Bishop Barron’s Lecture from Oxford University: “Newman and the New Evangelization”

[Applause] well thank you all very much for that kind of welcome and please know I mean what a thrill it is for me to be in this place and by this pulpit you know father did it early stage offer me the opportunity of giving the lecture from that Pope and I said dominate on some big nose you know I I would never mount the pulpit of Newman himself but to be this close to it is itself a great privilege gratitude of course the oratory and community father to you and to the Anglican community here I consider this one of the real signal privileges of my life to be able to give this lecture in this place that has so many historical and spiritual resonances father was telling me just before the lecture that Duns Scotus himself undoubtedly would have lectured in in at least the ancestor of this church and so to be in this place is an extraordinary privilege for me and thank you for that and before I begin these formal remarks I wonder if I might just go back in time to when I first encountered John Henry Newman I was a freshman at the University of Notre Dame and I was just beginning to look into the possibility becoming a priest and I met with a wonderful priest Holy Cross priest and father Tom McNally he's still alive in his 90s now but after talking to me he realized I had some intellectual interest and he said you know the book you should read is the apologia pro Vita sua of John Henry Newman well that point my life I had heard neither of númenor of the apologia pro Vita sua but I dutifully went to the Notre Dame bookstore and I bought this little red covered paper bag I still have it it's all wrinkled mal and dog-eared I think I read two pages at the time and and got nothing out of it but about four years later I was in Catholic University of America doing my master's work in philosophy and to our house for mass one night came the man who was regarded then as the Dean of American Catholic Church historians a great figure called John Tracy Ellis and he gave this grand stem winding sermon in the course of which he said as a kind of tossed off remark John Henry Newman the greatest Catholic theologian since Thomas Aquinas and so I tucked that away in the back of my mind I I better read this figure more carefully so in time I did and I fell in love with Newman as so many have now over these decades in the century and a half fell in love with Newman in his writings I taught a course in Newman for many years at Mundelein seminary outside Chicago and I would tell the students every year is now mark my words Newman will one day be a saint and a Doctor of the Church so we're halfway there and with that let me just say again what a delight it is to be with you today in this place and addressing this topic so friends I'm particularly delighted as the entire church celebrates the canonization of John Henry Newman to speak of what is arguably the central theme of his writing and pastoral work namely the psychological intellectual and spiritual dynamics of ascending to the propositions of Christian faith though he was doubtless one of the most intelligent men in the 19th century Newman was not really a pure intellectual that's to say someone primarily interested in ideas for their own sake indeed he frequently denies that he's a theologian and it was not false modesty he was rather a controversial 'lest an apologist preoccupied with the role that ideas play in the process of conversion given this practical commitment he was deeply interested in knowing what moves a person to say in regard to a religious proposition I accept that I assent to this and this makes him I would contend massively relevant to the pastoral concerns of the present day for the past 20 years or so I've been pointing out that the number of the nuns the N o n is that means the religiously unaffiliated has been climbing precipitously throughout the Western countries once solidly Christian religion in general and Christianity in particular are in sharp decline one might argue that what Newman saw commencing in the 19th century has come now rather sadly to fruition and so as Vatican 2 implied and as the last four popes have explicitly urged a new evangelization of formerly Christian lands is urgently needed and therefore a rediscovery of Newman recommended 150 years ago I think will prove very helpful in the concrete work of teaching preaching and evangelizing today now I want to be clear about something at the outset I don't think that Newman's apologetics what we might call today his fundamental theology is uniquely important or exclusive of other approaches as we shall see he proposed what would strike most people today probably as a rather dark apologetic grounded in a keen sense of our sin and helplessness might other avenues both classical and contemporary be useful well of course however I do believe that Newman's apologetic path intelligent spiritually honest psychologically astute biblically grounded will prove efficacious in our work today of evangelizing the unaffiliated now for our purposes this afternoon I'm going to concentrate on Newman's late career masterpiece the grammar of ascent much supplementary material can be found of course in the marvelous university sermons and in any number of Newman's other works but the most thorough statement of his position on evangelization and the ascent to religious propositions is clearly in the grammar I first want to make a general observation about the book a wonderfully dense and seminal text the grammar of ascent has been examined from myriad points of view and commentators have quite rightly seen links between Newman's arguments and American pragmatism whose early in phenomenology and elements of post-modernism it's been quite correctly interpreted as a pivotal text in the history of religious epistemology however what almost every commentator is tended to overlook are the roughly 75 pages at the very end of the text which provide