Introduction As we enter the new year, century, and millennium I propose as a trustworthy guide a man who lived nearly all of the 19^th century (1801-1890) and profoundly changed the thought of English-speaking Christianity, both Anglican and Roman Catholic This is the Venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman, the bicentennial of whose birth we observe next month. Born in the reign of George III and living through much of Victoria's reign, he was the acknowledged leader of the exciting but divisive Oxford Movement to recover Catholic theology within the established Church of England, then was led through his reading and reflection to convert to Roman Catholicism at the mid-point of his life (1845), and profoundly affected that church not only in England but worldwide. I-Iis extremely prolific writings explore many areas of theology, philosophy, history, and education; and he was an accomplished poet and novelist.

His published sermons are contained in five collections (three from his Anglican years and two fi7om his Roman Catholic years). His Parochial and Plain Sermons in eight volumes comprise the major collection, preached originally in the pulpit of the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford, where he was vicar from 1828 (age 27!) until 1843. It is in this latter collection, produced in the midst of a very busy life as a pastor (St. Mary's was a parochial cure, with responsibilities for people in the community as well as students and dons), a tutor, a Fellow doing serious research, that the reader finds the heart of Newman's beliefs. It is noteworthy that most secondary works on Newman's thought have more documentation from this source than from any other.¹

Charles Dessain, in the preface to his study of Newman, has this cogent summary:

The fundamental interest of Newman's life is his devotion to the cause of Revealed Religion. He was led to accept it wholeheartedly as a boy, and to seek out its full and balanced content. This devotion gave his life its unity ... In many of his efforts he failed at the time, but history has vindicated him, and the Catholic movement of reform has hailed him as a prophet. He was always a herald of forgotten truths.²

I would like to use this as a text to explore today some areas which reflect Newman's "devotion to the cause of Revealed Religion," first his relationship to Holy Scripture with particular attention to its expression in his preaching, and then more briefly his relationship to the ancient church.

Newman and Holy Scripture While Newman's family was not particularly religious, it was nevertheless a somewhat typical I SP century Bible-reading family; and the readings which he knew as a boy at home and in church were still from the elevated language of the 1611 Authorized Version. Ms immersion in the language, imagery, and teaching of Scripture as an adult, however, was largely a matter of self-teaching. His degree at Oxford was in classics and mathematics. There was not formal seminary training for ordination to the Anglican priesthood, only a series of lectures from a Professor of Divinity at Oxford. Nonetheless this reading and study gave to him a profound sense of God's providence within his life, a perspective which enabled him to deal with whatever came his way, including failure, hostility, and change. And it gave him very early his lifelong conviction that the way to truth and understanding is first and foremost through obedience.³

Before looking at Newman's dealing with Scripture in his preaching, two preliminary matters deserve some attention. First is the fact that when the English Catholic bishops in the 1850s decided that the time had come for a new English translation of the Bible, they entrusted the task to Newman (who was free to choose his own collaborators).⁴ Though for various reasons this project fell through (and was not really completed until the time of Ronald Knox a century later), the choice of Newman is remarkable. Certainly his mastery of English prose would have given it a rich texture. Second is the fact that in 1884 (when he was 83 years old) he wrote a very significant essay, "Inspiration in Its Relation to Revelation," in the period following Vatican I, giving his view of Biblical criticism and inspiration, including his interpretation of the decrees of the Council of Trent on this matter. In this essay it is particularly noteworthy that he interpreted the phrase "Auctor utriusque Testamenti" in a way which the church would not see stated so clearly until the great 1943 encyclical of Pius XII, Divino Afflante Spiritu.

As we turn now to Newman's understanding of the Bible in the church, we see that he often insists that the Bible is not a library of "mere knowledge" or a storehouse of information.⁵ Scripture is not intended to inform, but to make men better, holier, more obedient to God. The Bible is a book to which we "reverently draw near."⁶ Consequently he sought to learn how to have Biblical teaching and even imagery which he found there become familiar images before his mind.⁷ He was at the polar opposite of many recent trendy and tiresome attempts to "re-image God." For Newman one reaches into Scripture and finds there the treasure in the revealed images and teachings; and he passes this on with freshness that still comes alive today. And he never avoided the difficult passages: the call to sacrifice, to holiness, the notion of God's wrath, the waiting for harvest in another time, the hiddenness of one's spiritual life with Christ, and even the expectation of the pruning of the church.

Newman was especially conscious of a situation which we often see today of eclectic use of Scripture and remaking it in our own image. He describes in his 1838 Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification those who see Scripture as a "magazine of texts in behalf of our opinions."⁸ And he is quite aware of those who "though they profess to go to Scripture, when there is anything they don't like, they explain it away."⁹ We can see what he would make of extreme feminists who hold up Jezebel as a role model for her single-mindedness and of some exponents of "creation theology" who place environmental concerns at the center of the faith. (He indeed addresses this issue when he writes that the "heavens indeed declare the glory of God, but they do not tell us his will.")¹⁰

Newman was profoundly influenced by his reading of the fathers of the ancient church, but in his use of Scripture he avoided the excesses of allegorical interpretation and its search for hidden meanings.¹¹ Rather he saw the doctrinal teaching of the church as unfolding within the community of faith and saw the fathers as providing a pattern instructive for devotional understanding. Very important to him was the passage in Luke 2:19, "But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart," the text for his famous 1843 University Sermon XV, "The Theory of Development in Religious Doctrine," which saw its completion in his 1845 book, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. For him the fullness of truth is found in the ancient sources of Scripture and tradition, but the meaning continues to unfold in the course of history. And so while on the continent radical 19^th century Biblical criticism was raging (one of whose pioneers had been Richard Simon, a 17^th century French priest of the same community as Newman, the Oratory of St. Philip Neri), he continued to reach into the ancient sources for contemporary truth. And perhaps it was because he let this ancient truth speak to his own personal life that he was able to communicate so effectively to so many.¹²

Two brief examples will show something of his approach in use of Scripture in preaching. One is his dealing with Matthew 11:28-30 about the yoke of Christ. He says that indeed the "yoke is easy to those who are accustomed to it, not the unbroken neck."¹³ The passage is not true for the beginner; it becomes true through the experience of discipleship. Christ's service, he says, is perfect freedom—but not at first. At first it is servitude; with faithfulness, it becomes freedom. So the call is to obedience—quite a difference from the overwhelming focus on "celebration" these days. Newman knew that the way was narrow that led to eternal life, but he led many to find it.

