Section 13

Section 13 5 Justification

Thomas L. Sheridan

The young Evangelical’s creed (1817–1822)

From 1 August to 21 December 1816 a very young John Henry Newman underwent a conversion which Louis Bouyer has described as an experience which ‘left its seal upon him forever’.¹ Newman never repudiated that conversion, nor did he ever question its authenticity. Many years later he said of it: ‘When I was fifteen (in the autumn of 1816) a great change of thought took place in me. I fell under the influences of a definite creed and received into my intellect impressions of dogma which, through God’s mercy, have never been effaced or obscured.’²

Later he specified that this creed was ‘at the time Calvinistic in character’, adding that the religious impressions he then received ‘were to him the beginning of a new life’.³ In calling it ‘Calvinistic’ Newman was not referring to Calvinism as understood on the European continent at the time but rather to the doctrines of the Evangelical party of the Church of England.

The Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth century was basically a reaction to the cold, lifeless form of religion which prevailed within much of the Church of England of the time. As such it was an appeal more to the heart than to the head. Nevertheless, despite allowing for a wide variety of doctrinal interpretations, there were certain essential points on which all Evangelicals were agreed. Fundamental to all of these was the firm conviction of the total depravity of human nature as a result of Adam’s sin. But to remedy this there was the great good news of the Gospel: the Atonement, which for Evangelicals meant that Christ was punished not only on behalf of, but instead of, sinful humankind. Equal stress was placed upon the doctrine of grace, or God’s free mercy, with a consequent rejection of the ‘Roman blasphemy’ of merit, and upon the doctrine of justification by faith alone as the sole instrumental cause of salvation. For those who were justified by the free gift of the Holy Spirit there was the certainty of the state of grace and of final salvation. Finally, the sole authority for all their teaching was the Bible.

Newman first encountered Evangelicalism in the person of one of his teachers at Ealing School, the Rev Walter Mayers, himself a recent convert.⁴ In addition to Mayers’s personal influence, mention must be made of the books he gave the young boy to read, most notably the works of Thomas Scott of Aston Sandford, of whom Newman later said that he was ‘the writer who made a deeper impression on my mind than any other, and to whom (humanly speaking) I almost owe my soul’.⁵ It was principally from him that Newman received those doctrines that would comprise his Evangelical creed. ‘What, I suppose, will strike any reader of Scott’s history and writings’, Newman wrote, ‘is his bold unworldliness and vigorous independence of mind. He followed the truth wherever it led him, beginning with Unitarianism, and ending in a zealous faith in the Holy Trinity . . . It was he who first planted deep in my mind that fundamental truth of religion.’⁶ It was his deep sense of the majesty of the Triune God and the purity of His Law, of the utter incompatibility between God and the sinfulness of His creatures, that inspired Scott in his life-long crusade against antinomianism, the view that Christians are freed by the Gospel from the obligation of observing the moral law. It was from him that Newman adopted the adage that sustained him in so many of the controversies in which he would later be embroiled, ‘Holiness rather than peace’.

It was while he was at Trinity College, Oxford, that in 1821, ‘the date, be it observed, when he was more devoted to the evangelical creed and more strict in his religious duties than at any previous time’,⁷ Newman penned a document, entitled A collection of Scripture passages setting forth in due order of succession the doctrines of Christianity, in which he summed up his Evangelical creed.⁸ It is written in a florid style in which he seems to be consciously imitating Bishop William Beveridge, whose Private Thoughts Mayers had given him in 1817 and which he said had also exercised a most powerful influence on his thinking.

In this document are found all of the main tenets of Evangelicalism: the cardinal principle of justification by faith and faith alone, with the consequent disparaging remarks about baptismal regeneration; the dim view of human nature as corrupted by original sin (‘man does only evil continually’, and even of the justified man it is said that ‘his understanding is still darkened and his heart polluted’); insistence upon the complete gratuity of election; the predestination of individuals to salvation (whereas the rest are simply left to the condemnation which they have deserved); final perseverance; and a certain vindictive quality in God’s justice, which demands that redemption be not merely a question of Christ’s obedience, but of punishment as well.

Newman would later question, not the reality of his conversion, but whether it was a truly Evangelical conversion as understood by Evangelicals themselves. Many years later he would write of himself: ‘In truth, much as he owed to the evangelical teaching, so it was he had never been a genuine evangelical . . . He had indeed been converted to it by spiritual life, and so far his experience bore witness to its truth; but he had not been converted in that special way which it laid down as imperative, but so plainly against rule, as to make it very doubtful in the eyes of normal evangelicals whether he had really been converted at all.’⁹

The gradual rejection of Evangelicalism (1822–1825)

Newman was elected a fellow of Oriel in April of 1822 although, as he himself confessed, he did not fully ‘come out of his shell’ until 1826. His initial feeling of isolation was due not only to his natural shyness but also, as he himself pointed out, ‘the result of his Calvinistic beliefs’.¹⁰ In order to see what could be done with this shy young fellow, the members of the Oriel Common Room enlisted the aid of Richard Whately, of whom Newman would later say: ‘I owe him a great deal . . . While I was still awkward and timid in 1822, he took me by the hand, and acted towards me the part of a gentle and encouraging instructor. He, emphatically, opened my mind, and taught me to think and to use my reason.’¹¹