in fact the Herman suitable key to the entire book analysts have focused almost exclusively on the great sections dealing with notional and real ascent the difference between formal and informal inference the nature of the illative sentence etcetera but they have neglected to notice how all of that is but a propaedeutic to what newman is attempting in those final pages namely a vigorous apologetic for the Catholic faith the lengthy and sometimes frankly torturous journey through the first three quarters of the grammar is intended to make us more effective evangelizers now to make this clear I want to focus first on the famous distinction that Newman draws between real and notional assent and we'll see later it has a huge role to play in his apologetic he states the point of demarcation bluntly enough I'm quoting from him now in its notional a sense the mind contemplates its own creations instead of things in real it is directed towards things represented by the impressions which they have left on the imagination though Newman harbors no hostility toward notions or pure ideas he realizes that they are contrivances of the mind our official constructs designed to help us understand Universal qualities of being and hence they tend he things to put us at a certain remove from concrete things as many pointed out we see here how firmly Newman stands in the empirical tradition associated with human Locke and also stretching back to Duns Scotus and his insistence that real cognition terminates not in abstractions but in the form of particularity Haig say to us but Newman's principal point in making this distinction is to stress that real assent has greater power the notional assent to move persons to action and engage he provides the helpful example of opposition to slavery while at the notional level many had long held slavery to be a moral offence it required I'm quoting again now organized agitation with tracts and speeches innumerable so to effect the imagination of men so as to make their acknowledgement of that iniquitous nosov close quote many of remarked something strikingly similar in the american context though many in the united states in the mid 19th century would have held to the moral conviction that slavery is objectionable the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was in fact what roused many of them to indignation in action President Lincoln incidentally demonstrated his implicit acceptance of the Newman principle when upon receiving Harriet Beecher Stowe the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin at the White House during the Civil War reportedly said so this is the little lady who wrote the book that started this great war here's Newman's Own pithy account of this practical power of real assent I'm quoting again the imagination has the means which pure intellect has not of stimulating those powers of mind from which action proceeds and we shall not be very wrong in pronouncing that acts of notional assent and of inference do not affect our conduct and acts of belief that is of real assent do effect it close quote and one of the most celebrated passages of the grammar of ascent Newman makes the explicit connection between real ascent and religious conversion quote this is why science has so little of a religious tendency deductions have no power of persuasion the heart is commonly reached not through reason but through imagination by means of direct impressions by the testimony of facts and events by history by description persons influence us voices melt us looks subdue us deeds inflame us many a man will live and die upon a dogma no man will be a martyr for a mere conclusion close quote now I do realize how extreme even frankly anti-intellectual some of this can sound but recall that newman says the heart is commonly reached in this manner and as we'll see anon he firmly holds that inference and notional assent do indeed typically play a role in moving the mind to ascend but still there's no question that when we have quit the halls of academia into the arena of evangelical engagement Newman clearly favors the real over the notional now having made and perhaps over drawn a bit this famous distinction Newman turns to an explicit consideration of the act of believing in God in Chapter five of the grammar he first lays out with admirable precision the predicate that are proper to the God of the Christian faith I'm quoting again a God who is numerically one who is personal the author sustainer and finisher of all things the life of law and order the moral governor one who is supreme and soul like himself unlike all things beside himself the truth itself wisdom love justice holiness one who is all-powerful close quote now these predications he admits are the objects of notional assent since they are discovered through formal inference and can be laid out in a coherent theological program think for instance of the first twelve questions of acquaintances Summa theologia Numan to be sure is not denying that this sort of predication and the ratiocination that stands behind it are useful but he does question whether they will ever move people to action stirring their hearts to conversion and given that in materiality is one of the predicates associated with God he wonders whether there could ever be grounds for giving real assent to the proposition that God exists here's his quote can I enter with a personal knowledge into the circle of truths which make up that great thought close quote answering this question proves to be one of the principle pivots upon which the grammar of ascent turns Newman argues that there is indeed a real path to God and that it comes through the deep sense of moral obligation grounded in the conscience because he'll place so much weight on this idea Newman spends a good deal of time clarifying precisely what he means when he refers to this phenomenon he recognizes in the first place that amid the many other acts that make up our sensual and interior lives memory