John Henry Newman’s Dictum
Albert Benjamin Simpson’s Missio-Eschatology
Michele Nardi’s Example
Intro
John Henry Newman’s dictum: “To cease to be deep in history is to cease be Protestant.” continues to seduce superficial expressions of Evangelicalism for those ‘Coming Home to Rome’ and reveals a syncretistic historical theological fixation over gospel contextualization.
A generation later, two admirable and no less sophisticated historically minded churchmen of the same era, the Canadian/American A.B. Simpson (1838-1919) and the Italian/American Michele Nardi (1850-1914), moved forward within their contexts through the ‘old faith’ proclaiming ‘Jesus Only’ for peoples yet to hear to the annoucement of the end of ungodliness for all peoples. As Jesus Saves, Sanctifies, Heals and Is our Coming King!
At 15, John Henry Newman (1801-1890) was a convinced evangelical. Yet, in his 40s, his presuppositions concerning the superiority of the Western canon and its nationalisms plus a sprinkling of ritualism led him into the arms of Rome all while captivated by the false dichotomy of faith and reason. On a side note, His younger brother, Francis William Newman, perhaps an example of faith in action with another direction, participated in a short-term mission trip to meet the Plymouth Brethren’s Missionary pioneer Anthony Norris Groves in Baghdad in 1831, who was the brother-in-law to George Mueller and part of the Brethren who questioned the audacity of John Nelson Darby’s Dispensationalism. The younger Newman donned Llama wool and became a crusading vegetarian; the elder eventually wore scarlet; two quite gifted and eccentric sons of a failed banker.
At 15 A.B., Simpson was a convinced Presbyterian arguing for covenant Paedo-baptism from the Scottish High Church diaspora to Canada, yet Darbyism certainly captivated this historic premillennialist, who was staunchly against Postmillenialism for its implication of human progress. Educated at Knox College in Toronto, his baptism as a child was undoubtedly influenced by John Geddie, his pastor whose passion for missions led to him to the foreign field after a pastorate on Prince Edward Island, where Simpson was born.
Years later, after meeting Simpson with his keen dogmatic mind as a youth, Geddie challenged the Alliance founder to take up the torch of world missions! After several pastorates before ending up in New York City, Simpson welcomed the new waves of Italian immigrants and made his Presbyterian parishioners quite uncomfortable before founding the Christian and Missionary Alliance in 1884-1887.
At 17, Michele Nardi was part of the fight for the Italian state with Guiseppe Garibaldi, ending the Roman Catholic Papal State’s domination over the Italian Peninsula by founding its secular identity in 1870. Nardi received medals for his bravery fighting at the Battle of Mentana outside Rome literally as a child. Then, at 19, he went to Florence to study classics, where he learned English and interacted with foreigners. He set his sights on the new world, becoming a labor leader among skilled Italian workers in Pennsylvania while demonstrating courage and flexibility. He prepared himself for the new world, where he read the New Testament and was converted.
Simpson & Nardi’s missio-eschatology
A decade before Simpson and Nardi met, and just after Nardi’s brave youth, the ‘Breccia di Roma’ was a most significant event shaping A.B. Simpson’s mission fueled eschatology in 1871, where he witnessed the aftermath of Romanism’s loss of political power in which Nardi participated. These seminal events taken from an academic study, namely, Daryn Henry’s A. B. Simpson and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism. Among other themes, study that includes analyzes of Simpson’s eschatological motives and missiological connections, which Nardi followed into action. Now a spiritual warrior reaching immigrant Italians who was was also shaped by his mentor Simpson and who fondly remembered him when Nardi passed in 1914 in his homeland.
Simpson’s prolific pen wrote widely, yet recorded only one biography of another servant of the Lord. The book’s title, Michele Nardi, The Italian Evangelist: His Life and Times, was published by Nardi’s widow Blanche, one of Simpson’s early secretaries. This compilation of his beloved Italian friend’s life provided the basis for a significant published work in Italian in 2002 titled Michele Nardi, The Moody of Italy by the Italian Pentecostal leader Francesco Toppi, whose interpretation demonstrates how Nardi, and like Simpson, pioneered a movement combining holiness, evangelistic action, discernment, and unity. Leonardo De Chirico gave the book a positive review over two decades ago.
(https://www.alleanzaevangelica.org/index.php/news/9-attualita-italia/153-francesco-toppi-michele-nardi-il-moody-d-italia-roma-adi-media-2002)
Nardi attended Simpson’s Missionary Training Institute as one of Simpson’s first students; he began his ministry in his early 30s. People would say, “There goes the man with the golden heart.” As the ‘Moody of Italy,’ Nardi did not establish schools, broadcast, or publishing industries like the famous shoe salesman D.L. Moody from Chicago and also of many friends and mentors. Simpson also pursued an enterprising method whereas Nardi, ordained as a Presbyterian, had that special relational touch and motivated a fellow Italian American to go to Brazil, Luigi Francescon, where he pioneered a Pentecostal denomination.
