"In a higher world it is otherwise; but ...": John Henry Newman and the Meaning of History

“In a higher world it is otherwise; but …”:
John Henry Newman and the Meaning of History

Paul PARVIS

"In a higher world it is otherwise; but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often." So wrote John Henry Newman in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine—a book which may be seen as an attempt to recover a pattern of meaning in the history of the Church.

Ecclesiastical history as created by Eusebius of Caesarea presupposed (1) that the meaning of Church history is transparent—plain for all to see—and (2) that truth is one and invariant while error is shifting and fissiparous, so change is always a threat . Broadly speaking, that myth continued to be the dominant model of Church history until the nineteenth century among both Catholics and Protestants. And it was essentially the view which Newman and his friends still maintained in the heady, early days of the Oxford Movement. Newman's increasing disenchantment with that view can be traced in his preface to the Library of Fathers translation of Cyril of Jerusalem (1838), in his account in the Apologia of the terrible vision that briefly opened during the Long Vac of 1839, and in his last University Sermon, which affirms that it is heresy that is static and without development, while life is a sign of authenticity. These insights find expression in the Essay on Development. The passage I have quoted in the title of this article lies at the heart of the Catholic view of Church history. In it Newman rejects a negative evaluation of change by engaging self-consciously with two key texts — Pusey's preface to the first volume of the Library of Fathers and Vincent's Commonitorium.

If we follow Newman, we cannot look to the past—at least not in any straightforward sense—for the answers to theological questions, and that for two, inter-connected reasons: the past is not the end of the road—no theological question is ever finally over and done with—and history itself points ahead: it points us back to the Church in which we live and whose faith we are trying to understand.

History is not a locus of revelation. But it is the locus of the faithful articulation of the content of revelation. This articulation is not a mechanical process nor is it automatic, and while authoritative, it is never exhaustive. We never come to the end of the exploration: “there are,” as Newman says, “no words, ever so clear, but require an interpretation.”

In terms of the great triad of theological virtues—faith, hope, and love—we can say that if the historical process with which we are concerned lies between revelation and the fulness of knowledge, then its study lies somewhere between faith and the fulness of charity that is realized only in the Kingdom. The characteristic virtue of the historian, then, is hope—a hope which is willing to grapple with the disparate data of human experience and which looks confidently ahead to a time when it will all make sense.

They give us a glimpse of how Luther viewed his liturgical reforms and how he introduced the changes to the believers with theological, evangelical and critical reverence. All four articles illustrate the implication and application of Luther's rediscovered gospel, the doctrine of justification by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. On the one hand, faith and freedom in Christ are lifted. On the other hand, love and Christian obligation to one's neighbor are emphasized. As such, the characteristics of Luther's theology (biblical, christological, dialectical, paradoxical, pastoral , and the like) are revealed.