reasoning imagination the sense of the beautiful etc there is also a faculty by which upon the performance of properly moral acts we feel approbation or blame a specific type of pleasure or pain with its own distinctive texture this faculty is the conscience its nature Newman says is twofold including a moral sense and a sense of duty that's to say I'm quoting here a judgment of the reason and a magisterial dictate close quote in a word conscience both judges whether acts are right or wrong and it punishes the more actor or rewards him accordingly now what makes this moral intuition different from say an aesthetic sensibility Newman says that a perception of beauty or ugliness bears no relation to a person external to the perceiver but only to the objects under consideration so relying on his taste the s thief declares something beautiful or not but he feels no approbation or shame for having made such a declaration but with conscience it's otherwise the moral actor does not simply assess right and wrong behaviors objectively and dispassionately rather guided by conscience he I'm quoting though reaches forward to something beyond self and dimly discerned a sanction higher than self for his decisions close quote and hence we speak as we never would in regard to our aesthetic sense of the voice of our conscience indeed a voice I'm quoting Newman again imperative and constraining like no other dictate in the whole of experience close quote a voice unquestionably not our own may observe that this new Manian insistence present in many of his writings gives the lie to anyone whose number alas today is legion who would simply equate conscience with subjective willfulness with doing whatever one thinks is right in point of fact consciously conscience links us to someone radically other than the self someone reigning sovereignly over the self if a painter produced an aesthetically defective work of art he might be mortified but he wouldn't feel guilty he might sense he's violated some principle of good art but he would not feel a shame as though he had let someone down but this is precisely Newman things how one feels upon performing an immoral act and therefore let me quote again from Newman if as is the case we feel responsibility our ashamed are frightened at transgressing the voice of conscience this implies that there is one to whom we are responsible before whom we are ashamed whose claims upon us we fear close quote and still another justly celebrating the passage of the grammar Newman poetically describes the feeling tone of a conscience emphasizing its inescapably interpersonal implication again I'm quoting if upon doing wrong we feel the same tearful brokenhearted sorrow which overwhelms us on hurting a mother if I'm doing right we enjoy listen to the alliteration the same sunny serenity of mind the same soothing satisfactory delight which follows on our receiving praise from a father we certainly have within us the image of some person to whom our love and veneration look close quote the danger of quoting Newman is then returning to one's own Pro seems so clunky by comparison but will do so anyway this visceral sense this intense and deeply personal contact with a transcendent other is the ground for real ascent in matters of religion and therefore as we shall see the optimal starting point for any truly effective apologetic but why should Newman be so confident that the person with whom the conscience puts us in contact is the God described by classical Christianity we must recall he says that the person so met is a supreme governor since he makes laws a judge holy just and powerful since he passes sentence and all-seeing since he looks into the private recesses of the heart in short conscience puts us really and experientially in content with God thickly described whereas the classical cosmological arguments with which Newman seems to have very little patience only relate us he thinks notionally to the very thin abstraction of a prime cause see his approach is always real visceral felt particular he's uneasy with the the abstractions of the classical cosmological argument so having explored however briefly Newman's seminal distinction between real and notional assent let us turn now to a consideration of his treatment of formal and informal inference at the heart of this densely epistemological section of the grammar is a disagreement with John Locke mind you throughout his career Newman demonstrated a profound respect for John Locke often invoking him as a model of philosophizing and certainly as we saw Locke's more empirical turn of mind was amenable to Newman's own but in many ways the pivot upon which the whole of the grammar of ascent turns is Newman's dissociation of what Locke took to be properly associated namely ascent and inference for the great English empiricist the quality of ascent ought to be correlated tightly to the quality of inferential support that can be mustered for it thus I'm quoting Newman L commenting unlock thus it is not only illogical but immoral to carry our ascent above the evidence that a proposition is true to have a surplus egde of assurance beyond the degrees of that evidence close quote Newman takes this apparently common sensical analysis as a sign of angel ISM on Locke's part in the measure that it's predicated upon the assumption that we reason and draw conclusions in a manner other than we actually do perhaps in a higher world Locke's strict linkage between inference and assent might obtain but here below newman argues we frequently indeed typically give unconditioned assent to propositions for which there is far less than unconditioned inferential support he endeavors to show this through appeal to a wide range of cognitive acts for example in his beautiful phrase the furniture of the mind which to say that whole range of basic assumptions about the nature of physical reality is blindly and implicitly assented to though we hardly ever over to the reasons for this acquiescence