A. Theological Contours of Newman’s Doctrine of Justification.
Chapter 4: John Henry Newman’s Doctrine of Justification
A. Theological Contours of Newman’s Doctrine of Justification.
Having examined the background to Newman’s doctrine of justification, we will now analyze the substance of his position. The leading edge of our inquiry is concerned with how he identified the fundamental ground for justification, the formal cause by which Newman understood God to remove guilt and impart righteousness to sinners.
Like Vermigli, Newman refuses to drive a wedge between the options of justification as a legal declaration and the process of internal renewal. In this way, Newman stands in close proximity to the Reformed tradition by holding a forensic action (based upon an iustitia alienum) in simultaneous harmony with the ongoing impartation of love and charity (impertita iustitia). Defining the precise manner of this internal work will require careful attention.
Newman highlights the forensic nature of justification by distinguishing the declaration from the gift that it declares. While unified in a single act, the two are regarded as notionally distinct, starting with the “Voice of the Lord” that pronounces one to be righteous:
Justification is the “glorious Voice of the Lord” declaring us to be righteous. That it is a declaration not a making, is sufficiently clear from this one argument that it is the justification of a sinner, of one who has been a sinner; and the past cannot be reversed except by accounting it reversed.669
Motivating this legal pronouncement is “a real and gracious act on God’s part towards us sinners.”670 Following Augustine, Newman highlights the initiative of grace, occasioned by the human problem of guilt, the impious nature in which sinners are naturally born, and according to which they are justly condemned.671 To deny this or to rely upon one’s own righteousness, says Newman, amounts to the sin of pride—a vice that he routinely opposed in the liberalism of his day.672 But unlike Augustine, Newman recognizes the need for an “imputing righteousness,”673 an “estimation of righteousness [in Christ] vouchsafed to the past, and extending from the past to the present as far as the present is affected by the past.”674 In other words, since the problem of human guilt is exhibited before the judgment seat of God, a particularly judicial action is therefore supposed.675
Newman read the Evangelicals of his day as holding that justification consisted in a mere imputation and he therefore devoted roughly the first third of his Lectures (1838) to showing the distinction, but no separation, between justification and renewal.676 His problem is not with “imputation” per se; what he rejects is a “mere” imputation.677 In this way, Newman concedes that justification “viewed relatively to the past is forgiveness of sin, for nothing more it can be; but considered as to the present and future it is more, it is renewal wrought in us by the Spirit of Him who by His merits completes what is defective in that renewal.”678
Newman is equally insistent on the internal work of the Spirit. “The Voice of the Lord,” he states, “is mighty in operation . . . it has a sacramental power, being the instrument as well as the sign of His will.”679 Concerning the content of this activity, Newman continues, “Imputed righteousness is the coming in of actual righteousness,” since God’s word never returns to him void, but accomplishes what he pleases.680 Reaching beyond a mere legal declaration into the realms of history and ethics, justification establishes new creation by means of the indwelling presence of God.
He [God] imputes, not a name but a substantial Word, which, being “ingrafted” in our own hearts, “is able to save our souls. . . . God’s word, I say, effects what it announces. This is its characteristic all through Scripture. He “calleth those things which be not, as though they are,” and they are forthwith. Thus in the beginning He said, “Let there be light, and there was light. Word and deed went together in creation; and so again ‘in the regeneration.’681
In Newman’s et . . . et approach, insisting on both a forensic and an operative justification, he presupposes a duplex iustitia in which accounting righteous and making righteousness are bound together in an organic unity. Throughout his Lectures on Justification, Newman explains this pattern with the datum of redemptive history, where the one vindicated by God is also renovated, insisting that the two activities go hand-in-hand. In one of the more commonly known quotes from Newman’s Lectures, he argues,
We may, if we will, divide this event into parts, and say that it is both pardon and renovation, but such a division is merely mental, and does not affect the change itself, which is but one act. If a man is saved from drowning, you may, if you will, say he is both rescued from the water and brought into the atmospheric air; this is a discrimination in words and not in things. . . . In like manner, there is, in fact, no middle state between a state of wrath and a state of holiness. In justifying, God takes away what is past, by bringing in what is new. He snatches us out of the fire by lifting us in His everlasting hands, and enwrapping us in His own glory.682
In this particular analogy, it is difficult to see how deliverance from the suffocating water unto the freedom of atmospheric air illustrates the movement from justification (salvation from divine wrath) unto sanctification (an increased realization of holiness). Both of these images signify the initial point of justification when one is delivered from the imminent danger of God’s judgment. Since Newman means by sanctification the development of actual righteousness, his analogy would benefit from something other than the liberating presence of fresh air. Air, it turns out, is an excellent analogy for Newman’s concept of divine presence—something extra nos that reaches one’s interior and from there provides life. Actual righteousness, however, in terms of manifesting good works, is better represented by an actual activity such as an impressive swim stroke.
