Does Newman think the protestants have faith?
How many of you have read "Faith and Private Judgment" by John Henry Cardinal Newman? You might be interested to see what he says about the protestants of his day. He begins:
"WHEN we consider the beauty, the majesty, the completeness, the resources, the consolations, of the Catholic Religion, it may strike us with wonder, my brethren, that it does not convert the multitude of those who come in its way. . . .
"Many explanations may be given of this difficulty; I will proceed to suggest to you one, which will sound like a truism, but yet has a meaning in it. Men do not become Catholics, because they have not faith. . . ."
"If they had faith, of course they would join the Church, for the very meaning, the very exercise of faith, is joining the Church. But I mean something more than this: faith is a state of mind, it is a particular mode of thinking and acting, which is exercised, always indeed towards God, but in very various ways. Now I mean to say, that the multitude of men in this country have not this habit or character of mind. We could conceive, for instance, their believing in their own religions, even if they did not believe in the Church; this would be faith, though a faith improperly directed; but they do not believe even their own religions; they do not believe in anything at all. It is a definite defect in their minds: as we might say that a person had not the virtue of meekness, or of liberality, or of prudence, quite independently of this or that exercise of the virtue, so there is such a religious virtue as faith, and there is such a defect as the absence of it. Now I mean to say that the great mass of men in this country have not this particular virtue called faith, have not this virtue at all. As a man might be without eyes or without hands, so they are without faith; it is a distinct want or fault in their soul; and what I say is, that since they have not this faculty of religious belief, no wonder they do not embrace that, which cannot really be embraced without it. They do not believe any teaching at all in any true sense; and therefore they do not believe the Church in particular."
I think it well worth your time to read and, as always, the prose is beautiful.
by Iosephus @ 10/25/2005 11:31:00 PM
12 comments
St. Louis-Marie de Montfort, ora pro nobis
St. Joseph, ora pro nobis
St. Ambrose of Milan, ora pro nobis
St. Dominic, ora pro nobis
St. Francis (and St. Clare), orate pro nobis
St. Catherine of Siena, ora pro nobis
St. Alphonsus Ligouri, ora pro nobis
St. John Chrysostom, ora pro nobis
12 Comments:
I find far more difficult to speak with Protestants than with non-religious people. Non-religious people are at least open to whatever; Protestants are just stuck. When I first read the Newman article, I thought that was it, I was going to pass it to some of my Protestant friends. Nope. They either don't want to read it (because they "don't really buy those things") or don't get the point of it. We talk about Saints but they talk about their preferences and likes. We say "The Saint says. . ", they say "I like. . ". Anglicans are worse; it's "I like + Henry VIII liked", for "Everyone must swear allegiance to Henry VIII", who comes before the Church - before God. Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, once said that "I believe all Protestants and Catholics will go to Heaven together" but . . Really? I often truly doubt.
I do know the phenomenon that Catharina is talking about, but this is not my universal experience with Protestants. Many of the Protestants I have known believe very firmly in the rightness and wrongness of particular doctrines, and they don't think these beliefs came from themselves. Generally, they think they came from the Bible; there are problems with that, of course, but for the moment I just want to establish that there are Protestants who believe a large number of true things on the basis of authority. We still haven't established whether that's faith, but I don't think it's the problem that Newman is describing.
This is not intended as a slight to Newman, since the condition he is talking about certainly exists, and for all I know he may well have been right that this was the prevailing state among the men of England in his time. But it doesn't seem to fit with many of my experiences here. I have more to say about this, but later, since I need to run to class now.
In response to Catharina, I'd remind all that we've long known to Cormac Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor to be a real winner. As Catharina alluded to, in the Catholic Herald of 7 January 2005, the distinguished cardinal said of hell: "We're not bound to believe that anybody's there, let's face it."
That would have made Dante's work ever so much more boring. Of course, the good cardinal has been trained in the slick willy school of theology. His statement is, strictly speaking, true and indeed a doctrine of the Church: we know definitively that some souls are in heaven (the canonized saints), but we know nothing about the exact demography of hell.
Fine enough. But when his words hit the papers, the headline naturally becomes: "Archbishop of Westminster: 'No one in hell.'" Whether this is the message he wants to promote, I don't know. But it does seem to me that he ought to know well enough that his words will tend to promote that view, especially among the theologically uneducated.
Romano Amerio reports the following and in it we can see the similarties between Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor's position and that of the French bishops in 1978 who were mired in the most miserable heresy (they were dabbling in far more than revisions of doctrine about hell):
"The idea of hell was almost completely neglected by Vatican II . . . . The French bishops as a body have pronounced against the doctrine of hell, thus reinforcing what is taught by many of their parish priests: 'Hell is simply a manner of speaking that Christ used when addressing people whose religious outlook was somewhat primitive: we have developed further since.'"
