Frank. M. Turner’s JOHN HENRY NEWMAN: THE CHALLENGE TO EVANGELICAL RELIGION is both beautifully written and thoroughly provocative.
Yale history Professor Turner focuses on the Anglican first half--the pre-Roman
Catholic part--of Cardinal Newman’s life. And stormy, unstable years they were.

Yet Newman was far from alone in his efforts from 1833 to 1845 to“re-catholicize" a stubbornly Protestant established English Church. Froude, Keble
and Pusey and numerous other “Tractarians” are shown moving and interacting
with Newman, often discerning aspects of him which seemed to elude even the
great introvert himself.

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN: THE CHALLENGE TO EVANGELICAL RELIGION (xii, 740 pp) is long, but rightly so. By being long, the book is self-contained, offering scholar and casual reader alike all they need to move with confidence into 19th Century England’s politics, ethos, society, literature and religion. This is a book for thousands, not just for dozens of readers. 

“Young Man Newman” is presented by Turner as a person ever keen to create and dominate small face-to-face circles of admiring friends. His lofty intellectual and spiritual writings, more often than not, are described as growing directly, if unconsciously, from mundane quarrels with his brothers and sisters, from careerist sparrings with carping opponents within the Church of England or at Oxford University and from personal distaste with secularizing trends all around him. If Newman only occasionally seems aware how bound up his speculations
are with the concrete minutiae of his daily routines, he is also likely to ascribe his
spiritual zigs and zags to the unseen finger of God hovering over his personal
destiny. Late in the day he imagines himself the Prophet Elijah summoned by
God to do a limited, imperfect good to a faithful remnant within the Church of  England. 

Who has time to hunt down and read every last one of the Oxford Movement’s 90 TRACTS FOR THE TIMES (1833-1841)? Never fear. Professor Turner lays them out in ample detail. There are also many insights clarifying Newman’s stubborn, counter-cultural impulse toward monastic living with other celibate males. Underestimated elements of his age 15 (1816) conversion to Evangelical Christianity within the English church are visited and revisited throughout the narrative to explain how early family and school life conspired to make Newman Newman. 

The study abounds in speculations (almost always explicitly so designated), mostly psychological, but also linking one historical event to another. Though easily argued against one by one, their cumulative impact is grudgingly persuasive as to what sort of concrete, living, breathing, flawed human being John Henry Newman was during his years as a Catholic sort of Protestant.

The main story line traces the evolution of Newman’s religion from that of his
Bible-reading established English Church family, through early teen temptations toward falling away into rationalism (and even atheism) into a saving conversion
 to a pro-active Evangelical (moderately Calvinistic, Puritanistic) Christianity at age15. At that time God and John Henry made a bargain entailing the teen’s lifelong commitment to celibacy and obedience. Newman then moved steadily away from the extensive evangelical “package” of beliefs and practices which he had first
bought into. 

Ere long he was a High Churchman, albeit an increasingly loud and revolutionary one. Newman first feared a complete takeover, even despoliation of property by the English Parliament of Church properties. When that did not happen, Newman, now ensconced as a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford University, tried by might and main to carve out a tolerated place for an imagined “Church Catholic” within the established English Church Protestant. Ironically, he came to believe first that the evangelical religion (which had made him a true Christian) and then eventually the entire Protestant enterprise was one huge, awful mistake which was driving the ancient Church of England away from God and into rationalism and secularism. -OOO- 

RELATED BOOKS  also recommended: Maisie Ward, YOUNG Mr. Newman. Sheridan Gilley, NEWMAN AND HIS AGE. Ian Ker, JOHN HENRY NEWMAN: A BIOGRAPHY. Owen Chadwick, THE SPIRIT OF THE OXFORD MOVEMENT: TRACTARIAN ESSAYS. -OOO-

Swannanoa, NC 10/05/2002
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I. Drafted for www.amazon.com  [11/12/2002]

In 1845 the Reverend John Henry Newman left the Anglican Church of his birth. Why?***

He at once joined, without notable enthusiasm, the Church of Rome, which he had attacked for two decades and which he believed still in need of serious reform. Why?*** 

And why  precisely do this on October 9, 1845, when he had dithered for nearly four years?*** 

These questions are raised by Yale history professor Frank B. Turner in JOHN HENRY NEWMAN: THE CHALLENGE TO EVANGELICAL RELIGION.***

