John Henry Newman by Geertjan Zuijdwegt
Newman Studies Journal, 2024
This paper explores John Henry Newman’s intellectual engagement with English Enlightenment apolog... more This paper explores John Henry Newman’s intellectual engagement with English Enlightenment apologetics, the dominant framework for justifying Christian belief in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. While Newman’s relationship with the “Age of Evidences” is often characterized as antagonistic, this study uncovers his early theological and philosophical debt to this tradition. Drawing on his personal correspondence, sermons, and essays, the paper examines how Newman initially embraced evidential arguments, particularly those grounded in miracles and natural theology. However, his exchanges with skeptics, including his own brother Charles, led him to reevaluate the reliance on external proofs. Instead, he gradually foregrounded conscience as the primary means of encountering God, shifting away from the Enlightenment’s evidentialist paradigm.
De bisschop van Rome en de theologen van Leuven, 2024
Op 13 oktober 2019 werd de negentiende-eeuwse denker, schrijver en priester John Henry Newman doo... more Op 13 oktober 2019 werd de negentiende-eeuwse denker, schrijver en priester John Henry Newman door paus Franciscus heilig verklaard. Newman zou er zelf verbaasd over zijn geweest. Nog verbaasder dan toen hij 140 jaar eerder, in 1879, kardinaal werd gecreëerd door paus Leo XIII. Bij die gelegenheid beschreef Newman zijn actieve leven als een lange strijd tegen de invloed van het liberalisme op de religie. 1 Met religieus liberalisme bedoelde hij de opvatting dat er geen eenduidige godsdienstige waarheid bestaat, zodat het niet zoveel uitmaakt wat je gelooft, zolang je maar oprecht bent, het goed bedoelt en vriendelijk doet tegen de mensen om je heen. Voor Newman was zulk geloof zonder dogma ondenkbaar. In 1833, toen hij nog Anglicaan was, begon hij vanuit die overtuiging een vernieuwingsbeweging -de Tractarian of Oxford Movement -om de Kerk van Engeland te hervormen naar het beeld van de vroege kerk, waar dogmatiek een serieuze kwestie was waarover gewone gelovigen elkaar op de markt in de haren vlogen. Hoewel de beweging succes had, besloot Newman zich in 1845 te bekeren tot de Rooms-Katholieke Kerk, waarin hij de werkelijke voortzetting zag van de kerk van de apostelen en de kerkvaders. Newmans dogmatische ernst was een schrikbeeld voor veel Anglicanen in de liberale traditie van John Locke. Niet alleen voor zijn tijdgenoten, ook voor hedendaagse auteurs is Newmans dogmatisme moeilijk te vatten. De preken, traktaten en boeken waarin Newman afrekende met sporen van Arianisme, Nestorianisme en Socinianisme in de theologieën van zijn tijd deden voor het verlichte deel van zijn Victoriaanse publiek al achterhaald aan, laat staan voor moderne academici die Newman wel eens een obsessie met ketterij hebben verweten. In de bredere samenleving is de situatie niet veel beter. Het religieus liberalisme waartegen Newman streed is intussen gemeengoed in het Westen. Je kan het amper nog een opvatting noemen. Het is een vanzelfsprekend cultureel aanvoelen geworden, dat enkel op de voorgrond treedt in de zeldzame gevallen dat het expliciet wordt uitgedaagd. Het staat godsdienstige mensen vrij om te geloven wat ze willen, zolang ze maar niet zeggen dat ze gelijk hebben. Dat is namelijk onverdraagzaam.
Een roeping voor iedereen. Geloven in de gemeenschap van de heiligen, 2023
Clear heads and holy hearts. Helder denken, heilig leven. Dat is hoe mijn doctoraatssupervisor Te... more Clear heads and holy hearts. Helder denken, heilig leven. Dat is hoe mijn doctoraatssupervisor Terry Merrigan het religieuze en theologische ideaal samenvatte van de negentiende-eeuwse Engelse denker John Henry Newman. Sint John Henry Newman, moet ik zeggen, want hij werd in heilig verklaard door paus Franciscus. In deze bijdrage onderzoek ik wat deze heilige te zeggen heeft over heiligheid in verband met het intellect: wat is de relatie tussen die twee? Zijn er, naast clear heads en holy hearts, ook holy heads? Ik behandel deze vraag in vier stappen. Eerst bespreek ik de ontwikkeling van Newmans visie op heiliging. We zullen zien dat de plaats van het intellect in het proces van heiliging secundair is. Sterker nog, het intellect moet zowel wat het bewijzen als wat het begrijpen van de geloofsinhoud betreft een pas op de plaats maken. Hoe dat komt leg ik uit in stap twee en drie. Ten slotte schets ik kort wat een geheiligd intellect kan betekenen voor de theologie vandaag.
