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Developing Doctrines and Changing Beliefs
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
Extract
The notion of doctrinal development has become increasingly popular with Roman Catholic theologians in recent years, and has received official recognition in the decree of the second Vatican Council on Revelation. ‘There is’, the document maintains, a growth in the understanding of the realities and the words which have been handed down. … As the centuries succeed one another, the Church constantly moves forward toward the fulness of divine truth until the words of God reach their complete fulfilment in her. But, if dogma develops, how can revelation be constant? This, starkly put, is the dilemma to which many Roman Catholic theologians have directed their attention in recent years. If there has been a growth in dogma, must we not say that the contemporary Church is in a better position than the early Church? How can we deny that the Church today, in which dogmas have been better understood and more fully expressed, has an advantage over the primitive Christian community? As one nineteenth-century theologian observed, If there be a difference of any sort between Augustine and Liguori (and if there be not, what becomes of Mr Newman's theory?) it must manifestly be incalculably to the advantage of the latter … to compare the catachetical schools of Alexandria, Antioch, Gaesarea, with our Irish Maynooth, would palpably be an insult to the latter, too gross even for the licensed bitterness of religious controversy.
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References
page 280 note 1 Butler, W. Archer, Letters on Romanism in reply to Mr Newman's Essay on Development (2nd ed., 1858), pp. 25–26.Google Scholar
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page 282 note 1 Lépicier, F. A. M., De stabilitate et progressu dogmatis (1910), p. 371fGoogle Scholar. Cf. also Dhanis, E., ‘Révé1ation explicite et implicite’, 34 Gregorianum, 1953, p. 188.Google Scholar
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page 284 note 1 Because it would then be possible to communicate one thing and believe explicitly the opposite.
page 284 note 2 op. cit., p. 45. The last phrase contains a distinction prodigiously deep, which I do not pretend to understand!
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page 286 note 1 ibid., p. 66. Cf. also p. 76.
page 287 note 1 Only those theologians who identify the deposit of revelation with a list of propositions, can talk about a box or about a distinction between the thing itself and the Church's understanding of the thing; cf. the position of Lagrange, Garrigou, ‘L'immutabilité du dogme selon le Concile du Vatican et la relativisme’, 26 Angelicum, 1949, p. 316.Google Scholar
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page 288 note 2 Difficulties felt by Anglicans (1907), ii, p. 315.
page 288 note 3 cf. my article ‘Authority and the development of doctrine’ in Theology, 1960, p. 136f.
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page 289 note 2 The Wisdom of Faith, p. 44.
page 289 note 3 art. cit., p. 66.
page 289 note 4 I hope to deal with Tyrrell's position on another occasion.
page 289 note 5 The Faith and Modem Man, p. 120; this is somewhat modified in The Church and the Catholic, pp. 63, 88. For an earlier statement of this position cf. de Maistre, On Church and Society (E.T. 1959), p. 24.
page 290 note 1 The Council and Reunion (E.T. 1961), p. 164.
page 290 note 2 Küng, The Living Church (E.T. 1963), p. 309.
page 290 note 3 The Council and Reunion, p. 163.
page 290 note 4 Justification (E.T. 1964), p. 101.
page 290 note 5 The Council and Reunion, p. 163.
page 290 note 6 Structures of the Church (E.T. 1964), p. 93.
page 290 note 7 ibid., p. 93.
page 291 note 1 Justification (E.T. 1964), p. III.
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page 291 note 6 Pius X in Pascendi reprinted in Sabatier, Modernism (1908), p. 283.
page 292 note 1 op. cit., p. 42.