Development. . . or not

 

 

 

 

 

 

We hear a lot about doctrinal development from all kinds of people and with respect to all kinds of doctrines. We have to admit the obvious.  The development of doctrine has become the calling card for those who wish to change the faith once delivered to the saints.  Times change.  Doctrine changes.  While some might practice some restraint with respect to the development of doctrine and limit this to its elucidation, sharpened like iron in times of controversy, but not changing into something different, this is obviously not what either liberal Protestants or Roman Catholics think.  They have tended to view doctrine and everything into some sort of process or progress.  Indeed, reality itself is evolutionary. 

On the one hand, we hear it articulated by the fifth-century French priest and monk, St. Vincent of Lerins. In his Commonitorium , St. Vincent speaks of a very conservative development and insists that what to be catholic: “One must be careful to hold what has been believed everywhere, always and by all. … That is what is Catholic in the true and proper sense.”  The faith does not evolve or develop or progress but that which our Lord has revealed is unalterable.  In this sense, we do not grow in understanding beyond what the faithful have believed, taught, and confessed down from the apostles and through the ages. 

Dom Prosper Gueranger, Abbot of Solesmes, expands this understanding of doctrinal development.   “It is a fundamental principle of theology, that all revealed truths were confided to the Church at the beginning; that some were explicitly proposed for our belief from the start, whereas others, although contained implicitly in the first set of truths, only emerged from them with the passage of time, by means of formal definitions rendered by the Church with the assistance of the Holy Ghost, through Whom she is infallible.”

Now things appear to get interesting.  For added to the mix is both the understanding that the Spirit is still guiding the Church past what is written in Scripture but the whole idea that the Church is infallible.  What originally was about an unchanging deposit of faith has now left room for the Church to depart not only from Scripture but from the articulations of the early Church.  Now is it not simply our understanding that becomes deeper but the possibility for things to be added to the faith which were not first present with the apostles and taught by our Lord.

Rome depends upon this expanded understanding of doctrinal development.  Without it there could be no purgatory or papacy, no transubstantiation or treasury of merits, etc...  Rome requires for its very existence that doctrines develop from nothing or at least from something other than Scripture.  Luther's rejection of Rome was not in cardinal doctrines of the faith but in precisely those areas to which was added that which was not there from the beginning nor in Scripture and that which is, often, a contradiction of the Scriptures themselves.  Who can deny that the movement for historical criticism of Scripture has become a movement also for the development of understandings and doctrines different from the ones espoused or expected by that Word of God?

This is not simply about the Church’s ever-growing understanding, its ever-developing defense, and its ever-clearer proclamation of the mysteries of faith fostered by the Spirit but about the Church growing up and growing out of these mysteries claiming the same guidance of the Spirit. What Rome requires to hold up the rafters of its very house is what Protestantism has been using for years to justify departure from that faith.  It is time for all of us to admit this and to begin to deal with this difference.  Inherent in this argument is the presumption on the part of Rome (with is corollary in liberal Protestantism) that the Scriptures themselves are a creation of the Church, by the Church, and for the Church.  The movement past sharpening the words in the face of heresy to the actual development of doctrine from one thing into something else is a Word problem, a Scripture problem.  In this presumption the Church knows better than Paul what Paul wrote, better than the Gospel writers what they penned, and better than the apostles an understanding of who Jesus is and what He came to accomplish.  In this respect, it sounds more Gnostic than Christian.

If there is a reason for the misunderstanding of Lutheranism, it is because we insist that we have nothing new to offer, believe in nothing new, and will not advocate for that which is new but only for that which has always been believed everywhere at every time.  We keep up the mantra of catholicity, apostolicity, and historicity in the face of each new thing that is proposed -- from the way we describe the Trinity and its internal relationships to the invention of genders.  Indeed, Lutherans are tiresome (or at least they should be) in asking where was that written?