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| John Henry Newman |
I'm referring to the famous argument by John Henry Newman, of blessed memory--the "Development of Doctrine"--in which a former Protestant gave Catholics a sturdy rationale for why they've added so many "little weirdsies" to the Christian faith. For those who may not know: Newman was an Anglican, standing at the head of a wonderfully fruitful 19th-century reform movement before deciding that his reading of early Christian texts necessitated a move to the Roman Catholic faith. He gave us one of the most ill-considered (and thus oft-repeated) lines of the whole delightful Catholic-Protestant polemic: "To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant." This is, of course, a wild overstatement, as shown by the robust generations of high-church Anglicans and other Protestant scholars that championed Newman's Oxford Movement and then carried it forward, giving the church the inestimable gift of gathering, collating, and translating a vast corpus of the early church fathers into English--all while, amazingly, not converting to Roman Catholicism! Yes, that's right--the same collection of translations that is currently instrumental in persuading impressionable young men to become Catholic and Orthodox in droves is the love-labor of a host of committed Protestant scholars--high-church Anglicans, Lutherans, and Reformed. The heritage of patristics as an academic field of study is a Protestant gift to the church. (You're welcome, brothers.)
One could just as easily say, as many of those same scholars might have, "To be deep in history is to see Catholic accretions for what they are." Now, the nineteenth-century divines were a bit more tactful than modern YouTube apologists, so you won't find that exact quote dancing off anyone's tongue. But the sentiment is there throughout the scholars of the high-church Protestant traditions in Newman's day: they thought the Roman Catholic Church was a true church, remaining astonishingly vital across the ages, but perhaps, just perhaps, an orchard that had become rather overgrown for all its merits. These were men like Pusey, Schaff, Lightfoot, and Neale, none of whom could be accused of not being "deep in history." In their generation, no one knew the Fathers better than they; and they were neither Roman Catholic nor Orthodox.
So there's just my little soapbox moment to argue that Catholics ought to stop gloatingly using Newman's "gotcha" quote--it doesn't really hold up: not in our day, and not even in Newman's own day.
But let me draw us to the main point of Newman's contribution to Catholic apologetics--the idea of the "development of doctrine" as an explanation for how and why the RCC is so robustly overgrown with curious dogmas. (And, as a side note for anyone bristling at my playful language here, I acknowledge that there are certain mainline Protestant churches nowadays that are far more inventive with their teachings--damnably inventive, in some cases--and their inventiveness is not nearly so winsome.) Newman argued that doctrine, considered as a living deposit of faith subject to the continued guidance of the Holy Spirit, necessarily must develop over time. Further, one can see this development in areas that even Protestants do not dispute: the ever-clearer articulation of Trinitarian theology throughout the first few centuries, for instance, or the acceptance of a fixed canon of Scripture. (A clarifying note, though: while Protestants don't dispute the necessity of affirming these two "developments," they quite reasonably see them not as developments in the sense of innovations--i.e., adding something that wasn't already present--but rather as faithful recognitions of what was necessarily present in the apostolic witness.) Very thoughtfully, as was his wont, Newman outlined multiple different ways to distinguish authentic developments from corruptions. Just to give a few: an authentic development must preserve a continuity of character with what came before; it must be able to assimilate new cultural and intellectual material without itself being assimilated; it must be hinted at in earlier developments, even if not present in full; it must preserve and strengthen earlier teaching, not undermine or contradict; and it should show vigor, fruitfulness, and vitality. Beyond these, Newman also argued that it seemed reasonable that God would ordain an instrument that was equipped to guide and confirm these new developments as they arose--namely, the magisterial authority of Rome.
