8. John Henry Newman (1801–1890)
If people today think at all of John Henry Newman, it is probably as the author of the familiar hymn “Lead, Kindly Light.” Those who are somewhat acquainted with church history will identify him as one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement, which shook the Church of England and eventually led Newman himself into the Church of Rome. But it is Newman the preacher I want to examine in this chapter, the man whom W. Robertson Nicoll called “the most influential preacher Oxford has ever known,”1 and whom Alexander Whyte admired so much that he wrote Newman: An Appreciation.
Newman was born in London on February 21, 1801. His family would be identified with the moderate evangelicals in the Church of England. At age fifteen, Newman experienced conversion. He was educated at Trinity College, Oxford, where he fell under the influence of Richard Whately. “He, emphatically, opened my mind, and taught me to think and to use my reason,” Newman later wrote in his famous autobiography, Apologia pro vita sua. This was probably the beginning of Newman’s drift from the evangelical emphasis and into the High Church party, and eventually to the Church of Rome.
However, it was his dear friend Richard Hurrell Froude who influenced Newman the most. “He taught me to look with admiration towards the Church of Rome,” Newman wrote, “and in the same degree to dislike the Reformation.” Froude did more than this: he introduced Newman to John Keble—brilliant Oxford scholar, humble Anglican pastor, and a man utterly devoted to the Church of England. Keble is remembered today as the writer of “Sun of My Soul, Thou Savior Dear,” taken from his once-popular book of religious poetry, The Christian Year.
In 1824 Newman was ordained, and in 1828 he began his ministry as vicar of St. Mary’s, Oxford. I can never forget stepping into that historic church one summer day and actually climbing the stairs into Newman’s pulpit. As I stood there, I could hear faintly the Oxford traffic outside; but I quickly found myself carried, via imagination, to a Sunday afternoon service at which Newman was preaching. The church was filled with worshipers, mostly the younger fellows of the colleges and the undergraduates. Newman came in—“gliding” is the way one observer described it—and made his way to the pulpit, where he adjusted the gas lamp, laid his manuscript before him, and then in a musical voice that haunted, began to preach in a way that penetrated one’s very being. “It was from the pulpit of St. Mary’s that he began to conquer and to rule the world,” wrote Alexander Whyte, one of Newman’s most ardent Protestant admirers.
The rest of the story need not delay us. On July 14, 1833, Keble preached the “assize sermon” at St. Mary’s, and his theme was “national apostasy.” It was this sermon that gave birth to the concern that eventuated in what we know as the Oxford Movement (not to be confused with the Oxford Group Movement begun by Frank Buchman and later renamed Moral Re-armament). The burden of the movement was spiritual renewal in the Church of England. Newman, Keble, Froude, E. B. Pusey, and their associates sought to restore the spiritual authority of the church and to return the church to its ancient moorings. Their motives were commendable; their methods perhaps left something to be desired.
One of their chief ministries was the publication of “tracts for the times.” Various men—not all as gifted as Newman—wrote on subjects pertaining to the Church of England. The critics noticed a Rome-ward trend in the tracts, but the writers persisted. It was Tract Ninety that wrote finis to Newman’s leadership in the movement and his ministry at St. Mary’s. In this famous pamphlet, Newman tried to prove that the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England could be honestly interpreted from a Roman Catholic point of view. The result was official censure—the politics of the controversies from 1833 to 1845 are worthy of study—and Newman could do nothing but either step aside or recant. Deeply hurt by the church leaders he had thought would encourage him, Newman left Oxford; and on October 8, 1845, he was received into the Roman Catholic church.
I find the history of the Oxford Movement fascinating. In it one finds events and leaders that parallel situations we have today. There is really nothing new under the sun. People today who want to “purify” or “renew” the church would do well to read up on the Oxford Movement and then avoid its mistakes. The Oxford Movement by R. W. Church, dean of St. Paul’s, is the best introduction. A more modern study is The Oxford Conspirators by Marvin R. O’Connell. It is desirable to read Newman’s own account in Apologia pro vita sua, and keep in mind that he wrote this some twenty years after these events.
