John Henry Newman: becoming Rome's first ecumenical saint

Pope Benedict XVI, is due to carry out a state visit to the UK from September 16 to 19. His programme is to culminate with a public Mass in Coventry, at which he will beatify the ‘Venerable’ John Henry Newman. He will be performing the second stage of the English Cardinal’s Canonisation, or path to sainthood, by virtue of which Newman will be pronounced ‘Blessed’.

The false ecumenical movement in the UK owes much to Newman’s ‘developing doctrine’, which was particularly used in formulating the Agreed Statements of ‘The Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission’ (ARCIC). The visit is expected to boost the popularity of both the clever Anglican distortions of Newman and the old errors of Rome among undiscerning Christians.

In the 19th century, Newman saw the Anglican church as a way to bring Christians back to Roman Catholicism. It is instructive to learn that, early in 1833, months before the launch of the Oxford Movement, Newman and his friend Hurrell Froude, had visited Monsignor (subsequently Cardinal) Wiseman in Rome. ‘We got introduced to him’, wrote Froude ‘to find out whether they would take us in (to the Church of Rome) on any terms to which we could twist our consciences, and we found to our dismay that not one step could be gained without swallowing the Council of Trent as a whole.’

The pope, in elevating Newman to sainthood, and harnessing the power of the media as he does so, will endeavour to achieve in the 21st century what Newman set out to accomplish in the 19th.

Evangelical background

John Henry Newman was born in London in 1801. Within Anglicanism, Newman’s family had maintained strong bonds to biblical faith. He enjoyed reading the Bible during his childhood years and, at the age of 15, during his last year at school, he considered himself ‘converted’. This happened during an illness and following the failure of his father’s bank consequent upon the collapse of the economy after the Napoleonic wars. One of his schoolmasters, Walter Mayers, who had himself shortly before been converted to a Reformed form of evangelicalism was instrumental in this. The tone of Newman’s mind at this time became evangelical and Reformed and, significantly, he held to the conviction that the pope was antichrist.

Turning point

In December 1816, he matriculated at Trinity College, Oxford and, in June of the following year, went into residence there, graduating in 1821. He was elected a fellow of Oriel College in April 1822 and in 1824 ordained as an Anglican priest. Then at the suggestion of E.B. Pusey, a fellow at Oriel, he served as a curate of St. Clements, Oxford.

In sermons which Newman preached at the time, he distinguished between justification and regeneration. However, by 1825, the denial of the biblical concept of justification and an embracing of conferred inner righteousness with sacramental leanings became apparent in his life and spiritual understanding. In that year, he wrote in his diary: ‘I think, I am not certain, I must give up the doctrine of imputed righteousness, and that of regeneration as apart from baptism’.*

Tractarian movement

By 1833, Newman was completely won over to accepting what he saw as the Roman Catholic heritage of the Anglican Church, including the papal concepts of infused justification and baptismal regeneration. At Oxford, together with other High Church academics including John Keble, Hurrell Froude, William Palmer and E.B. Pusey, he began to publish numerous tracts. Newman became the principal proponent of the Tractarian Movement. In the tracts, he and the other Oriel academics distorted the Scriptures not only with regard to justification, but to prophecy as well. Together they claimed that Protestants had unjustly represented the Papacy as the Antichrist.

In 1829, the Catholic Emancipation Act triggered the arrival in England of the Jesuits, the prompt appearance of the Tractarians, and then the launch of the Oxford Movement in 1833. Papal Rome’s original policy was to encourage the Tractarians to defect from the Church of England to her own fold. In 1845, Newman was one of the first to actually do this. Rome, we believe, then changed her policy and advised such clergy to stay in the Church of England, to take its salary and swear its solemn vows, without the least intention of keeping them, and betray the church from within.

Great stir

Newman’s abandoning of his Anglican faith caused a great stir in the mid-19th century. At that time, his influence within both the Church of England and the Church of Rome was very significant and extensive. In his Lectures on Anglican Difficulties (1850), Newman looked back on the founding conception of the Oxford Movement. In the words of The Catholic Encyclopaedia, ‘It was meant ultimately to absorb the various English denominations and parties into the Roman Church, whence their ancestors had come out at the Reformation’.

