The sermons of John Henry Newman (1801-90) have been a go-to resource through my 40-plus years of ministry. As I was driving to Columbus, Mississippi, to meet friends, I hoped for some help in forming a sermon. I could not open my handy one-volume edition of Newman’s eight volumes of his Anglican Parochial and Plain Sermons, but I found a reading on YouTube.
The devoted voice coming through my car’s speaker read the 16th sermon in the first volume of Parochial and Plain Sermons, which Newman prepared for Trinity Sunday. I did not know this particular sermon, but I listened carefully. Newman begins the sermon by pointing to the wisdom of the Church for placing Trinity Sunday one week after Pentecost. Since Trinity Sunday presents us with an unfathomable mystery to ponder, it is clear that God gives the Holy Spirit, “not that we may know more, but that we may do better.” Here’s the whole passage:
There is much instruction conveyed in the circumstance, that the Feast of the Holy Trinity immediately succeeds that of Whitsunday. On the latter Festival we commemorate the coming of the Spirit of God, who is promised to us as the source of all spiritual knowledge and discernment. But lest we should forget the nature of that illumination which He imparts, Trinity Sunday follows, to tell us what it is not; not a light accorded to the reason, or the gifts of the intellect; inasmuch as the Gospel has its mysteries, its difficulties, and secret things, which the Holy Spirit does not remove. The grace promised us is given, not that we may know more, but that we may do better. It is given to influence, guide, and strengthen us in performing our duty towards God and man; it is given to us as creatures, as sinners, as men, as immortal beings, not as mere reasoners, disputers, or philosophical inquirers. It teaches what we are, whither we are going, what we must do, how we must do it; it enables us to change our fallen nature from evil to good, “to make ourselves a new heart and a new spirit.”
But it tells us nothing for the sake of telling it; neither in His Holy Word, nor through our consciences, has the Blessed Spirit thought fit so to act. … And since men are apt to prize knowledge above holiness, therefore it is most suitably provided, that Trinity Sunday should succeed Whitsunday; to warn us that the enlightening vouchsafed to us is not an understanding of “all mysteries and all knowledge,” but that love or charity which is “the fulfilling of the Law.”
When I finished listening to the first part of the sermon, I felt a chill run up my spine. I realized that in this and in many sermons Newman teaches me things I never knew before and none else has ever taught me. I already knew that the Church Calendar works like a jigsaw puzzle, but Newman explained in a few short sentences why it is so important that Trinity Sunday immediately follows Pentecost. In so many things, and for so many years, Newman has been one of my great teachers, and what he’s taught me turns out to be true and profound.
On Monday, July 31, Pope Leo XIV announced that Saint John Henry Newman (1801-90) will be made a Doctor of the Church. Cardinal Newman was beatified in 2016 and canonized in 2019. To date, the Western Church has made only 37 Doctors of the Church. The list includes the likes of St. Hilary of Poitiers (d. 368), St. Athanasius (d. 373), St Basil the Great (d. 379), St. Ambrose (d. 397), St. Jerome (d. 420), St. Augustine (d. 430), St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), St. Teresa de Avila (d. 1582), and San Juan de la Cruz (d. 1591). The brilliant theologians and apologists St. Irenaeus of Lyons (d. 202) and St. Pope John Paul II (d. 2005) have not yet gained the distinction. Perhaps they shall. The only English or British Doctors are the Venerable Bede (d. 735), St. Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109), and now Newman.
John Henry Newman’s career in the Church of England was at once astonishing, illustrious, inspiring, and notorious. Many accounts of his preaching on Sunday afternoons in the University Church may be found. It should perhaps not surprise us that two of the descriptions of Newman’s magic were written by auditors—Matthew Arnold and James Anthony Froude—who were to renounce him. But can any such deep influence on a person be gone forever?
Newman was the opposite of what many of us would conceive is a successful preacher. He stood almost motionless in the pulpit. He read his sermons from a manuscript. His voice was a good one, and as clear as glass, but it did not change much through his delivery. Yet I would argue that Newman’s sermons are among the best in the history of Christianity. He was brilliant and he was wise but above all he was utterly devoted to Jesus. This love of Christ comes through in his preaching. Each sermon shows he had done his homework with care and with a mind to affect his listeners. But I submit that what makes the sermons so rich—every one of them in all eight volumes—is the preacher’s unabashed love and common-sense understanding of what the Savior desires from His disciples in terms of faith, understanding, and response.
Though he very quietly became a Roman Catholic on October 9, 1845, Newman’s conversion shook the Anglican world. Through his penetrating preaching and incomparable prose, Newman had cut a wide swath on both sides of the Atlantic. Until 1845, the great American educator W.A. Muhlenberg (1796-1877) read Newman’s sermons to his students at vespers on Sunday afternoons. R.H. Hutton (1826-97) wrote in 1894 that Newman could be praised as “the great Anglican, the great Catholic, and the great Englishman” of his time (quoted in Frank M. Turner, John Henry Newman (2011), page 6). Newman was not only a prime mover in the much-contested attempt to reform and renew Anglican Christianity along Patristic and Catholic lines; he was an effective Christian influencer who made disciples of Christ everywhere.
About 35 years ago, I recommended Newman’s Parochial and Plain Sermons to an evangelical friend. This friend shook his head vigorously and responded with a sulfurous snort, “This veneration of Newman by Episcopalians is a form of masochism.” Some years later I made a gift of the Sermons to another evangelical friend, urging that these are some of the most profoundly evangelical sermons preached by any Christian in any age. I don’t believe my gift was much appreciated. The great Anglo-Catholic sage Darwell Stone (1859-1941) wrote in a paper that most of the Tractarians and their heirs came from pious evangelical homes and that this did not surprise him. “The solemnity of life, the awful issues of human action, the realities of repentance and faith, and the significance and power of Christ’s death” characterized both the Evangelical and the Catholic movements. Newman’s sermons get right to the heart of the matter—every time—and inspire us to be Christians in this world right now. To me, this is what it means to be not only an evangelical but a Doctor of the Church.
During the Oxford Long Vacation (summer break for Americans) of 1833, Newman had been traveling in Mediterranean Europe, where he became deathly ill. As he notes in the Apologia (1864), he wrote a poem onboard an orange boat bound from Palermo to Marseilles. The poem, which has been set to a tune at least twice, is another way to see that St. John Henry Newman was indeed a very great Teacher of the Church.
Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on.
The night is dark, and I am far from home—
Lead Thou me on. …
So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still
Will lead me on
O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone,
And with the morn those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.
The Rev. W.L. (Chip) Prehn, PhD, is president of The Living Church Foundation and is a principal of Dudley & Prehn Educational Consultants. He was a parish priest for 12 years before turning to school administration and consulting. Prehn writes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and history.