And the devil is in the corner, smiling slyly: "Excellent . . . excellent . . . everything is proceeding exactly according to plan!"
In response to Clara's comment, I wonder if, given the context in which Newman spoke, he wouldn't be willing to say the same things about the protestants whom you have in mind? Obviously, as we know, there were some very serious anglo-catholic types in Newman's day--he had been one himself. And I would also imagine that there were far more of that sort in the England of his day than there are now. And that, further, other things being equal, they were more educated theologically, etc., etc. Yet he said those things which he said in the discourse I posted! I think that you might want to consider giving more credit to Newman's insight into the protestant mentality. After all, he knew it intimately; he had been the glory of the Anglican church before he was received by Blessed Dominic Barbieri into what Newman called the "one fold of Christ."
In any case, I'll be interested to see how we all try to make sense of what Newman said.
Actually, Newman's education, and association with educated Anglicans, might make him particularly unsuited to imaginatively occupy the position of the sort of Christians I'm considering. As a theologically educated man, and furthermore an *Anglican* who obviously had from his early years a good grasp of the importance of authority to religious doctrine, Newman is one to whom the Question of Rome would naturally of occurred and should have been resolvable. (And evidently was, in the end.)
I'm more concerned about those with a greater potential claim to invincible ignorance -- faithful, but without any idea of why the Church would need to be united under one visible authority with these particular doctrines, etc. Think of uneducated American evangelicals who very ardently believe in Jesus, but who have hardly met any Catholics their whole life and who have never worried about the development of doctrine. That's closer to what I had in mind.
In response to Clara, let us analyze the words "invincible ignorance." Invincible in respect to what/whom? Surely not in respect to God. Let us assume that we are dealing with one of these Bible-belt protestants. He sincerely reads the Bible, and prays to God to enlighten him. If he reads the entire New Testament, and most protestants of this sort do (albeit in mangled translations), then he will encounter sufficient proofs for the Papacy, indulgences, invocation of saints, etc. IF he prays to God to enlighten him, then God will tell him what these verses mean. It may not be an angelic voice in his head, but it may be a stray Catholic pamphlet, etc. If God does not reveal (somehow) that these Bible verses point to Roman Catholicism, then God will be guilty of giving this protestant a stone instead of a fish (or however that parable goes). If a protestant reads the Bible and never comes to Catholicism, then he either wasn't paying attention to his Bible (a sin according to his own system), or else he wasn't praying to God for enlightenment (a sin), or he intentionally rejected the true, Catholic interpretation (a sin), or God failed to deliver truth to an honest-seeker (a logical impossibility, contrary to Divine Providence). Note, I am looking at this "in the long term" -- I am not saying that God will do all of this in the course of one day. The protestant may have to read multiple verses many times and exhaust all heretical possibilities. However, the conversion should take place this side of the grave, if the protestant really reads his Bible and really prays for guidance.
Incidentally, the "jesus" in whom protestants believe
1. is not the Son of an Immaculate Virgin,
2. is not present in the Holy Eucharist,
3. did not found a visible, hierarchical Church upon earth, 4. and does not cleanse a man from sin in the core of his (the man's) being (Calvinist and Lutheran "theology" rejects intrinsic justification).
What "jesus" are we talking about here? On the Last Day, Our Lord will tell some people who "cried Lord, Lord" and even cast out demons in His Name, "I knew you not."
I think we should be very reticent in speculating about who will be turned away by Our Lord with those words. It also seems to me that Tobias Petrus is assuming the very thing that he is trying to argue when he says that it would be a strike against the goodness of God if a worthy Protestant were not brought to the Catholic faith through prayer and genuine devotion. Yes, God has promised that those who ask for fish will not be given serpents, but are we sure that all "fish" have to come directly from the Catholic church? To me this is tantamount to demanding that God not grant anyone graces through mechanisms that we ourselves haven't approved.I don't see what gives us the right to do this.
It is very presumptuous to discount others' belief in Christ merely because they don't believe *all* the things the Church teaches on the subject. The points that Tobias brings up in his last post are things that many Protestants may not have thought about much at all. How many ordinary Protestants spend their time worrying about whether the Blessed Mother was immaculate or not? Or about the precise way in which Christ cleanses us from sin? They're not necessarily staunchly beyond persuasion, ie, not in the state of formal heretics. Obviously they would come to a fuller and more complete knowledge of Christ if they were enlightened about these points, but nonetheless, if a person has read the Gospels, recognized from those accounts that Jesus Christ is God and the key to our salvation, and attempted to order their life in such a way as to follow Christ's teachings and be closer to Him, then that person seems to me to have faith. I do think this process is possible, given a properly humble attitude, even without the aid of Church teachings.
