G.J. Zuijdwegt

This article examines the ethical validity of using viability as the cutoff point for abortion in the Netherlands, in view of potential changes to the Dutch perinatal care guideline. According to the Dutch Penal Code, abortion is permitted until viability: the point at which a fetus can survive outside the womb with technological assistance. Since the law was enacted in 1984, viability has been set at 24 weeks gestational age. Currently, in the Netherlands, the treatment limit for extreme prematurity is also set at 24 weeks. The potential revision of the guideline could lower this threshold. Such a change could have implications for abortion in the Netherlands. We critically evaluate the use of viability within the Dutch context and offer recommendations for modifying the legal framework concerning abortion. We conclude that relying on any interpretation of viability is morally problematic for abortion regulation, as it is too indeterminate a concept to establish a threshold in a mo...

This article connects a fundamental theological reflection on the nature of belief to the work of prison chaplains and the quest for a humane response to crime. An analysis of the act of faith as described in the work of John Henry Newman reveals the paradoxical nature of what it means to believe someone. Faith in persons is fundamentally dogmatic and not primarily a response to persons' characteristics or to the content of their words. This insight clarifies two key features of prison chaplaincy: fundamental trust in people in prison and the radical Rahnerian conviction that Christ is encountered in people in prison. An understanding of the paradoxical nature of belief in persons also sheds light on society's attempt to rehabilitate offenders. With the aid of Hannah Arendt, a concept of rehabilitation is developed that aims at reaffirming offenders as trustworthy citizens. Against recent claims by Martha Nussbaum, it is argued that a trust-oriented approach to offenders must also involve retributive punishment. The article concludes by recapturing the arguments on faith, prison chaplaincy, rehabilitation and punishment using the concept of symbolic encounter.

The story of Newman and Richard Whately (1787–1863) contains all the drama of friendship found and lost, and of the honing and clashing of two powerful intellects over high political and theological stakes. Bits and pieces of this story have found their way into the many studies of Newman and Tractarianism, but the full tale remains untold. The only monograph on Newman and Whately, moreover, is sadly vitiated by its construing Whately’s position largely on the basis of two works—on metaphysics and logic—which he did not write (Willam 1960: 55–113, 163–98; cf. Zuijdwegt 2013: 82). This chapter traces the course of Newman’s friendship with Whately from its promising beginnings in 1822 to its foundering in the political and religious turmoil of the early 1830s, and uncovers the conflict of theological principles at the root of Newman’s divergence from Whately and his polemic against noetic theology. Finally, it sketches Whately’s influence on Newman’s understanding of faith and reason in the University Sermons.

This article traces the development of the Roman Catholic understanding of 'extra ecclesiam nulla salus' between the Boston Heresy Case in the early 1940s and the Second Vatican Council. The Holy Office’s condemnation of the virtual limitation of salvation to Roman Catholics by Leonard Feeney and his followers is commonly construed as an important step in the development of an inclusivist understanding of ecclesial belonging. The present article, by contrast, argues that a common Bellarminian theological framework underlies the respective positions of Feeney, the Holy Office, and Joseph Clifford Fenton, the major American expounder of the Holy Office’s position. The real development of the Church’s official position was initiated and partly accomplished in the debates in the preparatory commissions for the Second Vatican Council, and resulted in Lumen Gentium’s non-Bellarminian understanding of ecclesial belonging.

In 1839 and 1840, Newman preached four Oxford University Sermons, which critiqued the evidential apologetic initiated by John Locke (1632-1704) and William Paley (1743-1805) and subsequently restated by Richard Whately (1787-1863). In response, Newman drew upon Whately’s works on logic and rhetoric to develop an alternative account of the reasonableness of religious belief that was based on implicit reasoning from antecedent probabilities. Newman’s argument was a creative response to Whately’s contention that evidential reasoning is the only safeguard against superstition and infidelity.

The present article uncovers a pervasive strand of Victorian critique of John Henry Newman’s religious apologetic. The exponents of this critique maintained that Newman defended a credulous adherence to Catholic doctrine on the basis of a sceptical approach to knowledge. The origins of this critical tradition are to be located in Tractarian Oxford, most notably in the disputes on religious epistemology between Newman and the Oriel Noetics, and the controversy over Newman’s 'Essay on Development' (1845). Later Victorian intellectuals continued this critical interpretation of Newman’s apologetic. The present paper discusses its development among its most prominent religiously liberal and agnostic exponents, namely, James Anthony Froude, Charles Kingsley, James Fitzjames Stephen, his brother Leslie Stephen, and Thomas Henry Huxley. All of these critics were committed to epistemological standards that ultimately derived from John Locke and which they charged Newman with subverting. Accordingly, they regarded Newman’s apologetic as fundamentally dishonest. In addition, they argued that Newman’s sceptical rhetorical strategy was a major cause of the Victorian crisis of faith rather than a persuasive to belief.

This article examines Thomas Aquinas’s critique of Peter Lombard’s controversial claim that the charity with which we love God and neighbor is the Holy Spirit himself. It discusses three interpretations of the Lombard’s position, analyses Aquinas’s objections to each of them, and presents Aquinas’s own developing view of the relation between charity and the Holy Spirit. In his Scriptum super Sententiis, Aquinas attacks the Lom- bard’s position as interpreted by the English Dominican Richard Fischacre, who tenta- tively argued that the Holy Spirit ‘co-constitutes’ human acts of charity either by means of a (quasi-)hypostatical union with the mind of the believer (i), or by means of a con- cursus simultaneus with the believer in the act of charity (ii). From the Lectura romana onwards, Aquinas is no longer concerned with Fishacre’s position. He rather reads the Lombard as maintaining that the Holy Spirit is the sole principle of the act of charity in the believer, without a mediating form or habit (iii). Aquinas maintains that the Lombard’s position is mistaken on each of these three interpretations. Instead of being the Holy Spirit himself, Aquinas argues, charity is a created habitual form in the soul of the believer, which enables the free and full participation of human beings in the divine love.

This Dutch language paper offers a close reading of Newman's subtle argument in his famous Preface to the third edition of the 'Via Media' and shows that along with an apologetic for the Church of Rome, it offers a penetrating critique of the imbalances in his Church under the pontificate of Pius IX.

'An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine', Newman’s rationale for his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1845, provoked a series of responses in the Victorian periodical press that all involved an assessment of Newman’s sincerity in religious affairs. This article presents a detailed analysis of the various verdicts on Newman’s honesty, delineating three types of responses neatly divided along ecclesial party lines. (1) Tractarians subtly discredit Newman’s sincerity while an Anglican, in order to shift the blame for Newman’s defection from the Oxford Movement at large to his own religious mindset. (2) Other Anglicans are fiercer in their assessments. Spearheaded by Evangelicals, they vigorously challenge Newman’s integrity as an Anglican to safeguard the essentially Protestant character of the Church of England. (3) Nonconformists, on the other hand, unanimously exculpate Newman from insincerity and use his honest conversion to question the Protestant nature of the established Church. The use of anti-Catholic Gothic literary tropes in the texts under discussion reinforces this threefold division. Tractarians and Nonconformists abstain from using such Gothic rhetorical ploys, while other Anglicans fully engage this type of anti-Catholic polemics.

As a teaser for my forthcoming book on Newman, Catholic University of America Press is letting me share its Introduction. An Evangelical Adrift: The Making of John Henry Newman's Theology is a unique theological biography detailing the radical transformation of Newman's theology between his adolescent conversion in 1816 and the beginning of the Tractarian Movement in 1833.