D. Newman Questions His Evangelical Assumptions
D. Newman Questions His Evangelical Assumptions
When Newman was elected a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford in April of 1822, he expected that his Evangelical faith would be questioned.537 He was right. After Richard Whately helped the “awkward and timid” John Henry crawl out of his introverted shell, his views were immediately challenged by the liberal atmosphere of the Oriel Common Room.538 In the face of such scrutiny, the first piece of Newman’s Calvinism to slip away was the doctrine of predestination.539 But this was just the beginning. The Noetic triumvirate of Thomas Arnold (1795–1842), Richard Whately (1787–1863), and Edward Hawkins (1789–1882) would impose sustained pressure on Newman to step back and re-evaluate his religious assumptions.
Newman became a full fellow of Oriel on April 4, 1823, the same day as Edward Pusey and William Churton became probationer fellows. As Newman’s relationship with Pusey grew, so did his estimation of Pusey’s Christian faith. At first, Newman had regarded him as simply “moral.”540 Soon, Newman was expressing how impressed he was by Pusey’s seriousness toward religion.541 Finally, Newman confidently exclaims, “That Pusey is Thine, O Lord, how can I doubt?”542 They spent much time together discussing religion, Newman contending for the doctrine of imputation, Pusey denying it, with Newman “inclining to separate regeneration from baptism, [and Pusey] doubting its separation.”543
Despite his anti-Calvinist colleagues, Newman held fast to his Evangelical creed. Mayers, who remained a mentor until his death in 1828, persuaded Newman to take holy orders, and, in 1824, he was ordained deacon (the following year he would be ordained to the priesthood). After being appointed curate of Saint Clement’s, a working-class parish in east Oxford, Newman engaged in pastoral work with great enthusiasm. It was in this context that Newman started to question a sine qua non of Evangelicalism: the distinction between “nominal” and “real” Christians.
The importance of this tenet among Evangelicals ran deep. As Newsome explains,
Time and time again, Evangelicals would stress that there were two kinds of Christian—the nominal Christian and the “truly religious” or “real” Christian, a distinction which gained currency with the publication of Joseph Milner’s Church History, which appeared in stages during the 1790s and the following decade, and with Wilberforce’s own Practical View . . . this distinction was soon recognized as stock Evangelical phraseology—and indeed its acceptance rapidly became a sort of party shibboleth.”544
The question of whether such a distinction is theologically and pastorally defensible asserted itself in the summer of 1824. With many of the fellows away, Newman developed a closer relationship to Edward Hawkins, who advised the young protégé on his parochial duties, particularly on his preaching. Hawkins sharply criticized Newman’s first sermon, which, by its Evangelical denigration of baptismal regeneration, “divided the Christian world into two classes, the one all darkness, the other all light.”545 According to Newman, Hawkins chided him by explaining,
Men are not either saints or sinners; but they are not so good as they should be, and better than they might be. . . . Preachers should follow the example of St Paul; he did not divide his brethren into two, the converted and unconverted, but he addressed them all as “in Christ” . . . and this, while he was rebuking them for irregularities and scandals which had occurred among them.546
To drive his point further home, Hawkins gave Newman a copy of John Bird Sumner’s Apostolical Preaching, which showed that Paul addressed the visible church as a collective body of Christians who categorically possessed the Holy Spirit (and not two distinct groups of converted and unconverted).547 This work, coupled with an active routine of pastoral visitation, severely dented Newman’s regard for the distinction between real and nominal Christians.548 Working out this idea, especially in conversation with Edward Pusey, would eventually lead Newman to question his commitment to the doctrine of imputation.549 In his own words, writing in January of 1825, “I think, I am not certain, I must give up the doctrine of imputed righteousness and that of regeneration apart from baptism.”550
While Hawkins reoriented John Henry’s thinking on baptismal regeneration and imputation, he had yet another far-reaching influence, namely his stress upon the necessity of sacred tradition alongside of Scripture.551 While ultimately unsatisfying to Newman from an Anglican point of view (his conversion to Catholicism turned on the Roman Church’s ability to account for sacred tradition),552 the tacit acceptance of tradition, which started in 1825, was a critical departure from his Evangelical background, as Newman himself explains,
He [Hawkins] lays down a proposition, self-evident as soon as stated, to those who have at all examined the structure of Scripture, viz. that the sacred text was never intended to teach doctrine, but only to prove it, and that, if we would learn doctrine, we must have recourse to the formularies of the Church; for instance to the Catechism, and to the Creeds. He considers, that, after learning from them the doctrines of Christianity, the inquirer must verify them by Scripture.553
Newman’s commitment to tradition would eventually create a doctrinal impasse. To the extent that he studied the history of doctrine, he was confronted by the universal practice of infant baptism. Newman reasoned that if baptism does indeed constitute the rite of initiation into Christ, and not simply the visible church, as Evangelicals were inclined to see it, it would therefore be possible for infants to be regenerated. He was not ready to accept this conclusion yet. Instead, he opted for the position of Beveridge and Mayers, which viewed baptism as planting the seed of grace. But make no mistake about it; as Newman modified his views on regeneration and the authority of tradition, he pursued a new religious path.