An Evangelical Adrift is a theological biography of John Henry Newman (1801-1890) that reconstruc... more An Evangelical Adrift is a theological biography of John Henry Newman (1801-1890) that reconstructs the most formative period in his development: the years between his teenage conversion to evangelicalism in 1816 and the beginning of the Tractarian Movement in 1833. By the early 1830s, Newman had explicitly rejected much of the theology he espoused in the late 1810s and early 1820s, and developed a highly original, deeply personal, and quite radical alternative, whose fundamental notions continued to shape his thought in later life. To date, there is neither a historically accurate nor a theologically sophisticated account of this change: the period in which it occurred is neglected, its significance is overlooked, its nature and content are misrepresented, and its scope is narrowed.
Besides being modelled on Newman’s own brief treatment of the period in his autobiographical Apologia pro vita sua (1864), later scholarly accounts are burdened by a persistent assumption that Newman’s catholic sensibility and anti-liberal convictions were constants throughout his life. This assumption was problematized by Frank Turner’s revisionist biography of the Anglican Newman (2002) and the ensuing debate about its reception. Zuijdwegt argues that Turner rightly identified evangelicalism as a key polemical target of the Anglican Newman, but stretched his argument too far by reducing Newman’s self-proclaimed lifelong battle against liberalism as a much later gloss on this earlier history.
The present study offers a compelling alternative to both mainline and revisionist interpretations. Based on detailed historical and theological analysis of the whole range of primary sources (including much neglected published and unpublished material), it meticulously reconstructs Newman’s youthful adoption of, gradual departure from, and theological alternative to evangelicalism. Against most mainline studies, it argues that this was a fundamental transformation, affecting nearly every aspect of Newman’s theology. Against Turner and other revisionists, it argues that this change was the product of careful and consistent theological reasoning and reflection, and that anti-liberalism was just as integral to it as anti-evangelicalism.
By kind permission of CUA Press, I can make the introduction available.
Answerable for our Beliefs, 2022
One can imagine many ways Christians could approach unbelievers, and the Church has tried quite a... more One can imagine many ways Christians could approach unbelievers, and the Church has tried quite a variety in its long history. Preach to them is one. Persecute them is another. A third option with a long pedigree is to engage in argument. "Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have," says 1!Peter, and this injunction has been used to sanction apologetics from the Patristic era to ours. But Christian conceptions of the role of argument and the scope of reason in addressing unbelief have varied considerably. In this paper, I analyze the apologetic response of three prominent Victorian Catholics to what they, along with many Christians of the day, perceived as the rapid secularization of English intellectual culture. "e subject is suited to the occasion, not only because it deals with John Henry Newman, but also because one of Terry Merrigan's long-cherished wishes is to write a book on the place of Christian faith in secular culture. Perhaps the exilic state of retirement will provide the conditions required for such a momentous e#ort. If so, the present modest contribution might prove of some use. Besides Newman, I will be considering William George Ward and Henry Edward Manning. All three were Oxford educated converts from Anglicanism, and despite considerable di#erences in their subsequent ecclesial careers, they all became leading Catholic intellectuals. Although good comparative work has been done about them, the present contribution directs attention away from the intra-ecclesial spectrum on which their thought is commonly mapped out. Usually, Ward and Manning are presented as unbending Ultramontanists, who could not tolerate diversity in Catholic theological opinion, and rejected nineteenth-century achievements in critical historiography and the natural sciences. "eir intransigence is contrasted with Newman's openness to the liberal Catholicism of the Rambler and the Home and Foreign Review and to pioneering work in the fields of ecclesiastical history or evolutionary
Journal for the History of Modern Theology, 2013
The present article uncovers a pervasive strand of Victorian critique of John Henry Newman’s reli... more The present article uncovers a pervasive strand of Victorian critique of John Henry Newman’s religious apologetic. The exponents of this critique maintained that Newman defended a credulous adherence to Catholic doctrine on the basis of a sceptical approach to knowledge. The origins of this critical tradition are to be located in Tractarian Oxford, most notably in the disputes on religious epistemology between Newman and the Oriel Noetics, and the controversy over Newman’s Essay on Development (1845). Later Victorian intellectuals continued this critical interpretation of Newman’s apologetic. The present paper discusses its development among its most prominent religiously liberal and agnostic exponents, namely, James Anthony Froude, Charles Kingsley, James
Fitzjames Stephen, his brother Leslie Stephen, and Thomas Henry Huxley. All of
these critics were committed to epistemological standards that ultimately
derived from John Locke and which they charged Newman with subverting.
