John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion [Hardcover]

Frank M. Turner (Author), Frank Turner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2002

One of the most controversial religious figures of the nineteenth century, John Henry Newman (1801–1890) began his career as a priest in the Church of England but converted to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845. He became a cardinal in 1879.

Between 1833 and 1845 Newman, now best known for his autobiographical Apologia Pro Vita Sua and The Idea of a University, was the aggressive leader of the Tractarian Movement within Oxford University. Newman, along with John Keble, Richard Hurrell Froude, and E. B. Pusey, launched an uncompromising battle against the dominance of evangelicalism in early Victorian religious life. By 1845 Newman’s radically outspoken views had earned him censure from Oxford authorities and sharp criticism from the English bishops.

Departing from previous interpretations, Turner portrays Newman as a disruptive and confused schismatic conducting a radical religious experiment. Turner demonstrates that Newman’s passage to Rome largely resulted from family quarrels, thwarted university ambitions, the inability to control his followers, and his desire to live in a community of celibate males.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Cardinal John Henry Newman is an intellectual icon to many Catholics, particularly those who gather on college campuses in the "Newman Centers" that bear the famous convert's name. Turner, a Yale University history professor, dispels some of the aura that has collected around Newman over the years by examining his earlier life and writings, which reveal an intense antipathy toward the evangelical Protestantism of the day and its influence on the Church of England. In this weighty work, Turner focuses largely on "Tracts for the Times," which Newman and his circle of colleagues began publishing in 1833 in an effort to challenge Anglicanism by seeking to recover parts of the ancient Catholic faith that had been lost. Later, however, their writings had the unintended effect of drawing many of the so-called "Tractarians" into the Roman Catholic Church. Turner suggests strongly that Newman's religious character and his own eventual conversion to Catholicism in 1845 were less the result of a natural progression toward Rome and more due to "contingency after contingency," including the departure of his own followers and his rejection by the Church of England. Indeed, he writes, the Newman found in his later spiritual autobiography, Apologia pro Vita Sua, is hardly the same Newman of the Tractarian period. Turner's work is unlikely to sway Newman devotees and those promoting his cause for sainthood, but it is absorbing nonetheless and certainly will attract readers with a bent for revisionism.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

A complex leader in the early 19th-century Church of England and at Oxford, John Henry Newman (1801-90) converted to Catholicism in 1845, became a cardinal in 1879, and is currently being considered for sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church. Turner (history, Yale; editor, Newman's The Idea of a University) describes Newman's years with the Church of England and Oxford with persuasive, documented research. Departing from previous interpretations, he shows Newman to be a controversial leader of followers at odds with what he saw as strong evangelicalism in the Church of England. His extreme rhetoric left him rejected both at Oxford and by high churchmen. Lectures, sermons, and correspondence give insight into his private judgments, whereby he recognized the collapse of his cause, which led to his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Turner shows Newman to be a champion of the authority of religious tradition and points to Newman's own writing to illustrate the idea of a dynamic Christian truth. Newman's concept of "development"-that the Christian truth was incomplete and constantly changing-provides for a truth that substantially transforms itself over the ages. This provocative text is recommended for academic and large libraries.
George Westerlund, formerly with Providence P.L.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 752 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 1st Printing edition (October 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300092512
• ISBN-13: 978-0300092516
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,460,200 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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41 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Ignores the "Historical Newman", February 13, 2004

By 

Thomas R. Rourke - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (Hardcover)

Having read a number of Newman's greatest works, including the Apologia, Development of Christian Doctrine, The Grammar of Assent, the Oxford University Sermons, and a number of biographies, I could not find the real John Henry Newman in Turner's work. This would be a very poor place to begin if one is looking for a Newman biography. Turner makes Newman out to be a confused man, yet Newman is one of the least confused people I have ever read. It is abundantly clear that Turner cannot accept Newman's eventual rejection of evangelical Christianity. As a result, he tries to read into it a variety of historical and psychological factors that really tell us a great deal about Turner but little about Newman. Turner's anti-Catholic bias is quite strong. Turner does not take the deepest movements in Newman's mind and heart seriously. He cannot, therefore, respect Newman's proclivity to live according to the evangelical counsels. Turner writes off Newman's deepening conversion as though it were some strange psychological idiosyncrasy, refering to it as a desire to live in a community with celibate males.