A second instructive passage interprets John 5:2-8, the story of the man at the pool of Beth-zatha (or Bethesda or Bethsaida) who was healed by Jesus after thirty-eight years of illness. It contains the notice about the angel coming to stir the waters (KJV= "troubling the waters"). He writes:

Learn to be as the Angel, who could descend among the miseries of Bethesda, without losing his heavenly purity or his perfect happiness. Gain healing from troubled waters. Make up your mind to the prospect of sustaining a certain measure of pain and trouble in your passage through life; by the blessing of God this will prepare you for it,--it will make you thoughtful and resigned without interfering with your cheerfulness.¹⁴

Newman's invitation to his congregation was to find the healing which comes from Christ within the very troubled waters of life, the pain and the suffering which come to all. Surely here if anywhere we see the profoundly true meaning of what became his personal motto when he was named cardinal, the words of St. Francis de Sales, "Cor ad cor loquitur." Without personal anecdote (so popular in our day) he speaks very personally and touches the heart with the words of the Gospel.

Newman and the Ancient Church. Newman in his careful study found in the ancient church the anchor and compass for the church in the turbulent 19^th century. His lifelong struggle against liberalism, which he defined as the notion that truth is relative to the individual (stated forcefully especially in his Biglietto speech in 1879) gives pride of place alongside Holy Scripture to the teachings of the early church fathers and the decisions of the ecumenical councils. His first published book, The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833) painstakingly explored the issues of the Nicene era and the attraction of Arianism to many in power. It was his study of the ancient church which underlay the Oxford Movement in the Church of England and his essays in the Tracts for the Times. Indeed his crusade was to bring the Church of England to recover its Catholic heritage.

It was his reading in the ancient church which haunted him until he converted to Roman Catholicism. The famous quotation from St. Augustine in an essay by Cardinal Wiseman in the Dublin Review (securus judicat orbis terrarum) moved him to see himself, even if in most ways theologically orthodox, as cut off from the Catholic Church. He had a lifelong interest in St. Athanasius (in the original Greek, of course).

His faithfulness to ancient tradition, indeed, was a major cause of his being "under a cloud" following his famous 1859 article, "On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine," published in the Rambler, in which he pointed out that in the 4^th century the ordinary faithful were more orthodox than the powerful, including many bishops, when Athanasius stood against the world. (For this, he was delated to Rome for heresy; and in the ongoing controversy Msgr. George Talbot, another convert, and Henry Edward Manning's confidant in Rome, was to describe Newman as "the most dangerous man in England".)¹⁵

As I reflect on the past several decades in the church, it appears that this is a perspective which is in danger of being lost. The giants of the past are not frequently cited among us as we seek sometimes frantically to relate to the trends of our culture. We are in the midst of an information explosion but not one of wisdom. The guidance which the past offers is obscured, our theology is sometimes short-sighted and governed by issues, ethnicity, or gender, and truncated. Newman was concerned that we never lose sight of the whole heritage of the church. He did not draw too sharp a line between the Biblical age and the age of the early church and saw that age closest to the apostles as providing continuing guidance to the church.¹⁶ In this his life was sustained, and I believe that he offers this as a salutary guidance to our age which is tempted to accommodate itself to the culture and which celebrates who we are in our diversity more than it calls to sacrifice and become conformed to the image of Christ. Lord Acton is reported to have said that Newman (in his An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine) taught the English to think historically. I believe that he can teach us to do that much better today and into the future, to find in our rich foundation heritage the perspective which will keep us true to the faith once delivered to the saints.

Conclusion. I can think of no person who can be a more helpful guide into a new year, century, and millennium for those who have committed themselves to Christ and his church than John Henry Newman. After the death of Pius IX and the beginning of the new pontificate, one of the earliest acts of Leo XIII was in 1879 to raise Newman to the rank of cardinal, lifting once and for all the cloud of suspicion of his orthodoxy brought on by some of his adversaries in England and in Rome. Leo XIII called Newman "il mio cardinale." In our time, this herald of forgotten truths has been acclaimed by Pius XII, Paul VI, and most recently by John Paul II, who declared him Venerable. Many of his contemporaries are forgotten, but Newman is still being heard and changing lives.¹⁷

What Louis Bouyer wrote in his preface to the Ignatius Press edition of the Parochial and Plain Sermons can, I believe, be extended to the whole range of Newman's writings: "Nothing [else] can contribute for us, still today, and maybe today more than ever, such an introduction to what Christianity may give to and expect from our surrender to its call in the midst of a world no longer pretending to be Christian. . . ."¹⁸ I hope that during this coming year some of you will want to join with Leo XIII and read his words again, read some of his words you have never read, and even claim the Venerable John Henry Newman as "my cardinal."

Continuing Education for Clergy, Diocese of Owensboro

© 2001, by the authors, all rights reserved.

¹ See, e.g., Eric Przywara, The Heart of Newman (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997). Significantly republication after conversion to Roman Catholicism was virtually without change to the text.