'His instruments, giving us that oneness with Christ': Bishop Phillpotts' 1842 Visitation Charge and Anglican sacramental teaching

As part of the series of weekly posts from the responses to Tract XC by Old High bishops in the visitation charges of the early 1840s, today we continue consideration of the charge given in 1842 by Henry Phillpotts (Bishop of Exeter 1831-69). These charges are a rich seam of Old High teaching. The focus of these posts is not so much on the well-known critique of Tract XC articulated in the charges but, rather, on what these visitation charges reveal about the teaching, piety, concerns, and vitality of the Old High tradition nearly a decade after the emergence of the Oxford Movement.

In today's extract, Phillpotts refutes those evangelicals who, in response to Tractarianism, adopted a low view of the sacraments (contrary, it must be said, to 18th century evangelicals such as Charles Simeon).  Phillpotts contrast such "ultra-Protestant" views - which he compares, in a footnote, to the sacramental teaching of Socinus (a point also made by John Williamson Nevin in his 1846 The Mystical Presence) - with the teaching of "the fathers of our reformed Church". 

The two figures chosen by Phillpotts are significant in the context of Tract XC.  Firstly, Hooker was invoked even as leading Tractarians began to regard Hooker as insufficient because of his clearly Reformed understanding. Secondly, Phillpotts quoted Isaac Barrow, a Restoration Latitudinarian, a divine representing a strain of Anglican thought unlikely to have impressed those around Newman. Phillpotts, however, was demonstrating how a lively, vibrant sacramental understanding was to be found in the teaching of mainstream Anglican divines. There was no need to go hunting in obscure Nonjuror sources; and there was certainly no need to journey over the Tiber for rich sacramental teaching. Such teaching was to be found in the mainstream divines of the Church of England.

While the Sacraments are thus unhappily depreciated by good men of our own day, it is refreshing to look back to the fathers of our reformed Church, and to listen to their sounder teaching. Let me, then, contrast with what I have just cited from our contemporaries, Hooker's brief, but pregnant, declarations on this subject. "Sacraments," says he, "are those visible signs which, in the exercise of religion, God requireth every man to receive, as tokens of that saving grace which Himself thereby bestoweth." Again, after describing "Grace, as the word of God teacheth," first, "His favour and undeserved mercy towards us;" secondly, "The bestowing of His Holy Spirit, which inwardly worketh;" thirdly, "The effects of that Spirit whatsoever, but especially saving virtues, such as are faith, charity, and hope;" lastly, "The free and full remission of all our sins:" - he immediately subjoins, "This is the Grace which Sacraments yield, and whereby we are all justified." In another place he says, with express reference to those who would so hold the doctrine of justification by faith only, as to derogate from the dignity and worth of Sacraments, "The old Valentinians held that the work of our restoration must needs belong unto knowledge only. They draw very near unto this error who, fixing their minds on the necessity of faith, imagine that nothing but faith is necessary for the attainment of all grace. Yet is it a branch of belief, that Sacraments are, in their place, no less required than belief itself." 

Such is the doctrine of one who is, by common consent, recognised as "the judicious Hooker," in strict accordance with the articles and homilies of our Church. Such, too, is the doctrine of a no less illustrious luminary of the next century, Isaac Barrow. He says, "The benefits which God signifies in Baptism, and (upon due terms) engageth to confer on us, are these: first, The purgation or absolution of us from the guilt of past offences by a free and full remission of them - his freely justifying us." 

Be such our teaching. Sacraments, in the fullest and truest sense, are not merely acts of men - acts of worship - sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving; they are all these, but they are far more, far higher, than all these. Their great, their distinctive characteristic is, that they are God's acts - applications of God to man - His means, His instruments, of giving to us that oneness with Christ, by which we are saved, and wherein we stand. Until we teach our people thus to think and feel of the Sacraments, we shall have left one main part of our office, as stewards of the mysteries of God, miserably neglected.