There are innumerable Protestant critiques of this argument, many of them bad but some quite good, and they're worth looking up if you're a glutton for polemics. My goal here is not to dispute Newman's framework, but to question its helpfulness in internecine Christian discussions. It might actually be true, but its main function is to salve Catholic doubts and maybe help tip the balance for sympathetic fence-riders like Newman--not really to persuade anyone else. Now, I'm not saying that it doesn't hold a necessary place in these discussions--it is, after all, the only answer Catholics have to give on certain questions--but it should probably only be offered in the sense of "Here's a framework that explains why we can reasonably believe what we believe" and not "Here's why you should believe what we believe." Even if Newman's argument were true, an argument can be true without being cogent, and to an outsider who actually is "deep in history," the "development of doctrine" argument is singularly uncompelling.
Why is that? Because even if one can trace RCC distinctives back to their earlier stages, following Newman's framework, the direction of argument is opposite from the one that most interlocutors want to see. We want to see an argument that takes the earlier precedents and then develops them forward in ways that make good sense and rule out obvious accretions from outside influences. Newman's doctrine doesn't do that; it takes RCC doctrines as they presently are and works backward. Now, to be clear, Newman designed his system to try to make it work in both directions, but in practice, its claims are almost always applied retroactively. Thus, a Catholic apologist tends to begin with a particular teaching or practice as currently understood, and works backward. Going in this direction, one is often able to clearly see the earlier steps that led to the present position, and since each earlier step is grounded in the authentic practice of the church at an earlier stage, each step looks sure-footed and true. But flip the question in the other direction, and there's a telling perspective-shift that occurs. When we start at the beginning--the initial teaching and practice of the Christian church in the apostolic age--one sees not only the next steps as taken in the Roman Catholic Church, which would eventually lead to its modern practice; one also perceives the multiform alternative possibilities as lived out in other ancient apostolic communions (the Nazarenes, the Church of the East, and the various Oriental and Eastern Orthodox churches), as well as a host of potential external factors that may well have impinged upon the process of choosing that next step. The step-to-step progression, now going from past to future, does not look nearly so sure-footed as it did from the other angle.
For instance, the argument typically runs that the veneration of Mary is rooted in the high honor that early Christians afforded her role (as, say, in Irenaeus), or that the monarchical papacy is rooted in early Christian sensibilities that Rome was "first among equals" in the episcopal pentarchy. This seems plausible enough when looking backward, but it is not at all evident that this unfolding of doctrine is indeed an "authentic development" when standing from the vantagepoint of early Christianity and looking forward through time. In neither of these cases (Marian devotion and the papacy) can one stand at the beginning of the development, looking forward, and get the sense that this was an authentic development, over against the other possibility: that the influence of external factors, like the subconscious effects of particular cultural assumptions (like patron-client social systems), or the gradual accretions of folk-religion syncretism, or the well-recognized tendency of power to accumulate more power to itself, or a growing inability to read and interpret the Scriptures in the language of the people, would all have effects exactly as we observe today. To most Protestants, the obvious Occam's-razor answer is just that: the RCC's "little weirdsies" look exactly like the natural accretions we would expect to see given the external influences that were abundantly present in the course of RCC history.
That's the main sticking point for outside observers: it's not that development doesn't happen, or even that development shouldn't. It's that much of the development that Protestants see as problematic (i.e., those in significant tension with the plain reading of Scripture or with the known practices of apostolic Christianity)--these developments are indistinguishable from what one would expect to see if accretions from known historical influences did, in fact, exert their effects on the RCC. One would think that authentic, Holy Spirit-guided development would perhaps not necessarily align so closely with influences mirrored in late-antique cultural dynamics or with the known patterns of self-accruing power to those in positions of authority. It came as no surprise to the Reformers, for example, that so much of medieval Catholic devotion appeared to run against the grain of clear New Testament teaching: the most straightforward explanation was not that this was a reasonable fulfillment of the Holy Spirit's guidance, but that it was the expected result for a church which, by and large, had lost the linguistic ability to read the Scriptures for themselves in a broad, deep, and persistent manner. The picture matched the more obvious postulate, at least in their eyes: accretion, not authentic development.
