Date of Award

5-1985

Degree Type

Master's Essay - Restricted

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Theology

First Advisor

Paul Misner

Abstract

John Henry Newman's thoughts on revelation stand among the most challenging and least fully understood in the Christian tradition. This paper contends that he casts revelation in the form of a via media between the two competing majority views of his day. Against enlightenment philosophers he insists on the possibility of a divine revelation by broadening the notion beyond the strictures set by rationalists. Against the divines, of human experience the empiricists and he insists that revelation does not reduce to a theological positivism characterized in Roman circles by neo-scholasticism, and in Protestant circles by fundamentalist "evidences" or enthusiasms. In both combats he appeals to what this paper refers to as "the dark side of revelation'': its inescapable call for docile submission to the incomprehensible mystery of the economy of salvation presented in Scripture. and dogma. Thus for Newman, the moral and intellectual difficulties which inevitably attend revelation are best understood as divinely appointed opportunities essential for personal growth in that spiritual perfection necessary for salvation: i.e., as an ascesis.

The first section of this paper reviews the status of scholarly research available on Newman's view of revelation. Section two follows with an account of the prevailing attitudes in both the academy and the churches against which Newman's thoughts on revelation were directed. Section three, after setting out the method to be employed in establishing the thesis, details Newman's theology of revelation as ascesis. The paper concludes with some reflections on the contemporary academic and relevance of Newman's approach to revelation.

Comments

An Essay Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School Marquette University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for The Degree of Master of Arts in Systemtic Theology, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

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