In Italy, the Pentecostal denominations published Simpson’s works are evidence of Nardi’s significance. The two are integral within Italian evangelical Pentecostal history and its early emphasis on totally reaching the newly founded nation-state, with many Italian Americans following.
Many others after Nardi have attempted to impact Italy enterprisingly. However, it was his genuine love of people and their spiritual needs through proclaiming the gospel in word over deed, which typified the era because of the eschatology, but on the other hand, within a remarkable unity as Leo affirmed in a review of Toppi’s reflection of Nardi; no easy task in this regionally diverse modern nation-state.
Nardi’s return to Italy found a reception with the Waldensians of his day, a particular and long-persecuted group of believers since medieval times, a fascinating history of the ‘Trail of Blood’ that describes Simpson’s posit of the ‘old faith.’ Sadly, the Waldensian Church struggles today as their ‘ancient paths’ are increasingly consumed by ecumenical compromise through Catholic embrace prepared by higher criticism and theological liberalism which decimated Mainline Protestants
Such compromise is all too common among Italian denominations, which complicates and obfuscates the people’s understanding and purpose in standing true to the Bible. Nardi was an evangelist shaped by Simpson’s missionary fueled eschatology, and always preaching about the soon coming of the Lord. Still Nardi understood the spiritual need. Here the gospel in word over deed provided scope and overemphasized at the neglect of cultural transformation. Such an imbalance accentuated a hyper-spiritual emphasis rather than a historical view in challenging the culture dominated by Rome.
Simpson’s Four-fold Gospel was more than mere slogans and certainly not a Christology; Jesus’ saves, sanctifies, heals, and is a King, coming again.’ Simpson provided a significant stream in making 20th-century evangelicalism and watched these slogans transfer into fundamentalist Pentecostal movements that siphoned many early Alliance members which shows a watershed where global vision succomed to ‘navel gazing and emotional sensationalism’ with the tonque speaking emphasis and later world of faith directions. A deeper life, yes, but what about godly transformation? Today a serious rupture exists where therapy and the individual prevails and thus no church discipline.
Still a missionary force stood inspired by the spiritual needs yet also the Scofield Bible and its dispensational theology, which Simpson held in ambivalence, yet leveraged to recruit. The era has been recorded well, yet the bible college movement Simpson started for the missionary enterprise has virtually faded away; today such eschatological-driven mission has tapped into holistic motivators. The division between Dispensationalists and other eschatologies remain an open wound among Italian Evangelicalism.
Simpson on Romanism
Nevertheless, Simpson predicted the eventual Catholic ecumenical turn from its 1870 political fall he had witnessed in Rome. Beside his weekly magazine of world missions where keen insights can be mined. He published A.J. Gordon’s critique of Cardinal Newman and posited his thoughts as syncretism and the common interpretation of ‘the whore of Babylon’ and the Papal system as the Antichrist.
Simpson’s latter works, The Coming One, The Old Faith, and The New Gospels: Special Addresses on Christianity and Modern Thought, are instructive for his latter views of Rome, yet still expounding Historicist Premillennialism. Romanism rejected stood among the new gospels emerging from higher criticism, which exalted the social gospel like his neighbor in the ‘Hell's Kitchen’ neighborhood in New York City the German Baptist pastor Walter Rauschenbach who exemplified such error, yet sought to change society through exclusive political activism which Simpson avoided.
Simpson’s suspicions are manifest today. Beyond the missionary statesman, Simpson is often labeled more as a devotional writer than theological or as cultural exegete. Astutely, he had already understood Rome’s systemic function as he anticipated the Papal system’s lamb-like transformation out of Vatican II. In Old Faith, he states: “In the Church of Rome the movement is typified by men like Father Tyrrell and he is nearer to the spirit of the New Theology than those Protestants who pin their faith to external standards of belief.”
Simpson’s statement is remarkable contextual discernment. He foresaw the destination of philosophical theology and its merger from various traditions as a diversion from ‘old faith’ doctrine. The Jesuit George Tyrrell was excommunicated for his philosophical subjectivism, a few years before Simpson published because of the Vatican I consensus and polarization.
Vatican II eventually absorbed Tyrrell’s subjectivism along with evangelicals. Simpson posited modern philosophy and medieval metaphysics as mutually exclusive, and as Romanism exists today, assimilated with humanity through the subjective. He states, “as the loss of the old faith, the rejection of the Bible and the Cross; the blotting out of the line of separation between the Church and the world.” Simpson precisely calls out a usurped incarnational ecclesial system and Romanism’s eschatological function as a kingdom of this world. For Simpson the ‘old faith’ precedes a ‘deep church’ with ‘Jesus Only.’
I encourage all to read “The Prophetic Theology of George Tyrrell” by David Wells. This intelligent study frames the ‘so-called’ Vatican II transformation that many observers and enthusiasts misread and provided a key text that helped Leonardo di Chirico properly understand the many dimensions of Vatican II in his analysis.
