If asked to identify the most influential theologian of the past two centuries, I suspect that few American Protestants would think of John Henry Newman. A few might be familiar with Newman's classic work, The Idea of a University, and its important contribution to the debate over the nature of higher education. Others might have dipped into his justifiably famous—and intriguing—autobiography, the Apologia pro vita sua, or recalled fondly his evocative hymn, "Lead Kindly Light." Some might even identify him with the ubiquitous "Newman Centers" that dot the campuses of American universities. Relatively few American Protestants, however, have studied Newman's important theological or devotional writings, or come to appreciate his enduring influence upon the life and theology of the Roman Catholic Church, especially through the unprecedented reforms of the Second Vatican Council—"Newman's Council," as it is sometimes called.

Newman was born in 1801 into a conventional, middle-class family of broad Anglican sympathies. Other than his adolescent conversion to evangelical Christianity, there was little about his early life that would suggest the extraordinary events that lay ahead. Much more influential for his spiritual and intellectual formation were the years he spent at Oxford, especially his election to a coveted Oriel Fellowship, through which he gained access to a coterie of remarkably devout and catholic-minded intellectuals, theologians, and poets. Around this time, Newman's evangelicalism (as he put it) "gradually faded away," though in a number of ways it continued to influence his outlook on a number of topics. After a brief flirtation with unbelief, Newman was attracted increasingly to the "Apostolical" tradition of the early Fathers. One of the most important expressions of this transformation occurred in 1833. In that year, Newman, John Keble, and Hurrell Froude formed the nucleus of the celebrated Oxford Movement, which set about restoring to prominence the catholic order and spirituality of the Church of England. During the turbulent history of the movement's initial phase, Newman became increasingly unsettled over his attachment to the via media of the English Church. Concluding that it could no longer be regarded as a true expression of the body of Christ, in 1845 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church—a decision that produced in him a deep sense of personal loss as acknowledged in his most famous sermon, The Parting of Friends.

What drove Newman along his odyssey from evangelical Oxford academic to Roman Catholic priest? The question of motivation has been explored again and again by his many biographers, and by Newman himself in the pages of the Apologia, but it has never been satisfactorily resolved. To be sure, personal factors cannot be entirely dismissed; after all, Newman's brilliance was only exceeded by his complexity. Several well-known accounts have explored the issue of Newman's inner life, but their conclusions remain unconvincing and they have failed to produce any consensus on the subject. Much more influential in initiating Newman's spiritual saga were a series of political and religious controversies that took place between the late 1820s and the early 1840s.

The remarkable drama of Newman's life in the Church of England was set against the backdrop of constitutional and university reform. Beginning in 1828, Parliament enacted a series of measures which startled conservative Anglicans. Whig Erastianism and the admission of Dissenters and Roman Catholics to Parliament created alarm that the Church of England was on its way to becoming "one sect among many" and that the state was on its way towards religious indifferentism. Though not by nature inclined to partisan politics, Newman nevertheless became highly agitated by these developments as well as by a number of subsequent controversies, including the proposed abolition of subscription at Oxford, which would have eliminated the Anglican monopoly in the University; the appointment of Renn Dixon Hampden as Regius Professor of Divinity, which placed Newman's chief nemesis and a prominent liberal at the head of the Oxford theology school; and the widespread condemnation of Tract 90, in which Newman had attempted to show that the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles were compatible with Roman Catholicism.

Lying at the heart of Newman's concern was the advance of liberalism, which he often referred to as the "Anti-dogmatic Principle." Liberalism was in the ascendant at Oxford during Newman's time, and though it proved difficult to define, he attempted it in Note A of the Apologia. "Liberalism," he wrote, "is 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." As Peter Nockles has observed, Newman dramatized what to many of his contemporaries seemed mere political issues into an almost apocalyptic struggle against the forces of darkness.

The enactment of constitutional and university reform was, in Newman's mind, deeply symptomatic of the rapid ascendancy in England of a spiritual and moral evil. Consequently, when Keble delivered his famous sermon on "national apostasy" in July 1833, protesting the Whig government's proposed reform of the Irish Church, Newman was propelled into action; for the next eight years, he served as the recognized leader of the Oxford Movement.

Of the many works chronicling these fascinating, albeit highly complex events, the most recent is Frank M. Turner's stimulating but controversial John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion. Turner, the John Hay Whitney Professor of History at Yale, has produced not a biography of Newman, but an extensive study of his life prior to his secession from the Church of England. Turner's principal theme is that Newman's historic importance during his years as an Anglican lies in his opposition to Protestant evangelicalism, not liberalism, as most previous studies and biographies have assumed. His most valuable accomplishment is his clarification of what Newman and the Tractarians actually said, and the polemical manner in which they said it.