But now to Newman’s preaching.
Between 1824, when he was ordained, and 1845, when he left Oxford, Newman preached over one thousand sermons, ten volumes of which are available today. His eight volumes of Parochial and Plain Sermons represent the best of his pulpit ministry at St. Mary’s. Sermons Bearing on Subjects of the Day and Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford are two volumes that complete the Protestant years. Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations and Sermons Preached on Various Occasions come from his Roman Catholic years.
I was amazed when I learned that Whyte had been such an admirer of Newman; for if any preacher emphasized the grace of God and the gospel of Jesus Christ, it was Whyte. Yet Whyte told a friend that he valued Newman’s sermons more than those of F. W. Robertson! On March 14, 1876, Whyte and some friends visited Newman at the oratory in Edgbaston and were received graciously. Whyte even incorporated in his Catechism a revision from Newman that clarified the doctrine of transubstantiation. There is no escaping the fact that Alexander Whyte admired John Henry Cardinal Newman.
Let us begin with the obvious reason: Newman’s sermons, not unlike Whyte’s, were directed to the conscience. “The effect of Newman’s preaching on us young men,” wrote William Lockhart, “was to turn our souls inside out!” In this, Whyte was a kindred spirit of Newman, for few evangelical preachers can expose sin and “perform spiritual surgery” like Alexander Whyte! But another factor was Newman’s “other-worldliness.” He, like Whyte, had an utter disdain of earthly things. Whyte reveled among the mystics and constantly called his congregation to a life of reality in the things of the Spirit. While Whyte would point sinners to the Lamb of God, however, Newman would find this life of the Spirit in a sacramental system.
Newman’s ability to examine a text and then develop it into a sermon was something Whyte greatly admired. “For, let any young man of real capacity once master Newman’s methods of exposition, discussion, and argumentation; his way of addressing himself to the treatment of a subject; his way of entering upon a subject, worming his way to the very heart of it, working it out, and winding it up,” wrote Whyte in his Appreciation, and that man would “soon make his presence and his power felt in any of our newspapers or magazines.”2
Add to this Newman’s pure English style—“the quiet perfection of his English style,” wrote Whyte’s biographer—and you can understand why the old Covenanter so much appreciated the preaching of Cardinal Newman.
Whyte was careful to point out his disagreements with Newman, not the least of which was Newman’s neglect of preaching the good news of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. When Newman’s sermons are “looked at as pulpit work, as preaching the Gospel,” wrote Whyte, “they are full of the most serious, and even fatal, defects. . . . They are not, properly speaking, New Testament preaching at all. . . . As an analysis of the heart of man, and as a penetrating criticism of human life, their equal is nowhere to be found. But, with all that, they lack the one all-essential element of all true preaching—the message to sinful man concerning the free grace of God. . . . Newman’s preaching—and I say it with more pain than I can express— never once touches the true core, and real and innermost essence, of the Gospel.”3
Why bother to read the sermons of a man who did not preach the gospel, a man who eventually preached himself right out of an evangelical tradition and into a sacramental system? Because Newman can help teach us how to preach to a man’s conscience, how to get beneath the surface and apply spiritual truth where it is needed. Newman was a better diagnostician than a dispenser of healing medicine (“I never take down Newman’s sermons for my recovery and my comfort,” admitted Whyte); but it is easier to apply the medicine after you have convinced the patient of his need.
It is worth noting that Newman warned against magnifying preaching above the other ministries of the church. In this, I think, he was reacting against the tendency on the part of some evangelicals of the day to turn their preachers into celebrities. Newman believed strongly in the continuity of the church and the need for sermons to minister to the body collectively. He himself shunned and even fled from becoming “a popular preacher,” and he had little confidence in men who used the pulpit to promote themselves.
It is unfortunate that Newman did not know the better evangelical men of that day. He saw only (or perhaps only wanted to see) a ministry that emphasized correct doctrine and dedicated zeal, but lacked Christian character and true spiritual power. R. W. Church described evangelicals as people with “an exhausted teaching and a spent enthusiasm.” The evangelical churches were “respectable” and popular with men of position, but (added Church) “they were on very easy terms with the world.”4 If there was one thing Newman hated with a holy zeal, it was a religion of words without reality, words that described an experience but failed to effect it in the lives of people.
