Month: June 2011

Recently I had the pleasure of participating in a Seton Hall faculty seminar on Cardinal Newman, sponsored by the University’s Center for Catholic Studies and Center for Vocation and Servant Leadership.   Newman, a convert to Catholicism from the Anglican Church, was the leading Catholic intellectual of the 19th Century.  The seminar was led by Notre Dame’s Cyril O’Regan.  It was an absolute joy.  Participants were encouraged to submit a 1000-word reflection on Newman.  Here’s my contribution to the seminar proceedings

Newman, Barth, and Natural Theology

Newman’s religious epistemology in A Grammar of Assent can strike the contemporary reader as unduly focused on loneliness, fear, and judgment.  His “first lesson” of natural religion is the absence and silence of God.[1] Indeed, “[n]ot only is the Creator far off,” he suggests, “but some being of malignant nature seems . . . to have got hold of us, and to be making us his sport.”[2] All religions, Newman argues, understand that humans are separated from God, and seek to find respite from God’s judgment through prayer, rites of satisfaction, and the intercession of holy men.

The preparation for revealed religion, in Newman’s estimation, is a sense of foreboding – a sense that seems quite distant from the appeal to symmetry and aesthetics that characterized Aquinas’ Five Ways.  It is also far distant, as Newman acknowledges, from the mechanistic remonstrations of William Paley’s watchmaker.  While Paley’s God – and perhaps, in Newman’s estimation, Thomas’ God – could turn out to be any sort of master tinkerer, merely a Platonic ideal of the Victorian gentleman naturalist, the God prefigured by Newman’s natural religion must be more viscerally terrible.  For Newman, “[o]nly one religion,” Christianity, supplies a God capable of dishing out, and absorbing, this sort of pain.

Newman’s focus on anxiety seems to prefigure the existentialist theologies that would come to define the twentieth century, particularly those of Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasaar.  But Newman was more an Augustinian than Barth or Balthasaar, particularly in his construction of revelation and authority.  For Newman, the bulwark of revealed religion was the institutional infallibility of the Roman Church.  Yet even here Newman recognized a dynamic aspect to the Church’s authority.  The decisions of Popes and Councils, he recognized, were often mired in jealousies and politics.[3] Still, the Church reached its conclusions over time spans measured in hundreds and thousands of years.  Time, and patience, and the slow work of God’s Spirit, ensured that the Church would preserve the truth against the vicissitudes of intellectual fashions.

Karl Barth’s theological anthropology, and his resulting appraisal of the “natural” human condition, was remarkably consonant with Newman’s.  For Barth, following Luther, Humanity stood separated from a hidden God.  And Barth repeatedly affirmed that “there is no possibility of dogmatics at all outside the Church.”[4] It might seem that Barth and Newman were following similar lights.

However, Barth was notoriously less sanguine – indeed, not at all sanguine – about the possibility of any sort of natural theology.  He refused any prior anthropological basis for theology.  Moreover, because, in Barth’s view, dogmatics always is a fresh encounter with revelation, he likewise would not assign the final say to any person within or document produced by the Church.  The Roman Catholic approach to dogmatics, even when it understood the Church’s teaching office to embody genuine progress over time, “fails to recognize the divine-human character of the being of the Church.”[5] According to Barth, “[t]he freely acting God Himself and alone is the truth of revelation . . . only in God and not for us is the true basis of Christian utterance identical with its true content.  Hence dogmatics as such does not ask what the apostles and prophets said but what we must say on the basis of the apostles and prophets”[6]

It is curious that Barth does not cite Newman in this section of the Dogmatics.[7] More similarities perhaps appear between this section of the Dogmatics and Newman’s construal of Church authority than otherwise meet the eye.  Newman’s discussion of the “tyrannical interference” that results when the Church acts too swiftly against an apparently new opinion resonates with Barth’s understanding of the “divine-human” Church.[8] If Christian belief and practice has varied since the inception of the Church, for Newman, this only reflects “the necessary attendants on any philosophy or polity which takes possession of the intellect and heart, and has had any wide or extended dominion.”[9] Great ideas can only be fully comprehended over time, particularly when communicated through human media to human recipients, even though transmitted “once for all by inspired teachers.”[10]

Nevertheless, Newman ultimately sides with history over experience:  “[t]o be deep in history,” he said, “is to cease to be a Protestant.”[11] For Barth, revelation is ever and again (to use a Barthian turn of phrase) a fresh encounter with Christ, scripture, and the proclamation of the Church; for Newman, revelation is complete, and what remains is only the development of the Church’s understanding and possession of what has been delivered.  Yet Newman and Barth seem to agree that natural theology, at most, highlights God’s hiddenness.  Nature tells us nothing about God except that God is beyond us, terrible and unreachable.

Is there space for natural theology between the poles of revelation-disclosed-in-history (Newman) and revelation-disclosed-in-experience (Barth)?  Newman rejected the Anglican via media, which, as Newman described it, sought to “reconcile and bring into shape the exuberant phenomena under consideration by cutting off and casting away as corruptions all usages, ways, opinions, and tenets, which have not the sanction of primitive times.”[12] This position of “neither discarding the Fathers nor acknowledging the Pope,” Newman thought, cannot resolve hard cases.[13] However, splitting the difference between history and experience is not the only possible “third way.”  Perhaps Newman’s “natural religion,” although it pointed towards the cross and the Resurrection, did not fully account for the cross and the Resurrection in the history of creation.

The suffering and separation of creation – our suffering and our separation from God – was taken up and transformed by the cross of Christ.[14] The cross reveals that the Logos who created the universe is the suffering servant who became incarnate, God and man, and who in the flesh of man suffered for us and with us.  In the cross and Resurrection, God is not distant or hidden – indeed, in the cross and Resurrection, the shape and purpose of creation is disclosed.  In the cross, history and experience join together; in the Resurrection, history and experience are fulfilled.  Through the cross and the Resurrection, we recognize in creation the love and beauty of the God who declared the universe “good,” the God who made us, and who accepts us by grace despite our sin.  Because the cross and the Resurrection are the center of history and experience, we can delight in creation as gift and know God in creation as the giver of all good gifts.  This is true “natural” theology.