For the 20th century Oxford Movement or Group see Moral Rearmament
The Oxford Movement was a loose affiliation of High Church Anglicans who sought to demonstrate that the Church of England was a direct descendant of the Christian church established by the Apostles. It was also known as the Tractarian Movement after its series of publications, Tracts for the Times (1833–1841). The effective leader was John Henry Newman, a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford and vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford. He had been influenced by a sermon by John Keble in 1833 criticizing the increasing secularization of the Church of England. Other prominent members were Archdeacon Henry Edward Manning, Edward Pusey, and Robert Wilberforce.
In the ninetieth and final Tract, Newman argued that the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, as defined by the Council of Trent, were compatible with the Thirty-Nine Articles of the sixteenth-century Church of England. The Movement ended when Newman, driven further than he had expected by his own arguments, converted to Roman Catholicism in 1845, to be followed by Manning in 1851. Anglo-Catholicism, which owes its revival to the Oxford Movement, has had a massive influence on global Anglicanism which continues to this day.
External links
Tracts for the Times (http://justus.anglican.org/resources/pc/tracts/)
Tractarianism did not at first have much to do with liturgy but with the recovery of the theological roots of the ancient faith, not only the biblical Christianity to which evangelicals were faithful but the Church Fathers as well.
Ironically, although the Tractarians had rejected the indifferentism of the Broad Churchmen, it was to a great extent the latter spirit which allowed their own triumph.
Here again some of the Tractarians were far ahead of their time, practicing a kind of deconstruction in which no text could be assumed to have a fixed and clear meaning.