Newman and the Alexandrian Fathers: Shaping Doctrine in Nineteenth-Century England, by Benjamin John King

Abstract

Benjamin King's book is the second in a new Oxford series ‘Changing Paradigms in Historical and Systematic Theology’. Edited by Sarah Coakley (University of Cambridge) and Richard Cross (University of Notre Dame), the series is intended to re-examine the ‘methods, hermeneutics, geographical boundaries, or chronological caesuras’ that have traditionally shaped theological scholarship. Each volume will focus on a single ‘period or key figure whose significance’, in the editors’ view, is now ‘ripe for reconsideration’. Given this intent, one might wonder why Coakley and Cross chose to commission a volume on John Henry Newman, who has been so widely studied that there may seem to be nothing left to ‘reconsider’. King does, however, have something to offer. First, he goes beyond Newman's most famous doctrinal studies—the Essay on Development and Grammar of Assent—to examine works written throughout his career, from The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833) to his revised translation of the Select Treatises of St Athanasius (1881). He also proposes a threefold chronology as an alternative to the traditional division of Newman's career into ‘Anglican’ and ‘Catholic’ phases. In the first phase, King suggests, Newman adhered to a ‘twofold system of doctrine’: the fixed, essential teachings of ‘Apostolical Tradition’ and the more flexible, secondary ideas embodied in what he called ‘Prophetical Tradition’ (p. 33). In the early 1840s, this dichotomy was replaced by the notion of ‘doctrinal development’, which held that ‘Apostolical Tradition’ was itself dynamic, as later generations of teachers led the Church into a ‘growing awareness of already present truth’ (p. 51). Yet another shift occurred roughly two decades later, as Newman began to work from a ‘scientific’ rather than a ‘historical’ perspective, employing the vocabulary and techniques of scholasticism to construct a well-defined ‘system’ of Christian thought (p. 62).