Nevertheless, Newman still clung to his Evangelical creed, although he had already noted ‘a gradual fading away’ of his belief in the final perseverance of the just.¹² E. B. Pusey was elected a fellow of Oriel in April 1823 and Newman immediately recognized a kindred spirit in him, but in his journal he regretted that he seemed to be ‘prejudiced against Thy children’.¹³ The two spent many hours discussing religion, Newman arguing for imputed righteousness and Pusey against, Newman ‘inclining to separate regeneration from baptism, he doubting its separation, etc.’.¹⁴

Another Oriel fellow who contributed to Newman’s development at this time was Edward Hawkins, Vicar of St Mary’s. In June of 1824 Newman had been ordained a deacon in the Church of England and begun to serve as curate of nearby St Clement’s. Hawkins read Newman’s sermons, criticizing not just their style, but also their content. He came down hard on Newman’s first sermon, which by its implicit denial of baptismal regeneration ‘divided the Christian world into two classes, the one all darkness, the other all light’. Hawkins denied that there was any such line, insisting that people ‘are not either saints or sinners; but they are not so good as they should be, and better than they might be’,¹⁵ a truth which Newman was to discover for himself very shortly when he instituted a programme of parish visitation at St Clement’s.¹⁶

Hawkins continued to criticize his sermons, but Newman did not give in easily. His early sermons at St Clement’s continued to be strongly Evangelical in tone and content. But Hawkins also influenced Newman in a way that was to have more far-reaching consequences; he taught him what Newman later referred to as ‘the quasi-Catholic doctrine of Tradition, as a main element in ascertaining and teaching the truths of Christianity’.¹⁷ This, of course, struck at another Evangelical principle, namely, that Scripture is the sole source of Christian teaching.

Two days after completing his parish visitation, on 15 August 1824, he wrote in his private journal: ‘The question of regeneration perplexes me very much’. He had been reading John Bird Sumner’s Apostolic Preaching, which he said ‘threatens to drive me either into Calvinism, or baptismal regeneration, and I wish to steer clear of both, at least in preaching’.¹⁸ By the beginning of the year 1825 he was all but decided to ‘give up the doctrine of imputed righteousness and that of regeneration as apart from baptism’. But in that same journal entry he immediately added: ‘Let me, however, explain myself on the latter subject. It seems to me the great stand is to be made, not against those who connect a spiritual change with baptism, but those who deny a spiritual change altogether.’¹⁹

Having recently discovered the importance of tradition, Newman’s investigations had convinced him that there was no escaping the fact of the constant and universal practice of infant baptism. But this posed a tremendous problem, with which he wrestled in a course of six sermons on faith preached on Sunday mornings from 20 February 1825 to 27 March: if baptism is the rite of admission into the true Church of Christ – and not just the visible Church (a distinction which he would soon reject) – this meant that infants are capable of being regenerated, that is to say, changed in their minds and hearts. But Newman was still reluctant to accept this. Instead he fell back on a solution suggested to him many years earlier when he had posed this problem to Walter Mayers: while baptism does not convey the Holy Spirit as thereby regenerating in the proper sense of the word, it does ‘place a person in a state of favour such, that God is henceforth bound by covenant to favour him with His Spirit, as he can bear it’.²⁰

But in 1825 Newman was still a long way from accepting the full doctrine of baptismal regeneration.

The final rejection of Evangelicalism (1825–1827)

Reviewing, in his ‘Autobiographical Memoir’ of 1874, the various influences that led to his gradual rejection of Evangelicalism, Newman wrote:

Mr Newman, then, before many months of his clerical life were over [he had been ordained a priest on 29 May 1825], had taken the first step towards giving up the evangelical form of Christianity; however, for a long while certain shreds and tatters of that doctrine hung about his preaching, nor did he for a whole ten years altogether sever himself from those great religious societies and their meetings which then as now were the rallying ground and the strength of the Evangelical body. Besides Sumner, Butler’s celebrated work, which he studied about the year 1825 had, as was natural, an important indirect effect upon him in the same direction, as placing his doctrinal views on a broad philosophical basis, with which an emotional religion could have little sympathy.²¹

Recounting in the Apologia how in 1827 the reading of Keble’s Christian Year had reinforced in his own mind the two principles he had learned from Butler, Newman refers to the one which is germane to our inquiry as ‘the sacramental system’, the realization that the material world is not just a sign, pointing to the world of the supernatural; it is the instrument, the means whereby we enter into contact with this world.

Butler’s influence is to be seen in three sermons preached towards the end of 1825. In the first of these, in order to encourage those who feel that they must wait for some extraordinary visitation of God’s grace before they can repent of their sins and be converted, he says: Not so: ‘God’s time is already come, it was the time of baptism. He has given grace and will give more to all who ask Him . . . All are invited to Christ through baptism as the means of his grace.’ The second sermon, ‘On the Communion of Saints’, echoes this same theme of the Holy Spirit given to the Church as a whole. In the third sermon, ‘The Use of the Visible Church’, we see that Newman still held that distinction between the visible and the invisible Church, but he stresses the importance of the visible Church as the ordinary means of instruction in God’s revelation.²²

But Newman still does not speak of ‘baptismal regeneration’. For Newman ‘regeneration’ is sanctification, and at least at this stage of his development, holiness for Newman is essentially moral holiness. Now moral holiness must show itself in action. So in the sense that the newly baptized child has been given the Holy Spirit in baptism as the principle of change of mind and heart, the child can be said to be regenerated, but only in a less proper sense. Regeneration is a life-long process, a never-ending struggle in which the inspirations of the indwelling Spirit are constantly needed to repulse the attacks of indwelling evil.

