Newman Studies Journal

Before he recognized the role of the Tradition in the Church, Newman rooted his life in the Bible, memorizing the King James Version. He commented on it throughout his life. This essay canvasses Newman’s reading of the Fourth Gospel, and brings to light the theology of the word presupposed by Newman’s interpretation of Scripture.

This essay explores and interprets two texts from Parochial and Plain Sermons in light of Newman’s understanding of religious imagination—specifically, the act of realization. Both texts suggest that for Newman, realization is a type of self-appropriation by which a fact or an object (real in itself) is assimilated (made personally real to the subject). One sermon concerns the Passion, the other the Resurrection. He indicates that when the object of the imagination is Christ, realization comes about through meditation on Scripture, and produces a stronger or weaker vision of Jesus in the soul based on one’s personal dispositions. It is often employed when the mind engages in conflicting ideas, such as Christ as both God and man.

In this article I argue that one way of approaching Newman’s Idea of a University is to view it as a text about the formation of imagination. This is done in three parts. First, I identify the core features of imagination as Newman conceived it by drawing on various sources from his life and work. Second, I turn to Idea of a University in particular, primarily the “Lectures on University Teaching,” to demonstrate that the concept of imagination is a significant underlying presence in Newman’s lectures. Finally, I conclude with a brief analysis of the relationship between reason and imagination within the university.

John Henry Newman was a man who sought to integrate life and holiness. He believed that the spiritual life needed to be lived in an active and dynamic way, touching a person’s fundamental attitudes and actions. Although Newman rejected the title of spiritual director as such, it is obvious from his correspondence that directing others through various facets of the Christian life was one of his dominant concerns. Utilizing his Letters and Diaries during his Catholic years (1845–1890), this lecture explores how Newman directed others, the methods he used, and the meaning it has for understanding his life.

In recent years, critical discourse concerning the millenarian eschatology of the early Patristic era of Christianity has called into question the common notion that millenarian concepts have been utterly rejected as heretical by the Roman Catholic Church. No Ecumenical Council has ever rejected millenarian eschatology, and papal and juridical statements on the issue have been taken out of context. This essay brings forward, as testing agents, John Henry Newman’s first two notes in Development in order to determine whether Patristic millenarianism, along with a more recently explored version called Eucharistic millenarianism, is a valid example of doctrinal development of an earlier type. Eucharistic millenarianism borrows many aspects from a primitive apostolic source and has been embraced by the Catholic hierarchy, raising the question of how millenarian aspects might legitimately inform contemporary theology. Newman’s theory of the development of doctrine, particularly as seen in his first two notes, is a valuable tool for reevaluating latent concepts that have been unfairly viewed as marginal or even heretical in mainline theological discourse.

This essay analyzes Newman’s response to the tendency in philosophical modernity and liberal Protestantism, as exemplified by John Locke, to denigrate the so-called “superstitious” nature of the religion of the masses. Newman constructed a philosophical and theological defense of Christians who were accused of an unenlightened superstition, due to their popular piety and lack of theological training, and proposes this very “superstition” to be the hallmark of genuine Christianity, as found from its inception. The essay concludes with a comparison to Augustine’s City of God.

The first scientific work by John Henry Newman, Arians of the Fourth Century, should not be read simply as a patristic historiography; Newman engages with theoretical problems in this work. This essay attempts to explain the theory behind Arians with particular regard to the problematic relationship between Scripture and doctrinal expression in the Church. It will demonstrate the confluence of Newman’s thought on this point with the theological reflection of Vincent Holzer, who discusses this problem in the context of German theology in the twentieth century. This article was originally published in French in Études Newmaniennes no. 29 (2013).

John Henry Newman was a discerning critic of the dominant social values and cultural features of England in the Victorian era that revolved around the sovereign self. Insofar as many of these features—individuals as their own masters, wealth and celebrity, the arbitrariness of answers about faith and meaning, and the character of higher education in the absence of theology—also characterize American society and culture in the early twenty-first century, Newman’s critique of his own time and society also applies to ours. This essay was first delivered as the 2014 Newman Legacy Lecture, sponsored by the National Institute for Newman Studies, at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on April 3, 2014.

Newman was keenly aware of the challenge posed to Christians by the development of historical biblical criticism in the nineteenth century. In several of his Anglican writings—most notably in no. 85 of Tracts for the Times, in unpublished notes and drafts dating from 1861–1863, and in two essays published in 1884—he attempted to resolve questions regarding the nature of biblical “inspiration,” the respective roles of the divine and human “authors,” and the nature of biblical “truth.” This article, originally a paper given at the 2012 conference of the Association française des Amis de Newman on Newman et la Bible, was first published in French in Études Newmaniennes no. 29 (2013).

Personalist philosopher Maurice Nédoncelle was known for his role in reintroducing John Henry Newman to the French public at a time when it was well needed. Nédoncelle’s merits consist mainly of presenting Newman as a religious philosopher and of drawing attention to Newman’s implicit philosophy. Nédoncelle’s interpretation of Newman is discussed here.