Blessed John Henry Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine
“I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth.
Blessed John Henry Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine
“I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth. He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears, and will declare to you the things that are coming.” (Jn. 16:12-13)
History exposing Protestantism’s unproven and unprovable assumptions is not enough. To diagnose is not to cure. Fair-minded believers born in the twentieth century are not responsible for the revolt of the sixteenth. I had honest questions about those peculiar doctrines that distinguish the Catholic Church. John Henry Newman helped me to see long-assumed, never-proven assumptions that underlie Protestantism. Then he helped me see the cure. The light of history humbles Catholics, and completely unseats Protestants.
Liar, lunatic or Lord
Born in 1801, Newman was twenty-four when ordained a priest in the Anglican communion. By 1845, after undertaking to prove the legitimacy of Anglicanism, this holy scholar and theologian entered the Roman Catholic Church. Newman, who lived to see most of the nineteenth century, died in 1890 a cardinal in the Catholic Church. Recall C.S. Lewis’ Liar, Lunatic or Lord-trilemna. Non-Catholics face a similar trilemna with the exclusive claims of the Catholic Church. You might lover Her, or hate what you think She is, but indifference toward Rome is not a valid option. When Newman became convinced the Catholic Church is the church of Jesus Christ, and his own communion was in schism, this Anglican divine relinquished his livelihood and submitted to the authority of the one, holy apostolic church. Submission is an option. Or rejection. Indifference is not valid.
Hidden in the Church’s bosom
Cardinal Newman’s seminal work, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, provides a framework for understanding “that the ‘articles of faith’ which ‘are necessary to secure the Church’s purity, according to the rise of successive heresies and error,’ were ‘all hidden, as it were, in the Church’s bosom from the first, and brought out into form according to the occasion.’” (An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Newman, J. H. C. (1994), Notre Dame Series in the Great Books, xvii / Kindle iOS version at 168). Newman treats the Church Age as a body of evidence to be considered, not ignored. Newman’s work “offers a ‘view’ of the course of doctrinal development in the early Church and invites the reader to recognize certain patterns which it traces in the historical phenomena.” (xxi / 227). He set out to justify the Anglican communion by an intense study of history. The study, however, led Newman into the Catholic Church, whose doctrines are not aberrations, or accretions or superstitions. Rather, what the Church “implicitly believed becomes explicitly professed, as the mind of the Church develops the ‘ideas, which it has hitherto held implicitly and without subjecting them to its reflecting and reasoning powers.’” (xxiii / 265).
Exploding ahistorical narratives
Many seem to believe “that Christianity does not fall within the province of history,—that it is to each man what each man thinks it to be, and nothing else[.]” (4 / 346). Recently, in speaking about the weight I perceived in the witness of Saint Ignatius of Antioch (The Wheat of God), a Protestant friend basically replied that the Apostolic Father’s interpretation of Scripture was no more or less valid than his or mine. On one hand, I could not believe my ears. On the other, I realize we grew up with an impression (formed who knows how) that the ancient, visible Church became corrupt and apostate (nobody can say when). I discovered that idea, built upon unexamined assumptions, withers in the light of history. With windows flung open, the relentless light of facts exposes ahistorical narratives; narratives necessary for the perpetuation of Protestantism.
What did the Apostolic Fathers know, anyway?
Laying aside unexamined assumptions, the defender of Protestantism must admit the most “natural hypotheses”, at least until presenting evidence to the contrary: “the society of Christians, which the Apostles left on earth, were of that religion to which the Apostles had converted them; that the external continuity of name, profession, and communion, argues a real continuity of doctrine[.]” (5 / 361). Reason does not permit the assumption that, with the passing of Saint John the Evangelist, the Church immediately careened into the ditch, hopelessly corrupting what had just been handed to them by those who walked with the Lord. Didn’t many of those same wi