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If asked to identify the most influential theologian of the past two centuries, I suspect that few American Protestants would think of John Henry Newman. A few might be familiar with Newman's classic work, The Idea of a University, and its important contribution to the debate over the nature of higher education. Others might have dipped into his justifiably famous—and intriguing—autobiography, the Apologia pro vita sua, or recalled fondly his evocative hymn, "Lead Kindly Light." Some might even identify him with the ubiquitous "Newman Centers" that dot the campuses of American universities. Relatively few American Protestants, however, have studied Newman's important theological or devotional writings, or come to appreciate his enduring influence upon the life and theology of the Roman Catholic Church, especially through the unprecedented reforms of the Second Vatican Council—"Newman's Council," as it is sometimes called.
John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion by Frank M. Turner Yale Univ. Press, 2002 740 pp. $35 |
Newman was born in 1801 into a conventional, middle-class family of broad Anglican sympathies. Other than his adolescent conversion to evangelical Christianity, there was little about his early life that would suggest the extraordinary events that lay ahead. Much more influential for his spiritual and intellectual formation were the years he spent at Oxford, especially his election to a coveted Oriel Fellowship, through which he gained access to a coterie of remarkably devout and catholic-minded intellectuals, theologians, and poets. Around this time, Newman's evangelicalism (as he put it) "gradually faded away," though in a number of ways it continued to influence his outlook on a number of topics. After a brief flirtation with unbelief, Newman was attracted increasingly to the "Apostolical" tradition of the early Fathers. One of the most important expressions of this transformation occurred in 1833. In that year, Newman, John Keble, and Hurrell Froude formed the nucleus of the celebrated Oxford Movement, which set about restoring to prominence the catholic order and spirituality of the Church of England. During the turbulent history of the movement's initial phase, Newman became increasingly unsettled over his attachment to the via media of the English Church. Concluding that it could no longer be regarded as a true expression of the body of Christ, in 1845 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church—a decision that produced in him a deep sense of personal loss as acknowledged in his most famous sermon, The Parting of Friends.
What drove Newman along his odyssey from evangelical Oxford academic to Roman Catholic priest? The question of motivation has been explored again and again by his many biographers, and by Newman himself in the pages of the Apologia, but it has never been satisfactorily resolved. To be sure, personal factors cannot be entirely dismissed; after all, Newman's brilliance was only exceeded by his complexity. Several well-known accounts have explored the issue of Newman's inner life, but their conclusions remain unconvincing and they have failed to produce any consensus on the subject. Much more influential in initiating Newman's spiritual saga were a series of political and religious controversies that took place between the late 1820s and the early 1840s.
The remarkable drama of Newman's life in the Church of England was set against the backdrop of constitutional and university reform. Beginning in 1828, Parliament enacted a series of measures which startled conservative Anglicans. Whig Erastianism and the admission of Dissenters and Roman Catholics to Parliament created alarm that the Church of England was on its way to becoming "one sect among many" and that the state was on its way towards religious indifferentism. Though not by nature inclined to partisan politics, Newman nevertheless became highly agitated by these developments as well as by a number of subsequent controversies, including the proposed abolition of subscription at Oxford, which would have eliminated the Anglican monopoly in the University; the appointment of Renn Dixon Hampden as Regius Professor of Divinity, which placed Newman's chief nemesis and a prominent liberal at the head of the Oxford theology school; and the widespread condemnation of Tract 90, in which Newman had attempted to show that the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles were compatible with Roman Catholicism.
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