H. The Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification
H. The Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification
Newman’s Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification was (and still is) a lightning rod. On the positive side, Chadwick calls it “a book that deserves to be ranked at least on a par with any of his more widely read writings on theology.”627 Ker describes it as “a pioneering classic of ‘ecumenical theology.”628 According to Alfred Plummer, the German historian J. J. Döllinger “always spoke of Newman’s Justification as the greatest masterpiece of theology that England had produced in a hundred years.”629 With similar approbation, the Swedish historian Yngve Brilioth regarded the Lectures as “perhaps the chief theological document of the Oxford Movement.”630 On the other hand, there have been a fair number of detractors. Faber, mentioned above, found Newman’s volume to be “confused and confusing.”631 Richard Holt Sutton dismissed the work as “somewhat straw-chopping and dry.”632 Most significantly, Bishop Charles Pettit M’Ilvaine of Ohio, whose lineage and personal interests belonged to Britain, was so disturbed by Newman’s position that he published a refutation in the form of a book of over five hundred pages, entitled Oxford Divinity compared with that of the Romish and Anglican Churches with a special view of the doctrine of Justification by Faith (1841). Whatever one’s perspective, the Lectures on Justification generally elicits a forceful and definite response.633
Newsome suggests that the Lectures on Justification may also be viewed as a clarification of sermons which Newman preached in the previous decade at St. Mary’s, in which he sought to disprove the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith only.634 Unlike his sermons, however, the Lectures speak with a strongly polemical tone in repudiation of the beliefs that he had once held as an Evangelical. Precisely because the doctrine of justification was so central to popular Protestantism, with its axiomatic focus upon a spiritual conversion, this subject was for Newman more than personal or theological; it was symbolic. Henry Chadwick is correct to point out that, “Without a treatment in some depth of the issue of justification, his statement of the via media must be gravely incomplete.”635 Now, at the age of thirty-six, Newman was evidently ready to conduct such a treatment.
The Lectures were initiated in Adam de Brome chapel on April 13, 1837. They were revised and published on March 30, 1838.636 Newman’s primary object for writing, according to Sheridan, “was to show how the Church of England understands the axiom ‘justification by faith only.’”637 Newman presented the position of Rome on justification as mostly true, but in some respects “defective.”638 The “ultra-Protestant” position (i.e., Evangelicalism), however, he denounces as simply “erroneous.”639 Even though Newman was meticulous in editing the Lectures,640 it makes no pretense of being a systematic treatment of the subject.641 So Sheridan writes, “[W]hile the overall picture is clear enough, the synthesis of the Lectures is far from complete in secondary details. There are some loose ends that do not fit into the complete pattern.”642
The Lectures should be understood as part of the larger project of Newman’s via media with his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, Parochial and Plain Sermons, Tracts for the Times, and Froude’s Remains. Thus, Newman opens the advertisement to the third edition:
These Lectures on the doctrine of Justification formed one of a series of works projected by the Author in illustration of what has often been considered to be the characteristic position of the Anglican Church, as lying in a supposed Via Media, admitting much and excluding much both of Roman and of Protestant teaching.643
Newman states his chief contention with Protestantism when he writes that “the Church considers the doctrine of justification by faith only to be a principle and the religion of the day takes it as a rule of conduct.”644 The tragic effect, as Newman saw it, was to reduce Christian faith to a subjective experience and to discard the urgency of obedience in favor of antinomianism.645 Facing such a crisis, Newman’s endeavored to steer a middle course between what he perceived as the extremes of solafideism (which he associates with “Lutherans who opposed Melanchthon”) and works-righteousness (namely, “Vásquez, Caietan, and other extreme writers of the Roman school”).646 Against these extremes, Newman occasionally identifies his position with the “English divines,” by which he largely meant the “Caroline divines,”647 in grounding justification in the instrumental causation of faith and works.648
Aware of the controversy crouching at his door, especially among Evangelicals, the footnotes of Newman’s Lectures mainly refer to Protestant authors. While Bishop George Bull (1634–1710) and Jeremy Taylor (1613–67) are occasionally presented as precursors of Newman’s position,649 a strong emphasis upon such infamous anti-Calvinists would not have served him well.650 Instead, he gives more attention to Richard Hooker (1554–1600) and a less occasional reference to John Davenant (1606–68).651 McGrath exposes the problematic way in which Newman connects the dots from Anglican history to his own position.652 After examining these historical movements, McGrath concludes,
