A School of Others: Jean-Nicholas Jager, Richard Hurrell Froude, Benjamin Harrison, and John Henry Newman's Turn to the Development of Doctrine

Abstract

A School of Others:Jean-Nicholas Jager, Richard Hurrell Froude, Benjamin Harrison, and John Henry Newman's Turn to the Development of Doctrine Michael J. G. Pahls (bio) John henry newman penned his public Letter to the Duke of Norfolk on 27 December 1874 in response to Prime Minister William Gladstone's own published attacks regarding the doctrine of papal infallibility. Gladstone had argued that the newly defined doctrine would require a "renunciation of moral and mental freedom," provoking "civil disloyalty" among English Catholics.1 In response, Newman ventured a more winsome presentation for the new dogma, mitigating implications so as to allay fears that a foreign pope might subvert the English monarchy by infallible fiat. More intriguing in his defense, however, was Newman's appeal to the ongoing interpretive work of the Schola Theologorum—the "school of theologians." Considering that Gladstone had committed himself to "a representation of ecclesiastical documents which will not hold."2 Newman declared, "None but the Schola Theologorum is competent to determine the force of Papal and Synodal utterances, and the exact interpretation of them is a work of time."3 Shorn of [End Page 5] this necessary process of theological reception, Newman judged that Gladstone's reading was precipitous and at least potentially inaccurate. Gladstone's understanding of the dogma, like his understanding of the English Catholic faithful, was thereby "neither trustworthy nor charitable."4 While numerous treatments of the Catholic Newman's mature conception of the Schola Theologorum have appeared over the years, few have noticed how his regard for the ongoing, collaborative, and interpretive work of theologians finds an important, embodied precedent in the work of the Anglican Newman and in the Oxford Movement of which he was a principal figure.5 This article will explore a discrete period in that broader story wherein the failure of Newman's via media—a proposal constructed in the context of debate with the Catholic Abbé Jean-Nicholas Jager—was brought home to him under the sometimes-painful interrogations of fellow Oxford Movement collaborators, Hurrell Froude and Benjamin Harrison. I argue here that this ongoing theological reception of Anglican doctrine ultimately pressed Newman to acknowledge both the actuality and permissibility of doctrinal development and so anticipated what Newman envisioned for the Schola Theologorum in embodied practice. ENTANGLED IN CONTROVERSY WITH A FRENCH ABBÉ Since 1832, Newman had been at work as a Tractarian, working to buttress the Church of England's flagging high church hegemony in the face of Lord Charles Grey's Whig Government reforms.6 Fully expecting eventual [End Page 6] disestablishment, Newman sought to arm himself and his growing Association of Tory churchmen against the "systematic hatred … borne by Romanists, Sectarians, Liberals, and Infidels" by "poking into the Fathers with a hope of rummaging forth passages of history which may prepare the imaginations of men for a changed state of things, and also be precedents for our conduct in difficult circumstances."7 Those labors evolved into an effort to prioritize an older apostolicity over the Church of England's Elizabethan preoccupation with monarchical establishment. Resigned to life without royal preferment, Newman imagined that the national church's cause could be entrusted to the English faithful directly—"thrown on the people," as he put it, in both an economic and a theological sense.8 Here, the commonplaces of the Oxford Movement's popular Tracts for the Times—defending the apostolic succession of bishops, the liturgical stability of the Book of Common Prayer, the sacramental powers of the clergy, and the divinely established jurisdiction of the church—developed into Newman's more comprehensive via media theory of the English Church when a chance encounter grew into a fervid epistolary debate. It is well-known that the 1837 Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church represent Newman's attempt to realize an only-theoretical via media as the "very truth of the Apostles" amid the competing "real" religions of "Protestantism and Popery."9 This work grew out of his "lectures on Romanism," delivered orally [End Page 7] in Adam de Brome chapel of Saint Mary the Virgin in the summer of 1836, but those lectures were immediately preceded by a months-long correspondence...