Charles Gore - Theologian at Pusey House

Theologian At Pusey House

In 1875 he was elected fellow of Trinity College, Oxford.

He was ordained to the Anglican priesthood in 1878.

From 1880 to 1883 he served as vice-principal of Cuddesdon Theological College.

When, in 1884, Pusey House was founded at Oxford as a home for Dr Pusey's library and a centre for the propagation of his principles, Gore was appointed as Principal, a position which he held until 1893. As Principal of Pusey House Gore exercised wide influence over undergraduates and the younger clergy, and it was largely under this influence that the Oxford Movement underwent a change which to surviving Tractarians seemed to involve a break with its basic principles. Puseyism had been in the highest degree conservative, basing itself on authority and tradition and repudiating compromise with the modern critical and liberalizing spirit. Gore, starting from the same basis of faith and authority, found from experience in dealing with the doubts and difficulties of the younger generation that this uncompromising attitude was untenable, and set himself the task of reconciling the principle of authority in religion with that of scientific authority, by attempting to define the boundaries of their respective spheres of influence. To him the divine authority of the Catholic Church was an axiom, and in 1889 he published two works, the larger of which, The Church and the Ministry, is a learned vindication of the principle of Apostolic Succession in the episcopate against the Presbyterians and other Reformed Church bodies, while the second, Roman Catholic Claims, is a defence, in more popular form, of the Anglican Church and Anglican ordinations and sacraments against the criticisms of Roman Catholic authorities.

So far his published views had been in consonance with those of the older Tractarians, but in 1890 a stir was created by the publication, under his editorship, of Lux Mundi, a series of essays by different writers, attempting to bring the Christian creed into a right relation to the modern growth of knowledge, scientific, historic, critical, and to modern problems of politics and ethics. Gore himself contributed an essay on The Holy Spirit and Inspiration, and from the tenth edition one of Gore's sermons, On the Christian Doctrine of Sin, was included as an appendix. The book, which ran through twelve editions in little over a year, met with a mixed reception. Orthodox churchmen, Evangelical and Tractarian alike, were alarmed by views on the incarnate nature of Christ that seemed to them to impugn his Divinity, and by concessions to the Higher Criticism in the matter of the inspiration of Holy Scripture which appeared to them to convert the impregnable rock (as Gladstone had called it) into a foundation of sand; sceptics, on the other hand, were not impressed by a system of defence which seemed to draw an artificial line beyond which criticism was not to advance. Nonetheless the book produced a profound effect far beyond the borders of the Anglican Church, and it is largely due to its influence, and to that of the school it represents, that the Anglican High Church movement developed on Modernist rather than Tractarian lines from then on.

In 1891 Gore was chosen to deliver the Bampton lectures, and he took for his subject the Incarnation of Christ. In these lectures he developed the teaching enunciated in Lux Mundi. This is an attempt to explain how it came about that Christ, though incarnate God, could err - e.g. in his citations from the Old Testament. The orthodox explanation was based on the principle of accommodation. This, however, had not solved the difficulty that if Christ on earth was not subject to human limitations, especially of knowledge, he was not as other men, not subject to their trials and temptations. This difficulty Gore sought to meet through revisiting the Kenotic Theory of the Incarnation. Theologians had attempted to explain what St. Paul meant when he wrote of Christ (Philippians 2:7) that he emptied himself (kenosis) and took upon him the form of a servant. According to Gore this means that Christ on his incarnation, although sinless, became subject to all human limitations and stripped himself of all attributes of Godhead, including omniscience, the Divine nature being hidden under the human.