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THE P RTAL
January 2017 Page 10
Thoughts on Newman
Going up
Dr Stephen Morgan
One of the challenges faced by the writer of a regular column is that of finding something new to say . With a monthly column it is challenge enough , even with a seam to mine as rich as the words and thoughts of Blessed John Henry Newman : for those who have to produce one each week , it must be a perpetual worry .
I began these columns in the summer of 2013 as a favour to a sick friend and had no notion that the privilege – for privilege it certainly is – would last so long . Life gets easier from now on , however , because I write this on the very day , two hundred years ago , at the end of 1816 , that Newman ‘ entered at Trinity College , Oxford ’, as he puts it in his diary .
The promise of future ease in finding themes comes from the fact that , from that date onwards , the entries in Newman ’ s diaries become very much more frequent and his surviving correspondence increasingly numerous . I make no excuses for the fact that , over the next year , I intend to look closely at what our eponymous hero ( a suitably nineteenth century expression , I think ) was doing and writing in his first year at Oxford .
Newman ends 1816 with what he calls ‘ Spiritual Notes ’ and he begins 1817 replying to an affectionate letter from the great religious influence of his school days , the Rev ’ d Mr Walter Myers . The note is , as one might expect from a precocious sixteen year old only lately converted to a religious enthusiasm , a rather selfconsciously pious thing , but makes a fitting manifesto for the next twenty eight years of his life in Oxford and indeed to the end of his life . We could worse than to make it ours for the year ahead .
The note begins ( it is written in Latin and Greek ), ‘ In every danger I am will free us , if we call upon Him ’ and carries on with a suitably Calvinist stress on ‘ grace alone , faith alone ’. Walter Myers had introduced Newman to an explicitly “ Reformed ” version of Protestant Christianity , through the writings of Thomas Scott , the founding secretary of the Church Mission Society .
This Calvinism was to survive , more or less intact , until broken on the wheel of the pastoral realities of life as a curate in the parish of St Clement ’ s , just over Magdalen Bridge , where it wasn ’ t so easy to identify the
saved and the unsaved by their vocalised confession of faith in Jesus Christ as their personal saviour .
It is easy for us to forget just how thoroughly Calvinist very large parts of the Anglican Church were prior to the Tractarians . It is true that there were other theologies of salvation operating the Church of England throughout the preceding centuries . The historic formularies were clearly drafted to give Calvinism generous accommodation .
The influence , Peter Martyr Vermigli and Martin Bucer , together with the home-grown Bishop John Hooper , was both wide-ranging and long-lasting , despite the efforts of Good Queen Mary to extirpate their errors ( and their persons – successfully so in the case of Hooper ).
The evidence of a large proportion of the surviving sermons from the seventeenth and eighteenth century testify to the fact that one was at least as likely to encounter the stark theology of Geneva in the parish churches of England as one was the gentler Arminianism or anything recognisably Catholic , with or without a terminal ‘ k ’.
Newman ’ s own journey to the communion which was both to hold him and beatify him , was at this point a long way in his future and there was no inevitability about it . He began 1817 , as we do 2017 , a man with an open future .
Like him , we can only pray that , at the end of it , as he ended his ‘ Spiritual Notes ’, we hear , ‘ Well done thou good and faithful servant : enter thou into the joy of thy Lord .’
THE P RTAL
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