Column Title: Communicating Faith in the Cross-Walk of Life
Column Entry: “Should Doctrine Change to Remain the Same?”
By Robert Stephen Reid, Professor Emeritus, University of Dubuque
Description: During most of Christendom people lived with some form of a theistic identity. But in our post-Christendom secular society most North American Christians are faced, sometimes explicitly but mostly implicitly, with a daily choice of whether to keep believing in God. Or, believing that, in Christ, God is still seeking to be reconciled with each generation of people in this world. If faith in God is to matter amidst the busy, bustling intersection of cross-purposes and cross-identities of contemporary secular life, my interest is to reflect on the diverse ways people communicate with others about this desire to pursue cross-centered lives of faith.
October 2024 | September 2024 (1) | August 2024 | June-July 2024 | May 2024 |April 2024 | March 2024
Should Doctrine Change to Remain the Same?
I first came across the writings of John Henry Newman in my graduate study in Communication. My mentor, John Angus Campbell is a deep fan of Newman’s The Idea of a University. He also had our grad seminar students read and discuss Newman’s Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, treating it as the most original treatise on the importance of rhetorical reasoning written in the 19th century. I Found Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Doctrine on my own. I read it as an interested Protestant who was once taught to believe that sola scriptura meant that a Reformed faith was opposed to the idea of the development of doctrine. So, when I recently came across a blogger’s use of a quote from the book, I suspected it was being taken out of context. I share the original context that ends with the italicized quote.
The beginnings [of a worthwhile idea] are no measure of its capabilities, nor of its scope. At first no one knows what it is, or what it is worth. It remains perhaps for a time quiescent; it tries, as it were, its limbs, and proves the ground under it, and feels its way. From time to time it makes essays which fail, and are in consequence abandoned. It seems in suspense which way to go; it wavers, and at length strikes out in one definite direction. In time it enters upon strange territory; points of controversy alter their bearing; parties rise around it; dangers and hopes appear in new relations; and old principles reappear under new forms. It changes with them in order to remain the same. In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.[1]
On its own, this final sentence seems like a profound expression of the necessity of embracing personal change in life. In context it is an eloquent defense of why a great idea or wise insight needs to be permitted to evolve in order to adapt to new cultural contexts so that its deeper truth can be sustained. The ability to allow a truth to be reframed to serve a new exigence is intrinsic to Newman’s measure of a great idea’s capabilities.[2] The ‘give and take” journey he uses to get to this point illustratively functions as his statement of the issue at stake in his essay. When it comes to church doctrines—institutional applications of convictions theologically derived from church dogma—he maintains that these great ideas must be allowed to develop. They need to be able to change in order to remain true to their value in providing Christian wisdom in changing societal circumstances. He depicts this adaptive process as occurring over time by a kind of theologically curated dialogue. Change when needed is something that permits a great idea to express a new capacity of its implication since no single expression of a great idea is ever the full “measure of its capabilities.”
His book was a timely contribution to the question Western societies were facing by middle of the 19th century. During the 18th and 19th centuries premodern agrarian societies were being transformed by the emergent technologies of industrialized societies. So much so that by mid-19th century both institutional Catholic and Protestant Christianity faced the same problem that their seemingly fixed and incontrovertible religious doctrines—that had served agrarian society well for more than two millennia—were no longer providing the right religious glue to hold communities together.[3] The Industrial Revolution created a demographic upheaval that transformed traditional multi-generational family structures that were held together by communal religious values. By mid-19th century Newman saw that church doctrines would need to adapt to this new societal context if the church’s ancient dogmas were “to remain the same.” So, he wrote The Development of Doctrine to give new life to a hermeneutic of doctrinal change that Thomas Acquinas had originally articulated in the 13th century.[4]
Newman cites Acquinas as stating, “The light of faith makes things seen that are believed” and, moreover, that “Believers have knowledge of the things of faith, not in a demonstrative way, but so as by the light of faith it appears to them that they ought to be believed.” From this idea he determined that, “It is evident what a special influence such doctrine as this must exert upon the theological method of those who hold it. Arguments will come to be considered as suggestions and guides rather than logical proofs; and developments as the slow, spontaneous, ethical growth, not the scientific and compulsory results, of existing opinions.” The teaching by Acquinas concerning the development of doctrine in which tradition guides but does not confine doctrinal change was part of the Catholic Church’s understanding of how its teachings regarding truth are the “perpetual possession of the doctrines that the Apostles left behind.”[5] The First Vatican Council of 1869-1870 reaffirmed the teaching of Acquinas that faith and reason should be seen as complementary in its Dei Filius ruling, but did so primarily in reaction to the competing authorities outside the church. It would not be until the Second Vatican Council—Vatican II—from 1962-1965, that as one official interpreter of this second council observes, “If one stands back from the details of the comparison [between the two councils], and takes a broad look at Newman on the one hand and the Council on the other, what does one see? In Newman . . . one sees a voice crying in the wilderness…. [But in Vatican II one sees] a vindication of all the main theological, religious, and cultural positions of the former Fellow of Oriel [Newman].”[6] Vatican II affirmed the need for the Church to allow doctrinal intentions to develop, stating that, “The Church, we may say, as the ages pass, tends continually towards the fullness of divine truth, till the words of God are consummated in her,” (Art. 8.)
