Abstract

This paper briefly surveys the intellectual context of the lecture “The Office of Justifying Faith" by John Henry Newman. Newman is an outstanding English theologian, writer and philosopher, who had a great influence on the development of the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches in the 19th and 20th centuries. Newman became one of the leaders of the so-called Tractarian Movement. Tractarians offered a radically new understanding of the relation between the Anglican Church and other ecumenical churches. The most famous expression of this rethinking was the branch theory. According to this theory, the Anglican Church is one of the three branches of a single universal Church alongside the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. According to the Newman's doctrine of via media, Anglican Church represents the middle way between Roman Catholic Church and Protestant Churches. In the “Lectures on Justification" published in 1838, Newman applies the doctrine of via media to the set of problems that concern the Christian idea of justification. The lecture “The Office of Justifying Faith" is in this sense a very characteristic example of the doctrine of via media. Here Newman demonstrates the difference between the doctrines of the Anglican Church about the relationship between justification and faith and the doctrine of the Protestants about justification by faith only.