Accordingly, they regarded Newman’s apologetic as fundamentally dishonest.
In addition, they argued that Newman’s sceptical rhetorical strategy was a
major cause of the Victorian crisis of faith rather than a persuasive to belief.
Newman Studies Journal, 2013
In 1839 and 1840, Newman preached four Oxford University Sermons, which critiqued the evidential ... more In 1839 and 1840, Newman preached four Oxford University Sermons, which critiqued the evidential apologetic initiated by John Locke (1632-1704) and William Paley (1743-1805) and subsequently restated by Richard Whately (1787-1863). In response, Newman drew upon Whately’s works on logic and rhetoric to develop an alternative account of the reasonableness of religious belief that was based on implicit reasoning from antecedent probabilities. Newman’s argument was a creative response to Whately’s contention that evidential reasoning is the only safeguard against superstition and infidelity.
Louvain Studies, 2010
An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Newman’s rationale for his conversion to Roman... more An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Newman’s rationale for his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1845, provoked a series of responses in the Victorian periodical press that all involved an assessment of Newman’s sincerity in religious affairs. This article presents a detailed analysis of the various verdicts on Newman’s honesty, delineating three types of responses neatly divided along ecclesial party lines. (1) Tractarians subtly discredit Newman’s sincerity while an Anglican, in order to shift the blame for Newman’s defection from the Oxford Movement at large to his own religious mindset. (2) Other Anglicans are fiercer in their assessments. Spearheaded by Evangelicals, they vigorously challenge Newman’s integrity as an Anglican to safeguard the essentially Protestant character of the Church of England. (3) Nonconformists, on the other hand, unanimously exculpate Newman from insincerity and use his honest conversion to question the Protestant nature of the established Church. The use of anti-Catholic Gothic literary tropes in the texts under discussion reinforces this threefold division. Tractarians and Nonconformists abstain from using such Gothic rhetorical ploys, while other Anglicans fully engage this type of anti-Catholic polemics.
Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman, 2018
This chapter contributes in two ways to a better understanding of the theme of conscience in the ... more This chapter contributes in two ways to a better understanding of the theme of conscience in the thought of John Henry Newman. First, it offers a genealogical account of the formation of Newman’s idea of conscience between his adolescent conversion and the eve of the Tractarian Movement—a period of profound development that has often been misrepresented. Second, it provides a systematic account of Newman’s understanding of conscience as a Roman Catholic. It elaborates on the role of conscience in the development of religious subjectivity, and on its role in the public realm, where it is confronted with the authority of Church and state.
Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman, 2018
Richard Whately (1787-1863) is an intriguing figure in John Henry Newman’s development. Through h... more Richard Whately (1787-1863) is an intriguing figure in John Henry Newman’s development. Through his mentoring and academic support, he taught the gifted young Newman to think for himself. But intellectual independence came at a price. After a close relationship in the mid-1820s, Newman began to steer a course of his own. In the tumultuous early 1830s, their friendship foundered, as they clashed over key theological issues: the authority of the church, the doctrine of the Trinity, the nature of revelation, and the reasonableness of religious belief. Newman had come to think that Whately's theology endangered orthodox Christianity. This conviction shaped his later opposition to other Oriel Noetics, who thought like Whately. Despite their conflicts, Newman drew on Whately's work in logic and rhetoric to formulate his own theory of the relation between faith and reason.
