Frank M. Turner, John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 724 pp.  $35.  Reviewd by Philip Blosser (This review is published under the above title at www.amazon.com.)

One cannot help asking how a 724 page book of such unsupportable pretension can get itself published. Then, again, not much should surprise us these days. The author, formerly Provost at Yale University, is well-connected, after all. The jacket carries four accolades from what appear prima facie to be well-credentialed authorities. I say "prima facie," because they turn out on closer inspection, either to have published nothing of any significance (if at all) on Newman themselves, or to be as bent on besmirching and burying Newman's memory as the author. One senses that Newman still poses a colossal challenge for many within the Protestant texbook tradition of ecclesiastical history, whether Protestants of the conservative evangelical variety or the liberal "Christianity-and-water" variety one finds here. To the former Newman is a challenge because of the transparent honesty and programmatic reflection with which he agonized his way out of his evangelical Protestant background and Oxford Tractarian movement--against the overwhelming anti-Catholic cultural biases of his British milieu--into the Catholic Faith. To the latter, he is an offense because of his utterly sincere supernaturalism and belief in objective and absolute truth, which sticks like a thorn in the side of their urbane, self-congratulatory naturalism, subjectivism and relativism. Turner shows utterly no appreciation or sympathy for these dimensions of Newman's convictions. Instead, one finds in this pretended biographer of a dogmatist a haughty contempt for all dogma (tenets of faith proclaimed by the Church as supernaturally revealed). Even Keble and Pusey are portrayed as sickly souls, which is more than any Anglicans worth their salt should tolerate. Turner consistently plays fast and loose with his facts, marshalling his historical data selectively in support of his foregone conclusions. He says nothing, for example, about those numerous eminent (and Protestant) Victorians who sided with Newman in his argument (in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua) against Kingsley's claim that he was insincere. Instead, quixotically tilting at a colossus of a man far greater than himself, Turner tries to belittle and besmirch a mind far greater than his-- a mind described by the Victorian Gladstone as "sharp enough to cut the diamond, and bright as the diamond which it cuts." Turner's volume is ineluctably self-serving, iniquitously malicious, incorrigibly biased, and irreparably flawed. For a thorough critique, see Stanley L. Jaki's review in the New Oxford Review (May 2003), pp. 37-46.