Many people have no use for John Henry Newman. He is from another century. He is pre-Vatican II. He is a dead white male. By all accounts he should be of no use to anyone. But I can think of people who could profit immensely from some of Newman’s arguments, people I deal with regularly. Let me explain.
We’re all familiar with Newman’s judgment on the historical basis of Protestantism, as given in the Essay on Development: “Whatever history teaches, whatever it omits, whatever it exaggerates or extenuates, whatever it says and unsays, at least the Christianity of history is not Protestantism. If ever there was a safe truth, it is this.” Protestantism he saw as historically illegitimate-it could not last. In a letter he remarked, “At this very time we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Protestantism, the breaking of that bubble of ‘Bible-Christianity.'”
Well, maybe not. The problem for Newman the prophet is that the bubble has not yet had the courtesy to burst. Despite a long period of decline, Bible Christianity is still with us-and arguably it is stronger today in some ways than it was in Newman’s time. It has grown even as the mainline Protestant churches have been committing the Christian equivalent of harakiri.
Of course, Newman wasn’t the only famous Catholic of some years back to think that Bible Christianity was doomed. His view was largely shared by a one-time pupil of his from the 1880s, a lad who would grow up to be as bellicose a Catholic as Newman was gentle. That bellicose Catholic was, of course, Hilaire Belloc. In 1930 Belloc wrote about people who today are known as Fundamentalists, conservative Evangelicals, or Bible Christians. He said, “There is something very gallant about these Literalists. They never retreated, they never surrendered, they were incapable of maneuver, and the few that remain will die where they stand rather than give way a foot. Their simplicity sometimes has a holy quality about it. . . . Most of us, asked to make a guess, would say that in fifty years no odd Literalist could still be found crawling on the earth. Do not be too sure. Our children may live to see a revival of this type in some strange land.”
Writing only five years after the Scopes Monkey Trial, Belloc naturally emphasized Bible Christianity’s attitude toward the first eleven chapters of Genesis. Perhaps that was all he knew about this brand of Christianity, which seemed nearly dead in England. To the extent it was alive, it was alive in America, where it probably was on life-support. In any case, the real battles were being fought elsewhere, and Bible Christianity could be ignored.
Events have shown that Belloc too was mistaken. He should have given more weight to his own observations regarding the tenacity of Bible Christians. Whatever they stood for, he said, they stood for it solidly, and he was right to imagine a revival of their faith “in some strange land,” such as the one across the Atlantic from England.
Belloc had no way of knowing, of course, of the travails the Catholic Church would undergo during the remainder of the century, He could not imagine a resurgence of modernism, which seemed moribund in 1930, or how, in two generations, Catholics would be woefully uninstructed in their religion, easy prey for sects that offered simple answers to the spiritual problems of an age that had ceased to be Christian in any real sense.
He could not imagine that Catholics would come to practice eight sacraments, the eighth being Holy Osmosis. Through it, they would come to say, the faith could be passed automatically to subsequent generations. No need to teach. No need to practice. Simply being a Catholic was insurance enough that your children would be Catholics-a fine theory the only fault of which is that it has never worked. Nor could Belloc know about the hollowness so many Catholics would feel-good people who, one day, woke to realize that their bonds to the Church were tenuous and that they might happily go wherever the Bible, as interpreted by newly-resurgent Bible Christians, seemed to lead them. And today there are many such leaders, many such followers.
There are five million self-described Fundamentalists in the U.S. There are another 50 million Evangelicals, the more conservative of whom are distinguishable from Fundamentalists only in tone, not in doctrine. Together Fundamentalists and Evangelicals nearly equal the number of Catholics in America, and they match the total population of the U.K.-plus, there are tens of millions of these Bible Christians in countries other than America. The bubble of Bible Christianity has not burst. After contracting for a few decades, it has expanded wildly.
One might think that Newman, his prognostication having proved as incorrect as Belloc’s, would drop out of the equation. Not so. As Bible Christianity has increased its numbers, it has done so largely at the expense of the Catholic Church-in fact, in many Bible Christian congregations more than half of the members are former Catholics. These people have been weaned from the Church through arguments which seem irrefutable but which Newman in his own time skillfully refuted. We can use Newman’s arguments today to move these people Romeward.
Consider the fundamental principle of today’s Bible Christian, sola scriptura. A discussion of the doctrine invariable involves a discussion of the inspiration of the Bible, and that invariably involves a discussion of the authority of the Church as interpreter. It seems to some that it makes little difference why one believes in the Bible’s inspiration, just so one believes in it. But the basis for one’s belief in its inspiration directly affects how one goes about interpreting the Bible.
