Cor ad Cor Loquitur, Cardinal Newman Speaks to China: Newman, Pusey, and the Issue of a National Church

what constitutes "the church" is both an academic question disputed within the precincts of rarified theologians and also an issue discussed among the rank-and-file Christians who populate the world's pews each Sunday. Among the quarreled questions regarding what is and is not "the church" is the matter of a local versus universal ecclesial body. In the post-Reformation era, few topics have engendered more tension regarding the nature of the church than where people believed the center of authority properly resides—with the state or with the papacy. Ambrose's (d. 397) fourth-century contention that, "The emperor is within the Church, not above the Church," held no currency for rulers after the sixteenth century who no longer granted authority to the claims of the Roman Church.¹ Newman was a convert from what he called a "National Church," the Church of England, to the Catholic Church, which is both inclusive of local churches throughout the globe and exclusive of those churches not in communion with the bishop of Rome.² His writings regarding his own transition from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism uniquely dovetail with ecclesiological debates that presently afflict China's Catholic Church, which is divided into two contingents: one that insists upon open and unconditional communion with the bishop of Rome, and another that insists upon the condition of being an independent national church that claims communion with the bishop of Rome in only "spiritual matters," free from outside governance. The ecclesial concerns brought to light in Newman's writings can serve as a conceptual lens through which to view the ecclesial difficulties experienced in contemporary Chinese Christianity.

The church of england

In one of the appended notes to his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, John Henry Newman (1801–1890) set out to "state plainly what I feel and have felt, since I was a Catholic about the Anglican Church."³ He wrote that after entering into communion with the Church of Rome he was able to apprehend the Anglican Church "from without" and could thus see it as "a mere national institution."⁴ In this note, Newman vacillated between charitable acknowledgement of the Church of England's long history as a "National Church" of "noble historical memories," a "monument of ancient wisdom, a momentous arm of political strength," and a deeply critical assessment that while it "is a religion," the Anglican Church is "the veriest of nonentities."⁵ The question of "church" was foremost in the minds of Newman and his Anglican interlocutors such as Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800–1882), who held opposing views of what that contested term implies. Among Newman's critiques of the notion of a "National Church," which is how the Anglican Church defined itself, was that the objective of national political empowerment often subjugated the religious sentiments of such ecclesial structures. As Newman suggested, "the Nation drags its Church to its own level."⁶ In what are perhaps some of his most acerbic assertions, he relegated the Anglican Church as something from which one must escape. "The Established Church has no claims whatsoever on us," Newman insisted, "they only have claims upon our commiseration and our charity whom she holds in bondage, separated from that faith and that Church in which alone is salvation."⁷ And in even more mordant prose, he wrote:

You can have no trust in the Establishment or its Sacraments and ordinances. You must leave it, you must secede; you must turn your back upon, you must renounce, what has—not suddenly become, but has now been proved to you to have ever been—an imposture. You must take up your cross and you must go hence.⁸

After his conversion, Newman's ecclesiology was assertively Roman Catholic in that he accepted the Catholic understanding that to be within the parameters of the "one Church" one must be in communion with, and be obedient to, the bishop of Rome.⁹ Newman was not, however, radically ultramontane in his understanding of obedience to the pope. Speaking of "The Papal...