C. Newman the Calvinist
C. Newman the Calvinist
Newman experienced his first religious conversion between August and December of 1816. A few months earlier, in March, his father’s bank stopped payments in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. Meanwhile, alone at Ealing School and shocked by the financial catastrophe afflicting his family, John Henry became ill.521 This condition led to Newman’s spiritual renewal under the influence of his schoolmaster, the Rev. Walter Mayers, who himself had recently converted to a Calvinistic variety of Evangelicalism. Mayers quickly became Newman’s guide. This guidance was mainly expressed through the books that Mayers offered him, which, according to Newman, were “the human means of this beginning of divine faith in me” and “all of the school of Calvin.”522 It is important to note that while Newman’s faith would change considerably over his lifetime, he never repudiated this conversion.523
Of the various authors that Mayers recommended to Newman, the most significant was Thomas Scott of Aston Sandford, John Newton’s successor. In addition to appreciating Scott’s doctrine and independence of mind, Newman valued his commitment to holiness:
Besides his unworldliness, what I also admired in Scott was his resolute opposition to antinomianism, and the minutely practical character of his writings. They show him to be a true Englishman, and I deeply felt his influence; and for years I used almost as proverbs what I considered to be the scope and issue of his doctrine, “Holiness rather than peace,” and “Growth the only evidence of life.”524
Scott’s emphasis on the holiness of the Triune God remained with Newman in perpetuity, as did his sober awareness of the problem of sin.525 On the matter of sin, Sheridan suggests that Scott was less than true to his Calvinist heritage by emphasizing personal transgression over the notion of total depravity.526 This is questionable. Sheridan is correct that Scott was serious about the acuity of personal transgression. It is certainly the light in which Newman himself presents Scott when he writes, “All they whom God justifies, says Mr. Scott, are considered as ungodly” in view of their flawed attempts at piety.527 The idea of him maintaining a stark contrast, however, between original and personal sin, with stress upon the latter, is hard to square with Scott’s volume, Remarks on the refutation of Calvinism, wherein he is very much in step with Calvin, especially in his first chapter, entitled, “On Original Sin and the total Depravity of Human Nature.”528 Thus, if we were to identify two main pillars of Scott’s creed, it would be the holiness of the Triune God juxtaposed with the utter depravity of human nature. This couplet, as we shall see, is especially important to Newman’s doctrine of justification.
During this period, Newman also read Thomas Newton’s Dissertations on the Prophecies (1754),529 a work that persuaded him that the Pope is the antichrist predicted in Scripture. Of more significance for the substance of Newman’s thought was Joseph Milner’s History of the Church of Christ (1794), with which Newman reports being “nothing short of enamoured,” especially “the long extracts from St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, and the other Fathers which I found there.”530 Then, in 1817, Mayers gave Newman a copy of Bishop William Beveridge’s Private Thoughts.531
In a letter thanking Mayers for Beveridge’s volume, Newman conveys confusion over a particular issue he had read about therein. The problem concerned the fate of infants who died apart from baptism. If, as Evangelicals such as Beveridge suggest, conversion is a conscious decision, therefore ruling out the efficacy of baptismal regeneration, on what basis can infants lay claim to Christian hope?532 Here is how Newman put the question to Mayers:
There is a passage in the first chapter of the second part [of Beveridge] that I don’t quite comprehend: it is on the Sacrament of Baptism. I had, before I read it, debated with myself how it could be that baptized infants, dying in their infancy, could be saved unless the Spirit of God was given them; which seems to contradict the opinion that Baptism is not accompanied by the Holy Ghost. Bp Beverage’s opinion seems to be that the seeds of grace are sown in Baptism although they often do not spring up; that Baptism is the mean whereby we receive the Holy Spirit, although not the only mean; that infants, when baptized, receive the inward and spiritual grace without the requisite repentance and faith.533
Sheridan, in his book, Newman on Justification, analyses Mayers’ answer to Newman in a letter dated April 14, 1817, and concludes that Mayers, like Beveridge, is comfortable affirming that regeneration may possibly be communicated in baptism, but not necessarily, as evidenced by the many “Christians” who constitute the visible church without actually belonging to the invisible church.534 In keeping with the Evangelical tendency to identify who is of the “real” church, regeneration (or “conversion” or “new life in Christ”) could only be known, in Mayers’ understanding, by observing the “fruit of maturer years.”535 This answer seemed to have satisfied Newman, since it was not until September 29, 1820 that the subject of baptismal regeneration once again arose in his writing.536
Newman’s correspondence with Mayers anticipates many of the concerns that re-emerge later in his life, particularly the question of Baptism’s efficacy and its relationship to repentance and faith. Bound up in this question is the concern of Newman and his Evangelical forebears to define the source of “real” Christian life, whether it is properly derived from the sacraments or faith alone.