THE DEVELOPMENT OF DOCTRINE, THE NOTION THAT THE CHURCH KEEPS
LEARNING
There is tension between how Christianity has developed and the Bible teaching
that divine inspiration as in making new scriptures and new prophets is over
since the last apostle died.
In Cardinal John Henry Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian
Doctrine he acknowledged that the Church of Rome different from the Early Church
but held that Protestantism was not identical to the Early Church. According to
him the Early Church was the same religion as Roman Catholicism and that the
Church learned more about the gospel through time and eventually it came to
teach explicit Roman Catholic doctrine. The primitive Church evolved not into
Roman Catholicism but into clarified Catholicism.
He gave seven tests to show when a genuine development has taken place for it
can happen that some developments are not developments at all but errors. Among
the tests is the idea that there must be a basic doctrine that implies other
ones so that they can be developed from it and that another that this basic
doctrine must come from the apostles to be a real development.
Another is that the development must fit the other revealed doctrines. Another
is that the development must be logically derived from the basic root doctrine.
Another is that the development be the only possible one for trouble would ensue
if a doctrine implied two or three different things. Another is that the
development must have taken the simplest road to be genuine. For example, the
simplest implication of a doctrine should be the accepted one.
Another is that the developing be done by or validated by the legitimate
authorities in the Church. The doctrine must be meant to be developed as well.
For example, if you say that the doctrine of original sin implies baptism is
necessary for infants to get rid of it then the problem is proving that original
sin meant to imply that. Perhaps God wipes the sin after it appears without
baptism or perhaps it will not be pardoned until the child is able to renounce
sin or perhaps if the child dies God will send it to Limbo from where it can go
to Heaven if it chooses. For a doctrine to be really open to development it
would have to explicitly say that it is just a root. The example we have given
fits absolutely none of the rules and yet it was a “developed” doctrine that is
one of the foundation stones of Roman Catholicism. It proves that Roman
Catholicism is wrong and a hoax. It really did alter and add to the Christian
faith.
Despite the opposition when they first came out, Newman’s ideas were locked into
the Church’s official stance at the Second Vatican Council (page 210, The Lion
Concise Book of Christian Thought).
It is a fact that few if any of the Catholic developments are in harmony with
these rules. The Church says it has to understand doctrines better all the time
meaning that the way a doctrine was stated before could be inaccurate so it has
to be improved. When Hell used to be thought of as a fire with demons with horns
in it under the earth that could have led to the development of misleading
doctrines, say that Hell will one day break out on earth and that demons have
bodies and that the sinners there deserve to burn as if their despair is not
enough. The rules are useless except for exposing the sham of Roman Catholicism.
The Development of Doctrine is a meaningless hypothesis for it opens the way to
invent new doctrines. For example, the early Church insisted that sin committed
after baptism had to be paid for in penance. Newman argued that the Church when
dealing with this idea came to discover that it implied that indulgences,
merits, purgatory, prayers, and masses for the dead should be believed in. But
it could be argued that death is the punishment that deals with the debt. The
Bible says that is what death is for (Romans 6:23). And it could be that God
will be strict and instead of sending you to purgatory he will miraculously and
secretly amplify your last agony at the point of death to pay off the debt in
full. And it could be that we can’t help the souls in Purgatory. Newman was
lying. And when religion is full of mystery – it cannot explain an all-good God
allowing evil to happen despite having the power to stop it - what sense does it
make to say that the debt of penance infers these things for what it infers may
be beyond our grasp of logic and inconceivable to our human earthly logic?
Newman knew that if the early Church taught salvation though the blood of Jesus
and that anybody who is a sincere Christian and accepts Jesus as Lord and
Saviour is in this Church which is an invisible communion that that was enough
to identify it with Protestantism for that is Protestantism reduced to its bare
essentials. Even Catholics have an invisible true Church like that the
Protestants believe in so it is nonsense to point to an organisation and call it
the true Church for it could be run by secret apostates. Yet Newman needs an
impeccable organisation to make his system work and to prove that the system
directs one to faith in the visible Roman Catholic Church. See the point? Jesus
said that the Church would never be destroyed but the Vatican could apostatise
meaning that those who are true to the Church as it used to be would be the true
Church though they no longer have an infallible head. The Church says that
infallibility belongs to the Church as a whole though it is only exercised
through Episcopal councils of the Church so a break-off of laypeople could then
function as infallible if they are the true faith. So pointing to an
organisation like Newman did as the holder of the true developments does not
work for he is begging the question: he assumes the Catholic hierarchy are the
guardians of the faith which need not be right. The Catholic Church has been
frequently accused of apostasy by its own. Even by Newman’s standards, the
Church must have left the faith and the true Church in the middle of the
nineteenth century when it made the Immaculate Conception a dogma for it is
neither in early tradition or implied by it. The Development of Dogma idea
suggest that a new dogma can occur to a school in the Church and if the Church
won’t exalt that dogma to dogma-hood then the school can leave the Church and do
it itself and become the true Church. Church means a teaching body and
community. The idea of a true Church is impossible to accept for parts of the
Church will have greater closeness to the truth than will the official heads for
there are many things not definitively settled. The section will be a truer
Church or body of teaching than the mainstream Church.
The Lion Concise Book of Christian Thought gives a good refutation of Newman’s
views. I repeat them here with my own observations.
The first problem is that Newman never justified the developments adequately and
ignored the fact that the early Church could have been mistaken say in the
matter of penance following forgiveness doctrine which denied that God is
generous with his forgiveness. It could be said the doctrine was heretical
though the Church accepted it and should have known better for it was not an
offshoot or anything of its doctrine that God was love and mercy and generosity
themselves but contrary to it.
Second, Newman does not think about the Eastern Orthodox claim to be the true
infallible Catholic Church even though its system is older than the Catholic
one. Catholics will say that perhaps it did not develop enough so the oldness
proves nothing. But it is itself-sufficient and that is the refutation of the
Catholic reply. If the Church has a sufficient system for getting revelation
from God and being a Church of God why should it need to develop into a papal
system?
To make the Church the one that has the divine guidance to say what scripture
means could and will lead to the Church stopping the Bible from being able to
speak for itself. The Church becomes the real authority and the Bible is its
subject. It is just like the New Testament doctrine that the Old Testament must
be read the Christian way. Without the New Testament our interpretation and
understanding of the Old will be radically different. If the Catholic Church
officially decides that John 6 is all about the transformation of bread and wine
into the body and blood of Jesus and uses its infallibility to see that then we
are not allowed to wonder if the doctrine is really taught by the scripture at
all. Newman even said that just as the Old Testament has no authority except as
interpreted by the New Testament which is the supreme authority giving the Old
only a relative authority so the New Testament has only a relative authority
because the Church and the pope have the power to decree what it means by the
power of the Holy Spirit in them. This is blasphemous. It is a mistake for a
Catholic to go to the Bible to prove the papacy when the book is no good without
the pope for that is seeing the Bible not as it is or might be but as the pope
says it should be seen.
Apparently, the only trace of a development of doctrine in the early Church was
its recognition of the view that that ordinations administered by heretics were
valid (page 57, Roman Catholic Claims).
The Catholic Church was not revealed lock, stock and barrel by Jesus and the
apostles which everybody admits therefore all its new doctrines are not
developments but corruptions and should be discarded