The Catholic believes in inspiration because the Church tells him so-that’s putting it bluntly but nevertheless accurately-and that same Church has the authority to interpret the inspired text. Bible Christians believe in inspiration, though on weak grounds. Their belief, good as it is, is undercut by the fact that they have no interpreting authority other than themselves. Recognizing that they themselves lack authority, they invest all authority in the sacred text, leaving none for the Church. The Bible itself becomes infallible.
This is a misapplication of the notion of infallibility. The proper note to apply to the Bible is not infallibility, but inerrancy. It is proper to say the Bible contains no error, not that it can commit no error. Fallibility and infallibility require an active agent. The terms may be predicated of a person, but not of an inanimate thing such as a book, not even of the Holy Book. The Bible itself cannot interpret. It is a repository and requires an outside interpreter.
Newman highlighted the Bible Christians’ problem in this way:
“It is antecedently unreasonable to suppose that a book so complex, so unsystematic, in parts so obscure, the outcome of so many minds, times, and places, should be given us from above without the safeguard of some authority; as if it could possibly, from the nature of the case, interpret itself. Its inspiration does but guarantee its truth, not its interpretation.
How are private readers satisfactorily to distinguish what is didactic and what is historical, what is fact and what is vision, what is allegorical and what is literal, what is idiomatic and what is grammatical, what is enunciated formally and what occurs obiter, what is only of temporary and what is of lasting obligation? Such is our natural anticipation, and it is only too exactly justified in the events of the last three centuries, in the many countries where private judgment on the text of Scripture has prevailed. The gift of inspiration requires as its complement the gift of infallibility.”
And that gift is not an attribute of the Bible, but of the Church. All this seems self-evident to us. It is not self-evident to Bible Christians. But it can seem compelling to them if we bother to present it to them. My own sense, after some years of engaging in Catholic apologetics, is that if you can get a Bible Christian to sit down and read such passages from Newman, as likely as not he will cease to be a Bible Christian-not invariably, not immediately, but often and after engaging in the further reading that Newman’s challenging words will lead him to.
One of the keenest arguments against the “Bible only” position-one that I have appropriated to my own work and have had considerable success with-was given by Newman in Tract 85. This is the way J. M. Cameron summarizes Newman’s argument:
“The argument is directed towards the Protestant critic of Tractarianism and in a simplified form goes like this. You criticize the Tractarians for teaching such doctrines as, for example, the Apostolic Succession of bishops or that the Eucharist is a sacrifice, and your criticism rests on the contention that these doctrines are not plainly and unambiguously contained in Scripture and may not indeed be in the Bible at all.
“I concede, goes the reply, that these doctrines are not to be found in the letter of Scripture or on its surface. But this is just as true of other doctrines you as an orthodox Protestant believe quite firmly, such doctrines as, let us say, the Godhead of the Holy Spirit or that Holy Scripture contains all that is sufficient for salvation. Neither of these doctrines is contained on the surface of Scripture, and there would even be logical difficulties in supposing that Scripture contained the latter doctrine.
It seems to me that you ought in consistency to believe less than you do or more than you do. If you confine yourself to what is contained in Scripture then the content of your belief will be thin and even incoherent and you will have no rationale for giving the Bible this supreme position. What you do, inconsistently, believe (for you are not, thank God, a Unitarian) is a warrant for your going further and adopting as your criterion the tradition of the first few centuries and using this tradition, embodied in the formularies of the Church, as that in the light of which Scripture is to be read and understood. You must either move upwards into Catholicism or downwards into unbelief. There is no midway point of rest.”
I know of many people for whom this argument has been an eye-opener. They had lived for years with the comfortable assurance that the Bible Christian approach “worked.” Reading Newman, they discovered that it didn’t. They found themselves forced to “move upwards into Catholicism or downwards into unbelief.” So far as I know, all of them have chosen the up escalator.
Often, in dealing with Bible Christians, you need to descend from the general to the specific. You need to discuss individual verses. Of course, there is a danger in this. As Newman cautioned, “A single text is sufficient to prove a doctrine to the well-disposed or the prejudiced.” I can testify that this is true because I happen to be both well-disposed and prejudiced, but in my own case, of course, prejudice is a virtue.
