In October 2019, on the day before John Henry Newman was canonized by Pope Francis, I addressed cardinals, politicians, and diplomats gathered inside the Vatican. I asked them to consider Newman as a bridge between Anglicanism and Catholicism. My knees were knocking under the table, but I don’t think they knew. What I didn’t know was that I would face a much harder task at Westminster Abbey a week later when, among British Anglicans and Catholics, I asked them to consider Newman as a bridge, too.
My premise was that Newman was a sort of theological bridge linking the two communions, transferring to Anglicanism the catholic vision of the Church that he read in the early Church Fathers and that he saw on his Mediterranean travels, while also bringing his Anglican scholarship of the Fathers with him when he became a Catholic. Although he crossed the bridge to the Catholic side, most Anglicans who learned from Newman about the catholic roots of their Church remained on the Anglican side of the bridge.
At the gathering in the Vatican, there was willingness to accept, as one cardinal put it, that Newman was “a ‘prophet of ecumenism’ before the word was ever used, both because of his passionate search for truth and because of the dialogues he kept with his contemporaries” (see Marc Cardinal Ouellet, “The Significance of Saint John Henry Newman for Catholic Theology”). The cardinal was right that Newman’s religious quest had begun with a Protestant conversion that he never disowned, referring to it even after his midlife conversion to Catholicism as the “beginning of divine faith in me.” Nor, ultimately, did his departure end his dialogue with fellow leaders of the catholic revival, known as the “Tractarian” or “Oxford Movement,” taking place within the Church of England and the Episcopal Church.
Those gathered with me in Westminster Abbey, on the other hand, had more difficulty in accepting Newman was a theological bridge between communions. Scholars there pointed out that most Tractarians did not like his conversion to Catholicism in 1845, and that it made him a figure of distrust, even of hatred, in a nation that in his day prided itself on being Protestant. A former government minister in our day told me at the gathering that in the 1990s he had followed Newman’s example by leaving the Church of England—because it offered no infallible teaching authority—and by becoming Catholic. Indeed, Newman felt that his soul was imperiled within the Church of England. At the Westminster Abbey gathering, therefore, the discontinuity between communions loomed large.
That these gatherings drew politicians and diplomats, alongside members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and laity, shows us something important about the context in which we interpret Newman today. He has international significance, and his canonization required diplomatic management. The Prince of Wales (now King Charles III), who attended the canonization, wrote in an op-ed piece at the time: “As we mark the life of this great Briton, this great churchman and … great saint, who bridges the divisions between traditions, it is surely right that we give thanks for the friendship which, despite the parting, has not merely endured, but has strengthened.” Here the soon-to-be supreme governor of the Church of England affirmed that, in canonizing a former Anglican, the Catholic Church was symbolizing that being Catholic was wholly compatible with loyalty to Britain—which wasn’t always the way it was seen in the 19th and much of the 20th century—and that the traditions of British and of global Anglicanism and global Catholicism could meet.
In July, the Vatican announced that Pope Leo XIV will confer on Newman the title of Doctor of the Church. The announcement garnered less attention than the canonization. But perhaps it is when international attention is switched off, and diplomacy is at a minimum, that his theology can be rightly judged. And it is for theological reasons that I think Newman should be considered a Doctor of the universal Church, not for his political or diplomatic usefulness.
When summing up his theology, it is important to say that it was not his alone, for he drew deeply from the wells of early Christianity. He wrote in the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) that what sets “Doctors” of the Church apart from other theologians was that, rather than inventing new opinions, they repeat and refine their theological views, “intently fixing their minds on what they taught, grasping it more and more closely.” The same is true of Newman. He returned to the Church Fathers throughout his life and became one of the preeminent scholars of Athanasius in the 19th century. His translations of Athanasius’ Against the Arians are widely available to this day in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series, and the English-language Catholic and Protestant websites that share those translations. But it was not just as a scholar that he read and translated the Fathers, but as a popularizer of them among the laity. To accompany the Tracts for the Times that disseminated the movement’s ideas, Newman published translations of the Fathers in a series of Records of the Church to show contemporary laity and clergy that they faced similar trials to the early Christians.
Despite Newman’s instinctive opposition to anything that challenged traditional Church teaching, he was among the first to face historical facts and affirm that the Church’s teachings developed over time. His Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine theorized how such change did not negate the creedal truths that God is always Triune and Christ always recognized in two natures. The Scottish Episcopal theologian David Brown recognizes the idea of development as perhaps Newman’s “most important contribution” to theology:
Religion is an aspect of life in which we all desire familiar landmarks … [and] it surely sounds strange to suggest that a changeless God would impose a changing pattern upon our understanding of him and his purposes for ourselves and his Church. Yet it is part of Newman’s achievement that he succeeded in reconciling his fellow Christians to this fact of change, perhaps primarily because he sought to do so in a way which does not threaten underlying, eternal truths. (See David Brown [ed.], Newman: A Man for Our Time [Morehouse, 1990].)
As a Church history professor, I have shared this insight with students who ask why the Church does not change as quickly as they would like. Newman expressed another great insight in “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine” (1859), saying that the laity should be listened to because they uphold tradition when sometimes the bishops or theologians seek to change it. It is the laity who, rightly in Newman’s mind, slowed the pace of change in Church teaching.
Another aspect of Newman’s theology, and one that makes him unique among the doctors of the Church, is that he drew upon earlier Anglican theologians such as Joseph Butler and Richard Hooker. Such theological partners over the first half of his life made Newman’s theology into something very different from any of the other 37 doctors to date. Unlike most Catholics of his day, he was no scholastic or neoscholastic.
He was also unlike most British theologians of his day in philosophy. He argued that beliefs were reasonable based not on John Locke’s narrow “evidentialist calculus,” but based on probabilities and a broader construal of what counted as evidence. To put that more simply, Newman thought the sort of reasoning that occurs in daily life owed less to formal logic than to faculties that are usually associated with religious believing, such as the imagination and intuition. He used a fully embodied metaphor to show what he meant. He described the process by which skillful thinkers do their thinking as like the “ascent of a skillful mountaineer up a literal crag. It is a way which they alone can take; and its justification lies in their success. And such mainly is the way in which all [of us], gifted or not gifted, commonly reason—not by rule, but by an inward faculty.” (See John Henry Newman, Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford [Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909].)
According to Newman, people in everyday life could reason successfully for themselves, including in their religious beliefs.
Newman preached this metaphor in a sermon he delivered in Oxford in 1840, five years before his conversion. And, in conclusion, it is worth noting that he did not feel the need to change the University Sermons when he republished them as a Catholic. What does it mean for Anglicans and Episcopalians that Newman conceived such ideas among them, before he took those ideas with him into the Catholic Church? And what might it mean for Catholics who now revere him as a doctor of the Church that he first thought those ideas as an Anglican? Is Newman indeed a bridge between us both, rather than the property of one and not the other?
The Rev. Benjamin J. King, Ph.D., is the Duncalf-Villavoso Professor of Church History at Seminary of the Southwest.
