← The Word on Fire Show - Catholic Faith and Culture
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Welcome back to the Word on fire show. I'm Dr. Matthew Petrusyk, senior director of the Word on Fire Institute and the host of the Word on Fire Show. Thank you, as always, for joining us. Friends, in honor of St. John Henry Newman's recently being named a Doctor of the Church, we're bringing you Bishop Barron's entire Word on Fire Institute lecture series on John Henry Newman. In this last week, we'll conclude our deep dive into one of Bishop Barron's spiritual and intellectual heroes. As always, enjoy.
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Well, Word on Fire Institute members, thank you for hanging there with me. We've gone through four of John Henry Newman's major works. The Apologia Privita Sua, the Essay on Development, the Idea of a University, and then finally, the Grammar of Ascent. I hope you're sensing that I've just been able to touch, you know, highlights of these wonderful books. They're already worth plowing through. Thanks for hanging in there with me. For this last lecture, I'm going to look at a final issue, one that has been very important in our time and where Newman has played a key role in influencing things, namely the issue of authority, infallibility, and theological freedom. What's the proper play between these things? So theologians speculate and lay people wonder about religious truth, and then authority has a role to play. What is the right relationship between them? And Newman has a lot to say about it, and he's been very influential. Just two texts I'll look at briefly. The first one is the famous and controversial article on Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine. Remember, it got him in such trouble when he was editor of the Rambler magazine. And then secondly, the final chapter of the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, when He finally answers Dr. Kingsley. Remember, Charles Kingsley had critiqued him, and then Newman decided to write the whole Apologia to answer him. At the very end, he gives this sort of pointed response to Kingsley. So I'll look just kind of briefly at some themes in those two texts. So on consulting the faithful in matters of doctrine, I know on the surface it sounds kind of relativistic. So what, we just. We take a poll of the people to determine what the Church believes? Is doctrine a matter of a popular vote? I mean, a lot of people today seem to operate that way, don't they? Well, you know, 79% of Catholics say X or, you know, 80% say this. So shouldn't we change the teaching? Is that what Newman is implying? That. That we should just consult the faithful to find out what the Church should Believe. And the quick answer there is clearly no, that's not what he means. He makes a distinction between two senses of the word consult. And it's only in the second sense that we consult the faithful. The first sense of consultation, Newman says, is taking counsel or submitting to the judgment of. The second sense is simply inquiring into a state of affairs. So, for example, in the first sense of the term, a physician is indeed consulted by his patient. He seeks the wisdom and direction from the doctor. But in the second sense, the physician consults the pulse of the patient. Does that make sense? It's cool the way he uses that. So within the same ambit, the patient will consult his physician. What should I do, doctor? But the doctor will consult the pulse of the patient to find out the patient's health. It's in that second sense that we consult the faithful in matters of doctrine. It doesn't mean we take a poll to find out what the people are saying and therefore what we should believe. Rather, listen now, this is Newman. The sensus fidelium, the sense of the faithful is a branch of evidence which it is natural or necessary for the Church to regard and consult before she proceeds to any definition. See, that's what he means. As the Church kind of discerns itself, what do we hold on this? One of the places we'll look would be the faithful. What do the faithful say? As though that's the clinching, determining thing. No, no, it's seeing what's up with the people as one of the signs of what the Holy Spirit is about. Again, the faithful are consulted because the body of the faithful is one of the witnesses to the fact of the tradition of revealed doctrine, and because their consensus throughout Christendom is a voice of the infallible Church. Not the voice, the final one, but a voice, an indicator of the infallible Church. I like this. In page 398 of the collection of Newman's works, Newman avers that the one apostolic truth is always available are especially evident somewhere in the life of the Church, whether in the voice of the bishops, whether in the teaching of theologians, in the liturgy, in the rites and ceremonies of the Church, or in the sensus fidelium. You see what he means? It's like, what's the indicator that there's something wrong with the body? It might not show up everywhere. It shows up in a particular symptom, or what's the sign that someone's body is really healthy? It might appear in a particular way, and so in the life of the Church, it might Particularly emerge. Oh, there we can see or hear the infallible voice. Now, mind you, again, I'm quoting Newman. The gift of discerning, discriminating, defining, promulgating any portion of the tradition resides solely in the Ecclesia Docens, Latin for the teaching Church. Finally, at the end of the day, it is Pope and bishops together, the Ecclesia Docens, that determines. But. But they do indeed consult the sensus fidelium to see what the Spirit is up to. They maybe the sensus fidelium is the clearest indicator of where the Spirit is operating. In that sense, they are indeed consulted. Mind you, in line with our earlier lecture, the Ecclesia Docens plays the umpiring role, Right? Finally, as the game is unfolding and all the