THE P RTAL
April 2014
UK Page 3
Thoughts on Newman
Resurrection
and Real Assent
by Stephen Morgan
The summer
and autumn of 1984 were warm and given to an unusual number of thunderstorms.
One of these caused lightning to strike York Minster three days after the July service at which David
Jenkins was made Bishop of Durham. In many ways, Jenkins himself was something of thunderstorm.
He rarely did or said anything of note that didn’t cause something of an upset. Two months after the York
Minster lightning strike, during that unusually hot September, he suggested, in a television interview, that
“the resurrection is not a conjuring trick with bones”.
Quite what caused him to use such unfortunate
language is anyone’s guess, but the tone in which it
was said, and other remarks denying the Virgin Birth,
immediately led to headlines suggesting that the
Bishop had called the central mystery of the Christian
faith a conjuring trick with bones.
If the resurrection is not a conjuring trick with
bones, then it is a truth – something “real”, to use
David Jenkins’ expression – that demands of us exactly
the real assent that Newman described. What might
that real assent to the truth of the resurrection look,
feel and sound like?
This was quite the opposite of what he had actually real assent
Preaching in St Clements, Oxford, on May morning
said, in an answer, to his interviewer, that had begun,
1825, Newman preached the third of three sermons
“The resurrection is real. That’s the point of it.”
on the Resurrection that year. He had preached the
It is true that he later went on to say that he didn’t others on the two preceding Sundays but, sadly, the
think that the risen Christ had a physical body texts do not survive.
but he must be acquitted of the charge of denying
In the surviving sermon, Newman reminded his
the resurrection At the time – as a newly received
Catholic – I can remember being relieved to now be hearers that “Never was a fact more strongly proved
within a Church where Bishops seemed unlikely to than our Lord’s resurrection.” Amongst the proofs
he cited were the multitudes who believed the eyemake such remarks.
witness testimony of the disciples to the empty tomb
notional assent and real assent
and the post-resurrection appearances of Christ. But
Writing his An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent1 in more important still, as evidence of the fact of the
1870, Newman described and contrasted two distinct resurrection, were, he noted, the transformed lives of
ways in which we give our agreement to propositions: the Apostles.
notional assent and real assent.
Peter, who had denied Christ three times, lived a life
The former ‘tend to be mere assertions without of heroic witness and eventual martyrdom. Paul, the
any personal hold on them on the part of those who one-time persecutor of the infant Church, turned into
make them’,2 whereas the latter ‘representing as they its most heroic advocate, before, too, paying with his
do the concrete, have the power of the concrete upon life for his faith in the Risen Christ.
the affections and passions, and by means of these
indirectly become operative’3.
Here, then, is real assent to the resurrection: lives
lived as if nothing else mattered. No conjuring trick
Real assent’ is that assent which, when we give it with bones: a real event with real consequences if we
to a proposition, changes the way we behave, the will but give it our real assent.
way we believe. It is the latter, ‘real assent’, which is,
1
JHN, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, (London:
for Newman, the character of ‘belief ’, and this is, he
Longmans, 1870), (‘Grammar’).
argues, a precondition for the communication of
2
JHN, Grammar, p.40.
faith.
3
JHN, Grammar, p.89.