However that may be, one of the first verses to arise in any discussion, and one that Newman deftly handles, is 2 Timothy 3:16: “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” Bible Christians say this verse proves sola scriptura. Newman thought otherwise:
“It is quite evident that this passage furnishes no argument whatever that the Sacred Scripture, without Tradition, is the sole rule of faith; for, although Sacred Scripture is profitable for these four ends, still it is not said to be sufficient. The Apostle requires the aid of Tradition (2 Thess. 2:15). Moreover, the Apostle here refers to the Scriptures which Timothy was taught in his infancy. Now, a good part of the New Testament was not written in his boyhood. Some of the Catholic Epistles were not written even when St. Paul wrote this, and none of the Books of the New Testament were then placed on the canon of the Scripture books. He refers, then, to the Scriptures of the Old Testament, and if the argument from this passage proved anything, it would prove too much, that the Scriptures of the New Testament were not necessary for a rule of faith.”
Few Bible Christians have ever considered this consequence of their interpretation of 2 Timothy 3:16. They have not bothered to consider that who says A must say B. I have found that Newman’s logic throws them for a loop-and being thrown for a loop is the first stage in a conversion of mind.
As were their nineteenth-century counterparts, today’s Bible Christians are notoriously weak in Christian history. They operate as though the death of the apostle John was followed in about a decade by the posting of the 95 Theses. The second through fifteenth centuries disappear into a time warp. They see the New Testament Church here and the Catholic Church of Luther’s time there, and they know viscerally that there can be no connection. Again Newman comes in handy.
He noted that, in any century, what was believed by the Catholic Church can be seen to be the logical and necessary outgrowth and the deeper understanding of what was believed the century before. Going backwards, from the nineteenth century to the early Middle Ages, is easy. No one really doubts that what was called the Catholic Church in 1845 was the same institution that took that name in, say, 845.
The hard part concerns the early centuries, but, if one examines these in sequence, he sees a natural progression, a true maturation in doctrine. There is no change of course, but a continuation along a single road. Something is clarified in one century, and in the next that clarification is investigated and built upon so that a further clarification is produced.
On and on it goes. What was determined with finality in the past is kept-there is no jettisoning of old doctrines for new-but fuller understandings are added. Thus, the few biblical references to Mary result in the splendid devotion to the Mother of God that was a hallmark of the Medieval Church.
A common anti-Catholic argument in Newman’s time, and one that still convinces Bible Christians, is that the Catholic Church transformed pagan festivals into Christian feasts and that such an association with paganism is conclusive proof of Rome’s compromising. Anti-Catholic writers still quote with relish Newman’s seemingly damaging admission:
“We are told in various ways by Eusebius, that Constantine, in order to recommend the new religion to the heathen, transferred to it the outward ornaments to which they had been accustomed in their own. It is not necessary to go into a subject which the diligence of Protestant writers has made familiar to most of us. The use of temples, and these dedicated to particular saints, and ornamented on occasions with branches of trees; incense, lamps, and candles; votive offerings on recovery from illness; holy water; asylums; holy days and seasons, use of calendars, processions, blessings on the fields: sacerdotal vestments, the tonsure, the ring in marriage, turning to the East, images at a later date, perhaps the ecclesiastical chant, and the Kyrie Eleison, are all of pagan origin, and sanctified by their adoption into the Church.”
This passage is not used by opponents of the Church in exactly the form I have read it. Usually it comes with an ellipsis, which appears in place of one offending phrase, namely “the ring in marriage.” And there’s good reason for the ellipsis.
Once, in a debate with a prominent anti-Catholic controversialist, I asked, “Are you married? Yes, I know you are. And when you were married, was your bride wearing a white gown, and did she carry a bouquet of flowers? You say she did. And did the two of you exchange vows and then rings? You’re nodding your head. Well, it seems that in your marriage ceremony you engaged in four pagan acts, since the white gown, the bouquet, the vows, and the ring are all taken from pre-Christian pagan rites. Are we to conclude that your brand of Christianity is pagan at its roots?” My opponent smiled and promptly changed the subject.
Bible Christians forget that even paganism had some truth mixed in with its error. Christianity took those elements of truth, removed erroneous associations so that they ceased to be pagan, and made use of the purified truth the better to express Christian notions. Christianity gave new meanings to old things, and in the process the pagan connections ceased.
We should keep in mind, I propose, that today a dead white male, John Henry Newman, can give new understandings to people who harbor old prejudices about the Catholic faith. He still has something useful to say to Bible Christians who are serious about their religion and who are seriously misinformed about the Catholic faith.