John Henry Newman's Personal View of the Holiness of the Church: Some Useful Insights for our Times
- John Henry Newman's Personal View of the Holiness of the Church:Some Useful Insights for our Times
"This is our consolation at all times. Our very sins do not overcome the Church, for faith is independent of sin."1
Unlike apostolicity and authority, the topic of the holiness of the church in the thought of John Henry Newman is strikingly undramatic. Yet, by "undramatic" we do not mean unimportant, but rather unchanged. As both an Anglican and a Catholic, the fact that the church of Jesus Christ was holy remained a simple and patent fact.2 The fact that this vision traversed Newman's dramatic conversion in 1845 reveals all the more how centrally situated it was within his vision of the church. Throughout his life, Newman was deeply invested in the theme of holiness, attuned particularly to the modern demand to render an account of the church's members' sins. In his Anglican period, this investment centered principally around the papacy; it was only after his conversion that his interest extended more broadly to the entire church. It was Newman's perennial consolation to see this sanctity continually radiating from Christ within the very heart of the church: "One living Saint, though there be but one, is a pledge of the whole Church Invisible. Let this thought console us."3
Newman's ecclesiology, though seemingly minor to his corpus, was integral to the very architecture of his theology. With affinities to Johann Adam Möhler, it was distinctively personalistic.4 To describe it as such is not to imply any connection [End Page 81] to the twentieth-century schools that developed the term. It does, however, express where he laid the emphasis. His ecclesiology was personalistic in the sense that it was not only centered on the trinitarian persons and the Incarnation of the Godman, but likewise on the way the reality of the church is lived out in real, created persons. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how Newman's vision of the holiness of the church was distinctively personal. We will present this vision in two parts: first, in offering Newman's five fundamental aspects of the holiness of the church, and second, how these aspects together reveal a truly creative recasting of the tradition, in Newman's very own personalistic understanding of ecclesial holiness.
five main aspects of the holiness of the church
1
Newman's foremost concern regarding the church's holiness was to establish its Christological grounds. The holiness of the church is entirely and continually receiving the holiness of Christ her head, but this reception is rooted in the church's perpetual union with Christ, a dynamic and continuous life that began in her historical origin. For this reason, it is impossible to separate Christ and the church. The church as a body remains permanently united to her head because the head destined her to total union with him for all of time. In Newman's mind the church must always be first understood according to this mysterious union. Failure to do so results in reducing theological mystery to sociological description, a move that eclipses the possibility of perceiving the church's inner holiness. Reflecting on Matthew 16, Newman preached:
But while the Church of Christ is literally what the world calls a party, it is something far higher also. It is not an institution of man, not a mere political establishment, not a creature of the state, depending on the state's breath, made and unmade at its will, but it is a Divine society, a great work of God, a true relic of Christ and His Apostles, as Elijah's mantle upon Elisha, a bequest which He has left us, and which we must keep for His sake; a holy treasure which, like the ark of Israel, looks like a thing of earth, and is exposed to the ill-usage and contempt of the world, but which in its own time, and according to the decree of Him who gave it, displays to-day, and to-morrow, and the third day, its miracles, as of mercy so of judgment, "lightnings...
