Was Newman wrong?

Peter Leithart is one of the most insightful Protestant thinkers of our day, but his recent post on “Tradition and the Individual Theologian” gave this Protestant pause. He begins with the assertion that “Catholics, Orthodox, and not a few Protestants have been known to reject theological novelties with a wave of the hand and an appeal to tradition.” They have, in other words, set up a dichotomy between tradition and new theological ideas. And, based on his last (rather startling) paragraph, Leithart readily places Newman in this camp. Newman was mistaken in asserting that to know history was to reject Protestantism, Leithart argues, for the history of theology is the history of individual thinkers who protested against the prevailing tradition and suggested new ways to think the tradition. So to object to all theological innovation—to think of tradition as a permanent feature of the theological landscape—is to misunderstand the history of theology.

http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/08/was-newman-mistaken