also sometimes we cease to assent to a claim though the inferential ground fort remains fundamentally unchallenged and intact this could be due to prejudice to the shock of the new to external pressure new experiences etc still other times we come for a variety of reasons to accept the truth claim that we had previously rejected though no one has proffered anything like a compelling argument for it the upshot and it's key to Newman is that inference and assent though always to a degree tethered to one another are by no means identical the principle difference between them and this is the insight that came to Newman in 1866 prompting the undertaking of the grammar of a sin the difference is that inference is always conditional while assent is unconditional hence I'm quoting again Locke's theory of the duty of accenting more or less according to degrees of evidence is invalidated by the testimony of high and low young and old ancient and modern as continually given in their ordinary sayings and doings there's Neumann the psychologist if you want the sociologists how do we actually come to a cent not the way Locke maintained but in this much more subtle and complex manner once again I realized that some of Newman's rhetoric can give the impression that he's indifferent to inference or even more than slightly anti intellectual nothing of course could be further from the truth Newman reverences inferential ratiocination but he's convinced that it's inadequate in itself though usually necessary to bring the mind to ascend and the reason for this is that formal inference expressed for example in terms of the classical air Sicilian syllogism never reaches fully to particular think of SCOTUS again consider Newman suggests the following syllogism all men have their price Fabricius is a man therefore for breeches has his price it's certainly a valid logical form but doesn't deliver the truth only Newman says to the degree that the abstraction man adequately describes the utterly unique individual for breeches perhaps for breeches is the only man who doesn't have a price one might recall here that delicious seen from a man for all seasons in which the corrupt cromwell insinuates to the Duke of Norfolk that Thomas More when he was chancellor took bribes and the Duke explodes damn it man he's the only judge since Cato who didn't take bribes now here's Newman's gorgeously crafted summary of the limits of syllogistic reasoning quote thus it is that the logician turns rivers full winding and beautiful into navigable canals close quote abstractions are always deeply attractive to the enquiring intellect but they carry with them the deep shadow of never being able to reach to the messy but eloquent particularity of things here's Newman again words which denote things have innumerable implications but in inferential exercises it is the very triumph of that clearness and hardness of head which is the characteristic talent for the art to have stripped them of all these Co natural senses to have drained them of that depth and breadth of Association which constitutes their poetry their rhetoric and their historical life close quote precisely because they commence with abstractions syllogisms end with abstractions and this means they can indeed indicate the direction in which the truth lies but they can never by themselves deliver the truth in its fullness quote again from newman they may approximate to a proof but they only reach the probable because they cannot reach to the particular close quote using language that his oxford predecessor Duns Scotus would have heartily approved newman says quote let units come first and so-called universals second let universals minister to units not units be sacrificed to universals close quote and therefore in summary Newman can say of the syllogism its chain of conclusion hangs loose at both ends it comes short both the first principles and concrete issues now we'd be derelict indeed if we drew from these considerations that can that the epistemic project is therefore doomed to failure or at least frustration for Newman feels that formal inference which is again indispensable and moving the mind toward ascend is supplemented by what he calls informal inference naming and defending the legitimacy of this mode of inferential argument is perhaps the gravamen of the entire argument of the grammar what does Newman mean by informal inference he provides a sinuously beautiful description at the very commencement of his consideration I'm quoting again it is the cumulation of probabilities independent of each other arising out of the nature and circumstances of the particular case under review probability is too fine to avail separately to subtle and circuitous to be convertible into syllogisms to numerous and various for such conversion even were they convertible close quote Newman demonstrates here as he often does his indebtedness to Bishop Butler who argued for the crucial role played by probability in a determination of truth in action he also shows I think a very interesting affinity to the American pragmatist Charles Sanders purse to a lesser degree William James both younger contemporaries of his all of these thinkers would concur that we rarely if ever settle a matter on the basis of clinching and utterly convincing formal argumentation much more commonly we come to our real beliefs through the process grounded in and guided by informal inference of assessing probable arguments hunches and experiences that point in the same direction and often even typically this undertaking is as much unconscious as conscious hears Newman so is the mind unequal to a complete analysis of the motives which carry it on to a particular conclusion close quote that's prior to Freud of course but interesting acknowledgement of the unconscious role played in a court with this insight newman recommended to judges and administrators that they should make their judgments firmly and announce them confidently but should refrain from giving