Simpson’s Old Faith
Simpson’s view of Western Christianity juxtaposed to the ‘old faith’ as analogous to the unity of individuals amid religious corruption [on Unity and Corruption]. He states: “Both find their historical fulfillment in the faithful few who have ever existed in even the darkest ages of medieval corruption; the Albigenses and Paulicians, the Hussites and Moravians, the Waldenses and Vaudois, the Wycliffites and Huguenots, the Reformers and Covenanters, and the pure and true ones who have before and since dared to be faithful to God and His holy Word.”
Revisiting Newman’s dictum: “To cease to be deep in history is to cease be Protestant,” still rings with truth or, as I posit, helps frame our evangelical convictions within the ‘old faith.’ Simpson and classically trained Nardi knew very well that the victor writes history. Such narrative control, Rome has executed with such precision and like no other institution and for so long. All from its political perch either through violent opposition and always through absorption of grassroots movements or their elimination.
Cardinal Newman’s Western Canon’s ‘deep history’ is relatively shallow. By focusing on the Reformation, we must remember its questionable political dimensions and their manifestations today. We must not lose sight of the “old faith” and rush over the complexity of the event with theological posits that were not created in vacuum. Still it is an era that represents a significant recovery.
Simpson included the long, and historically verifiable Ana-Baptist tradition that made up the first Waldensians 300 years before the Reformation welcomed them. Here, the magisterial Reformers and their worldly patrons often make theology look like a means toward a political ends. Thus, reductionism emerged upon our own via moderna.
In other words, textual perspicuity moved soteriology and its doctrines of grace as progressive revelation onto our perch of rationality still embedded within Christendom as evidenced by hyper-grace and antinomianism throughout the personality cults of evangelicalism today and not biblical fidelity or on the other hand, a propositional faith from a systematic theological text. Still, Rome cannot call us ‘Fideist’ if we understand the real axioms that matter.
Modernity’s Hegemony
Modernity, which I define as the wrong destination of the ‘Western Canon’ as a logical conclusion if we allow dichotomies like faith and reason as pressuppositions. Such stubborn dichotomies exist and shown by modernity’s ability to provide conceptual apparatus. Thinking with a systemic over an atomistic approach helps us with contextual possibilities. We must act more as archaeologists of eras and methods to understand the genealogy of our evangelical traditions and their questionable elements often bound to context and eras not to be repeated.
The ‘Old Faith’ illustrates the continuity of Biblical revelation and evangelical mission as the creation mandate, yet in a spiritual sense and beyond our Earthly fixation, and not without ‘being of this world and engaged in it.’ This historical validity stands vindicated by ‘the righteous ones’ found in the pages of scripture through an obedient and active faith with contextual witness (Hebrews 11).
It is based upon the doctrine of perspicuity, recovered and defined in the Reformation, yet focuses on the means to lead people to salvation through the ‘obedience of faith’ as the material principle drawn from scripture. Thus what the Lord requires to unleash us in acting ‘righteous’ as the justified, the formal principle, not hyper spiritual nor antinomian, yet coupled with local contextual creational stewardship.
Are we intimidated by Rome’s hagiography and theological sophistication? Beyond Greek Philosophy and Roman Natural law, Rome usurped revelation as the Bible teaches with blatant supersessionism while Vatican II virtually defines ‘easy belief-ism.’
It is evident to us that the so-called ‘mother church’ has lost all respectability, yet what about the Catholic critiques of the event of Reformation and its secular result as they claim? Charles Taylor’s ‘A Secular Age’ and Brad Gregory’s ‘Unintended Reformation’ are worthy to ponder, yet need qualification and critique.
Modernity’s pervasive reach must be discerned and much jettisoned, for example, when the Reformation as an ‘event’ conflicts with political posturing over witness it is clear an unbiblical element has emerged. Rome must not define the ‘Western Canon,’ yet for Biblical Evangelicals convinced of the Reformation, how then shall we reckon with its hegemony?
Conclusion
Therefore, theological imagination must submit to the ‘obedience of faith’ as the ‘analogy of faith.’ Serving as a simple spiritual transformative reading as the companion within revelation and mission (the Cultivated Olive Tree) of Scripture, not necessarily through the dictations of dispensations, covenants nor metaphysics, for our respective traditions ‘see through a glass darkly.’ Simpson ‘old faith was not a simplification but a spiritual revival of faith and action.
For, ‘the old faith’ is not reactionary like John Henry Newman’s fixation, which proved to be a ‘nationalistic’ slippery slope through Anglicanism and eventually Rome; nationalism absorbed back into syncretized Christendom. The forward-looking contextualization Simpson and Nardi exemplified with an eschatological fragmentation absorbed poltical dimensions within evangelicalism throughout the 20th century, thankfully this has become more holistic in gospel proclamation and action rather than escapism to focus on the task of world evangelism for which Simpson is best known and founding a global movment and influencing many others, not necessarily a denomination.
May we prayerfully and intelligently reinforce our gospel proclamation movement, the announcement of “the end of ungodliness” to all people by His amazing grace through our obedience of faith based upon the infallible and inerrant scriptures to teach us about our Lord Jesus Christ and plant vibrant communities of local action. “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.”
