The Freedom of the Theologian as the Precondition for “Doctrinal Development”: Catholic Teaching on Slavery as Case Study

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.