the reasons that led them to these determinations for their ability to articulate the ground for a decision will always be limited the famous example of this implicit and informal intellection that newman provides is the manner in which we come to the absolutely certain conviction that Great Britain is an island only insane people would seriously doubt it mentally sound people universally and unhesitatingly assent to the truth of the proposition and yet patch a lock nothing like airtight inferential support for this claim is available there's no Aristotelian syllogism that could ever render the indubitable conclusion that Great Britain is surrounded on all sides by water and yet assent to the claim is made absolutely in point of fact this intellectual acquiescence is produced by a complex process of informal inference here's Newman's summary of it we've been so taught in our childhood it's on all the maps we have never heard it contradicted or questioned on the contrary everyone whom we have heard speak on the subject of Great Britain every book we have read invariably took it for granted our whole national history the routine transactions and current events of the country our social and commercial system all imply it in one way or another close quote mind you none of this would rise to the level of requisite Lockean inferential support and yet it gives rise to unconditioned assent in line with many of his nineteenth-century intellectual colleagues Newman does not hesitate to say that the same indirect and informal process obtains even in the so-called hard sciences here's Newman again quote here as an astronomy is the same absence of demonstration of the thesis the same cumulating and converging indications of it the same in directness of proof close quote this example was taken from the research fascinating to many scientists in the 19th century that the position of stars and other heavenly bodies could be determined only imperfectly through assessment of statistical probabilities and the principle of epistemic indeterminacy has been only further confirmed in our time in the context of quantum mechanics now having laid out the difference between formal and informal inference Newman wonders whether there's a faculty or sense by which the various arguments both formal and informal are assessed and which therefore produces the psychological state of certainty he determines there is and he characterizes it as follows I'm quoting this power of judging and concluding in its perfection I call the illative sense close quote to shed light on its nature and function Newman makes a comparison to the moral sensibility that Aristotle termed phronesis or right judgment often rendered in the Latin context as the moral virtue of prudence iya prudence one might know the relevant principles that govern a moral action but if that person lacks prudence or sound judgment he will not know how to apply them to a particular situation and as Aquinas consistently indicates prudence is a type of knowledge born of experience rather than by means of the purely rational moves Newman also makes a comparison with our artistic sensibility again one might grasp the great principles that that govern the art of painting but unless he has some innate and developed aesthetic know how he will not be able to judge the quality of particular paintings so why Neumann wonders I'm quoting again should ratiocination be an exception to a general law which attaches to the intellectual exercises of the mind close quote the epistemic correlate of phronesis in the moral order and the artistic intuition in the aesthetic order is the illative sentence the faculty that carries from fair a lot to its latin illative that carries the mind from the deliverances of formal and informal inference to actual assent now the last part of the paper taking these great insights of Newman from the bulk of the grammar was sent now applying them to those last 75 pages we see why he wrote the book so we could use all of this in articulating how we go about the work of evangelizing and making an apologetic case for Christianity once again one might be forgiven for overlooking in the final section of Newman's masterpiece since what's gone before is so densely textured so filled with rich insight but just as the most important figure in a liturgical procession comes last so the most significant part of this book comes at the end everything that Newman said about real emotional ascent formal and informal inference the illative sense is meant finally to shed light on the project of making an apologetic for the Christian faith relying on the classically Catholic idea that grace supposes and perfects nature Newman turns first to a consideration of what he terms natural religion his strategy is fundamentally Paul line in the measure that he imitates the Apostles apologia on the Areopagus and Athens this God whom you worship without knowing is the one I will tell you about by natural religion he means the form of religiosity that follows from the vivid sense of God given in conscience and hence president least in principle universally though some knowledge of God can indeed be given through history and nature Newman holds that the surest and most complete sense of the divine and one likely to lead to action is delivered to us as we saw through conscience so that'll be his apologetics starting point though it suggests a number of things regarding the nature of God conscience primarily presents God under his attribute of just judge though it runs counter probably the most approaches used today Newman insists I quote we learn from its information the conscience to conceive of the Almighty primarily not as a god of wisdom or knowledge or power or benevolence but as a God of judgment and justice close quote see I mean when I say it's a somewhat darker approach than we probably use today we must face the rather awful fact that since most of our actions are wicked rather than virtuous quote it follows