Newman’s contemporary, Roman Catholic historian Lord Acton, admired ‘the power and the charm of Newman’s style’, but considered him ‘to be a sophist; the manipulator, and not the servant of truth’. As leader of the Tractarian Society, which was characterised by its secretiveness, Newman had defended what he called the ‘economical’ mode of teaching and arguing, i.e. setting out the truth advantageously, or withholding it (today it is described as ‘spin’).

The good news

The Scriptures clearly declare that by self-righteous deeds, or by one’s good works, no one can be justified, because ‘by the deeds of the law there shall be no flesh justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin’ (Romans 3.20). It is the purpose of the Apostle Paul to declare that justification is reckoned to the convicted sinner by God’s grace alone and received by faith alone, with the righteousness of God imputed or reckoned to the believer who knows he is a sinner. ‘But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets; even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference. For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God’ (Romans 3.21-23).

What is revealed in these verses is not keeping the law or any kind of human works, as Newman would have us believe, but rather the convicted sinner’s justification is God’s righteousness imputed to him and received by faith alone in the Lord Jesus Christ’s perfect sacrifice. The gospel is an historical manifestation of the perfect satisfaction which Christ rendered to all the demands of the law, and which God places to the credit of every true believer. Before God’s all-holy nature and wrath, sin had to be punished and true righteousness established. This was accomplished in the faithful obedience of the Lord Jesus Christ and his propitiatory sacrifice. Justification is the divine act whereby the infinitely holy God judicially declares the believing sinner to be acceptable and righteous before him, whom he sees as perfected once and forever in his beloved Son.

The gospel cast aside

Newman seriously errs in his exposition of the gospel. His teaching crucially distorts and undermines the pivotal truth that God’s righteousness in Christ is imputed or credited to the believer. In 1838, Newman published Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification. Thomas L. Sheridan, a Jesuit priest, stated correctly, ‘The Lectures remain, for all practical purposes, Newman’s last word on the subject’. Newman taught what Sheridan defined as a ‘synthesis of justification and regeneration’. This was to be a hallmark of the new Newman; he now denied what he had previously upheld. Thus, he wrote: ‘The Law written on the heart, or spiritual renovation, is that which justifies us’. However, in Romans 3.20, Paul states the opposite. The law as such convicts and condemns us and can never justify us. Yet, Newman had the audacity to write: ‘I have been arguing from the essential union between justification and renewal, that they are practically interchangeable terms’. This identification of justification with inner righteousness is the consistent erroneous teaching of the Church of Rome. For, definitively, the Vatican declares: ‘Justification is conferred in baptism, the sacrament of faith. It conforms us to the righteousness of God, who makes us inwardly just by the power of his mercy’ (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1994, para.1992).

Newman’s teaching, like that of Rome, is that justification and renewal are convertible terms. As we have seen, this is a negation of comprehensive scriptural teaching that justification derives from legal righteousness in Jesus Christ alone, and is simply imputed or credited to the believer.

In denying biblical imputed righteousness, Newman repudiated the central wonderful truth at the heart of Christ’s sacrificial death, which is to be found in the glorious doctrine of substitutionary atonement by which Christ was a ransom for his people. Regrettably, these truths are being repudiated among ecumenical evangelicals today. It is disturbing that all this has resurfaced as the Vatican finalises its plans for Pope Benedict’s visit in September.

* Editor: It is salutary to note that this is a very similar trajectory to those followed by today’s New Perspective and Federal Vision.

This article is an edited extract from John Henry Newman: Becoming Rome’s First Ecumenical Saint by Richard Bennett and Michael de Semlyen, Dorchester House Publications, PO Box 67, Rickmansworth, Herts., WD3 5SJ (01923 282333), price £2.00, and is used with permission.

Richard Bennett is a native of Ireland and a former Roman Catholic priest, an author and evangelistic preacher and teacher. His ministry website is http://www.bereanbeacon.org

Michael de Semlyen is author of two books warning about the neglect of our Christian heritage, and the dangers to both church and nation of continuing ecumenical compromise. His ministry website is http://www.reformationfaith.com