THE DEVELOPMENT OF DOCTRINE

Catalog description

The development of doctrine is formally a topic in fundamental theology: it addresses the question of how tradition works, or in other words, it addresses the question of how the deposit of revelation once commended to the apostles is preserved, without di minishment and without addition, from generation to generation. Though the reality of development was acknowledged anciently by Vincent of Lérins and by scholastic theories of the virtually revealed, it attracted sustained attention only with the advent of modern historical studies, which drew greater attention to the differences in the conceptual presentation of the gospel across the ages and the emergence of doctrines seemingly unknown to the apostles, such as those of original sin or of purgatory or of transubstantiation, and was not addressed with the requisite historical erudition and psychological sophistication until John Henry Cardinal Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845, 1878). The reception of Newman, however, has been controverted and complex. The course begins with Newman, passes on to the period of Modernism, in which his thought was variously received and contested, recalls the reviviscence of the scholastic approach in F. Marin -Sola, considers how certain of the “gr eats” treated the issue in mid -twentieth century—de Lubac, Rahner, Schillebeeckx —and concludes with Congar’s reception of Newman especially as shaped up by Andrew Meszaros.