Obviously it isn’t hard for me to understand, since I’ve said it a number of times.
The logic of the Essay, yet again is:
- “Protestantism” (affirming sola scriptura over against the witness of the Fathers) is condemned out of hand by its rejection of history.
- “Anglicanism” appears plausible because it attempts to construct a sort of pristine early Catholicism based on the witness of the Fathers.
- But this argument ignores the reality of doctrinal development within the patristic period itself, and is thus inconsistent. There is no pristine period, but a constant process of doctrinal development guided by the Magisterium of a living Church.
You’re too hung up on terminology. You assume that as soon as he decided Catholicism was true he would drop the Anglicanism/Protestantism distinction. You don’t see that he needs it in order to make the argument he’s making in the essay, which is an argument against neo-patristic Protestantism (what he calls “Anglicanism”), not against strictly “Biblicist” Protestantism (what he calls “Protestantism”).
You keep ignoring the context and structure of the work as a whole.
Edwin
The terminology I used was from Newman
as I quoted previously, all emphasis mine
"…I have nothing more to say on the subject of the change in my religious opinions. On the one hand I came gradually to see that
the Anglican Church was formally in the wrong, on the other that the Church of Rome was formally in the right; then, that
no valid reasons could be assigned for continuing in the Anglican, and again that
no valid objections could be taken to joining the Roman. Then, *
I had nothing more to learn; *what still remained for my conversion, was, not further change of opinion, but to change opinion itself into the clearness and firmness of intellectual conviction. Now I proceed to detail the acts, to which I committed myself during this last stage of my inquiry.
In 1843, I took two very significant steps:—1. In February,
I made a formal Retractation of all the hard things which I had said against the Church of Rome. 2. In September, I resigned the Living of St. Mary’s, Littlemore included:—I will speak of these two acts separately…"
From and for context:
newmanreader.org/works/ap…hapter4-2.html
I would just add from that context
"May 4, 1843 … At present I fear, as far as I can analyze my own convictions, I consider the Roman Catholic Communion to be the Church of the Apostles, and that what grace is among us (which, through God’s mercy, is not little) is extraordinary, and from the over-flowings of His dispensation. I am very far more sure that England is in schism, than that the Roman additions {209} to the Primitive Creed may not be developments, arising out of a keen and vivid realizing of the Divine Depositum of Faith.
“You will now understand what gives edge to the Bishops’ Charges, without any undue sensitiveness on my part. They distress me in two ways:—first, as being in some sense protests and witnesses to my conscience against my own unfaithfulness to the English Church, and next, as being samples of her teaching, and tokens how very far she is from even aspiring to Catholicity.”
to borrow a very funny line from Reagan
