Charles Gore

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Statue of Charles Gore, outside St Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham
Statue of Charles Gore, outside St Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham

Charles Gore (born 1853 in Wimbledon; died January 17 (though usually commemorated on January 23), 1932) was an English divine and Anglican bishop.

Contents

[edit] Oxford

Born the third son of the Honourable Charles Alexander Gore, brother of the fourth Earl of Arran. His mother was a daughter of the fourth Earl of Bessborough. He was educated at Harrow and at Balliol College, Oxford and was elected fellow of Trinity College, Oxford in 1875. From 1880 to 1883 he was vice-principal of the theological college at Cuddesdon and 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 he was appointed the principal, a position which he held until 1893. As principal of Pusey House Gore exercised a wide influence over undergraduates and the younger clergy and it was largely, if not mainly, under this influence that the Oxford Movement underwent a change which to the survivors of the old school of 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 any compromise with the modern critical and liberalizing spirit. Gore, starting from the same basis of faith and authority, soon found from his practical 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 Protestant bodies, while the second, Roman Catholic Claims, is a defence, couched in a more popular form, of the Anglican Church and Anglican orders against the attacks of the Romanists.

So far his published views had been in complete consonance with those of the older Tractarians but, in 1890, a great stir was created by the publication, under his editorship, of Lux Mundi, a series of essays by different writers, being an attempt to succour a distressed faith by endeavouring to bring the Christian creed into its 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 a little over a year, met with a somewhat 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 greatly impressed by a system of defence which seemed to draw an artificial line beyond which criticism was not to advance. None-the-less the book produced a profound effect far beyond the borders of the English Church and it is largely due to its influence, and to that of the school it represents, that the High Church movement developed on Modernist rather than Tractarian lines from then on.

In 1891 Gore was chosen to deliver the Bampton lectures and took for his subject the Incarnation. In these lectures he developed the doctrine, the enunciation of which in Lux Mundi had caused so much heart-searching. This is an attempt to explain how it came 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, ignored 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 the Kenotic Theory of the Incarnation. Theologians had attempted to explain what St. Paul meant when he wrote of Christ (Phil. ii.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, became subject to all human limitations and had stripped himself of all the attributes of the Godhead, including the Divine omniscience, the Divine nature being hidden under the human.

The Bampton lectures led to a tense situation which was relieved when in 1893 Gore resigned his principalship and became vicar of Radley, a small parish near Oxford. In 1894 he became a canon of Westminster. Here he gained commanding influence as a preacher and in 1898 was appointed one of the court chaplains.[1]

[edit] Birmingham

In 1902 he succeeded JJS Perowne as Bishop of Worcester and in 1905 was installed Bishop of Birmingham, a new see the creation of which had been mainly due to his efforts. The second parish church of Birmingham, St Philip, became a cathedral. While adhering rigidly to his views on the divine institution of episcopacy as essential to the Christian Church, Dr Gore from the first cultivated friendly relations with the ministers of other denominations, and advocated co-operation with them in all matters when agreement was possible. In social questions he became one of the leaders of the considerable group of High Churchmen known, somewhat loosely, as Christian Socialists. He worked actively against the sweating system, pleaded for European intervention in Macedonia, and was a keen supporter of the Licensing Bill of 1908. In 1892 he founded the clerical fraternity, known as the Community of the Resurrection. Its members are priests, who are bound by the obligation of celibacy, live under a common rule and with a common purse. Their work is pastoral, evangelistic, literary and educational. In 1898 the House of the Resurrection at Mirfield, near Huddersfield, became the centre of the community; in 1903 a college for training candidates for orders (College of the Resurrection), was established there, and in the same year a branch house, for missionary work, was set up in Johannesburg in South Africa.

[edit] Works

  • Lux Mundi (editor) (1889)
  • The Incarnation (Bampton Lectures, 1891)
  • The Creed of the Christian (1895)
  • The Sermon on the Mount (1896)
  • The Epistle to the Ephesians (1898)
  • Romans (1899)
  • The Body of Christ (1901)
  • The New Theology and the Old Religion (1908)
  • Orders and Unity (1910)
  • Belief in God (1921)
  • Belief in Christ (1922)
  • The Holy Spirit and the Church (1924)
  • The Doctrine of the Infallible Book (1924)
  • Christ and Society (Halley Stewart Lectures, 1927) (pub. 1928)


Belief in God, Belief in Christ and The Holy Spirit and the Church were reissued in a single volume as The Reconstruction of Belief in 1926.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Cf. the Lutheran theologian Ernst Sartorius in his Lehre von der heiligen Liebe (1844), Lehre ii. pp. 21 et seq.: the Son of God veils his all-seeing eye and descends into human darkness and as child of man opens his eye as the gradually growing light of the world of humanity, until at the right hand of the Father he allows it to shine forth in all its glory. See G. F. Loofs, Art. Kenosis in Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopädie (ed. 1901), x. 247.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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