Frank Turner's 2002 book, John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion, was controversial not merely for what even the author occasionally admitted was “tendentious speculation” but also for his claim that Newman scholars had too easily accepted Newman's own account of his life in the Apologia. That account, Turner claimed, was selective and created an overdetermined narrative that ignored the contingency in his story. It was important, Turner and his friends claimed, to read more widely among nineteenth-century authors to get the real story about the Tractarian movement and about Newman himself than had traditional scholarship.

One of the Turner supporters is Kenneth Parker, who now holds the Newman Chair at Duquesne University, spent two decades at St. Louis University both doing productive work and directing some very talented graduate students, all of whom profess that Turner is very important. What they have contributed is largely in the areas of a) sources Newman may have relied upon more than he admitted in his autobiography and b) the more complicated reception of Newman's thought by Catholics than previously understood. Parker has shown, using Oriel College library records, that Newman was familiar with and likely borrowed, even if only subconsciously, from the seventeenth-century Catholic convert, Franciscus à Sancta Clara (Christopher Davenport), in composing Tract 90. With his student C. Michael Shea, Parker has also demonstrated that Newman's thought was both more positively received and had more influence in the theology of the Roman schools of the late nineteenth century than has been acknowledged. Indeed, it was a source for the declaration of papal infallibility at Vatican I, which Newman himself thought inopportune.

Ryan J. Marr, director of the National Institute for Newman Studies, and another Parker doctoral student, provides a test case of whether “Turnerism” really shifts our views of Newman with To Be Perfect is to Have Changed Often: The Development of John Henry Newman's Ecclesiological Outlook, 1845-1877. Marr salutes Turner and his methodological challenges, but declines commitment to the late historian's actual conclusions. Too many historical theologians, Marr argues, are prone to talking about “Newman's Catholic ecclesiology,” when the reality is that Newman's writings on the theology of the Church went through their own development even after Newman converted. Chapter 1, titled “An Imbalanced Ecclesiology: Newman's Moderate Ultramontanism,” argues that Newman's Anglican writing, shaped as it was by his own questions, was ultimately too much concerned with infallibility in the Church. When he became a Catholic, Marr argues, Newman simply flipped his assessment of Roman claims and embraced a moderate ultramontanism in the vein of Bellarmine or Suarez, insisting famously in the Essay on Development that the antecedent likelihood was not only that divine revelation would be accompanied by development but also by an infallible interpreter. Marr carefully declines to give a psychological account of Newman's views, but instead notes that they were consistent with his thought and never abjured—indeed, his central ideas on infallibility are “standard pillars of official Roman Catholic ecclesiology” (9).

So where is the imbalance? For Marr, it is in what Newman was not emphasizing. In chapters 2 and 3, Marr demonstrate how different aspects of Newman's thought reemerged after his ultramontane honeymoon. In chapter 2, on the Rambler affair, Marr shows how Newman brought back early thoughts on the importance of the lay faithful in the defense and the development of Catholic doctrine in his 1859 essay “On Consulting the Faithful.” While he notes that Newman was somewhat vague about how the laity could defend the faith or develop it if their voice was merely the echo of the teaching Church, Marr notes that “the groundbreaking character of his ecclesiology had to do with the fact that he brought the laity into the conversation at all” (33).

Chapter 3, “Resisting the Neo-Ultramontanes,” provides a good summary of the story of Newman and the decisions of Vatican I. Here Marr uses the typologies of Kenneth Parker of “successionist” and “historicist” metanarratives of the Catholic Church. The former, represented by Cardinal Manning, relies upon an understanding of doctrine as “absolute and changeless” as it proceeds from the mouths of bishops and popes, while the latter, represented by Ignaz von Döllinger, represents doctrine as settled by an appeal to historical research. While Newman agreed with neither, he saw what was good in both—and his balance came from his minimalist interpretation of the dogma of papal infallibility. Indeed, Newman's thought turned back during this period to a theme that had also animated his Anglican writing: the centrality of the theologians (schola theologorum). While historians could provide evidence for or against doctrines, and the pope and bishops were authorized to declare it finally, it was the theological guild that ultimately interpreted and opened up the questions that declared doctrines inevitably raise.

Marr's fourth chapter, on Newman's Grammar of Assent, is a very useful summary of the main points defending unlettered belief in the Church's authority as well as active consciences that received divinely revealed truth, traits that are needed to provide a balanced view of the Church. It is in his fifth chapter, “A Balanced Ecclesiology: Newman's Theology of the Threefold Office,” where Marr shines in showing us how Newman's 1877 essay on ecclesiology, attached as a preface to his third edition of his Anglican Via Media, provided the opportunity for him to sketch out a non-clerical view of the Church that included not just the formal authority of the pope but also that of the laity and the theologians.

Marr has not drastically changed the view of Newman held before, but his carefully drawn and elegantly written account of Newman's own Catholic development deepens our understanding and brings out the drama of his thought in a new way. I think there is more to be said about Newman's later skepticism about the overemphasis on authority (and the Catholic University affair plays an important part here), but what Marr has written is both useful as an introduction to the Catholic Newman as well as a second look for those who know him well.