Oxford and the Evangelical Succession (Ross-shire: Christian Focus, 2007). In addition, dissenting evangelicals in Oxford were led by James Hinton (1761–1823) at the now named New Road Baptist Church. See Chance Faulkner, ed., The Diary of James Hinton (1761–1823) (Peterborough: H&E Publishing, 2020).

[92] Timothy Larsen, A People of One Book: The Bible and Victorians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1.

[93] Personal correspondence with David Bebbington, September 2022.

[94] Snyder, Gatsby’s Oxford, 30. Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865), xiv-xv.

[95] Snyder, Gatsby’s Oxford, 33.

[96] The movement began with John Keble’s sermon “National Apostasy,” preached in St. Mary’s on 14 July 1833. See Keble, National Apostasy Considered in a Sermon (London: A. R. Mowbray, 1931). Further, see Tracts for the Times, 6 vols. (London: Rivingtons, 1834–1841).

[97] Eamon Duffy, “The Shock of Change: Continuity and Discontinuity in the Elizabethan Church of England,” in Anglicanism and the Western Christian Tradition, ed. Stephen Platten (London: Canterbury, 2003), 63–64. See also Duesing, “A Cousin of Catholicism,” 224.

[98] Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England, 1547–1603 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990), 78. See also Duesing, “A Cousin of Catholicism,” 243.

[99] Heather Ellis, Generational Conflict, 187.

[100] Kenneth J. Stewart, “John Henry Newman (1801–1890) in His Second Century,” Themelios 39.2 (2014): 268–80. See also J. I. Packer, “The Oxford Evangelicals in Theology,” in J. S. Reynolds, The Evangelicals at Oxford, 1735–1871: A Record of an Unchronicled Movement with the Record Extended to 1905 (Oxford; Marcham Manor, 1975), 82–94.

[101] For a summary see Geoffrey Chang, “Spurgeon’s Use of Luther against the Oxford Movement,” Themelios 43.1 (2018): 53.

[102] Trueman, Creedal Imperative, 115. The phrase ‘by and large’ cited here is not meant by this author to overlook the faithfulness of many Evangelical Anglicans who seek to follow the Thirty-Nine Articles. See Richard Turnbull’s helpful Anglican and Evangelical? (London: Bloomsbury, 2007) and Duesing, “A Cousin of Catholicism,” 244–46.

[103] MTP 10:323.

[104] Chang, “Spurgeon’s Use of Luther,” 54.

[105] Timothy Larsen, Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

[106] Larsen, A People of One Book, 1.

[107] Kenneth J. Stewart, “The Oxford Movement and Evangelicalism: Initial Encounters,” Themelios 44.3 (2019): 509.

[108] The full inscription reads, “To the Glory of God, and in grateful commemoration of His servants, Thomas Cranmer, Nicholas Ridley, Hugh Latimer, Prelates of the Church of England, who near this spot yielded their bodies to be burned, bearing witness to the sacred truths which they had affirmed and maintained against the errors of the Church of Rome, and rejoicing that to them it was given not only to believe in Christ, but also to suffer for His sake; this monument was erected by public subscription in the year of our Lord God, MDCCCXLI.” See “Martyr’s Memorial,”19 November 2022, https://tinyurl.com/bdh99fdj.

[109] Andrew Atherstone, “The Martyr’s Memorial at Oxford,” in JEH 54 (2003): 278–301. In fact, Owen Chadwick shares that “Newman and Keble refused to have anything to do with the plan [for the memorial]. They thought that they would appear to repudiate [Richard] Froude. They shared his hostility to Reformers.” See Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church: Part One 1829–1859, 3rd ed. (London: SCM, 1987), 177.

[110] Ffoulkes, A History, 219. For more on Ffoulkes, see “Edmund Salusbury Ffoulkes,” Jesus College Oxford, 19 November 2022, https://tinyurl.com/4jsr2by7. The principles to which the Church of England was set free by the Reformation, according to Ffoulkes, are (1) the Scripture is the standard to which the church should conform and (2) the church is free to change ceremonies so long as it does not depart from the commands of Christ.

[111] This was due, in part, to a consistent evangelical presence in Oxford through St Ebbe’s Church and St Edmund Hall. See J. S. Reynolds, The Evangelicals at Oxford.

[112] David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 228.

[113] Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (New York: Viking, 2010), 915.

[114] Iain Murray, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The Fight of Faith (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1990), 52, 76.

[115] Harry Lee Poe, The Making of C. S. Lewis (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), 251. The Sunday evening services were set aside for well-known preachers to address students. A tradition started in 1898 by then vicar, Henry Lewis Thompson, evening services were the first to use the new electric light and were established to ensure St. Mary’s retained “its ancient and traditional power as the true centre of Christian Oxford.” See Marjorie Reeves, St Mary the Virgin University Church Oxford (Oxford: Norham, 2003), 2.

[116] Justin Taylor, “75 Years Ago Tonight: C. S. Lewis Delivers a Sermon in Oxford on ‘The Weight of Glory,’” The Gospel Coalition, 19 November 2022, https://tinyurl.com/2snyyzcy.

[117] Taylor, “75 Years Ago Tonight.” Vicar T. R. Milford enlisted Lewis to aid in ministering to “many bereaved and distressed people” by first starting “a question-time session after the morning service in which C. S. Lewis, author of The Problem of Pain, assisted.” See Reeves, St Mary the Virgin, 8.

[118] Sarah Clarkson assesses that “Lewis practised what he preached in his sermon … and ‘conducted all his dealings’ in such a way that his life was the slow becoming of ‘everlasting splendor.’” See Sarah Clarkson, “The Best Tale Lewis Ever Told,” in C. S. Lewis at Poet’s Corner, ed. Michael Ward and Peter Williams (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2017), 106.

[119] Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2022), 14.

[120] Alister McGrath, “Telling Truth Through Rational Argument,” in C. S. Lewis at Poet’s Corner, ed. Michael Ward and Peter Williams (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2017), 8–9.

[121] C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, reprint ed. (San Francisco: Harper One, 2001), 26.

[122] George M. Marsden, C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity: A Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 174.

[123] Further, Lewis explains the aesthetic value of Christian theology in his essay, “Is Theology Poetry?” when addressing the “confusion between imaginative enjoyment and intellectual assent.” As to the specific use of ancient pagan imagery, Lewis explains, “We should, therefore, expect to find in the imagination of great Pagan teachers and myth makers some glimpse of that theme which we believe to be the very plot of the whole cosmic story–the theme of incarnation, death, and rebirth.… It is not the difference between falsehood and truth. It is the difference between a real event on the one hand and dim dreams or premonitions of that same event on the other.” See C. S. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?,” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, 128–29.

[124] Kevin Vanhoozer, “In Bright Shadow,” in The Romantic Rationalist, ed. John Piper and David Mathis (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), 96.

[125] Baxter, Medieval Mind, 88.

[126] Baxter, Medieval Mind, 92.

[127] Baxter, Medieval Mind, 92.

[128] Leland Ryken, J. I. Packer: An Evangelical Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015), 265–67.

[129] One could argue, that had not Packer discovered that box of books, his tremendously influential and life altering works, Fundamentalism and the Word of God (1958) and Knowing God (1973), may never have appeared—not to mention the republishing of the works of John Owen themselves as well as many other volumes in the Puritan canon readily available today. See also Kenneth J. Stewart, “The Young J. I. Packer as a ‘New Warfield’? A Chapter in the Post-1930 Revival of Reformed Theology,” Themelios 47.3 (2022): 516.