different participants are playing their particular roles, but finally it's the umpire that says, okay, you're out of bounds, or no, no, you can't do that and still play basketball. So that's how the Ecclesia Docens determines the question. But listen indeed to the voice of the faithful. He points out that in 1854, in the famous proclamation of Mary's Immaculate Conception, Pius IX consulted the bishops, but he also consulted the faithful. He took indeed a kind of poll of the faithful to find out what their view was. Not that they determined the matter, but they were an important voice in the process. Now, here's something that's really powerful, I think, and Newman has his church historian hat on when he does this. Go back, he says, to the 4th century. That was his area of particular interest as an historian. Go back to the Arian controversy. Was there a time in the life of the Church when the lay faithful more clearly held to the orthodox faith than even the bishops did? Yes, he says, in parts of the Church, that was true. As many of the bishops went over to an Arian or semi Arian heresy, the people maintained their fidelity. They, if you want, were the active voice of the Church's infallibility at that time. Listen to this. Nothing more can be argued than that the Ecclesia Docens is not at every time the active instrument of the Church's infallibility. Now, the Ecclesia Docens decides at the end of the day, that's true, but it might be more apparent, it might be more active and evident in other parts of the Mystical Body. It's a very typical of Newman, isn't it, this subtlety and balance and careful discrimination. We so often fall into these either or scenarios. It's either complete papal and episcopal authority, or it's let the people decide. And Newman's got a much more delicately balanced understanding of how this works. Now let's move from that text to his answer to Kingsley. So this is the very end of the apologia pro vita sua when he's told his whole life story and now he definitively answers Kingsley. Here the focus is on the play between authority and reason in the life of the Church. Think, if you want, of the kingly office of the pope and bishops and the prophetical office of theologians. What's the play between these two? As theologians speculate and wonder and write and so on, and then as bishops and the pope determine what's the right play or relationship between them? That's what he's concerned about. Okay. Newman commences, as he often does, with conscience. Remember, he begins typically not with cosmological arguments, but with conscience, this real assent that we give to God's presence. We know that we're in the presence of a person when we hear the voice of the conscience. The conscience convicts us of two basic things. He says, first of all, the existence of God, the one who speaks the voice of conscience, but secondly, of our own depravity, because let's be honest, I mean, every one of us is a sinner. And so when our conscience speaks to us, it tends to speak to us of our sin. It tells this moral truth that we've wandered far from God. God exists, but we live in alienation from him. Newman takes that as a basic truth of natural religion. Okay. What follows from that? It follows that it's altogether reasonable to suppose that God would take action to overcome this split. What we can't do on our own, God will do through a great act of revelation. And so Christian revelation becomes something reasonable. Yeah. God would disclose truth about himself to overcome this split. Moreover, he would establish a church, it seems reasonable, that would carry on the truth of his revelation. Further, he'd give that church a supreme authority, enabling it to announce this truth unchangingly up and down the ages. You see, what he's done here, it's very clever, is beginning purely with natural religion, conscience. He. He's argued toward the legitimacy of a church having an infallible or absolute authority. A church that didn't have that kind of authority wouldn't be able to carry on God's revelation. If you couldn't carry on God's revelation, we couldn't overcome the split between us and God. We'd be left in our degradation. And so authority, here's his point, is not something that is imposed on us. As a terrible burden. Authority is in fact something liberating. It allows us to be liberated from sin. What's the Church? Here's Newman. An institution whose whole purpose is to resist the tide of sin and rebellion. Good. And that needs something like an infallible authority. See, to this mighty and terrible authority of the Church, Newman gratefully, happily submits, finding it a shelter from the storm of original sin. Okay, having said that, and he wouldn't gainsay it for a second, he confronts the serious objection. Doesn't this submission to a divine, infallible authority imply a sort of intellectual subservience? That freedom of thought now seems to be just overwhelmed or undermined. Why not just say, okay, God's spoken, full authority. I give up? Here's Newman. Listen to this beautiful sentence, by the way. The energy of the human intellect does from opposition grow. It thrives and is joyous with a tough elastic strength under the terrible blows of the divinely fashioned weapon, and is never so much itself as when it has been lately overthrown. What's he saying here? He's writing at the high water mark, in some ways, of Enlightenment, rationalism, reason, ideas, human accomplishment. I mean, there was Such confidence mid 19th century in the powers of reason. Newman's arguing, actually reason is stronger when limits are set to it. If you say reason simply has full reign, it has nothing finally to fight against, to struggle against. It actually makes reason weaker and less focused. Think here of Chesterton, again strongly influenced by Newman. What makes a game exciting? Rules. Right? If you just a bunch of kids and you throw a ball to them and say, hey, kids, go play. Well, they want