From Bossuet To Newman The Idea Of Doctrinal Development

In this classic work, Owen Chadwick traces the development of the notion that changes in Christian doctrine are both possible and legitimate. In the seventeenth century Bossuet opined that Christian doctrine hardly or never changed. Over two centuries later Newman saw that its expression necessarily changed in a changing society. This book shows how one opinion changed into the other.

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John Henry Newman's decision to become a Roman Catholic was confirmed by his work on one of his major contributions to theology, Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Ironically, the writings that brought him into the Catholic Church were viewed so suspiciously by Church officials that from his very first days as a Catholic he experienced distance, avoidance, distrust, and even cynicism in his relationship with the hierarchy. In hope of obtaining an honest and competent critique of his views on the development of doctrine, he conceived the idea of a presentation of his ideas, not in English, but in Latin, and in the style not of a historical essay, but of a Scholastic treatise. The result was De catholici dogmatis evolutione, here translated into the author's native tongue as On The Development of Catholic Dogma

John Henry Newman and the Development of Doctrine provides an analysis of the attempts by John Henry Newman to account for the historical reality of doctrinal change within Christianity in the light of his lasting conviction that the idea of Christianity is fixed by reference to the dogmatic content of the deposit of faith. It argues that Newman proposed a series of hypotheses to account for the apparent contradiction between change and continuity, that this series begins much earlier than is generally recognized and that the final hypothesis he was to propose, contained in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, provides a methodology of lasting theological value and contemporary relevance. Stephen Morgan establishes the centrality of the problem of change and continuity in theology, to Newman's theological work as an Anglican, its part in his conversion to Catholicism and its contemporary relevance to Catholic theology. It also surveys the major secondary literature relating to the question, with particular reference to those works published within the last fifty years. Additionally, Morgan considers the legacy of the Essay as a tool in Newman’s theology and in the work of later theologians, finally suggesting that it may offer a useful methodological contribution to the contemporary Catholic debate about hermeneutical approaches to the Second Vatican Council and post-conciliar developments in doctrine.

Troeltsch's struggle with historicism sets the stage for a proposal that Christology be done from within and from ahead. Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics and Schleiermacher's experiential theology inform a Christology from within that is rooted in tradition and experience, while Pannenberg's notion of proleptic eschatological fulfilment serves as resource for a Christology from ahead. This volume develops a hermeneutical Christology that takes into account the historical contingency of knowledge, and seeks a Christology beyond the objectivism of timeless truth and the relativism of absolutised contextuality. The book is concluded with an examination of the convergence of critical traditionality, experiential appropriation and eschatological prolepsis in the Christology of the apostle Paul. The author explores how Christology might respond to the scandal of universality in postmodernity without defaulting on its claim to transcontextual referentiality.