that the aspect under which Almighty God is presented to us by nature is one who is angry with us and threatens evil close quote in a word conscience reveals to us the exceptionally good news that God exists and at the same time the rather exceptionally bad news that God is not happy with us and one of the more memorable lines from the Grammer Newman observes in its natural form religion quote has almost invariably worn its dark side outwards close quote an obvious implication of the conviction of alienation from God and this can be seen he thinks in almost all religions world why'd is the institution of something like priesthood and something like the practice of sacrifice nearly all religions involve acts of propitiation offered to an offended divinity or divinities and therefore they give rise they tend to anyway to a caste of sacred persons whose primary obligation is to preside over these ads in its more refined expressions natural religion tends to gravitate toward the idea of atonement or ritual satisfaction to solve the suffering of the conscience it gives rise to priesthood sacrifice atonement now what is the experience of God given and conscious tell us about the creator's relationship to nature whereas the overwhelming majority of Christian apologists across the century use some form of cosmological argument to indicate God's necessary connection to the natural world Newman does no such thing he takes the existence of God as a given from conscience but what he notices is not so much God's presence in the movements and dynamics of nature but rather his distance I'm quoting again what strikes the mind so forcibly and so painfully is his absence if I may so speak from his own world close quote though probably counterintuitive to many apologists today I wonder whether this approach might actually find a good deal of traction today for what impresses many young people is indeed how distant God seems from the affairs of the world that they complain of this or at least feel the pain of it is a sign that they don't exactly disbelieve in God but they are keenly aware that God ought to be present but is not perhaps the task of the apologist today is to show that this is not so much God's doing as ours in other words to show that the explanation of the absence of God is not so much scientific or met physical but moral here's how newman succinctly even at a dois specially puts it quote I see only a choice of alternatives an explanation of so critical a fact God's absence either there's no creator or he has disowned his creatures close quote conscience infallibly dictates which of those two is correct not that there's no God that's too easy NUMA thought of course there's a God but that there's a felt absence of God that comes from our moral rebellion he thinks that's essential to natural religion another Universal feature of natural religion Newman holds is prayer whether it's the dancing of the priests of Baal or the whirling of dervishes prayer expresses the human longing that the alienation with God might be overcome and immediately consequent upon prayer is the expectation of a response from God some revelation of God's will and healing purpose quote accordingly it is another alleviation of the darkness and distress which way upon the religions of the world but in one way or other such religions are founded on some idea of Express revelation coming from the unseen agents whose anger they deprecated close quote an expectation that something will come from outside that will solve this problem that I can't solve myself so in some the natural religious person knows that God is that the person is alienated from God that he or she longs for reunion but is incapable of effecting that reconciliation on his own or her own and therefore longs for a divine intervention all of that Newman thinks is delivered through conscience which is delivering quite a bit and that's his starting point now having clarified these basics born of real assent Newman lays his apologetic cards on the table he's extremely wary of the apologist who would seek to provide a scientific and objective argument designed to be convincing to any prospective conversation partner rather he would prefer to follow informal inference and the illative sense I'm quoting again for me it is more congenial to my own judgment to attempt to prove Christianity in the same informal way in which I can prove for certain that I've been born into this world and will die out of it how's he know those two things now through formal inference but through this informal inferential process governed by the illative sentence in a similar way I come to religious truth and so he commences with those already imbued with a keen sense of natural religion those who have ears to hear to use the biblical language to those insufficiently attentive to the instincts of natural religiosity Newman really has nothing to say what he shall attempt is a pulling together now of a variety of strands proceeding from conscience and tending in the direction of Christianity his initial move is a negative one namely to say that any religion that's predicated upon obvious immorality and hence repugnant to conscience is if so facto not a true religion therefore for instance the mythological religions of ancient Greece and Rome which lionized divinities who were engaged in patently immoral behavior are certainly not authentic in the manner of Augustan Newman does not hesitate to affirm I'm quoting now Jupiter and Neptune as represented in classical mythology our evil spirits and nothing can make them otherwise close quote so he's got a limited ecumenical sense when it comes to the classical religions more positively a religion that inculcate sin it's AB de in its adepts the expectation of a saving revelation is likely to be true Newman thinks that the ready conversion of dyneisha sinned de maras on the Areopagus is an example of this principle in action though Paul gave very little substance in his famous sermon