Scripture, the Fathers and Ecumenism

The philosophical and theological thought and the spirituality of Cardinal Newman, so deeply rooted in and enriched by Sacred Scripture and the teachings of the Fathers, still retain their originality and value. As a leading figure of the Oxford Movement, and later as a promoter of authentic renewal in the Catholic Church, Newman is seen to have a special ecumenical vocation, not only for his own country, but also for the whole Church.[1]

Pope St John Paul II

Newman is at first sight an improbable ecumenist. His most famous work is an autobiographical account of how he became to believe that the Church of England was “not part of the Catholic Church”, and that the Roman Catholic Church by contrast was “the one fold of Christ”.[2]  

After his conversion he could and did publish dismissive statements about Anglicanism that were wounding to his former Anglican friends. But at a more fundamental level, Newman was a bridge figure between Catholicism and Anglicanism. His Apologia pro Vita Sua insisted on the reality and permanent value of his teenage Evangelical conversion, and the book is pervaded by affection and gratitude for the Anglican mentors from whom he learned and deepened his Christian faith. More fundamentally, he never abandoned the historical, scriptural and patristic studies that shaped his Anglican writings. His 1866 open Letter to Pusey formulated a rich Marian theology based entirely on Scripture and patristic writings, rather than the pious legends and extravagant emotion that partly characterised nineteenth-century Catholic Mariology. That reliance on Scripture and the Fathers would prove fruitful for the twentieth-century movement, “nouvelle theologie,” which helped revitalise Catholic theology, and influenced the theological idiom of the Second Vatican Council – for instance, the chapter in Lumen Gentium on the role of Mary in salvation history owes a great deal to Newman’s example.

That same patristic emphasis had informed one of Newman’s most important Anglican writings, the 1837 Lectures on Justification, intended as a distinctive Anglican alternative to the standoff between polarised Catholic and Lutheran theologies of Justification. In them Newman deployed instead the Greek patristic notion of deification, making the indwelling presence of Christ through the Holy Spirit the agent of Justification, breaking an impasse and greatly influencing modern Roman Catholic / Lutheran dialogue. 

But perhaps Newman’s greatest contribution to Ecumenism is the extraordinary fact that after his conversion, instead of repudiating his Anglican writings, he republished most of them, with only minor changes, a body of work shaped by Anglican theological method, which has proved a new and fertilising force for the ongoing renewal of Catholic theology.

[1] Pope St. John Paul II, “Letter to the Archbishop of Birmingham for the Centenary of the Elevation to the Cardinalate of John Henry Newman” (7 April 1979), in AAS, Vol. 71 (1979), 656–658 (at 657).

[2] John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), 221, 235.