Oxford University Sermon 5: Personal Influence and Personal Teaching

Although St. John Henry Newman wrote many books and articles, he thought that “propagating the truth” also required something more. “Personal influence,” as he calls it, is the primary means of shining the light of truth from one heart to another.

In England in the 1830s, there were many shadows and falsehoods lurking in men’s minds: rationalism, utilitarianism, and outright infidelity. Newman and his Oriel College colleagues were most concerned with one particular symptom: the heresy of Erastianism, when State governments attempt to rule over the Church’s spiritual authority. The Oxford Movement, initiated by Newman and his friends, opposed this and attempted to teach Englishmen about the proper relationship between faith and reason, the Church and the State. Newman points to a sermon, “National Apostasy,” given by John Keble on July 14, 1833, as the formal beginning of the Movement. However, Oratorian Henry Tristram, editor of Newman’s Autobiographical Writings, looks to Newman’s sermon from January 22, 1832, collected as the fifth Oxford University sermon, “Personal Influence the Means of Propagating the Truth,” as a more subtle beginning, an “appeal for volunteers in spiritual combat.”

In the sermon, Newman meditates at length on Christ’s thirty silent years in Nazareth before the beginning of his public ministry, and wonders at, from a human vantage, the development of Christ’s influential personality. To the modern mind committed to industry, concrete results, and efficiency, these silent years might seem odd, even useless. Why, the pragmatist of today wonders, would Christ, the God-Man himself, personal possessor of Truth, remain silent and apparently idle for thirty years? Why not proclaim his Kingdom-movement boldly from the very beginning, blazon it upon the minds of all, advertise it, post it, broadcast it, declaim it? 

Newman points out that, in any case, overt signs are not how Christ kept sincere followers. Many fell away even after witnessing Christ’s miracles and enjoying their effects. Further it can’t just be the moral example of Christians that wins converts; they are still imperfect, and are often “scattered and hidden in the multitude” of daily life. And even more difficult, Newman notes that the thing required for true conversion is, usually, lacking: an openness to putting aside one’s own criteria for judgment in order to embrace a new, God-given standard of faith in Christ. Christ’s Gospel cannot be understood by “merely rational beings.” How can any human criteria, then, ever open itself to the Truth of faith on its own terms?

Newman’s answer, looking to the silent years of Christ, is that there must be some “inherent moral power”—grace in a personal form—that transcends words. The Truth-giver must possess some personal capacity to invite another to a change of heart, not just of mind. As Newman suggests in another Oxford University Sermon, such a change requires exchanging pride for humility, self-sufficiency for love, both of which are necessary for an act of faith. Such a change, indeed, requires a personal and miraculous touch.

So Newman meditates on the growth and development of Christ silently in Nazareth, in order to understand how the “Teacher of Truth” inwardly prepared for a ministry of changing hearts. Newman focuses on Christ’s human nature in order to find the living, personal sense in which Christ spoke from his heart to other hearts. Whereas sinful men fail to habitually listen to the voice of God in their conscience, and only imperfectly grasp at truth, Christ’s human heart developed perfectly, making his grasp of truth “fixed and definite.” Christ’s perfect human conscience made him a shining light of Truth; and, with his divine nature, he is the Truth in person.

Thus, Christ’s perfect, upright state of heart was his own testimony, bearing witness to himself in obedience to the Father’s will. He does not initially “unfold a system for our intellectual contemplation,” but demands and supplies “the formation of a certain character” to accept the startling fact of the Incarnation, that God himself is standing before men as one of them. Christ is our study; he is our Philosopher, and has come to personally transform our hearts into his likeness.

Newman’s point is to consider how a living, not merely notional, faith can be passed on. “Nothing is so easy as to be religious on paper; and thus the arms of Truth are turned, as far as may be found necessary, against itself…” But more powerful than mere verbal proclamation of the Truth is to live it—to inhabit it—to be transformed into Christ’s likeness. “One little deed, done against natural inclination for God’s sake, though in itself of a conceding or passive character, to brook an insult, to face a danger, or to resign an advantage, has in it a power outbalancing all the dust and chaff of mere profession.” To live the truth, even without speaking, is excellent testimony. But to profess the truth without living it is a lie. 

Newman himself bravely confronted his own deficiencies in this regard. Shortly after writing this sermon, while traveling around the Mediterranean in 1833, he endured his famous “third conversion” while ill on the island of Sicily (his first conversion as an early teenager prompted him away from a brief dalliance with atheism, his second as an examiner at the university stopped his drift towards rationalism, or “liberalism in religion”). His illness coincided with a harsh feeling of self-reproach for presumption and willfulness towards Edward Hawkins, the provost at Oriel College. Newman felt that, as a preacher and teacher, he had been teaching others in theory what he himself was not actively living. His courage to look deeply at himself opened him up to God’s mercy, and renewed in him an energy to simply be an instrument for God’s work in England.

Let us pray, especially through St. John Henry Newman’s intercessions, that we may likewise look deeply at ourselves, and allow the God of all mercy to change our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26). The great Christian tradition is not dead in libraries or documents or search engines; it is powerfully alive in hearts that speak unto hearts (Newman’s cardinalate motto, Cor ad cor loquitur, heart speaks unto heart), transformed by contact with Christ’s Living Heart. Letting Christ make our hearts like his, we become true teachers who do not only speak, but who follow and imitate Him in love, deed, and sacrifice.