Recovering a Neglected Critical Tradition: The Victorian and Modernist Critique of Newman's Religious Apologetic and its Contemporary Significance.

John Henry Newman (1801-1890) was one of the most important and original religious thinkers of the nineteenth century. He rose to fame in the early 1830s, as one of the leaders of the Tractarian Movement, a lastingly influential campaign to revitalize the Church of England. After he converted to the Church of Rome in 1845, he became one of the most renowned – even notorious – Catholics of the Victorian era. He was created Cardinal in 1879, and his legacy continues to influence (Catholic) theology today. Unsurprisingly, Newman’s life and vast opus have occasioned a continuous stream of scholarly literature. And yet, the formative period prior to the Tractarian Movement is routinely overlooked or misrepresented. There simply is no satisfactory account of how Newman came to hold the ideas that made him such a famous and important thinker. This dissertation sets out to provide this account: a theological biography mapping the comprehensive transformation of Newman’s thought between his teenage conversion to evangelicalism in 1816 and the beginning of the Tractarian Movement in 1833.

The current state of Newman studies mandated such a research project. Historically, the field emerged out of the predominantly Catholic effort to defend Newman from the charge of Modernism, and this defensive posture lingers on. Much mainline scholarship continues to assume that Newman’s catholic sensibility and anti-liberal attitude were constants throughout his life. This approach was never without its critics, but it only was problematized thoroughly when Yale-historian Frank Turner published his revisionist biography of the Anglican Newman in 2002. Turner rightly identified evangelicalism as a key polemical target of the Anglican Newman, but stretched his argument too far by reducing Newman’s self-proclaimed lifelong battle against liberalism as a much later gloss on this earlier history. By means of a meticulous reconstruction of Newman’s theological development this dissertation offers a compelling alternative to both mainstream and revisionist lines of interpretation. Using many hitherto neglected sources, including a wide range of unpublished manuscripts, it traces and analyses Newman’s gradual departure from the evangelical theology he adopted after the religious conversion he experienced as a teenager. Against most mainline studies, it argues that this transformation was fundamental; it affected almost every aspect of Newman’s theology. Against Turner, it argues that this change was the product of careful and consistent theological reasoning and reflection (rather than family dynamics), and that anti-liberalism was just as integral to it as anti-evangelicalism.

As a boy of fifteen, Newman underwent a religious conversion. This experience, informed by the theological frameworks of Enlightenment apologetics and Anglican evangelicalism, impressed upon him two fundamental religious convictions: (i) human beings must believe in revelation on God’s authority, and (ii) they must change from leading sinful to leading holy lives. As a (moderate) Calvinist, the young Newman held that every sinner must undergo a radical affective change, called conversion or regeneration. This post-baptismal change is effected sovereignly by God, and consists in a transformation of human emotions and desires through confrontation with the gospel message (Christ’s atoning sacrifice on the cross for our sins). In the mid-1820s, the demise of Newman’s Calvinism set in. After adopting the idea that baptism conveys regeneration, he began to understand conversion as a lifelong process of habit formation, that is, of becoming virtuous, driven by conscientious obedience rather than by the affective import of the gospel message. Increasingly, he conceived of being religious as involving a specific moral character, formed by obedience to conscience, which functions as a path not only to the good but also to God. Thus, he began to view pre- and non-Christian religion on a continuum with Christianity, with Christ as the apex of God’s revelatory activity. On this basis, he critiqued the evangelical idea that religious obedience is conditional upon (the affective import of) faith in the atonement.

Newman’s gradual turn from evangelicalism coincided with a growing antagonism towards liberalism. Newman used the term liberalism to denote a set of increasingly popular secularizing tendencies, such as religious indifference and doctrinal relativism, which accompanied the sea change in English social, cultural, and political life in the 1820s and early 1830s which undermined the status and authority of the Church of England. To counter these tenets, he launched the Tractarian Movement in 1833. Soon after he did so, he began to discern liberal tendencies in much of the Protestant theology of the day, especially in evangelicalism. He was almost bound to make this discovery, because his own evangelical theology in the mid-1820s had tended towards some of the liberal positions he now derided. Back then, he had argued that, because revelation is intrinsically geared towards affective change, those doctrines which effect it (especially the atonement) are more valuable than those that do not (such as the Trinity). He now realized that this evangelical practice of emphasizing specific doctrines because they elicit specific emotional responses threatened to make faith revolve around the human subject rather than the divine object. Against liberals, evangelicals, and – implicitly – his former self, he argued that Christian faith entails intellectual submission to a necessarily mysterious God, whose self-communication should not be judged by its subjective effects.