While Newman made a mid-century plea for a hermeneutic that viewed doctrine as dynamic rather than fixed, 19th century American Protestant Christianity had varying reactions to doctrinal development. For example, American Puritanism’s Covenant Theology vision of creating an orderly and stable society governed by a doctrinally strict communal theological understanding of election. But this strict Calvinistic view had faded from the scene between the two Great Awakenings. As one “Reformed” theologian wrote in the last decade of the 18th century, “It is a matter of fact that the preaching that has been most blessed by God and most profitable to men is the doctrine of sovereign grace in the salvation of souls, mixed with a little of what is called Arminianism.”[7] Religious adherence in America began to thrive with this change.[8]
Yet even as many churches faced the need to adjust doctrinal understandings in order to speak to the individual rather than live with fixed orders, newly “enlightened” secular scientific and educational ideas were challenging the primacy of a theistic worldview as they understood it. Within a decade of the publication of The Origin of Species (1859) Darwin’s theories of natural selection had transformed the intellectual space for scholars to exercise personal freedom of inquiry in the human and physical/biological sciences in the academy. This freedom was even in evidence in academic theological inquiry as religious scholarship engaged in what was called “higher criticism” that raised questions about the historical Jesus and Christian origins.
Most Protestants at the outset of the 20th century still remained committed to the Enlightenment resistant hermeneutic of Scottish Commonsense Realism, which in general practice called for a literal, flat horizon understanding of the biblical text that did not distinguish between a principle of faith and a culturally bound application of that truth.[9] Religious historian Mark Noll states that over the course of the 19th century Protestant Christians generally accepted the idea that it was “self-evident that, if the Bible was God’s supreme revelation, the best way to understand the Bible was by using the methods of ordinary common-sense open to all men, women, and children of all ages.”[10] The founder of Scottish Commonsense Realism developed this hermeneutic as a way to place boundaries on too much Enlightenment philosophical skepticism. However, as a Christian hermeneutic of reading scripture and understanding fixed doctrines derived from such reading, it provides many church leaders a platform to challenge the questions about doctrinal implications necessary to allow doctrine to develop to meet new social contexts.
By the turn of the century in America, this fixed doctrinal hermeneutic found significant expression in the publication of The Fundamentals: A Testimony to The Truth—a series of published essays written between 1910 to 1915 meant to challenge the scholarly inroads of liberal Protestant “higher criticism” and modernity’s skeptical questions regarding the inspiration of all of scripture, the virgin birth of Jesus, and the atonement and resurrection of Christ. Those who held fast to this hermeneutic became known as Fundamentalists. But even non-fundamentalist institutions like Princeton Theological Seminary were still training future clergy according to preceptive versions of the Scottish philosophy that assumed a flat interpretive horizon of doctrinal beliefs.[11] In 1929 the seminary voted to move beyond a commitment to biblical literalism and permit faculty to have more liberty of conscience in developing a hermeneutic able to balance the paradox of the value of skepticism while seeking to sustain a Reformed heritage that held fast to the “faith once delivered to the saints.” The seminary’s goal was to prepare clergy whose doctrinal perspective would be open to a “broader construction of the historic Christian faith.”[12] This decision marked a significant point of turning among what became the movement of progressive American Protestantism that came to characterize mainline Protestant denominations that remained committed to historic Christian doctrines while allowing greater openness to realizing possible new measures of a specific doctrine’s “capabilities.”