Nevertheless, in a paper of over sixty pages on ‘Infant Baptism’ in answer to his brother Frank’s objections to the direction in which he had been going, we can see that Newman had finally abandoned the distinction between the visible and the invisible Church.²³ The members of the true Church are the baptized. In his rejection of the Evangelicals’ subjective criterion of membership in favour of the objective criterion of baptism, we see Newman’s definitive break with Evangelicalism.

‘Shreds and tatters’ of Evangelicalism (1829)

Beginning on 25 January 1829 and continuing on Sunday afternoons to 28 June, with one long interruption during March and April for a Lenten series, Newman delivered a series of sermons on the Epistle to the Romans.²⁴ The series is interesting because it incorporates many, though not all, of the changes we have seen in Newman’s thought while still exhibiting what he would later call the ‘shreds and tatters of Evangelicalism’.

The entire series may be summed up under two headings: (1) justification by faith only, and (2) the necessity of obedience, even for the just. (1) Since man is incapable of pleasing God by his own efforts at justification, his only recourse is to faith: that is to say, to trust in God’s mercy for his only justification, a trust which is founded on the realization of his own sinfulness and helplessness. Whereas this is the only means of justification in any dispensation, the Christian is more blessed in this respect than others in that he has the assurance that he will be so justified. (2) This inability to please God by his obedience does not, however, take away the obligation and the necessity of obedience to the Law of God for all men, the Christian included. For the Law of God still stands, as both conscience and Bible testify. Obedience is a necessity for the further reason that it is only by acts of obedience proceeding from faith that a man can grow in that holiness which is necessary to fit him for the enjoyment of heaven. The obedience of the Christian, however, is different from the obedience of other men in that it is characterized by a freedom which proceeds from love and by an absence of fear.

Some of these individual sermons will be preached again later on by Newman, and it is interesting to see certain changes he made in editing them. For example, in the 1829 redaction of sermon no. 4 he had written: ‘If he is saved, it must not be by an obedience to which he cannot attain but as the next best way, by confession and trust towards God, by faith’. In the 1834 redaction this is changed to read (changes are indicated in capital letters): ‘If he is saved, it must not be by THAT PERFECT obedience to which he cannot attain but as the next best way, by confession and trust towards God, AND OBEYING AS WELL AS HE CAN AND by faith IN ORDER THAT HE MAY OBEY AND BY FAITH SO FAR AS HE CANNOT OBEY’.

The definitive solution to the problem of faith and obedience will be found in the idea of the Indwelling of the Holy Spirit, which will be the heart of Newman’s doctrine in the Lectures on Justification. In these sermons on Romans there is frequent mention of the Holy Spirit, but almost as it were in passing, except for one passage in the very last sermon which presages that further development:

Now the agent producing in our hearts this spiritual state, be it more or less developed within us, is the Holy Spirit . . . By him it is said Christians are born to a new life . . . We are baptized before we begin to think, as an acknowledgment that He must come to us before we move a step towards Him – and not only must His grace once precede us, but ever, throughout our lives. He must dwell in us according to His own gracious promise . . . Faith, the first principle of the spiritual mind, is from Him, and all graces springing from faith come too from His guardian care – so the whole new man – according to the words ‘God worketh in us to will and to do of his good pleasure’.

(Phil 2)

Deepening of the Anglo-Catholic perspective (1830–1835)

By the year 1830 his investigations into the question of baptismal regeneration had led Newman to the great discovery of the Church. But now he saw that same Church threatened by new developments, particularly what he referred to as ‘Liberalism’, namely ‘the mistake of subjecting to human judgment those revealed doctrines which are in their nature beyond and independent of it, and of claiming to determine on intrinsic grounds the truth and value of propositions which rest for their reception simply on the external authority of the Divine Word’.²⁵ News of developments in England, which reached him while on a Mediterranean voyage, further added to his anxiety, all the more so because of the helplessness he felt at such a distance from home.

Arriving home on 9 July 1833 Newman found that others beside himself were dismayed by the Liberal threat and ready to do something to combat it. Their answer was what came to be called the Oxford Movement, and one of its principal instruments was the Tracts for the Times. Prior to deciding to write his own treatise on baptism, Pusey had asked Newman to write on the subject. When Pusey’s volume appeared in 1835, Newman’s much shorter tract, though almost ready for the publisher, was never sent. Instead, as he notes at the head of the manuscript, it was ‘turned into sermons’.²⁶

Writing in an irenic spirit which contrasts sharply with the polemical tone of the subsequent Lectures on Justification, Newman explains from the outset that he is not so much interested in proving the doctrine of baptismal regeneration as in explaining what is meant by it. For ‘a great number at least of members of the Church who are suspicious of it, would receive it, if they understood it’. Newman hopes thereby to enlist the Evangelicals as allies in the struggle against Liberalism. Many of these were at first sympathetic to the Tractarians, only to turn against them later on when they detected what they took to be signs of ‘papist sympathies’.