Another way to describe Newman’s approach is in terms of the “both/and” relationship of justification and sanctification. Newman regards their distinction, which was so often argued by the Evangelical party of the Church of England, as “technical and unscriptural.”683 This “unreal righteousness,” says Newman, is an aberration.
Away then with this modern, this private, this arbitrary, this unscriptural system, which promising liberty conspires against it; which abolishes Christian Sacraments to introduce barren and dead ordinances; and for the real participation of the Son, and justification through the Spirit, would, at the very marriage feast, feed us on shells and husks, who hunger and thirst after righteousness. It is a new gospel, unless three hundred years stand for eighteen hundred. . . . [I]f men are bent on seducing us from the ancient faith, let them provide a more specious error, a more alluring sophism, a more angelic tempter, than this.684
After critiquing the Evangelical party, Newman levels a similar charge at the Roman Catholic position. His aim is not focused upon any official statements of the Church, but rather on some unnamed theologians who appeared to be reducing justification to the habit of obedience that results from God’s favor. Such an approach, argues Newman, replaces a properly Christ-centered vision with unhealthy introspection (incurvatus in se).685
Newman added a footnote in the third edition (1874) of his Lectures, which embellished upon his disagreement with the Catholic position and identifies the particular theologians that he had in mind:
This school is elsewhere called in these Lectures ultra-Roman or extreme Romanist. Such Catholic divines as Caietan, Vasquez, and Bellarmine were intended by this title, who, by making justification consist in the habit of charity or again in good works, not in sanctifying grace as an initial and distinct gift from above, seemed to the writer to fix the mind, equally with Anglican Arminians, not on a Divine inward Presence vouchsafed to it, but on something of its own, as a ground to rest upon and take satisfaction in. Of course, such a judgment seems to him now unreal and arbitrary.686
Newman’s qualification clarifies his point of disagreement with the Catholic position. Due to what he perceived as a reduction of justification to a religious transaction—an exchange of “the [mere] influence of grace, not as the operations of a living God, but as something to bargain about, and buy, and traffic”—Newman expressed reservations about the phrase “inherent righteousness.”687
If the Presence of Christ is our true righteousness, first conveyed into us by Baptism, then more sacredly and mysteriously in the Eucharist, we have really no inherent righteousness at all. What seems to be inherent, may be more properly called adherent, depending as it does, wholly and absolutely upon the Divine indwelling, not ours to keep, but as heat in a sickly person, sustained by a cause distinct from himself.688
With this taxonomy, Newman lays the groundwork for his via media. While “righteousness” is in the first place God’s forensic declaration, the essence of justification, for Newman, consisted in the indwelling of the divine presence. Therefore, what Protestants commonly call “justification” (the judicial pronouncement) and sanctification (internal renewal) are, Newman reiterates throughout his Lectures, joined as one:
• “Justification and sanctification were [are] in fact substantially one and the same thing . . . [they are] parts of one gift, properties, qualities, or aspects of one.”689
• “Justification, then, as such, is an imputation; but the actual Gospel gift called justification is more, it is renewal also.”690
• “Justification renews, therefore I say it may fitly be called renewal.”691
• “It is a parallel mode of speaking, to say that justification consists in renewal, or that renewal constitutes justification.”692
• “[Justification] consists of two parts, acceptance and renewal.”693
• “Again, we speak of being baptized with God’s grace; and thus we may allowably say that we are justified or accepted by obedience. And we might of course with propriety urge that baptism is not a mere outward rite, but an inward power; and so we may say that justification is a change of heart.”694
• “I have been arguing from the essential union between justification and renewal, that they are practically convertible terms.”695
Even though Newman’s Lectures portray justification and sanctification as one, they also state that justification is in some sense the beginning of sanctification: “Justification tends to sanctify.” 696 The elasticity of these terms enables Newman to affirm the Thirty-Nine Articles, when it says, “We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own works or deservings.”697 How exactly this works, particularly with reference to the formal cause or ground of justification, is the critical question. It will be taken up by considering the constituent elements of Newman’s position and their arrangement, and evaluating its theological integrity.