Newman’s groundbreaking 1845 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine eventually led to the official, magisterial acknowledgement of doctrinal development as integral to the Catholic conception of the church and of divine revelation itself, as evidenced in Vatican II’s Dei Verbum, Newman’s 2019 canonization, and his likely elevation to status of “Doctor of the Church.” But Newman’s Essay, brilliant as it was, mistakenly–I argue–cast what is really the church’s development as a development of doctrine itself. This paper concerns the consequences of this mistaken conceptualization of “doctrine” as the subject of development, and how this perspective serves to make invisible the role of the theologian and her intellectual freedom in what is commonly called “doctrinal development.” Ever since, Newman’s originating formulation of doctrine as the subject of development has visited mischief on theologians’ attempts to articulate historical changes in the Catholic Church’s doctrinal positions and to make theological sense of these changes. While theories of doctrinal development have progressed far beyond Newman, his view that Christianity is an “idea,” with quasi-autonomous power to develop, has generated the opposing poles of “liberal” and “conservative” positions on the nature and limits of doctrinal development. These two positions, accordingly, give divergent evaluations of the freedom of the theologian to question or critique contemporary magisterial teaching. For the “liberal” Catholic, this freedom is to be championed, and the dissenting theologian is often cast as a hero fighting an intransigent bureaucracy. For the “conservative” Catholic, on the other hand, the freedom of the theologian is the capacity to suggest expansions and translations of magisterial teaching, or to explore new domains of inquiry that have not been touched by the official guardians of the faith, but never to question what is magisterially given.
The solution to this seemingly intractable liberal-conservative stand-off, I suggest, is to abandon the idea of “doctrinal development” and to grasp that it is not doctrine but the church that develops, and that this occurs through the necessary (though not sufficient or sole), integral role of theologians freely raising questions and criticisms of the Catholic Church’s current doctrinal teaching. To illustrate this necessity of the theologian’s freedom, I will use as a case study the doctrinal history of slavery in the Catholic Church, depending on Christopher Kellerman’s 2022 book, All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church.
This paper proceeds as follows. First, I articulate how the idea that doctrine itself develops generates its antithesis, a doctrinal “reversal,” by which a theologian or a magisterial act affirms what the official church denied as true doctrine or denies what the church once officially taught.
Second, I lay out the indispensable role of theologians in the Catholic Church’s development in its magisterial teaching on slavery, moving from slave-holding as morally permissible to being reckoned as an intrinsic evil. Without theologians’ exercise of freedom vis-a-vis what was established doctrine in their time, no development would have occurred. Of particular importance in this narrative are abolitionist theologians and clerics who resisted the views of pro-slavery theologians that slaveholding was accepted Catholic doctrine and thus could not legitimately be changed.
Third, I demonstrate the process by which this development in the Catholic Church’s thinking and teaching on slavery occurred, through a dialogue with the notion of intellectual development laid out by Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan. Lonergan speaks of the stages of the development of the conscious subject. If it is possible, as Lonergan argues, to come to understand and thereby self-appropriate one’s own cognitional process in its orientation towards truth and away from intellectual and moral biases, this self-appropropriation is a development in the individual subject. And every development, as Lonergan shows, involves some revision. By analogy, I propose that it is possible for theologians and magisterial officials to understand and self-appropriate their own historical roles in instances of the church’s history that they have recognized as “development of doctrine,” which is in fact the Catholic Church’s development, viz., the development of the minds of the human persons comprising and leading it. This self-appropriation serves to make visible the function of theologians, obviates the threat of admitting “doctrinal reversals,” a threat that only arises when one believes that it is doctrine that develops and not theologians and the church. We historically have seen, and should therefore expect in the future, reversals of doctrinal positions, for changes in the church’s doctrinal positions are the byproducts of this development, not the development itself.
Fourth, I argue that to deny the freedom of the theologian is tantamount to denying the “development of doctrine” that has now itself become magisterial doctrine, for to deny the necessary means for a touted end is to deny the very validity of the end. Church practice that therefore seeks to restrain the freedom of the theologian to ask questions and critique current teaching represents a performative self-contradiction: when a subject makes judgments about the nature of knowing that contradict the very process by which she comes to utter that judgment. To deny theologians their freedom and its role in the church’s development, while also affirming as true particular historical developments in the church’s life, is therefore to fall into incoherence.
Finally, I conclude by suggesting that understanding the church as a historical and developing subject accords more with recent Catholic magisterial teaching on development, which underscores the church’s “growth in understanding the realities and words” that tradition hands on (Dei Verbum, §8), and not growth in doctrines themselves. It aligns, ultimately, with Pope Francis’ call for theologians to “dare to go further” than current teaching in their theologizing–the latter a sign that this self-appropriation is beginning to be performed by some in the Catholic magisterium as well.
The Catholic Church’s magisterium has acknowledged doctrinal development as integral to the Catholic conception of the church and of divine revelation itself. But Catholic theologians, beginning with Newman, have mistakenly cast what is the church’s development as a development of doctrine itself. This paper concerns the consequences of erroneously taking “doctrine” as the subject of development, and how this perspective serves to make invisible the role in “doctrinal developments” of the theologian and her intellectual freedom. To show this, I focus on the Catholic Church’s development in its magisterial teaching on slavery; without theologians’ exercise of freedom vis-a-vis what was established doctrine in their time, no development would have occurred. Ultimately, I argue that to deny this freedom to theologians is to fall into the incoherence of a performative self-contradiction, for to deny the necessary means for a touted end is to deny the very validity of the end.