Newman approaches the subject gradually. He does not speak of regeneration until page 18 of his thirty-five-page manuscript, and the word ‘baptism’ does not appear until page 23. Instead he begins with a common starting-point: election, original sin, and the kingdom of heaven. Throughout the treatise the stress is on the mysterious nature of the divine dispensation, in contrast to the rationalistic mentality of the common adversary. The gift which is bestowed on man by the Holy Spirit in regeneration is the imparting of a new nature; it is something holy and mysterious, different in kind from anything possessed by nature, raising the soul to what it was not before. Newman wants to reassure the Evangelicals that he is not reducing the gift of regeneration to a mere outward formality, as they might have feared. But at the same time he is careful to guard against their mistaking his concept of regeneration for their own. Thus the imparting of a new nature is ‘only the beginning of the future gift of perfection and immortality’.

Newman meets the principal objection of the Evangelicals, and one which he himself had once shared, namely the lack of holiness in so many of the baptized, by showing that the regeneration of which he is speaking does not consist in holiness, but in something higher. Certain characteristics are given, for example, that it is completely unconditioned and the imparting of it is sudden and complete. Mostly it is described in its effects: ‘It brings the soul into a mysterious state . . . man regenerate is initiated into the unseen world’. But what is this gift? The answer is given in the sermons which Newman preached during the period immediately following the writing of this tract. It is the gift of the Indwelling Spirit whereby, as St Peter tells us, we are made partakers of the Divine Nature.²⁷

It is here that we see the influence of the Fathers of the Church whom Newman had been reading avidly all during these years. The doctrine of humanity’s divinization, of their restoration into the image and likeness of God which they had lost by sin, and this through baptism and the Eucharist, is so much a part of the teaching of the Fathers that it could not have failed to make an impression on Newman. This impression was undoubtedly confirmed by the reading which he was also doing at this time of the works of the great Anglican divines of the seventeenth century such as Launcelot Andrewes and George Bull.

This special indwelling of the Holy Spirit is directly linked to regeneration:

The Holy Ghost . . . dwells in body and soul, as in a temple. He pervades us (if it may be so said) as light pervades a building, or as a sweet perfume the folds of some honourable robe, so that, in Scripture language, we are said to be in Him and He in us. It is plain that such an inhabitation brings the Christian into a state altogether new and marvellous, far above the possession of mere gifts, exalts him inconceivably in the scale of beings, and gives him a place and an office which he had not before . . . This wonderful change from darkness to light, through the entrance of the Spirit into the soul, is called Regeneration, or the New Birth; a blessing which, before Christ’s coming, not even Prophets and righteous men possessed, but which is now conveyed to all men freely through the Sacrament of Baptism.²⁸

The final synthesis (1837–1838)

By the year 1837 Newman had reached the final stage in the development of his thought on the subject of justification, and it was time for a synthesis. The needed synthesis came, to a certain extent, in the Lectures on Justification published in 1838 – ‘to a certain extent’, because the theology of the Lectures is not systematic, but polemic. Newman had failed in his attempt to win the Evangelicals over to his side in the struggle against Liberalism. In fact, in the unpublished tract on baptism he implied that they themselves had given in to the Liberal temptation. For in maintaining that ‘the lives of baptized Christians show that they are not regenerate’ and that ‘it is inconceivable that children should have a moral change wrought in them’, were they not being led rather by reason than by faith?

And so it is the Evangelicals who are now clearly the adversary, though the greater danger of Liberalism is never far from Newman’s mind.²⁹ Oddly enough, it is Martin Luther on whom Newman principally trains his guns. Whether the system that Newman was refuting should be traced back to Luther himself is open to question. But I think that anyone who compares what Newman says about Luther himself and his doctrine would have to agree that Newman is not, in fact, entirely fair to Luther. For, in actual fact, Luther’s own doctrine had much in common with the position that John Henry Newman was defending, as will be shown in the course of this chapter.

Newman had become convinced that the Catholic position on justification and regeneration was being rejected outright by many members of the Church of England because of a one-sided view of the doctrine of ‘justification by faith only’ which, he believed, was not the traditional teaching of that Church, namely, an interpretation of that axiom which was widespread in the Evangelical party, particularly among its more enthusiastic members. The fact of the matter, as Newman viewed it, was that many members of his Church simply did not know what their Church stood for. Hence the need to construct what he called a via media, not as a compromise between two contrasting opinions, but as a return to primitive Christianity as it existed prior to what he called Protestant ‘exaggerations’ and Roman Catholic ‘corruptions’. Such a return was possible, he felt, by gathering into a systematic body of theology the wisdom of the golden era of Anglican theology, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Lectures on Justification were to be one contribution to this all-important task. As we have seen, to the extent that Newman’s thought developed away from Evangelicalism, he gradually came to see that the blessings of justification and regeneration were conferred not in the Evangelical experience of conversion but by admission into the Church through the sacrament of baptism. He did not arrive at this conclusion, however, independently of a doctrine which he had received from his Evangelical masters, namely that justification and regeneration are the work of the Holy Spirit. Even in his Evangelical days he was willing to admit that baptism might under certain circumstances bring a person within the sphere of influence of the Holy Spirit. The reason, then, why he finally accepted baptismal regeneration was that he came to see that baptism admitted to the Church which was that sphere of influence in its concrete realization.

On the other hand, while Newman’s thought was developing along these lines, his understanding of the proper role of the Holy Spirit was also deepening. He came to see that the Spirit’s work of regeneration did not consist merely in moral betterment, but in a communication of the divine nature to a person through His indwelling presence, that regeneration was in fact this divine Indwelling.

