Christianity and Change
Can Christianity change? Should it change? Questions about change are behind most theological controversies and schisms in the history of Christendom. One body of Christians accepts, and another rejects, a teaching, council, or practice, and a schism emerges. Premodern schisms were ultimately caused by divergent constellations of authoritative loci, such as Scripture, tradition, councils, and popes.
With the dawn of modernity, another kind of authoritative locus entered the fray: culture or similar concepts such as history, the world, and the contemporary context. Hence, the question came to be asked: To what extent can Christianity assimilate to, or correlate with, the culture? While few theologians ever answered this question in an absolutely negative way, the extent to which one answers affirmatively depends on what limits, if any, there are to such assimilation and correlation. Is that limit dogma? Scripture? Ecclesial unity? And if these are dismantled by historicism of the liberal Protestant variety, what is left but private judgment?
Today, Christians are still confronted with the challenge of both maintaining what they believe to be the apostolic faith delivered (as written in Jude chapter 3) “once and for all” and responding adequately to changing historical circumstances to spread the Gospel. Any question that concerns the content of a Christianity that is both authentic and relevant involves, to some degree, the question of change and, hence, of doctrinal development. The relevance of doctrinal development transcends denominational lines.
For Catholics, the locus classicus on the question of development is St. John Henry Cardinal Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, originally published in 1845 while Newman was still an Anglican. Born in 1801, raised Anglican, and having found Jesus in an evangelical conversion as a teenager, Newman gradually came to appreciate the role of tradition not only in interpreting Scripture, but in regulating ecclesial life. Reading the Church Fathers, he came to see the sacramental dimension of the Church as integral to the Christianity of antiquity.
Confronted with an established Church that took even its theological marching orders from Parliament, Newman spearheaded with others such as John Keble and Edward Pusey the Oxford Movement, a religious revival that placed doctrine, sacraments, and apostolic succession at the center of Anglican theological discourse. Their Tracts for the Times reminded their readers of the Anglican Church’s apostolic root, which, they taught, was nothing other than the Catholic Church in England.
It was at this time that Newman developed an idea of the via media that justified the Anglican settlement as an apostolic church that avoided both the errors of continental Protestantism and the superstitious excesses and aberrations of Roman Catholicism. But Newman’s study of the early Christological councils began to set off alarm bells. The “middle position” was not always the orthodox one; his heroes Sts. Athanasius and Augustine both, in different ways, made appeals to the pope. When his Tract 90, which sought to interpret the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion in a Catholic way, was rejected by Anglican bishops and divines, he came to the conclusion that the via media he had been promoting was not a lived faith, but a theory, a “paper religion.” It was after the rejection of Tract 90 (an attempt that, to be frank, was bound to fail) that Newman left Oxford for Littlemore to live a semi-monastic life with a few other like-minded men.
At this point Newman was, as he wrote in his spiritual autobiography, Apologia pro Vita Sua, “on his deathbed as regards membership with the Anglican Church,” and it was then that he composed An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. An essay in the most literal sense, it was an attempt to account for the difficulty of eighteen hundred years of doctrinal change, divergence, and controversy. Newman essentially held that the “Christian Idea,” like any great idea in history that “takes possession of the intellect and heart” over “a wide or extended dominion,” is bound to develop and express itself in diverse and, at times, divergent ways; that “the highest and most wonderful truths,” though revealed, “could not be comprehended all at once, but, as being received and transmitted by minds not inspired and through media which were human, have required only the longer time and deeper thought for their full elucidation.” For Newman, revelation must be not just intellectual, but also ethical, social, and political, in order to take root in society. “In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often,” he wrote in Development.
Part of his theory of development was the divine provision of an infallible authority that would ensure that, amid the confusion and tumults of history, revelation was secure and identifiable: “A revelation is not given, if there be no authority to decide what it is that is given.” Unwilling to accept some developments and not others, the Roman Catholic Church seemed to be the only viable successor to the Church of the Middle Ages and of antiquity. Probing further, Newman came up with seven “tests” of authentic development as opposed to corruptions, and provided historical instances of developments that met these criteria: the growth of dogmatic pronouncements, the development of rituals, burgeoning devotions to the saints and relics, variations in the practice of penances, and the emergence of monasticism and doctrines concerning purgatory and Mary, to name a few. Every chapter Newman wrote became shorter and shorter; he wrote: “As I advanced, my view so cleared, that … [b]efore I got to the end, I resolved to be received” into the Catholic Church.
There ends the first chapter of Newman’s life, followed by another forty-five years of writing, preaching, and pastoring as a Catholic priest and Oratorian. Though there were moments of hardship and controversy, especially due to his controversial (at the time) affirmations of the laity and his being a so-called “inopportunist” with respect to Vatican I’s definition of papal infallibility, what clouds existed over his head began to be dispelled when Pope Leo XIII in 1879 made him a cardinal. He influenced a generation of twentieth-century theologians such as Jean Daniélou, Joseph Ratzinger, and Yves Congar, who were all instrumental in the composition of the Second Vatican Council’s texts.
Newman’s thoughts on the responsibility of the laity, doctrinal development, and resistance to ultramontanism were all in some indirect way sanctioned by Vatican II. He is the only individual of the nineteenth century (other than popes) to be quoted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church in its paragraph on conscience. With the conferral of the title doctor ecclesiae by Pope Leo XIV, Catholics in particular are invited to engage more deeply with Newman’s thought and doctrinal development.