Newman’s use of the later Caroline divines to determine what constitutes an authentically Anglican doctrine of justification is deeply problematic. The theology of justification of the post-Restoration divines, such as Bull and Taylor, by no means represents a unanimous or even the majority opinion within contemporary Anglicanism.653
The biggest historiographical error in Newman’s Lectures, however, is his treatment of Martin Luther. Newman gets Luther badly wrong, ostensibly collapsing his doctrine of justification into nineteenth-century Evangelicalism.654 Newman’s relative ignorance of Luther’s Reformation, his inability to read German, and a poor translation of Luther’s 1533 Commentary on Galatians (which was purged of anything that smelled Roman), worked against him.655 It is telling that Newman quotes from the John Gerhard’s Loci Theologici more than from Luther and Melanchthon.656 Most troublesome is that Newman quotes Luther with selective omissions that have the effect of altering the meaning of Luther’s doctrine.657 McGrath conducts an analysis of the most egregious of these instances and charitably concludes that the fault is probably owing to inadequate English translations of Luther.658
Newman’s most severe critique of Luther (and by extension the Evangelicals whom he represents) is reserved for the final chapter entitled, “On Preaching the Gospel.” By this point Newman has made his case. According to the “Advertisement to the Third Edition” (1874), his argument hangs together according to the following outhne.659 (1) The first two lectures delineate the Protestant and Catholic doctrines of justification. (2) Three lectures—the third, fourth, and fifth—inquire into the meaning of the term, “justification.” (3) The next four—the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth—determine what “real thing” is denoted by the term, “justification.” (4) In the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth, the office and nature of faith is examined in relation to justification. Additionally, a sixty-one-page appendix is devoted to understanding justification’s formal cause from the history of Christian thought.660 However, in between lecture twelve and the appendix is lecture thirteen, where, in Newman’s words, “practical application is made of the principles and conclusions of the foregoing Lectures, to the mode of preaching and professing the Gospel, popular thirty or forty years since, called Evangelical.”661 Here Newman the pastor pulls out all the superlatives and speaks with an extraordinary degree of candor.
The point of this chapter, as Newman’s clever turn-of-phrase states, is to respond to the “imputation of legalism” from Evangelical detractors. Newman spins the Protestant argument on its head by insisting that it is not creeds, rites, and works that inculcate self-righteousness and superstition; rather, it is Luther’s position of “faith only.” In addition to communicating the concern of this chapter, it also gives voice to the fundamental burden of Newman’s overall Lectures.
Men congratulate themselves on their emancipation from forms and their enlightened worship, when they are but in the straight course to a worse captivity, and are exchanging dependence on the creature for dependence on self.
I observe, then, that what the Jews felt concerning their Law, is exactly what many upholders of the tenet of “faith only,” feel concerning what they consider faith; that they substitute faith for Christ; they so regard it, that instead of being the way to Him, it is in this way; that they make it a something to rest in; nay, that they alter the meaning of the word, as the Jews altered the meaning of the word Law; in short, that, under the pretence of light and liberty, they have brought into the Gospel the narrow, minute, technical, nay, I will say carnal and hollow system of the Pharisees. . . . And thus faith and (what is called) spiritual-mindedness are dwelt on as ends, and obstruct the view of Christ, just as the Law was perverted by the Jews.662
After the original version of Newman’s Lectures was released in 1838, a second edition was published in 1840 with simple formatting changes. It was in 1874, five years before he was elevated to the Catholic Cardinalate, that Newman published the third and final edition. His stated reason for doing so appears in the opening page of the advertisement to the third edition, “Unless the Author held in substance in 1874 what he published in 1838, he would not at this time be reprinting what he wrote as an Anglican; certainly not with so little added by way of safeguard.”663 This resembles what Newman says in his Apologia: “What I held in 1816, I held in 1833, and I hold in 1864.”664 In our next chapter, after summarizing the substance of Newman’s position, we will consider whether his claim to consistency is in fact justified.