These two ideas achieve a final synthesis in the Lectures on Justification.³⁰ ‘The great benefit of justification . . . is this one thing – the transference of the soul from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of Christ’.³¹ On the other hand, ‘this is to be justified, to receive the Divine Presence within us, and be made a Temple of the Holy Ghost’.³² It stands to reason, therefore, that incorporation into this Kingdom and the entrance of the divine Presence into the soul are one and the same thing. The Spirit does not enter into us to leave us what we were before. ‘For what in truth is the gift [of justification] but a grafting invisibly into the Body of Christ; a mysterious union with Him, a fellowship in all the grace and blessedness which is hidden in Him?’³³ Hence ‘our justification, or being accounted righteous by Almighty God, consists in our being grafted into the Body, or made members of Christ, in God dwelling in us and our dwelling in God, and the Holy Ghost is the gracious Agent in this wonderful work’.³⁴ The indwelling of the Holy Spirit is directly linked by Newman with the Resurrection of Christ. Newman distinguishes two moments in the act of salvation: the Atonement, of which Christ in his body ‘of flesh’ was the ‘sole Agent’, and justification, of which the Holy Spirit is the ‘sole agent’. But justification is still termed a ‘part’ of ‘Christ’s work of mercy’. For not only is it the ‘application of the Atonement’, but that application is made by the ‘Spirit of Christ’, the One sent by Christ upon His Resurrection. There is some mysterious connection between Christ’s rising and the Spirit’s coming, so close that we can say that ‘His going to the Father was, in fact, the same thing as His coming to us spiritually’.³⁵ The Spirit sent by Christ, because He is the Spirit of Christ, unites us to the risen Body of Christ and transforms us into Him. The Resurrection then is not just a condition, but a true cause of our justification.

Although the divine Indwelling lies at the heart of Newman’s theology of justification, his main object in writing the Lectures on Justification was to show how the Church of England understands the axiom ‘justification by faith only’. His adversaries interpreted it to mean two things: (1) that justification is a question of mere imputation, ‘a change in God’s sight’, and (2) that faith, by which is meant a special kind of trust, is the only instrument of justification, excluding not only works but also sacraments. In addition, says Newman, they held that faith is also the only means of regeneration, the ‘change within’, which is not to be identified with justification, since we are not justified by anything ‘in us’.

As regards the first point, Newman agrees that the word justification itself does mean a declaring righteous, in other words an imputation. But, he says, this is a divine imputation. It is ‘a declaring righteous while it proceeds to make us righteous’.³⁶

‘The Voice of the Lord is mighty in operation, the Voice of the Lord is a glorious Voice’. It is not like some idle sound, or a vague rumour coming at random, and tending no whither, but it is ‘the Word which goeth out of His mouth’; it has a sacramental power, being the instrument as well as the sign of His will. It never can return ‘unto Him void’, ‘but it accomplishes that which He pleases, and prospers in the thing whereto He sends it’. Imputed righteousness is the coming in of actual righteousness. They whom God’s sovereign voice pronounces just, forthwith become in their measure just. He declares a fact, and makes it a fact by declaring it. He imputes not a name, but a substantial Word, which, being ‘ingrafted’ in our own hearts, ‘is able to save our souls’.³⁷

Or, as he says so beautifully later on: ‘Justification is an announcement or fiat of Almighty God breaking upon the gloom of our natural state as the Creative Word upon chaos’.³⁸

With statements such as these we can see Newman’s care to show that the Catholic position on justification safeguards all the positive values that a mere-imputation theory wishes to vindicate, and more. Far from detracting from God’s mercy and liberality, it magnifies His power and His love. Nor is the creature given undue credit: our justification, while in us, is not of us. It is the indwelling presence of God: ‘He imputes, not a name, but a substantial Word’. This is not to deny that it is intrinsic to us: we are made righteous. But ours is a participated righteousness, depending entirely on the righteousness of Christ as its source: ‘None but the Eternal Son, who is incommunicably like the Father, can be infinitely acceptable to Him or simply righteous. Yet in proportion as rational beings are like the Son, or partake of Him, so are they really righteous; in proportion as God sees His Son in them, He is well-pleased with them.’³⁹

Newman never questioned the validity of the axiom ‘justification by faith only’. It was accepted by the Church of England in its eleventh Article as ‘a most wholesome Doctrine’. His problem was to show how it was to be understood without admitting what he called the ‘ultra-Protestant’ interpretation of the formula. The key to the solution of this problem was furnished by the Article itself, which refers to the ‘Homily of Justification’ for a fuller explanation of it. The Homily states that: ‘The very true meaning of this proposition or saying, we be justified by faith only (according to the meaning of the old ancient authors) is this, We put our faith in Christ, that we be justified by Him only’.⁴⁰ The emphases are those supplied by Newman in citing this passage. In other words: ‘Salvation by faith only’ is but another way of saying salvation by grace only. Again, it is intended to humble man, and to remind him that nothing he can do of himself can please God; so that ‘by faith’ means ‘not by works of ours’.⁴¹ In short, faith is ‘a symbol of the nature and mode of our justification, or of its history’. This is the special ‘office’ of faith: ‘It magnifies the grace of God, and is a sort of witness of its freeness and its largeness’.⁴²

But is faith only a symbol of the gratuity of our justification? Does it not also have an instrumental role therein? Newman realizes that he is obliged by the Homilies to grant that it does. How is he also to maintain the equally unique role of baptism? This is where matters become a bit more complicated.

