The Cause of the Canonisation of John Henry Cardinal Newman

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A Meditation for the Twenty-Third Sunday of the Year: what is Salvation?

Categorised as Featured and published Friday, September 4th, 2009
A Meditation for the Twenty-Second Sunday of the Year: the Law of God, the Gospel of God
A Meditation for the Twenty-Fourth Sunday of the Year: Conversion, Truth and Love

Alessio Baldovinetti, Annunciation, 1447, Uffizi, Florence

In his 1840 sermon ‘Righteousness not of us, but in us’ Newman turns to one of his characteristic themes: how do we achieve salvation? Looking at both God’s initiative in sending his Son to this world, to suffer and die for mankind, and also at salvation as a real change in our lives which requires our active involvement, Newman formulates a synthesis that we find already in his Lectures on Justification (1838):

There are two opposite errors: one, the holding that salvation is not of God; the other, that it is not in ourselves. Now it is remarkable that the maintainers of both the one and the other error, whatever their differences in other respects, agree in this,—in depriving a Christian life of its mysteriousness. He who believes that he can please God of himself, or that obedience can be performed by his own powers, of course has nothing more of awe, reverence, and wonder in his personal religion, than when he moves his limbs and uses his reason, though he might well feel awe then also. And in like manner he also who considers that Christ’s passion once undergone on the Cross absolutely secured his own personal salvation, may see mystery indeed in that Cross (as he ought), but he will see no mystery, and feel little solemnity, in prayer, in ordinances, or in his attempts at obedience. He will be free, familiar, and presuming, in God’s presence.

Neither will “work out their salvation with fear and trembling;”  for neither will realize, though they use the words, that God is in them “to will and to do.” [Phil. 2: 12-13] Both the one and the other will be content with a low standard of duty: the one, because he does not believe that God requires much; the other, because he thinks that Christ in His own person has done all. Neither will honour and make much of God’s Law: the one, because he brings down the Law to his own power of obeying it; the other, because he thinks that Christ has taken away the Law by obeying it in his stead.

They only feel awe and true seriousness who think that the Law remains; that it claims to be fulfilled by them; and that it can be fulfilled in them through the power of God’s grace. Not that any man alive arises up to that perfect fulfilment, but that such fulfilment is not impossible; that it is begun in all true Christians; that they all are tending to it; are growing into it; and are pleasing to God because they are becoming, and in proportion as they are becoming like Him who, when He came on earth in our flesh, fulfilled the Law perfectly.