On 12 September 1830 Newman preached a sermon in the University Church entitled “Jeremiah, A Lesson for the Disappointed.” It has not, so far as I am aware, ever attracted a great deal of attention. Though it was later published in Parochial and Plain Sermons—“the most important publication not only of Newman’s Protestant days, but of his life,” as Owen Chadwick once averred—it had to wait til volume eight for inclusion: hardly typical of “The Very Best Of …” territory.
That is fitting in a way, however. For the whole topic of “Jeremiah, A Lesson for the Disappointed” is the fact of being overlooked, of deserving recognition but not getting it, of striving and failing—or rather, of seeming to fail.
Newman’s description of self-denial in light of the invisible world can help us to examine and renew three fundamental relationships: with God, our neighbor, and the natural world.
An important theological theme in the Christian tradition is that of the divine ideas or <em>logoi</em> in the mind or Word of God by which God knows and loves in himself eternally all the ways that creatures can or do participate in a living likeness of him.
Pusey’s appraisal of Mariology—a polemic containing a mixture of historical, theological and anecdotal evidence—was, on the whole, untrue and mostly a caricature; yet as Newman would be forced to admit in his formal published reply to Pusey in 1866, the <em>Letter to Pusey</em>, there was partial veracity to his claim that at times Mariology, in some of its devotional outpourings, has obscured devotion to God, especially God’s loving mediation brought to humanity through the Incarnation.
The primary purpose of Lemna's masterful book The Apocalypse of Wisdom: Louis Bouyer's Theological Recovery of the Cosmos is to shed light on the "twists and turns of the path Bouyer charts in Cosmos" (xiii).
