THE P RTAL
April 2015
UK Pages - page 14
Thoughts on Newman
Evidences of the Resurrection
Dr Stephen Morgan muses on Newman’s sermon on the Resurrection
Publication deadlines
are such that this article, to be published in the full joy of the
Easter season, is being written in the depths of Lent, when reflections tend to look no further than the
events of Good Friday. And yet, if we are ever to make sense of those events, if we are not to spend our Lent
in despair, we must know the events of Easter morning, we must know that death on the Cross was not the
last word, we must always remember – even if our liturgy forbids us yet to utter it – Alleluia! But knowing
about Easter morning, knowing of Christ’s victory over death, knowing of the Resurrection is not something
simple.
It certainly isn’t as neat and tidy as a mathematical
proof or a scientific experiment proving cause and
effect. Ultimately, our knowledge of the Resurrection
is a belief grounded on the witness of others.
When still a deacon in the Church of England, barely
twenty-four years old, in the pulpit of St Clement’s,
Oxford, on Sunday, 1st May 1825, Bl. John Henry
Newman tackled this question straight on. He called
the Sermon ‘Evidences of the Resurrection’ and his
evidences, garnered from Sacred Scripture led him to
make the bold claim:
‘Never was a fact more strongly proved, than
our Lord’s resurrection.’
Paul, whose encounter with Christ on the road to
Damascus changed him from the merciless persecutor
It seems an extraordinary boast to the modern mind, of the nascent Church into its greatest missionary and
duped, as it is, by the claims of scientists to a universal set him on the path to shipwreck, imprisonment and,
and infallible certainty in all things. What Newman eventually, beheading in the same city in which Peter
knew, however, and what Professors Brian Cox, Richard had suffered.
Dawkins and Mr Stephen Fry seem unprepared
to countenance, was that the claims of scientific
In the 1825 sermon, Newman observes that there was
materialism can speak only to the self-imposed limited nothing to be gained, at least not in human terms, for
conception of reality that acknowledges nothing that the Apostles – all but one of whom suffered martyrdom
cannot be seen, touched, heard, smelled or tasted.
– in their fidelity to the belief in the Resurrection.
People in the first century Mediterranean were no
Newman recognised that there were other means more credulous than you or I.
of proof than those of the laboratory bench or the
mathematician’s notebook. It was, he knew, possible
They were, if the popular literature of the time is
to infer, with certainty, truths from the witnesses, the to be believed, always on the look out for charlatans.
actions of others.
They could spot a confidence trickster a Roman mile
off and yet, as Newman observed, ‘thousand and tens
For Newman, the most powerful testimony of the of thousands were induced to give up all their worldly
Resurrection was the behaviour of those who claimed prospects to embrace a persecuted religion … Surely
to have encountered the Risen Christ. The coward such numbers would have been little willing to sacrifice
Peter, transformed into the fearless leader of the early comfort, nay life its