to make fun at all, and they'll end up bickering within minutes. Now give them a field with goals and out of bounds lines and rules and umpires. Oh, they'll balk a bit at the umpire, but it's all of that regulation that makes the game fun. Chesterton's great image is. Imagine a bunch of kids playing football at the edge of a cliff. But the cliff has a high, thick wall around it. They'll have a ball, they'll play all day. Bounce the ball off the wall, they'll play. What if one of the kids says, in the name of freedom, I say we knock down that wall? They knock it down and now what? They just cower in fear? No one has the courage to play anymore because the walls disappear. Walls in opposition. In this sense, liberate the mind, toughen the mind, make it stronger and more focused. That's his point. See, think of a theologian now operating within the Church, if he just becomes a kind of freewheeling Voltairean rationalist, following my mind wherever it goes. It's like a river that's. The banks have collapsed and the river just opens up into this big lazy lake with no energy, no purpose, nothing to resist it. It's precisely the resistance of the infallible authority against the mind that makes the mind stronger. I like this. The infallibility of the Church now is under consideration. Its object is not to enfeeble the freedom or vigor of human thought in religious speculation, but to resist and control its extravagance. Again, think of a game, you know, if you're. I'm so into the game that I'm just going to pick up that basketball and run with it. Not dribble anymore. Well, no, no, that's an extravagance. That's silly. That's not basketball. I'm having so much fun, I'm just gonna run out of bounds and run around my opponents. Well, no, now you're not playing the game anymore. Actually, the lines and the opposition and the referee and the rules bring out the best in your performance. So Newman says, in regard to theologians operating intellectually within the Church, infallibility makes them better, makes them better theologians than they would have been otherwise. Notice two, Newman says, how rarely the Church has actually intervened infallibly in the life of the Church. It's happened very rarely. In fact, the Church lets theologians have an awful lot of room. It's only on rare occasion that they intervene to control extravagance. There's a kind of myth of the oppressive and overbearing infallible Church. In fact, it's invoked very rarely. Again, like a referee who doesn't over referee the game but lets it unfold. Something else, Newman admits sometimes the legitimate power of the Church in disciplining theologians has been harshly, even too harshly used. So he admits that practically speaking, we might say, hey, look, they shouldn't have come down so hard on this particular theologian, okay? That doesn't mean, though, that we oughtn't to exercise infallible authority at all. How about this too? He says, look at the great authority figures in the life of the Church. They're not the ones who make the great leaps forward in understanding the faith. Here's Newman. Authority in its most imposing exhibition. Grave bishops, laden with the traditions and rivalries of particular nations or places, have been guided in their decisions often by the commanding genius of individuals, sometimes young and of inferior rank. He's thinking here of like an Augustine, you know, as a young man making these great theological moves. Think of the young Thomas Aquinas, 25 years old, writing the De Ente at Ascensia. These are the people that push the conversation forward, not the popes and bishops so much. They're like the referees that set certain limits to the extravagant play of the best players. The infallible teaching office does not compromise the creativity of theological investigation. In fact, it calls it forth. Here's the last quote, and this is one that people often cite because Newman's referring to himself. He's saying, you know, if I felt the Pope or the Bishop was looking over my shoulder every time I put pen to paper, I'd never write. Listen. If I felt an authority which was supreme and final, was watching every word I said and making signs of assent or descent to each sentence as he uttered it, I would write nothing. There's an over refereeing of the game. There is an authority that's imposing itself too much. The happy place is the two of them now bringing out the best in each other. You might say it's the theologian pushing the envelope a bit who brings out the best in the authority. It's the authority in pushing back against the theologian that brings out the best in him or her. That's a typical Newman esque resolution of the issue and one I think we could really benefit from today. Well, friends with that, I bring this series of lectures to a close. We've covered a lot of ground, but I hope you see in, you know, necessarily a pretty superficial way. There's an awful lot going on in these great texts of Newman. We've kind of skated over the surface. My hope is that it's whetted your appetite a bit to delve really deeply into this great mind, into this great writer. Again, anyone that savors English sentences. You'll love getting deeper and deeper into John Henry Newman. And I do hope it might not be directly, but certainly indirectly. These considerations will help you with bringing people to the ascent. See that we call evangelization, to bring people to the point where they say, I accept this teaching. That's all Newman business. I hope these lectures will help you in that work. And God bless you.
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Matthew Petruzyk, here again, thanks so much for joining us on the Word on Fire show. As always, if you'd like to learn more about how Word on Fire can help you grow closer to Christ and become a better evangelist with and for others, visit institute.WordPress.org that's institute.WordPress.org. we'll see you next time. And God bless and protect you.