John Henry Newman - Doctor of the Church

John Newman (1801-1890) - St. John Newman - is an interesting figure for Anglicans to reflect on, and this week he prompts a bit of reflection because a few days ago Pope Leo XIV has announced that John Newman - made a Cardinal by Leo XIII - is to be deemed a "doctor of the church" - a teacher of the highest rank, in other words.

Naturally it is not for an Anglican to comment on whether John Newman should or should not have received this accolade, but from afar there are a few observations to be made.

First, there is an Anglican kind of question which - with tongue slightly but not completely in cheek - asks whether John Newman was a doctor of the church when he was an Anglican priest, leading the then charge within the CofE to develop the catholic nature of the CofE, with vigorous writing of Tracts which sought to challenge some of the prevailing thinking of the CofE which, in summary, the Tractarians (Newman was not alone) saw as too much "Reformed" and not nearly enough "and Catholic."

Secondly, once Newman became a Catholic and then Catholic priest (1845), he undoubtedly contributed to Roman Catholic theology, and in doing so became one of a relatively small group of English Catholic theologians of note through the past 2000 years. His canonization and now naming as a doctor of the church will be of great encouragement to English Catholics.

Thirdly, we who lean to the evangelical side of being Anglican might take note of this paragraph in John Newman's Wikipedia entry:

"Although to the end of his life, Newman looked back on his conversion to Evangelical Christianity in 1816 as the saving of his soul, he began to shift away from his early Calvinism. As Eamon Duffy puts it, "He came to see Evangelicalism, with its emphasis on religious feeling and on the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone, as a Trojan horse for an undogmatic religious individualism that ignored the Church's role in the transmission of revealed truth, and that must lead inexorably to subjectivism and skepticism."^[37]"

Fourthly, if you can make head or tale of these paragraphs about Newman, from First Things, then let us know in the comments:

"Rather than single out any particular contribution, I would point out that key ideas such as conscience, development, education, and the rival claims of faith and reason weave in and out of all Newman’s writings. It is as if he views reality in myriad ways in seeking to piece together the jigsaw of creation (and its Creator). He views reality in a highly intuitive manner and excels at holding disparate truths together in creative tension. It could be said that his approach to discerning truth is both East and West, and that it draws on both the Anglo-Saxon empirical tradition as well as the continental. 

This amounts to a new way of viewing the world. It brings in the religious imagination, sacramental vision, the personal, subjective, relational, and existential, in contradistinction to approaches that privilege the objective, systematic, and the scholastic—and which thereby complement the thinking of, inter alia, the Angelic Doctor."

There is nothing distinctively Catholic about Newman - if this is indeed his mode of thinking and arguing - and it seems like some kind of confusing approach to theology!

Fifthly, and finally, Newman is a most intriguing Catholic theologian because of a notion associated with him and often commented on, "the development of doctrine," defined in the Wikipedia article at that link in this way:

"Development of doctrine is a term used by John Henry Newman and other theologians influenced by him to describe the way Catholic teaching has become more detailed and explicit over the centuries, while later statements of doctrine remain consistent with earlier statements."

Now, there is a lot going on in this conception of (shall we say) progress and change (which may not be actual change) of doctrine. Clearly some mischief could be made from it ("No, we haven't changed the doctrine, we have just developed it") and that mischief could be at the hands of Catholic and Protestant theologians. Clearly also, there is not time in my life to (er) develop a detailed response to this concept. Suffice to say, here, that making John Newman a doctor of the church, is fascinating and may be especially so some 200 years hence - should the Lord tarry, and I pray that He will not - when we find there is something going on in development [change???] of doctrine and Newman is invoked ...