B. Incarnation
B. Incarnation
Instead of regarding justification as the articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae, Newman considered “incarnation” to be the chief tenet of Christian doctrine,698 what he called “the central truth of the Gospel, and the source whence we are to draw out its principles.”699 To some degree this reflects the historical and existential realities of Newman’s religious journey as expressed in his Apologia (1864) and in works like Loss and Gain (1848), in which ecclesial and sacramental categories are asserted with such force and definition that they function as an organizing principle for his theology in general and for soteriology in particular.
On account of its central importance in Newman’s thought, the concept of Christ’s incarnation is a suitable place to begin a study of his doctrine of justification. Newman’s principle of incarnation grows out of his own personal religious struggle, which may be summarized as a desire to commune with the living God—a value that can be traced from his early days as an Evangelical into subsequent years, when he lived in the full embrace of monastic values and settings. This melodic line runs through the whole of Newman’s religious experience and is even captured in the slogan of his coat of arms, “cor ad cor loquitur.”700 What is the ultimate heart to which a human heart can ever hope to speak? Newman provides the answer through the heroine of his novel, Callista (1856), who points to the divine heart of God: “[T]here was a higher beauty than that which the order and harmony of the natural world revealed and a deeper peace and calm than that which the exercise whether of the intellect or the purest human affection can supply.”701 To commune with God is the highest and most desirable end, and the incarnation makes this possible.
Newman’s view of Christ’s incarnation owes much to his reliance upon eastern fathers, a reliance he acquired in 1827 when he began to read a collection of patristic writings which Edward Pusey obtained for him in Germany.702 This study led to Newman’s first book, The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833), in which principles of the Alexandrian school, such as a high regard for the invisible presence of God and the inadequacy of human cognition for apprehending that presence, are developed and applied to the religious sociology of England in general and Oxford in particular.703 Emerging from these principles are themes that shaped Newman’s theological vision for the remainder of his life, particularly the importance of preserving divine “mystery,” totus Christus, and the sacramentality of the universe.704 The aggregate of these tenets may be expressed in terms of union with Christ and the saving effects that such solidarity produces.705 In Newman’s words,
The sanctification, or rather the deification of the nature of man, is one main subject of St. Athanasius’s theology. Christ, in rising, raises His saints with Him to the right hand of power. They become instinct with His life, of one body with His flesh, divine sons, immortal kings, gods. He is in them, because He is in human nature; and He communicates to them that nature deified by becoming His, that them It may deify.706
Thinking with the eastern tradition, Newman focuses on the persons of the Triune God to understand how divine life condescends in redemption. He concludes that it is in the Son of God “who came down on earth, and who thus, though graciously taking on Him[self] a new nature, remained in person as He had been from everlasting, the Son of the Father.”707 Accordingly, the Son, precisely because he possesses the same nature as the Father and the Spirit, is never considered in abstract isolation from the members of the Godhead (as popular Evangelicalism was susceptible to doing); rather, the triune deity is the starting point for understanding the person and mission of the incarnate Christ. So, Newman posits, “In truth His Divine Sonship is that portion of the sacred doctrine, on which the mind is providentially intended to rest throughout, and so to preserve for itself his identity unbroken.”708
The scope of Newman’s incarnational theology is enhanced by the teaching of St. Ignatius of Antioch, which upholds the centrality of the incarnation with the atonement in salvation, as events that are not simply in the past, “but as present facts, in an existing mode, in which our Saviour comes to us.”709 Here one sees how the principle of incarnation naturally leads to totus Christus, the embodiment of Christ’s person in his members. For example, in his sermon titled “The Mystery of Godliness” (published in 1840), Newman asserts,
He has taken our nature, and in and through it He sanctifies us. He is our brother by virtue of His incarnation, and, as the text says, “He is not ashamed to call us brethren;” and, having sanctified his nature in Himself, He communicates it to us.710
When Newman uses the plural “us,” he wishes to stress, in contradiction of his many Evangelical contemporaries, the community of God’s people, and not simply the individual Christian. What is more, unlike the Evangelical conception of the real church as invisible, Newman insisted that Christ’s body also has institutional dimensions.711 This “Communion of Saints” or “Kingdom,”712 as Newman described it, is inherently sacramental, which inevitably defines the character and structure of justification.713