The RCC can, of course, respond by saying that those developments, even if bearing the marks of external cultural influences, are not beyond the sovereign guidance of the Holy Spirit and, as such, represent the authentic development of Christianity within late-antique Roman culture, and then medieval culture, and so on. But to accept this argument, one essentially needs to have already agreed that Rome's magisterial stamp of approval is what settles the issue. To Protestant eyes, it's a self-referential argument, circular in nature: you should believe Rome because its doctrine has developed in authentic trajectories throughout its history, and you should believe those trajectories are authentic because Rome says so.
But again, this critique does not argue against the possibility of Newman's idea being true--it still might be. But in the lack of any feature that distinguishes "authentic development" from the expected results of other external influences, such as those which Protestants have enumerated over and over again, the argument lacks something in cogency. Newman tries to offer such distinguishing marks, but those distinctives are awfully hard to pin down when it comes to doing case studies of particular doctrines. Does the cult of the saints show a reasonable line of development from earliest Christianity, with all its emphasis on feasts, relics, prayers, and so on? There's perhaps a little something there, to be sure (2 Kgs 13:21; Acts 19:11-12). But ask the question another way, and the picture becomes murkier: Does the cult of the saints bear the marks of early Christian reverence for its heroes having been gradually assimilated into the existing frameworks of Roman cemetery rituals and the overriding cultural paradigm of patronage systems, in which you strove to cultivate contacts with intermediaries above yourself in the social hierarchy, who could then do you good? The answer is perhaps not as clear as Newman would like it to be--it looks unnervingly like a corruptible sort of assimilation that might rule out authentic development, at least in the eyes of an outside observer: not the church authentically expanding into a new cultural form, but a culture parasitically hijacking a Christian notion and turning it into something rather different than what the apostles likely envisioned.
Or to take another example of Newman's distinctives: Does current Marian devotion exhibit fruitfulness and vitality? Sure, of a sort--Marian devotion is absolutely everywhere in the Catholic world. But many Protestants would note that in some forms, it fosters a popular sensibility that Mary is more inclined to listen to us than Jesus is (the all-too-familiar "If you want Jesus to listen, go through Mary, just like at Cana" argument, or the "The Queen Mother has the ear of the King" argument). In this guise, the flourishing of Marian devotion comes, in some degree, at the expense of devotion that would otherwise be offered directly to Christ. People are praying to Mary instead of praying to Jesus, at least in part. Naturally, that's not the way the Catechism portrays Marian devotion, as I'm well aware--it is meant to magnify Christ, not diminish him--but perhaps Catholic apologists should be aware that Protestants frequently have the experience, when in dialogue with lay Catholics, of encountering exactly the dynamic described above. The perceived distance between Christ and the Christian is too often increased when Mary is inserted, not decreased. Such fruitfulness and vitality in Marian devotional practice, then, is more suspect than it might appear at first glance. While the theological error is a simple one that could be amended with good pastoral instruction, it is still worth noting that the distinguishing mark that Newman offers appears to undercut the doctrine it is meant to defend.
Again, for Protestants who want to hold to "the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3)--past tense, in the apostolic age--we look at these doctrines from the vantagepoint of the apostolic witness, and many of the RCC's later developments look indistinguishable from what one might reasonably expect natural accretions to look like, given the influences exerted on the RCC throughout its history. That doesn't automatically make them false, but to the Protestant mind, that should probably render them (at most) as optional standards for believers, rather than compulsory ones. In such a model, as in Anglican practice, one may choose to honor Mary and the saints, or not, so long as one holds firm to the universal Christian faith--that which has been believed always, everywhere, and by all (in other words: the apostolic witness, rooted in the New Testament and faithfully expounded in the fourth-century creeds). On this mark, then, I don't begrudge the Catholics their developments/accretions, nor am I campaigning for them to convert to Protestantism. I'm just calling foul on their overused argument that a deep understanding of history necessarily plays to their advantage. It doesn't.
So is Newman's idea of the development of doctrine helpful? Sure, it's helpful for Catholics, and that's definitely worth something. But it's not really persuasive for many of us who are indeed "deep in history."
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