First of all, it is clear that whether speaking of faith as symbol or faith as instrument, what Newman means by faith remains the same. Faith is:

an original means of knowledge, not resolvable into sense, or what is commonly called reason, confirmed indeed by experience, as they are, but founded on a supernaturally implanted instinct; an instinct developed by religious obedience, and leading the mind to the word of Christ and of His Apostles as its refuge.⁴³

When Newman is speaking of faith as an instrument, he is clearly talking of either the act or the habit of faith. On the other hand, when he is referring to faith as a symbol, he is not speaking of either of these, but of faith considered in the abstract. It is almost as if all he meant by ‘faith’ here was the word itself. Take for example the comparison he draws between faith in this context and the name ‘rock’ or ‘foundation’ which our Lord gave to Peter, not intending thereby to exclude the other Apostles from being foundations also:

His name expresses what all of them, including himself, really are, – foundations. In like manner, on the explanation before us, faith is said to justify, not that it really justifies more than other graces, but it has this peculiarity, that it signifies, in its very nature, that nothing of ours justifies us . . . Faith heralds forth divine grace, and its name is a sort of representation of it, as opposed to works.⁴⁴

By adding the words ‘on the explanation before us’ Newman carefully qualifies the statement ‘not that it really justifies more than other graces’. Elsewhere he will maintain that, in another sense, it does. For he is also committed to holding an instrumental role of faith which is exclusive of other graces. What then is that truly instrumental role such as to exclude any other internal instrument from the role of justifying?

For Newman faith is an instrument of justification only after baptism. It does not ‘convey’ justification; it ‘preserves’ it. Hence the expression ‘by faith only’ does not rule out baptism, which is the ‘sole external instrument’. But it does rule out ‘all other graces’, that is to say, love, trust, repentance, etc., ‘from the office of justifying’. Why this is, Newman does not pretend to know: ‘Faith surely, and not any other grace, is that which operates in keeping us in it. Why it does so is altogether a distinct question, and one perhaps which we cannot adequately determine. But whatever be God’s inscrutable designs for thus connecting faith with His evangelical gifts, so has He done.’⁴⁵ That last statement provides an important clue to his thinking here. For it shows that his claim of the sole instrumentality of faith rests not upon the exigencies of his system, but upon his conviction that it is a datum of revelation found both in Scripture and in the teaching of his Church. To deny it a priori would be to yield to that same Liberal way of thinking that he so decries. And so he has recourse to mystery. In the third edition (1874), as a Roman Catholic, he will deny it, albeit in a footnote: ‘Catholics hold that, not faith only, but faith, hope and charity are the “sustaining causes” of justification’.⁴⁶ But, as long as he was an Anglican, he felt obliged by the tradition of his Church, whose teachings he was ready to defend, as events were to prove, with his career and his reputation.

But faith alone, in the sense of faith existing by itself, in no wise justifies. So true is this that Newman can go so far as to say that ‘when we say that God justifies by faith on our part, we mean by acts of whatever kind done in faith’.⁴⁷ Hence there is a true sense in which he can say that ‘though we are justified as St Paul says, by faith, and as our Articles and Homilies say, by faith only, nevertheless we are justified, as St James says, by works’.⁴⁸ For Newman faith is the ‘quality’ or ‘mode’ of obedience which makes it acceptable.⁴⁹ Faith ‘lives in outward works’.⁵⁰ Faith, because of its power to focus our attention upon the divine Indwelling as the source of all our justification, gives to our works an orientation to Christ and away from ourselves which makes them acceptable.

Here then are the main lines of Newman’s theology of justification: by the sacrament of baptism the Christian is made a member of the Body of Christ and a temple of the Holy Spirit. It is in this that justification properly consists. God declares the sinner just, not leaving him to his sin, but by a real imputation of the Incarnate Word, the risen Christ, through the agency of the Holy Spirit and the instrumentality of the sacrament of baptism, which is God’s very act. This union with the risen Christ is further consolidated and intensified through the reception of that Sacred Body in Holy Communion. But man is not passive in his own justification. He ‘receives’ it by faith, which is transformed by the actual communication of the presence of Christ from a mere condition into an instrument of justification. Faith, in turn, lives in works of love, or obedience, which are themselves the fruit of this indwelling Spirit, who imparts a gracious quality to them and makes them acceptable. A person can therefore ‘obey unto justification’, not that his righteousness in any sense proceeds from himself, but only from that divine Presence which is their source. Faith stands guard here, preventing these works from degenerating into mere acts of self-righteousness by keeping the mind fixed on Christ who is their source. In short: ‘Justification comes through the sacraments; is received by faith; consists in God’s inward presence, and lives in obedience’.⁵¹

Postscript

While it is clear throughout the Lectures on Justification that it is an extreme branch of the Evangelical wing of his Church that Newman has in view, the Evangelicals are never mentioned by name. Instead it is principally Martin Luther at whom Newman directs his polemic. This is strange since, as Alister McGrath has pointed out, ‘From 1600 onwards, the main Protestant influence upon English theology was Reformed, rather than Lutheran – due to Calvin and Beza . . . rather than Luther’.⁵² It is also unfortunate since, in actual fact, Martin Luther’s own teaching on justification, while differing on many points, was very close to that of Newman on the most essential points.⁵³