Definitely not recommended.

35 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Contingency and Contentiousness: Turner's Double Irony, June 27, 2003

By 

Joshua Hochschild (Emmitsburg, MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (Hardcover)

Turner proposes that the supposedly unifying feature of Newman's life-the philosophical critique of liberalism-is in fact an invention of the later Catholic Newman, a myth which Newman used to justify the behavior of his prior Anglican self, and which has been perpetuated by sympathetic Catholic hagiographers. According to Turner, a proper historical examination reveals that Newman's activity in the Oxford Movement was motivated more by political, psychological and personal preoccupations, and an emotional antipathy for Evangelical faith, rather than an intellectual critique of "liberal" ideas. But Turner's judgment is not so much the conclusion of historical research as the direct implication his historiographical assumptions. The integrity of the "continuity thesis" regarding the critique of liberalism must be ruled out by Turner a priori, because his historical method leads him to treat any sign of intellectual coherence as implying a "teleology" and "inevitability" directly opposed to historical "contingency." The first irony is that in trying to be a more authentic historian of contingency, Turner reads Newman as a captive of his psychological urges and political interests-in other words, as precisely the opposite of the sort of rational agent who, having made intelligent and free choices, can thus be said to have a genuine history. The second irony is that articulating a proper understanding of human agency and historical knowledge is one of the central concerns of Newman's intellectual critique of liberalism. We may say of Turner what Newman once said of his own obstinate brother: "That I could be contemplating questions of Truth & Falsehood never entered into his imagination!" (quoted by Turner, p. 615).

41 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Ineluctably self-serving, irreparably flawed, May 7, 2003

By 

Philip Blosser (Detroit, Michigan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (Hardcover)

One cannot help asking how a 724 page book of such unsupportable pretension can get itself published. Then, again, not much should surprise us these days. The author, formerly Provost at Yale University, is well-connected, after all. The jacket carries four accolades from what appear prima facie to be well-credentialed authorities. I say "prima facie," because they turn out on closer inspection, either to have published nothing of any significance (if at all) on Newman themselves, or to be as bent on besmirching and burying Newman's memory as the author. One senses that Newman still poses a colossal challenge for many within the Protestant texbook tradition of ecclesiastical history, whether Protestants of the conservative evangelical variety or the liberal "Christianity-and-water" variety one finds here. To the former Newman is a challenge because of the transparent honesty and programmatic reflection with which he agonized his way out of his evangelical Protestant background and Oxford Tractarian movement--against the overwhelming anti-Catholic cultural biases of his British milieu--into the Catholic Faith. To the latter, he is an offense because of his utterly sincere supernaturalism and belief in objective and absolute truth, which sticks like a thorn in the side of their urbane, self-congratulatory naturalism, subjectivism and relativism. Turner shows utterly no appreciation or sympathy for these dimensions of Newman's convictions. Instead, one finds in this pretended biographer of a dogmatist a haughty contempt for all dogma (tenets of faith proclaimed by the Church as supernaturally revealed). Even Keble and Pusey are portrayed as sickly souls, which is more than any Anglicans worth their salt should tolerate. Turner consistently plays fast and loose with his facts, marshalling his historical data selectively in support of his foregone conclusions. He says nothing, for example, about those numerous eminent (and Protestant) Victorians who sided with Newman in his argument (in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua) against Kingsley's claim that he was insincere. Instead, quixotically tilting at a colossus of a man far greater than himself, Turner tries to belittle and besmirch a mind far greater than his-- a mind described by the Victorian Gladstone as "sharp enough to cut the diamond, and bright as the diamond which it cuts." Turner's volume is ineluctably self-serving, iniquitously malicious, incorrigibly biased, and irreparably flawed. For a thorough critique, see Stanley L. Jaki's review in the New Oxford Review (May 2003), pp. 37-46.