This Morning: "The Spiritual Presence of Christ in the Church"

As promised, I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show with Matt Swaim at about 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central to talk about a PPS (Parochial and Plain Sermon) St. John Henry Newman preached during the Easter Season, "The Spiritual Presence of Christ in the Church".

Please listen live here; the podcast will be archived here.

At the end of my post on Friday, Newman had contrasted Jesus' appearances to St. Mary Magdalene and St. Thomas: He would not allow her to touch Him but He commanded St. Thomas not only to touch Him but to probe His wounds:

Or again: consider the account of His appearing to St. Mary Magdalene. While she stood at the sepulchre weeping He appeared, but she knew Him not. When He revealed Himself, He did not, indeed, at once vanish away, but He would not let her touch Him; as if, in another way, to show that His presence in His new kingdom was not to be one of sense. The two disciples were not allowed to see Him after recognizing Him, St. Mary Magdalene was not allowed to touch Him. But afterwards, St. Thomas was allowed both to see and touch; he had the full evidence of sense: but observe what our Lord says to him, "Thomas, because thou hast seen Me, thou hast believed; blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." 

And he concludes:

Faith is better than sight or touch.

Not that we're left with only faith to guide us to the Truth about the Resurrection, the Ascension, and the Presence of Jesus in His Church, but Jesus has given us the better guide to that Truth: Faith. 

At this point in his life, Newman might have been thinking of Faith--as Reinhard Hutter explains in Chapter 2 ("Faith and Its Counterfeits") in Newman on Truth and Its Counterfeits--as "a higher reason and a gifted inference", and therefore a human act of will. But as a Catholic, through studying St. Thomas Aquinas and several Counter-Reformation Thomists, Newman would understand this Faith as Divine, supernatural Faith, one of the theological virtues infused in us at Baptism, by which we believe what God has revealed--a virtue, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, above our nature.

Nevertheless, in 1838 Newman is sure that he can teach and describe what God has revealed about Christ's Presence in His Church and summarizes those teachings for his congregation, while alluding to some of the mysteries we cannot understand but accept by Faith:

Let so much suffice, by way of suggesting thoughts upon this most Solemn and elevating subject. Christ has promised He will be with us to the end,—with us, not only as He is in the unity of the Father and the Son, not in the Omnipresence of the Divine Nature, but personally, as the Christ, as God and man; not present with us locally and sensibly, but still really, in our hearts and to our faith. And it is by the Holy Ghost that this gracious communion is effected. How He effects it we know not; in what precisely it consists we know not. We see Him not; but we are to believe that we possess Him,—that we have been brought under the virtue of His healing hand, of His life-giving breath, of the manna flowing from His lips, and of the blood issuing from His side. 

Newman asserts that we may not understand it all now, but we'll know we've experienced it later (like the disciples on the road to Emmaus and back to Jerusalem). And there's a hint that this knowledge was infused by the virtue of Faith we didn't even know we had, that raises us above our human nature partly through our persistence and obedience but mostly because God is with us:

And hereafter, on looking back, we shall be conscious that we have been thus favoured. Such is the Day of the Lord in which we find ourselves, as if in fulfilment of the words of the prophet, "The Lord my God shall come, and all the saints with Thee. And it shall come to pass in that Day, that the light shall not be clear, nor dark: but it shall be one day which shall be known to the Lord, not day, nor night: but it shall come to pass, that at evening time it shall be light." [Zech. xiv. 5-7.] Nay, even before the end comes, Christians, on looking back on years past, will feel, at least in a degree, that Christ has been with them, though they knew it not, only believed it, at the time. They will even recollect then the burning of their hearts. Nay, though they seemed not even to believe any thing at the time, yet afterwards, if they have come to Him in sincerity, they will experience a sort of heavenly fragrance and savour of immortality, when they least expect it, rising upon their minds, as if in token that God has been with them, and investing all that has taken place, which before seemed to them but earthly, with beams of glory. 

He further instructs them that they will know these truths through the Church (by this time Newman was asserting that the Church of England was a branch of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church of the Nicene Creed) because Jesus is present with His Church:

And this is true, in one sense, of all the rites and ordinances of the Church, of all providences that happen to us; that, on looking back on them, though they seemed without meaning at the time, elicited no strong feeling, or were even painful and distasteful, yet if we come to them and submit to them in faith, they are afterwards transfigured, and we feel that it has been good for us to be there; and we have a testimony, as a reward of our obedience, that Christ has fulfilled His promise, and, as He said, is here through the Spirit, though He be with the Father.

And thus he concludes:

May He enable us to make full trial of His bounty, and to obtain a full measure of blessing. "There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the Most High. God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved: God shall help her and that right early ... Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge." [Ps. xlvi. 4, 5, 10, 11.]

A sermon like this, preached a certain point in the development Newman's "religious opinions" as he called them in the Apologia pro Vita Sua, certainly demonstrates what Father Louis Bouyer of the Oratory said in the Ignatius Press one-volume edition of the Parochial and Plain Sermons:

These sermons are . . . the most lasting expression of Newman's own gradual discovery of all the fullness of the appeal and the challenge addressed to all men by Catholic truth and Catholic life, inseparable as they are within genuine Christianity. There, above all, he himself will be found, with his intellectual power, his poetical vision, as well as his moral and spiritual integrity. Nothing can constitute for us, still today, and maybe today more than ever, such a powerful introduction to what Christianity may give to and expect from our surrender to its call in the midst of a world no longer pretending to be Christian.

St. John Henry Newman, pray for us!