Theologisch nadenken over het falen van de Kerk is geen sinecure. In het credo belijden katholiek... more Theologisch nadenken over het falen van de Kerk is geen sinecure. In het credo belijden katholieke christenen elke zondag dat de Kerk heilig is. Die heiligheid is volgens het Tweede Vaticaans Concilie tegelijk gave en opgave. Ze is gave omdat alleen God heilig is, die er in Christus voor gekozen heeft de Kerk te heiligen door zijn Geest. Ze is opgave omdat de Kerk geroepen is haar deelname in Gods heiligheid uit te drukken in haar concrete leven (LG 39). Dit betekent dat de zichtbare heiligheid van de Kerk kwetsbaar is. De Kerk heeft het dikwijls moeilijk om haar hoge roeping waar te maken. Hoe kunnen we haar mislukkingen theologisch begrijpen? Als een intellectuele discipline zoekt de theologie consistente modellen en verklaringen. Het is voor theologen dan ook erg verleidelijk om de spanning tussen de heiligheid van de Kerk en haar concrete falen op te lossen door een van die twee polen los te laten. Wie vertrekt vanuit een rotsvaste overtuiging van de heiligheid van de zichtbare Kerk, komt gemakkelijk in de verleiding om actuele misstanden te minimaliseren, toe te dekken met de mantel der liefde, of simpelweg te ontkennen. Wie daarentegen de heiligheid van de Kerk buiten beschouwing laat, of aan een ideële, onzichtbare Kerk toeschrijft, komt al snel tot de conclusie dat uit de zichtbare Kerk niets goeds kan voortkomen. Hoe kan hier een wijze theologische koers uitgezet worden?
Prison and Punishment by Geertjan Zuijdwegt
Louvain Studies 45, 2022
This article connects a fundamental theological reflection on the nature of belief to the work of... more This article connects a fundamental theological reflection on the nature of belief to the work of prison chaplains and the quest for a humane response to crime. An analysis of the act of faith as described in the work of John Henry Newman reveals the paradoxical nature of what it means to believe someone. Faith in persons is fundamentally dogmatic and not primarily a response to persons' characteristics or to the content of their words. This insight clarifies two key features of prison chaplaincy: fundamental trust in people in prison and the radical Rahnerian conviction that Christ is encountered in people in prison. An understanding of the paradoxical nature of belief in persons also sheds light on society's attempt to rehabilitate offenders. With the aid of Hannah Arendt, a concept of rehabilitation is developed that aims at reaffirming offenders as trustworthy citizens. Against recent claims by Martha Nussbaum, it is argued that a trust-oriented approach to offenders must also involve retributive punishment. The article concludes by recapturing the arguments on faith, prison chaplaincy, rehabilitation and punishment using the concept of symbolic encounter.
The Praxis of Justice, 2019
Theology by Geertjan Zuijdwegt
Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales, 2012
This article examines Thomas Aquinas’s critique of Peter Lombard’s controversial claim that the c... more This article examines Thomas Aquinas’s critique of Peter Lombard’s controversial claim that the charity with which we love God and neighbor is the Holy Spirit himself. Aquinas’s response to the Lombard’s teaching in the Sentences took its initial shape from a contemporaneous theological debate sparked by the English Dominican Richard Fishacre, but developed over the course of Aquinas’s career. Aquinas defines charity as a created habitual form in the soul of the believer over against three different readings of the Lombard’s position. Two are suggested by Fishacre, who tentatively argues that the Holy Spirit co-constitutes human acts of charity either (i) by means of a (quasi-)hypostatical union with the mind of the believer, or (ii) by means of a concursus simultaneus with the believer in the act of charity. The third is Aquinas’s own interpration of the Lombard, which takes the Holy Spirit to be the sole principle of the act of charity in the believer, without a mediating form or habit. Aquinas challenges these three positions in order to safeguard the possibility of a free and full participation of human beings in the divine love.
