THE P RTAL
February 2017 Page 10
Thoughts on Newman
Development
The Revd Dr Stephen Morgan
By the time this column appears - a month or so after it is written - it is possible that the foment in the media , social and printed , about the conflicting interpretations of the recent post-synodal Apostolic
Exhortation Amoris Laetitia may have died down .
Like a grumbling appendix , however , these things have a habit of not lying low for very long . They flare up time and again unless and until the doctors ( in this case “ of the Faith ”) intervene decisively . So my wager is that this will still be a live issue by the time you read this .
The question is what , if anything , does Blessed John Henry Newman have to say that might be of relevance and contribute to any such intervention ? Since much of the mischief appears to be caused by differing understandings of conscience and since Newman had interesting things to say about the claims of conscience , that might seem an obvious place to look .
I have written on this before - and relatively recently - so you will , I hope , forgive me for looking at another area where Newman ’ s thought might be of assistance .
It is being claimed by some commentators that the relaxation of sacramental discipline based on a liberal interpretation of certain parts of Amoris Laetitia given by some individual Bishops and even Bishops ’ Conferences , is merely a “ development ” of doctrine .
There are other , even less credible , claims that the doctrine remains untouched but the exhortation ushers in a new , more pastoral approach , one more faithful to what we have only now come to know of the merciful Jesus - notwithstanding the Lord ’ s own apparently rigid words in Matthew 5 and Mark 10 . Such arguments need not trouble us sufficiently to dignify them with a response .
The question of the development of doctrine should , not least since John Henry Newman offers , perhaps , the only coherent and systematic account of how the development of doctrine takes place and how we can determine whether a change is an authentic development or a corruption of the Church ’ s teaching .
Newman ’ s last work as an Anglican , written immediately before and published shortly after his conversion and submission to the Catholic Church , was ‘ An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine ’.
Written , he said , to offer a hypothesis to account for the apparent difficulty that whilst the “ idea ” of Christianity - Jesus Christ and the faith He committed to the Apostles - is fixed , the Church ’ s teaching has changed through the passage of centuries .
He alights upon the fact that this is , in itself , unsurprising but requires a way of making sense of those changes , tying them coherently and cogently to the “ idea ”. Newman proposes that there are seven tests ( in the later editions he calls these “ notes ”) by which it is possible to assess whether a change in teaching does that or whether it is , in fact , a corruption .
There isn ’ t room in a short article to look at them in detail but it is , for our present purposes , enough to name them - the book is readily available and even freely so if you have access to the internet .
The seven tests or notes of authentic doctrinal development are ( 1 ) preservation of type , ( 2 ) continuity of principles , ( 3 ) assimilative power , ( 4 ) logical sequence , ( 5 ) anticipation of its future , ( 6 ) conservative action on its past , and ( 7 ) its chronic vigour .
Newman argues that all seven of these characteristics need to be present for a doctrinal development to be an authentic one , absent one or more , what you have is a corruption . Rather than engage in bitter polemic , still less in calumny and detraction , we might better use our time reasonably to pose a simple question - the Latin word is dubitum : do these “ advanced ” interpretations of Amoris Laetitia meet Newman ’ s criteria ?
The answer , it seems to me , is abundantly clear .