Since Vatican II (1962–1965), the Catholic Church has undergone an unprecedented series of doctrinal, liturgical, and ecclesial reforms. Traditionalists, following Archbishop Lefebvre, invoke tradition against certain conciliar reforms, whereas progressives who ignore or dismiss magisterial teaching on issues such as sexuality, the priesthood, and the unicity and salvific universality of Christ, appeal to the signs of the times or changing contexts. In recent decades, Newman has been appealed to as a sort of “conservative radical,” one whose theological principles, positions, and personal disposition modeled a way of avoiding either of these extremes. He would have accepted Vatican II (as he did Vatican I in his own day), but he also would have avoided extreme or erroneous interpretations of it in either direction.
The issue of doctrinal development, however, became even more acute during the Francis papacy due to his reforms. While previous popes also conducted reforms, Francis’s, rightly or wrongly, caused controversy, for instance, the development of “pastoral blessings” (as opposed to liturgical and ritualized blessings) for homosexual couples in Fiducia Supplicans. While I believe such reforms can be congruent with the deposit of faith, the imprecise theological argumentation often marshaled in support of them allows for more extreme interpretations to take hold that amount to a clear rupture with the Catholic doctrinal tradition. These interpretations either serve as a license for enthusiasts of synodality to reopen other teachings in the hope that the synodal process can instigate doctrinal revision, or they constitute for traditionalists more evidence of a post-conciliar Church that has lost its way. Increasingly, not only is the implementation of the Council criticized, but its teaching is as well. Indeed, a regular feature of Catholic traditionalist discourse (among its exponents on YouTube) is the argument that many of Vatican II’s statements constitute a form of Modernism.
There is no one factor that can explain this polarization, nor any one solution. But Newman can still teach us. Without speculating about what Newman would say or do in this situation, let us instead consider some key principles and arguments that Newman sought to establish in his own day, which are just as applicable today.
First, with Newman’s study of the earliest councils, he shows that tradition alone is insufficient ground to resist development. Underlying most ecumenical councils is some kind of theological tension, and that tension is often not resolved by keeping the status quo. In this respect, Vatican II was no different.
Most traditionalists will not object to development per se. They’ll accept change, but argue that change has to be an authentic development and not a corruption. Too often, however, determining whether a development is legitimate is simply measured by some magisterial statement that preceded it. So, the traditionalist’s argument goes, Vatican II’s teaching on religious liberty in Dignitatis Humanae contradicts Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (and most magisterial statements on liberalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries); hence, it’s a corruption.
But Newman’s point is this: the overall continuity or homogeneity between the resulting reform or development and the original Christian idea need not be perceptible chronologically, but logically. Vatican II’s teaching on religious liberty might say something very different from the anti-liberal magisterial documents of modernity, but they cohere with a number of Catholic principles concerning theological anthropology, human dignity, the freedom entailed in (or uncoerced nature of) the act of faith, and the obligations that arise from religious duty; these teachings are in some ways more obliquely expressed in those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century condemnations of particular liberal tenets, but they have roots far deeper in the Catholic tradition.
Doctrinal developments, when authentic, are not random and willful. They exhibit in different ways Newman’s tests or notes of authentic development, such as logical sequence—a sequence here meaning a conclusion follows (sequi) from a principle, not that which immediately preceded it chronologically. It is up to the theologian (and with him or her, all other relevant practitioners of ancillary disciplines) to demonstrate this sequence or show how a development maintains key Catholic principles such as the spiritual reading of Scripture, or shores up or strengthens past doctrinal statements. Marian dogmas, for example, do both; by invoking the protoevangelium or the “New Eve,” they manifest the mystical sense of Scripture, a hallmark of Catholic scriptural hermeneutics; and they shore up Chalcedon because they celebrate human nature’s cooperation with the divine will.
The importance of providing a theological rationale for everything the Church says and does is evident in the value it has placed on study and disputation. Providing a theological rationale, or a demonstration of how a doctrine or practice is rooted in sources of Scripture and tradition, is one of the great bulwarks against doctrinal development becoming a free-for-all, a catchphrase that justifies change without concern for continuity. Indeed, such argumentation presupposes stable and reliable doctrinal milestones, expressed in propositions from which the theological train of thought can proceed. In short, it presupposes that dogma, and not the Zeitgeist, is the measure of future developments. Without argumentation that measures potential developments against previously articulated teaching, the grounds for development shift from logos to some other factor, whether it be pragmatism or power: whatever is expedient or whatever is willed by the majority.
Newman’s theory is now seen by some progressives to be obsolete because it is unworkable for creating and justifying change now. Yes and no. Indeed, Newman’s entire theory of doctrinal development was an attempt to account for past change, not to agitate for future change. The kinds of potential changes Newman’s theory is best equipped to handle are those that have been percolating for centuries. In Newman’s own day, his 1845 Essay on Development obliquely assisted in the eventual 1854 definition of the Immaculate Conception. But this belief had roots already in the patristic era; its theological coherence was hammered out in the Middle Ages; and its status as an object of belief was manifest from centuries of Marian devotion. This is a far cry from potential developments of teaching and ecclesial governance whose campaign started in the 1960s.
Naturally, however, the life of the Church continues, and it still needs a way to acquire some indication of whether a potential or hypothetical development is workable. And while Newman’s notes are by no means perfect or exhaustive (which he himself admitted), they do invite the theologian to make the case.
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