Louvain Studies, 2013
This article traces the development of the Roman Catholic understanding of extra ecclesiam nulla ... more This article traces the development of the Roman Catholic understanding of extra ecclesiam nulla salus; between the Boston Heresy Case in the early 1940s and the Second Vatican Council. The Holy Office’s condemnation of the virtual limitation of salvation to Roman Catholics by Leonard Feeney and his followers is commonly construed as an important step in the development of an inclusivist understanding of ecclesial belonging. The present article, by contrast, argues that a common Bellarminian theological framework underlies the respective positions of Feeney, the Holy Office, and Joseph Clifford Fenton, the major American expounder of the Holy Office’s position. The real development of the Church’s official position was initiated and partly accomplished in the debates in the preparatory commissions for the Second Vatican Council, and resulted in Lumen Gentium’s non-Bellarminian understanding of ecclesial belonging.
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John Henry Newman by Geertjan Zuijdwegt
Besides being modelled on Newman’s own brief treatment of the period in his autobiographical Apologia pro vita sua (1864), later scholarly accounts are burdened by a persistent assumption that Newman’s catholic sensibility and anti-liberal convictions were constants throughout his life. This assumption was problematized by Frank Turner’s revisionist biography of the Anglican Newman (2002) and the ensuing debate about its reception. Zuijdwegt argues that Turner rightly identified evangelicalism as a key polemical target of the Anglican Newman, but stretched his argument too far by reducing Newman’s self-proclaimed lifelong battle against liberalism as a much later gloss on this earlier history.
The present study offers a compelling alternative to both mainline and revisionist interpretations. Based on detailed historical and theological analysis of the whole range of primary sources (including much neglected published and unpublished material), it meticulously reconstructs Newman’s youthful adoption of, gradual departure from, and theological alternative to evangelicalism. Against most mainline studies, it argues that this was a fundamental transformation, affecting nearly every aspect of Newman’s theology. Against Turner and other revisionists, it argues that this change was the product of careful and consistent theological reasoning and reflection, and that anti-liberalism was just as integral to it as anti-evangelicalism.
By kind permission of CUA Press, I can make the introduction available.
Fitzjames Stephen, his brother Leslie Stephen, and Thomas Henry Huxley. All of
these critics were committed to epistemological standards that ultimately
derived from John Locke and which they charged Newman with subverting.
Accordingly, they regarded Newman’s apologetic as fundamentally dishonest.
In addition, they argued that Newman’s sceptical rhetorical strategy was a
major cause of the Victorian crisis of faith rather than a persuasive to belief.
Prison and Punishment by Geertjan Zuijdwegt
Theology by Geertjan Zuijdwegt
Besides being modelled on Newman’s own brief treatment of the period in his autobiographical Apologia pro vita sua (1864), later scholarly accounts are burdened by a persistent assumption that Newman’s catholic sensibility and anti-liberal convictions were constants throughout his life. This assumption was problematized by Frank Turner’s revisionist biography of the Anglican Newman (2002) and the ensuing debate about its reception. Zuijdwegt argues that Turner rightly identified evangelicalism as a key polemical target of the Anglican Newman, but stretched his argument too far by reducing Newman’s self-proclaimed lifelong battle against liberalism as a much later gloss on this earlier history.
The present study offers a compelling alternative to both mainline and revisionist interpretations. Based on detailed historical and theological analysis of the whole range of primary sources (including much neglected published and unpublished material), it meticulously reconstructs Newman’s youthful adoption of, gradual departure from, and theological alternative to evangelicalism. Against most mainline studies, it argues that this was a fundamental transformation, affecting nearly every aspect of Newman’s theology. Against Turner and other revisionists, it argues that this change was the product of careful and consistent theological reasoning and reflection, and that anti-liberalism was just as integral to it as anti-evangelicalism.
By kind permission of CUA Press, I can make the introduction available.
Fitzjames Stephen, his brother Leslie Stephen, and Thomas Henry Huxley. All of
these critics were committed to epistemological standards that ultimately
derived from John Locke and which they charged Newman with subverting.
Accordingly, they regarded Newman’s apologetic as fundamentally dishonest.
In addition, they argued that Newman’s sceptical rhetorical strategy was a
major cause of the Victorian crisis of faith rather than a persuasive to belief.