Into the present century Protestant hermeneutics has had three main responses to the question of reframing its once held “fixed doctrine” hermeneutic version of Scottish Common-Sense Realism. Fundamentalism still holds fast to it. They read scripture with the flat hermeneutical horizon that treats many 1st century biblical applications of gospel truth as culturally binding for all societies across the centuries. Since the 1930s the progressive movement of American Protestantism has balanced its Reformed theology of “sola scriptura” with a hermeneutical engagement that permits change of biblical applications, while also seeking to retain the truth of the biblical principle that informed those understandings. It allows “old principles to reappear under new forms” by permitting doctrinal change in order to sustain the sacred value of the enduring principles of its doctrines.[13]
For three quarters of a century Evangelicalism has lived with one hermeneutical foot in each of these two Protestant worlds; always balancing how much weight to put on one or the other footing.[14] Originally more weight was given to the Fundamentalist hermeneutic from which it sought to emerge. But through some of its own dialogically curated steps, change was being increasingly implemented that allowed doctrinal commitments to adopt a broader construction of historic Christian faith commitments, to realize new “capabilities” that let doctrinal ideas “change in order to remain the same.” However, more recently some Evangelicals have rejected these efforts and have chosen to place greater weight back on the hermeneutically conservative footing of their Fundamentalist heritage by reaffirming adopting a flat horizon literal Biblical and doctrinal hermeneutic. As Christianity in the West continues to adapt to the transformation of becoming a post-industrial digital society, Evangelicalism is at a crossroads. In all this change, Newman reminds us why theological dialogue about the need for doctrinal ideas to be allowed to adapt to societal change matters: “In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”
Notes
[1] John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Doctrine, Rev. ed. (1845; London, Longman Greens, 1878) 41.
[2] Newman expresses this idea more succinctly at the outset of his Development of Doctrine argument: “There is no one aspect deep enough to exhaust the contents of a real idea;” Development, 35.
[3] Historians Will and Ariel Durant observe that the “replacement of Christian with secular institutions is the culminating and critical result of the Industrial Revolution;” From Will Durant and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968); Ch 8: 43-51.
[4] Newman, Development of Doctrine, 336.
[5] Newman was more committed to the idea of the theologically curated dialogue than a pronouncement of papal infallibility in the Aeterni Patris Affirmation, but appreciated the church’s reaffirmation of the Thomistic view of the development of doctrine. See John Henry Newman, “The Vatican Definition” in A Letter Addressed to the Duke of Norfolk (1900; New York: Longman Greens, 2015), 84-95; Stanley L. Jaki, “Newman’s Logic and the Logic of the Papacy,” Faith and Reason: The Journal of Christendom College, Vol. XIII, No. 3 (1987): 241 – 265.
[6] Bishop B. C. Butler, “Newman and the Second Vatican Council,” The Rediscovery of Newman: An Oxford Symposium, John Coulson and A.M. Allchin, eds. (Sheed and Ward/S.P.C.K., 1967); Retrieved at https://vatican2voice.org/3butlerwrites/newman.htm.
[7] Steve W. Lemke, “History or Revisionist History? How Calvinistic Were the Overwhelming Majority of Baptists and Their Confessions in the South until the Twentieth Century?” Southwestern Journal of Theology 57.2 (Spring 2015), 233.
[8] See Roger Finke and Rodney Stark. The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992.
[9] Literalism assumes that a reader’s ability to determine the plain meaning of words and sentences of a translated sacred text is sufficient to arrive at its meaning as long as attention is given to its linguistic construction and original historical context. Thomas Reid, the Scottish philosopher who formulated the Common-Sense Realism hermeneutic, wrote “If there are certain principles, as I think there are, which the constitution of our nature leads us to believe, and which we are under a necessity to take for granted in the common concerns of life, without being able to give a reason for them — these are what we call the principles of common sense; and what is manifestly contrary to them, is what we call absurd.” Terence Cuneo and René van Woudenberg, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 85.
[10] Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 201.
[11] See Tim McConnel, “The Old Princeton Apologetics: Common Sense or Reformed? Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 46/4 (2003): 647-72; available online by title.
[12] John W. Hart, “Princeton Theological Seminary: The Reorganization of 1929,” Journal of Presbyterian History, Vol. 58, No. 2 (1980), 124-140.
[13] A modern example of this concordance can be found in Anthony C. Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics: The Theory and Practice of Transforming Biblical Reading (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1992). The book was originally published by Marshall-Pickering in Great Britain, but its publication by Zondervan in the U.S. clarifies my point that it serves both Evangelical and Mainline Protestant constituents.
[14] On Scottish Common-Sense Realism as the dominant hermeneutic of 20th century evangelical thought as well as 20th century evangelical homiletics see Mark A. Noll, “Common Sense Traditions and American Evangelical Thought,” American Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 2 (1985): 216-238; and Mark A. Noll, “Common Sense Realism,” in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 4th ed. (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), 2:431-33.