Luther too taught that our justification consists first and foremost in Christ dwelling in us: ‘The righteous man himself does not live; but Christ lives in him, because through faith Christ dwells in him and pours his grace into him, through which it comes about that a man is governed not by his own spirit, but by Christ’s’.⁵⁴ Thus Luther did not hold that we are justified by mere imputation, as Newman would maintain. Using a line of argumentation similar to Newman’s, Luther taught that ‘divine imputation may not be regarded as amounting to nothing outside God, as some think that the apostle’s word “grace” means a favorable disposition rather than a gift’. He continued: ‘For when God is favorable, and when he imputes, the Spirit is really received, both the gift and the grace. Otherwise grace was there from eternity and remains with God, if it signifies only a favorable disposition in the way that favor is understood among men. For just as God loves in very fact, not in word only, so, too, He is favorably disposed with the thing that is present, not only with the word.’⁵⁵

Newman’s harshest criticism of Luther comes when he says: ‘He [Luther] found Christians in bondage to their works and observances; he released them by his doctrine of faith; and he left them in bondage to their feelings’.⁵⁶ While he might have said this of his Evangelical adversaries’ understanding of faith, it does not apply to Luther himself. To be sure, Newman understood faith as primarily an intellectual assent, while for Luther it was primarily a question not of feelings, but of the will.⁵⁷ But in their understanding of the symbolic meaning of the axiom ‘justification by faith only’ they were in essential agreement. Luther, in fact, never spoke of faith as the instrument of our justification. For Luther, as for Newman, that axiom showed forth the total gratuity of our justification. Newman was correct in his assessment of Luther’s motivation for insisting upon the truth of the axiom: ‘The reasons which led to his insisting upon it were chiefly the two following, both arising from his opposition to the Roman doctrine concerning good works; – first his wish to extirpate all notions of human merit; next, to give peace and satisfaction to the troubled conscience’. But unfortunately he drew from this the conclusion that ‘He taught that the Moral Law is not binding on the conscience of the Christian’.⁵⁸ Many others had drawn this same conclusion, leading Luther in 1520 to write his Treatise on Good Works, in which he explained how each of the Ten Commandments applied to the Christian, while insisting that faith must be the driving force behind all good works, and that it is because of that faith that they are pleasing to God.⁵⁹ This is the very point that Newman himself would make in Lecture XII.

Part of the reason why Newman failed to see the extent to which, however much they differed on certain points, Luther’s own teaching was in many respects in substantial agreement with his own was that Newman had most probably never read Luther firsthand.⁶⁰ Then, too, the Lectures were essentially a polemical work, and in polemics the tendency is to stress differences rather than similarities.⁶¹ Be that as it may, the question remains: in view of the fact that Newman’s polemic is directed against an extreme branch of the Evangelical wing of his own Church, why does he single out Martin Luther for especial condemnation?

Part of the problem may lie with the Evangelicals themselves, who regarded Luther as ‘a hero larger than life’, but whose understanding of him made him out to be like one of themselves rather than the sixteenth-century figure that he was.⁶² As Henry Chadwick has pointed out, ‘Perhaps Newman chose Luther for his target because relatively few English people knew much of his writings, whereas they knew Calvin much better’ and were better disposed to Calvin and the Calvinists than to Luther, with whom they felt far less comfortable.⁶³

And then it must be remembered that Luther was a German. Is it not possible that Newman wanted to imply that the roots of the doctrine he was opposing were not English but a foreign import? In the very first Lecture he speaks of ‘the Lutheran, or what might be called the Continental view, that faith is the proper instrument of justification’.⁶⁴ And he reminds us that Luther is ‘the German Reformer’.⁶⁵ More importantly, conservative Anglicans (such as Newman’s friend H. J. Rose) tended to accuse Luther of being responsible for German Rationalism, because of Luther’s rejection of Church authority in the interpretation of the Scriptures.⁶⁶ And for Newman it was that rationalistic spirit which he called ‘Liberalism’ which would always remain the deadliest of all enemies to the Faith.

Notes

1. L. Bouyer, Newman: His Life and Spirituality (London: Burns Oates and Washbourne, 1958), 8.

2. Apo., 4.

3. A.W., 29.

4. Ian Ker, John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 4.

5. Apo., 5.

6. Apo., 5.

7. A.W., 80.

8. Birmingham Oratory Archives A-9-1. There are two redactions of this document, the second of which is incomplete.

9. A.W., 79. See also p. 82. For Newman’s critique of the Evangelicalism of his day, as well as its positive contributions to his own spiritual development, see Ian Ker, ‘Evangelical Christianity’, in Newman and the Fullness of Christianity (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1993), 19–30.

10. A.W., 65–6.

11. Apo., 11.

12. Apo., 4.

13. A.W., 191.

14. A.W., 203.

15. A.W., 77.

16. On 17 July 1824. See L.D., i:179; A.W., 79, 206.

17. A.W., 78. Newman’s italics.

18. A.W., 202.

19. A.W., 203.

20. Birmingham Oratory Archives, A-17-1, Sermon nos. 57, 61 and 67; A-7-1, outhnes of these and of nos. 59, 63 and 65.

21. A.W., 78. The reference is to Joseph Butler’s The Analogy of Religion Natural and Revealed to the Constitution and Course of Nature. It was first published in 1736.