Tobias maintains that such an attentive reader will also recognize the warrant of the Church based on that reading, and thus will be brought to the Catholic faith. I don't find this assertion plausible. Naturally, I do believe that Christ founded the Church, and that the warrants for her authority are contained within Scripture. I won't deny that a person MIGHT recognize those passages and consequently become a Catholic. But it takes a lot more work to find them and piece them together than it does to recognize the importance and power of the figure of Christ, based on an unaided reading of the Bible. A person certainly could pick up on the one point without grasping the other.
And as for finding the Catholic faith, in our world of "denominations", there are plenty of cradle Catholics who don't understand what the Church claims to be, so we can hardly expect that everybody else will. I myself have a powerful childhood memory of once, while reading the Bible, being granted an insight into the necessity of there being one unified and authoritative Church. (The passage was, of course, Matt. 16:18.) At this time I was nine years old, thoroughly Mormon, and with very little notion of what Catholicism was beyond the usual vague stereotypes. Now, supposing that Tobias (who I believe is a cradle Catholic?) had been sitting at my shoulder just at the moment that I received that grace, he might have seized the opportunity by encouraging me to go and become a Catholic. The suggestion would have seemed totally irrelevant to me. I wouldn't have seen the connection at all. I think there are plenty of people who never get past this point; not everyone, obviously, is an intellectual.
The Church teaches that all people have sufficient grace to be saved, no matter what their life circumstances. Since we can't be saved without faith, I take this to mean that some kind of saving faith is possible for everyone, whether or not they have been properly instructed in the teachings of the Church. Obviously the conditions of invincible ignorance are impossible for us to know, but that being the case, I don't think we should presume to be sure that it is impossible for anyone to come to know Our Lord without formally submitting to the Church.
Clara has many very good points here. I think we must be careful in what we say -- the chief thing driving us should be our charity towards those who are ignorant of the fullness of Christian truth, whom we are to serve and instruct. A formulation of the Church's teaching that keeps ever before us the profound duty to instruct the ignorant is, practically, very important. The danger here is rhetorical: it is easy to multiply examples of invincibly ignorant souls, to ease our own consciences and to quell the sorrow of our hearts at the thought of the poor suffering souls of the damned. In multiplying these examples, what sometimes happens is that souls particularly given to the vices of sloth or or presumption will, practically speaking, abandon the Lord's mandate to preach the nations, saying to themselves, in effect, that my poor efforts to teach won't do any good, and so maybe those poor heathens would be better off without me troubling them with God's law.
What we must emphasize, then, whenever we speak of invincible ignorance, is that we have a duty to instruct each soul living within our reach, whom we might instruct, and that their ignorance can be imputed to us if we fail in that duty. Thus, the ignorance that may allow one to be saved may in fact cause another to be damned.
It is also, I think, always worth remembering that the path to salvation -- the path of true Faith -- is narrow, even for those with the graces of the sacraments and the full teachings of the Church to aid them. To hold the faith, even in the natural or incomplete sense that Clara speaks of, is not easy, and Satan, like a lion waiting to devour, is always roaming and searching for the weak. Good will is not enough, for all men sin and by sin darken their intellects and by darkening their intellects begin to reject the truths of the faith. Without the effectual aid of the sacraments, grace, saintly intercession, and the authority of the Magisterium, it is difficult to persist in the faith. We cannot presume for ourselves that we could do without these things, and so it is no charity to presume that our protestant brethren can do without them. This is not to contradict what Clara says, but to call each of us to a renewed commitment for practicing our faith more vigorously and for zealously -- yet prudently -- sharing the fullness of the faith with others.
I intend to respond to Clara's post later, when I have a chance to think about it. This is an important discussion.
Ambrosius' warnings are wise and I disagree with nothing that he has said. But I do also think that it can be important it can be important to recognize what faith a person already has before helping them to increase and fortify it with the many aids given to us in the Church. If a person already has some knowledge of and devotion to Christ, it is vital that they not think that they will have to lose that by submitting to the Church. In ministering to schismatics or heretics, it is necessary to walk a very thin line, affirming what is already right in what they believe, and helping to correct the errors.
In response to what Ambrosius wrote a little about, about sorrowing for the damned....I think it may be the case that, once they are, in fact, damned--so if we knew that fact now per impossible and also if we were rightly thinking, we would not sorrow over them or pity them. See here.
I'm only trying to be informative: I don't quibble with Ambrosius' point at all. For certainly, we feel great sorrow now for those whom we fear may yet be damned, and this fear and sorrow is altogether salutary, both for our own souls and the salvation of others.
Post a Comment
<< Home