In the hagiography that has surrounded Newman since his death, scholars have generally accepted the claim, advanced in the Apologia (and elsewhere), that his opposition to the growing ascendancy of liberalism lay at the heart of his campaign in favor of Apostolic faith. Turner rejects this assertion, however, and his detailed examination of Newman's writings undertakes to illustrate forcefully the development—and ultimate extent—of his hostility to Protestant evangelicalism.

A number of factors combined to bring about this important transformation in Newman's thinking. Close at home was the spiritual saga of his younger brother, Francis. After graduating from Oxford, Francis passed rapidly through various "phases of faith": he embraced extreme forms of evangelicalism, seceded from the Church, and, after returning from Baghdad (where, acting as he believed under the direct inspiration of the Spirit, he had gone to convert the Muslims), he became a Unitarian. In similar fashion, Newman witnessed at firsthand the secession of a number of Oxford evangelicals into various forms of ultra-Calvinism, or worse. Most prominent among them was Henry Bulteel, the popular perpetual curate of St. Ebbe's, who had been ordained into the Church of England with Newman in 1824. After falling under the influence of the extreme Calvinist John Nelson Darby and seceding from the Church, Bulteel (like Newman's brother) passed through a series of spiritual incarnations. In rapid succession, he became an antinomian, a Pentecostal (and Arminian) Irvingite, a mongrel Baptist, a Plymouth Brethren, and eventually a member of the schismatic Free Church of England.

These case histories undoubtedly contributed to Newman's concern that the principal tenets of Protestant evangelicalism (e.g., private judgment, biblicism, the atonement, conversionism, justification by faith) encouraged the neglect of a number of important Apostolic doctrines (e.g., tradition, sanctification, the sacraments). This neglect, in turn, promoted religious individualism, which, Newman feared, encouraged believers to run headlong into schism and spiritual volatility, if not atheism.

For all its insight and scholarly erudition, Turner's corrective is not entirely convincing. He is too quick to dismiss as unreliable Newman's own account of his spiritual motivation in the Apologia and elsewhere, and he offers no overarching—or persuasive—argument as to why we should accept his interpretation of these events rather than Newman's. We are repeatedly discouraged from taking Newman's words (or those of others) at face value; in attempting to inform us about what Newman really meant, Turner makes extensive use of psycho-historical evidence to advance his own points, while the preponderance of evidence often suggests otherwise. Thus, Newman's description in the Apologia of the Anglican evangelical Thomas Scott as "the writer who made a deeper impression on my mind than any other, and to whom (humanly speaking) I almost owe my soul," is given scant attention, presumably because it must be dismissed as either propaganda or nostalgia.

Another concern is Turner's failure adequately to explore the nuanced and rapidly changing nature of English evangelicalism between 1820 and 1845. The important distinction between Anglican and non-Anglican evangelicals (as well as between Anglican evangelicals and latitudinarians, such as Hampden) is sometimes blurred, though to Newman it was both obvious and important. In fact, there were more areas of cooperation between Anglican evangelicals and the High Church party in Oxford (and elsewhere) than has generally been assumed. Moreover, while Turner has described the fractures that occurred within evangelicalism during this period, as well as the cleft between the moderates and ultras (which expressed itself in a stiffer biblical literalism and premillennialism), their consequences have not been fully weighed.

During the period in question, for example, a significant number of evangelical clergy and laity joined Newman in seceding from the Church of England (though into various forms of Protestant Dissent), many concurring with him that the English church had become indelibly "stained" by liberalism. In the aftermath of such upheaval, the evangelical party (especially in Oxford) lost much of its former unity, confidence and influence. In the Apologia, Newman himself was quick to dismiss the importance of "serious religion" in the university. "The party called Evangelical," he remarked, "never has been able to breathe freely in the atmosphere of Oxford, and at no time has been conspicuous, as a party, for talent or learning." In light of this, Turner's argument that Newman came to regard Protestant evangelicalism as the real enemy of Apostolic faith cannot be sustained. Though Newman criticized evangelicalism on numerous occasions, he attacked liberalism relentlessly. The reason behind this seems clear: while the nature of evangelical doctrine may have encouraged some to descend into liberalism, as Newman feared, it was liberalism that had led many more to embrace the real enemy—atheism.

Perhaps Newman should be allowed to have the last word on the subject. In 1879, at one of the most significant moments in his life—the official announcement of his elevation to cardinal at Rome—when the avoidance of sincerity and candor is all but impossible to imagine, his brief response included this appeal: "I rejoice to say, one great mischief I have from the first opposed myself. For thirty, forty, fifty years I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of liberalism in religion. Never did Holy Church need champions against it more sorely than now, when, alas! it is an error overspreading, as a snare, the whole earth."

Grayson Carter is Associate Professor of Church History at Fuller Theological Seminary SW in Phoenix, Arizona. He is the author most recently of Anglican Evangelicals: Protestant Secessions from the Via Media, c. 1800-1850 (Oxford Univ. Press), reviewed in this issue.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.