reported in acts 17 and though he performed no miracles these two Greeks converted precisely because Paul spoke of a revelation given in answer to their expectation in this context Newman once again engages in polemic against Paley and indeed against anyone who would attempt to detach rationalistic form of apologetics I'm quoting I say plainly I do not want to be converted by a smart syllogism if I am asked to convert others by it I say plainly I do not care to overcome their reason without touching their hearts I wish to deal not with controversial lists but with Inquirer's those that have that natural sense of religion they're searching they're looking based on what's given to them in conscience but can we make an even more specific case that Christianity is the one true religion well Newman says that it alone Christianity alone quote has a definite message to all mankind close quote the one my quarrel with him on this score he argues that Islam is tied inextricably to the culture that produced it and does not carry a properly saving message the various Eastern religions he thinks claim no definite communication from personal God now I'm quoting Christianity on the other hand is in its idea an announcement a preaching it is the depository of truths beyond human discovery momentous practical maintained one in the same in substance in every age from its first and addressed to all mankind close quote these observations put me in mind of NT Wright's assertion that Christian is not trading and timeless spiritual truths but rather in the telling of a great story the setting forth of a drama and our precise position within it a drama furthermore in which every single person is meant to play a role and this segues neatly into Newman's next section on the mosaic anticipation of Christianity there is he asserts no other people in the history of humanity who have more consistently and reliably conveyed the fundamental truths about God than the Jews what the Romans are to the law and the Greeks to abstract thought the Jews are he thinks to correct religion they taught not only monotheism and the doctrine of Providence but they cultivated that profound longing for deliverance and anticipation of Revelation which is central to a fully evolved natural religion and the biblical Jews he argues specified this expectation further holding quote that a great personage was to be born of their stock and to conquer the whole world and to become the instrument of extraordinary blessing to it moreover that he would make his appearance at a fixed date close quote and although this sort of appealed to explicit prophecy was largely reputed in the 20th century I believe it can and should be revived under a NT right style rubric ancient Israel did indeed anticipate a messiah who would gather the tribes who would cleanse the temple in Jerusalem deal with the enemies of the nation and finally rule as Lord of the world all this was taken for granted in the preaching of the first evangelists and finally from this Lion of Judah there came forth the church whose purpose indeed has been the domination of the world spiritually speaking here's Newman I'm quoting a Catholic Church which aimed at the benefit of all nations by the spiritual conquest of all close quote and this victory came now through military effort or political manipulation but through the proclamation the word something scarcely imaginable in purely human terms that all of this congruence and logical sequence happen by sheer coincidence or historical accident strikes Newman as absurd now let me close with this what he's been doing throughout this closing section of the grammar and again whether we agree with them on every point as that's not what I'm arguing so much but to show you the style what he's been doing throughout this section of the grammar is exercising his illative sense drawing together the various probable arguments indications hunches conclusions that all point he thinks in the direction of Christianity and he's rested the entire exercise on the real assent to God's existence that flows from conscience and gives rise to action in a word he has finally been constructively constructing the edifice of a convincing apologetic on the foundation he's so painstakingly constructed in the first 300 pages of the text the entire grammar of ascend closes with a magnificent Eve occasion appropriately enough for Newman of the image of Christ whereas Caesar and Alexander the Great he says endure for the most part as names and books read by school children or specialist historians Jesus is a vivid and powerful presence lively in the imaginations of those who revere him I'm quoting Newman now here is one then who is not a mere name who's not a mere fiction but a living reality he is dead and gone but still he lives lives as a living energetic thought of successive generations as the awful motive power of a thousand great events close quote though notional assent is indeed given to creedal and Theological claims about him Jesus is the object of a very real ascent up and down the ages awaking devotion and conducing to action then beautifully and aptly Newman closes with the words of the Savior himself I am The Good Shepherd I know mine and mine know me my sheep hear my voice I know them and they follow me no bloodless abstractions or merely syllogistic demonstrations call forth faith but rather this colorfully imagined Christ the fulfillment of the longing of Israel and a personal revelation corresponding to the ache of the alienated soul the one whose voice calls out to those who have ears to hear god bless you all thanks for listening this afternoon [Applause] you [Applause]

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

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Keywords: Bishop Barron, Oxford, Newman, Evangelization, Catholic, Anglican

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Length: 55min 4sec (3304 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 23 2019