Newman desired to elevate worship in the church. While I do not agree with his sacramentalism, I do applaud his purpose; it is my conviction that true worship is the greatest need in our churches today. How easy it is to have words without power (Paul was aware of this—read 1 Thessalonians 1:5) and program without substance, especially in an evangelical church. Newman would have agreed with William Temple’s definition of worship: “to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open up the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God.” We do not experience this kind of worship in many churches today, and often the preacher is to blame. Newman spoke about the “rudeness, irreverence, and almost profaneness . . . involved in pulpit addresses, which speak of the adorable works and sufferings of Christ, with the familiarity and absence of awe with which we speak about our friends.”
Next to irreverence and the “unreality of words,” Newman abhorred preaching that tried to cover “three or four subjects at once.” He insisted that each sermon have a definite purpose expressed in a concrete statement. “Definiteness is the life of preaching,” he wrote in Lectures and Essays on University Subjects, “a definite hearer, not the whole world; a definite topic, not the whole evangelical tradition; and, in like manner, a definite speaker. Nothing that is anonymous will preach.”5 Of course, the ultimate aim of all preaching is the salvation of the hearer, but this can be accomplished only when the preacher is prepared and knows what his aim is. We preach to persuade, and we must preach to the emotions as well as to the intellect, always using simple and concrete language.
The thing that impresses me about Newman’s sermons is their freshness of spiritual expression. He did not preach on the “topics of the day.” He carefully explained some first principle of the Christian life, some doctrine of the Christian faith, and wedded it to the practical life of the worshiper. He shunned oratory and sought to make the message of the Word the most important thing and the messenger the least important. He did not even debate the great issues involved in the Oxford Movement. Rather he strengthened and extended the movement by avoiding the issues and dealing with the fundamental truths that gave rise to these issues.
There are men called by God to preach on the issues of the hour, and we need their ministry. But for permanent strengthening of the church, we also need preachers who will dig again the old wells and lead us intelligently down the old paths and who, renouncing cheap pulpit rhetoric, will focus the white light of revelation on the human heart and examine us in that light. In short, today we need preaching that appeals to the conscience, penetrating preaching, clinical preaching, preaching that moves men to cry, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” Newman’s preaching did this.
But let us go one step further: let us apply the blessed medicine of the gospel (something Newman did not do) and reply to those under conviction, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved!” Newman would run to the beaten man at the side of the road and pour in the wine; but he could not pour in the oil.
If you want to get acquainted with Cardinal Newman, start with Newman: An Appreciation by Whyte. Then secure The Preaching of John Henry Newman, edited by Newman scholar W. D. White. White’s scholarly introduction will acquaint you with Newman’s world and his philosophy of preaching. I think both Newman and White were too hard on the evangelicals, but this is a minor fault in an otherwise capable essay. White included thirteen sermons that Newman considered his best. If you are interested in owning more of Newman’s sermons, visit your local Catholic bookshop or watch the used-book stores in your area.
The best modern biography of Newman is Meriol Trevor’s two-volume Newman. The first volume is subtitled The Pillar of the Cloud, the second Light in Winter. The author has also abridged this work into a one-volume edition titled Newman’s Journey.
Newman wrote materials other than sermons, some excellent and some not so good. A Newman Reader, edited by Francis X. Connolly, will give you a rich sampling of his writings. My favorite edition of his autobiography, Apologia pro vita sua, is the one edited by David J. DeLaura. It contains all the necessary texts of Newman’s controversy with Charles Kingsley, plus helpful notes that clarify material in the text.
One final observation: When I read Newman’s sermons, I find myself examining not only my heart but also my preaching. I find myself asking: Am I a faithful physician of the soul? Am I preaching to the conscience? Am I faithful to declare truth, not simply my “clever ideas” about truth? Do I offer Christ as the only Redeemer? Do I get beneath the surface and help my hearers where they need it most? While I disagree with Newman’s theology, I appreciate his preaching and have learned from it.