Newman lived from 1801 until 1890, for the first half Anglican, for the second half  Roman Catholic. He had been strongly tempted by  agnosticism or even atheism before a life-transforming conversion to Evangelical Christianity at age 15. Staunchly Evangelical as an Oxford undergraduate, he slowly gave up its Calvinistic theology under influence of colleagues of the Oriel College Common Room, moving from Low Church to High Church views. Then, under the spell of his younger colleague Hurrell Froude, Newman became first anti-Evangelical and ultimately anti-Protestant while finding ever more signs of an ideal, mystical Church Catholic in its flawed Roman incarnation.***

Frank Turner contends that in his 1864 APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA,  Newman put a questionable spin on his Anglican years and the reasons and the timing for becoming Roman Catholic. APOLOGIA left the impression that God was leading Newman from an early age towards peace and fulfillment in the bosom of Rome. Newman’s artful re-interpretation for decades held the field. But growing accessibility of his more than 20,000 letters and more attention by scholars to contemporaries’ view of Newman as an ecclesiastical wrecking ball within the Anglican Church gave Professor Turner a plausible basis for his revisionist interpretation of why and when Newman became Roman Catholic.***

Turner portrays an increasingly sceptical, confused Newman doing everything he can to stay a loyal Anglican. He also points to a wider Victorian “conversion” milieu to show that deep inside his conscience Newman remained to the end of his Anglican days Evangelical and Protestant in his claimed right to a private judgment and to an autonomous conscience directly linked to a loving God leading him on through severe trials. There was more emotion and personal frustration behind Newman’s unconvincing and unenthusiastic conversion to Rome than other historians and biographers commonly assert.***

Turner sketches Newman’s ever changing day to day relationships: with his parents and five siblings, with friends (primarily male), mentors, critics, church authorities and with his books. From these relations emerges Newman’s vision of a God-intended, visible church authoritatively teaching truth and providing channels of holiness. Newman is presented as often in communication at one and the same time on the same issue or decision with God, Church, personal speculations, friends, enemies, family and his Victorian milieu. To Professor Turner  Newman is temperamentally a counter-puncher, reacting to his milieu rather than proactively dominating it.  Newman  is described as Protean, indeterminate--a kind of Aristotelian prime matter passively receiving impressions and forms from everything in his busy daily life of prayer, penance and controversy. Whenever he acquires new friends (e.g. Richard Whately, Hurrell Froude) he is also likely to acquire new ideas and changes of heart and mind. ***

Will Newman or won’t he--i.e., become Roman Catholic? That was asked by thousands in England and elsewhere when Newman, Froude, Keble and soon Pusey launched the Oxford or Tractarian Movement and with 14 others wrote 90 Tracts for the Times between 1833 and 1841.***

Professor Turner emphasizes both Newman’s battle against Protestantism and his derivative but growing sympathy for contemporary Roman Catholicism. Newman’s becoming Roman was never inevitable. Had Anglican Bishops not rejected Newman’s Tract 90 and made it clear that England was a Protestant nation in vigorous opposition to Rome, had he found more warm personal sympathy and more public support  from 1841 to 1845, had his younger monastically inclined coterie not moved so strongly towards and into Rome and away from him as their leader, then Newman would likely have remained within the established Church of England, warts and all.***

Newman was also well aware of other viable, socially workable choices taken by eminent Victorians. He might become Methodist or join a dissenting body. He might form his own  sect. He might become a sceptical worldling. To many observers Newman had already tailored a private religion for himself. What drove him to Rome? In large measure mere contingencies, according to Turner. In the end an ecclesiastical court decision against one of his younger disciples, the prospect of a new, less sympathetic Anglican bishop arriving in Oxford, the conversions of his young disciples, such proved the external signs which the perennially Evangelistic Newman demanded of God that it was time for Rome. Not on a planned timetable, but prematurely, shortly before completion of his great book on the development of Christian doctrine, Newman bolted. He simply cut and ran.***

This is a book for scholars. But it is so well written and concrete and moves along so deliberately that non-scholars with a couple of preparatory Newman studies under their belts can tackle it with pleasure and gain. In the end Frank Turner makes a fair case that Newman’s transplanting himself into the Roman Church was neither inevitable nor entirely rational. Newman to the last moment enjoyed a range of other real choices. Had he had followed his head more than his heart, Newman might have turned out very differently from the icon who is today’s Venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman, Father of the Second Vatican Council.***

The book is long. Its arguments are complex, its speculations many, tantalizing and not always persuasive. It could use but does not have a five page executive summary. Its great merit is to compel Newman scholars to revisit their sources in order to challenge Turner’s “what ifs.”-OOO-

TPK Swannanoa, NC 11/12/2002
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