22. Birmingham Oratory Archives, B-3-IV, Sermon no. 118; A-50-2, Sermon nos. 120 and 121.

23. Birmingham Oratory Archives, A-9-1.

24. Six of the sermons in their entirety, and fragments of five others, have been printed in V. F. Blehl, SJ (ed.), John Henry Newman: Sermons 1824–1843 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), ii:133–206. The eighth in the series was published as ‘Holiness Necessary for Future Blessedness’ in P.S., i:1–14. Two of the sermons are missing entirely.

25. Apo., 288.

26. Birmingham Oratory Archives A-9-1. The sermons referred to are nos. 16, 17 and 18 of P.S., iii:220–35, 236–53, 254–70.

27. P.S., ii:26–40, 217–31; iii:254–70; iv:282–94.

28. P.S., ii:222–3.

29. Newman himself said that the Lectures were written against ‘the so-called Evangelical school’ and ‘against their system’; see L.D., vi:129.

30. The Lectures on Justification were originally delivered in the Adam de Brome Chapel of St Mary the Virgin, beginning on 13 April and ending on 1 June 1837. In the ensuing months they were extensively revised for publication, the first edition finally appearing in March 1838. Unless otherwise indicated, references will be to the substantially identical second edition (London: Rivington, 1840), with the third edition (1874), i.e., the standard edition, given in square brackets.

31. Jfc., 113 [101].

32. Jfc., 160 [144].

33. Jfc., 181 [160].

34. Jfc., 230 [202]. Compare 249 [219].

35. Jfc., 231–5 [203–7].

36. Jfc., 81 [74].

37. Jfc., 87–8 [79–80].

38. Jfc., 91 [83].

39. Jfc., 119–20 [107].

40. Jfc., 282 [249].

41. Jfc., 321–2 [282–3].

42. Jfc., 276 [243].

43. Jfc., 304 [267]; compare 306 [269] and U.S., 176–201, 177–202 (Sermon nos. 10 and 11, which were delivered in 1839).

44. Jfc., 278–9 [246].

45. Jfc., 264 [225].

46. Jfc. (third edition), 226.

47. Jfc., 334 [293].

48. Jfc., 312 [274].

49. Jfc., 318 [279].

50. Jfc., 343 [302].

51. Jfc., 316–17 [278].

52. A. E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 312. McGrath devotes pp. 308–21 to an extensive critique of the Lectures, which he calls ‘easily the most significant theological writing to emerge from the Oxford Movement’, but he judges that ‘Newman’s historico-theological analysis appears to be seriously and irredeemably inaccurate’. Every aspect of this analysis was faulty, says McGrath, with respect to ‘the doctrines of justification associated with Luther (and to a much lesser extent, with Melanchthon), with Roman Catholic theologians such as Bellarmine and Vásquez, and with the Caroline Divines’, but ‘supremely in the case of Luther himself’ (see 309). He also faults Newman for neglecting the Reformed tradition, and especially for the paucity of references to John Calvin, with whom he also shared some important insights (see 317).

53. For a more extensive treatment of this question see T. L. Sheridan, ‘Newman and Luther on Justification’, Journal of Ecumenical Studies 38 (2001), 217–45.

54. Martin Luther, Commentary on Galatians (1519) in Luther’s Works (St Louis: Concordia, 1964), xxvii:238.

55. Luther, Commentary on Galatians (1519), xxvii:252.

56. Jfc., 386 [339–40]. For a detailed critique of this paragraph, see Alister McGrath, ‘Newman on Justification: An Evangelical Anglican Evaluation’, in T. Merrigan and I. Ker (eds.), Newman and the Word (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 94–6.

57. J. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), iv:153–4, sums up Luther’s view of faith as follows: ‘The faith that justifies is no mere historical knowledge, but the firm acceptance of God’s offer promising forgiveness of sins and justification. Luther set himself against scholastic theology with the simple antithesis: “Where they speak of love, we speak of faith”. “Faith” here meant more than virtue or knowledge (though not less). It meant, above all, “a firm trust [fiducia]”, for which “Christ is the object of faith, or rather not the object, but, so to speak, the one who is present in the faith itself”. Thus faith was “a sort of knowledge or darkness that can see nothing”. It was, then, believing “in” Christ; that included, as Luther’s exposition of the Apostles’ Creed showed, believing “that” the life, death and resurrection of Christ were historically true – but above all that they were true “for me”, a phrase that one was to “accept with a sure faith and apply to himself” without doubting’.

58. Jfc., 26 [24].

59. Pelikan, Christian Tradition, iv:147.

60. Like almost of all his contemporaries, Pusey being one notable exception, Newman did not read German, so he was dependent upon the very poor translations of the time and secondary, probably polemic, sources.

61. For A. E. McGrath this polemical intent seriously compromises the value of the Lectures: ‘Both in this work and in the earlier Arians of the Fourth Century, Newman uses historical theology as little more than a thinly-veiled foil for his own theological and ecclesiological agenda, which is firmly wedded to the realities of the Church of England in the 1830s’. See McGrath, ‘Newman on Justification’, 105.

62. W. J. Baker, ‘Julius Charles Hare: A Victorian Interpreter of Luther’, South Atlantic Quarterly 70 (1971), 91.

63. H. Chadwick, ‘The Lectures on Justification’, in I. Ker and A. G. Hill (eds.), Newman after a Hundred Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 297–8.

64. Jfc., 3 [3].

65. Jfc., 4 [4].

66. Baker, ‘Julius Charles Hare’, 238.