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The Authority of Doctrinal Development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2024

Henry St John O.P.
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During the past half century, throughout the Christian world both Catholic and Protestant, great progress has been made in the scientific and critical study of the biblical text, more particularly of the New Testament documents, and, in continuation of this, of the history of Christian origins. The Encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu of the present Pope bears witness to the multiple sources of progress in biblical studies and gives directives concerning it which envisage and prepare for still greater progress to come by Catholic scholars in this field. The appearance two years ago of A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture, to cite only the most comprehensive instance amongst much other evidence, is witness also to the fact that in England Catholics are taking a share, fuller than hitherto, in this general movement of Christian scholarship, and that in doing so they are able gratefully to acknowledge and make use of the fruits of much of its labours.

One of the most striking effects of progress in biblical scholarship and the study of Christian origins has been a deeper realization of the fact and extent of doctrinal development down the centuries, and its bearing upon our conception of the nature and function of that Tradition by which such development has been brought about. The view one takes of the nature and function of Tradition in the development of doctrine is inevitably bound up with one’s view of the nature and function of the Church, as the receptacle, so to say, and guardian and interpreter of God’s revelation concerning his means and method of redeeming mankind.

Type
Research Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 36 , Issue 427 , October 1955 , pp. 372 - 381
Copyright
Copyright © 1955 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

Footnotes

1

The Pattern of Christian Truth. A Study in the relations between Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Early Church. The Bampton Lectures 1954 byH. E. W. Turner, Lightfoot Professor of Divinity in the University of Durham. (A. R. Mowbray, 1954.)

References

2 Stand by the Bible. English Translation (C.T.S. 1945).

3 Turner, op. cit., page 473.

4 op. cit., page 476.

5 op. cit., page 478.

6 op. cit., page 498.

7 Enchiridion, Denzinger‐Bannwart, 783.

8 Summa Theologica IIa IIae, 1, 9 ad 3 and 10 ad 1.

9 I am indebted for the substance of the above paragraphs on St Thomas' teaching to Father Victor White's paper in Dominican Studies, Jan., 1948, ‘St Thomas’ Conception of Revelation’.

10 Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching considered. Vol. II (London, 1892), page 12.

11 A fuller discussion of this subject will be found in Eastern Churches Quarterly, Supplementary issue, Vol. VII, ‘Tradition and Scripture’. See also the comment of the Abbot of Downside in a review of Origen's Doctrine of Tradition by R. P. C. Hanson: Downside Review, Summer 1954, page 312.

12 Newman, op. cit., pages 31‐61.

13 Theology, Jan. 1955, page 24. The whole of this discussion of the meaning of Tradition is based upon a correspondence arising out of an article A modern defence of Infallibility by R. P. C. Hanson in Theology, Oct. 1954, Jan. 1955 and March 1955. I have adopted one or two quotations from this source for my own definitions or descriptions for the sake of clear elucidation and without further explicit acknowledgment.

14 In comparatively recent times, for example, such commonly accepted teaching as the literal interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis has been called in question under the impact of various scientific hypotheses and a better understanding of primitive oriental literary habits and idiom. So too, under the influence of a changed world out‐look, the accepted relation of the heathen and the good pagan and the unbaptized baby to the unchanging truth, extra ecclesiam nulia salus, has undergone, or is undergoing, modifications in the area of what has been commonly accepted, but not de fide, teaching.

15 Turner, op. cit., page 474.

16 It is interesting that the learned New Testament scholar Oscar Cullmann, in his study of Baptism especially in its relation to circumcision, concludes as against Karl Barth that infant baptism, though not directly supported by New Testament evidence, is congruous with its general doctrine of baptism, by which he implies an argument from fittingness which has an important bearing on the nature of doctrinal development in general. Baptism in the New Testament, Studies in Biblical Theology, No. 1, by O.Cullmann. S.C.M., London, 1954.

17 Faith and Order—‘Our Oneness in Christ and Our Disunity as Churches’. S.C.M. Press, 1954.