The Problem with Newman
In my last post, I previewed a discussion of Cardinal John Henry Newman and his highly influential work An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. A couple of months back, I talked about a discussion between Ross Douthat and Dr. Massimo Faggioli, regarding the future of the Roman Catholic Church in the Era of Francis. One of the things that struck me about that conversation was that there was a hole in the middle of it--no one was able to really grapple with theological change and how it works. Usually when issues involving theological change comes up, the default move is to cite to Newman. I have read a great deal about this work, but I had never actually read it myself.
So, I went out and read it. It was a clarifying read, because it is clear to me that the hole that Douthat and Faggioli circle around in their talk is a product of Newman and his approach. Newman doesn't actually provide a theological basis for how and why doctrine changes over time; instead, he provides a theological framework for explaining how and why doctrinal changes reflect a deeper continuity after those changes have occurred. Said another way, Newman's work is wholly apologetical, attempting to defeat the claim raised by outsiders that the Roman Catholic Church doesn't really have continuity with apostolic teaching (and, thus, is not the "true church") because this or that doctrinal statement cannot be found in previous eras of the church. What it doesn't do, and doesn't even seem interested in trying to do, is to come with with a set of criteria or some sort of process for determining or evaluating whether to make a new doctrinal statement or to change an existing position. Newman is interested in tidying up things that have happened in the past, not providing any guidance going forward.
To see this, let's look at Newman's method. After a long historical and conceptual prologue, Newman articulates seven "notes" that delineate "genuine developments" from "corruptions." These are (1) "preservation of its type;" (2) "continuity of its principles;" (3) "its assimilative power;" (4) "its logical sequence;" (5) "anticipation of its future;" (6) "conservative action on its past;" and (7) its chronic vigour."
The first principle, "preservation of its type," is basically defined in terms of what outside observers of the church would say about it:
Let us take it as the world now views it in its age; and let us take it as the world once viewed it in its youth; and let us see whether there be any great difference between the early and the later description of it. The following statement will show my meaning:—
There is a religious communion claiming a divine commission, and holding all other religious bodies around it heretical or infidel; it is a well-organized, well-disciplined body; it is a sort of secret society, binding together its members by influences and by engagements which it is difficult for strangers to ascertain. It is spread over the known world; it may be weak or insignificant locally, but it is strong on the whole from its continuity; it may be smaller than all other religious bodies together, but is larger than each separately. It is a natural enemy to governments external to itself; it is intolerant and engrossing, and tends to a new modelling of society; it breaks laws, it divides families. It is a gross superstition; it is charged with the foulest crimes; it is despised by the intellect of the day; it is frightful to the imagination of the many. And there is but one communion such. (207-08).
Every bit of this is problematic. If we look to Newman's ultimate home, the Roman Catholic Church, arguably it doesn't even claim all of those things for itself anymore after Vatican II, specifically the idea that "all other religious bodies around it heretical or infidel" (see, e.g. Lumen Gentium, paragraph 8, which explains that all other Christian bodies "subsist in" the Catholic Church in some inchoate sense). And the idea that the Church was somehow always and everywhere "a natural enemy to governments external to itself" is hard to make sense of in light of medieval Europe, and is in any event not necessarily something to be celebrated. But Newman's key point is that it has always been the case that external forces (however defined) have hated the Church, and so to the extent that external forces hate the Church then this hatred is a sign that the Church is doing something right. Taken literally, this principle represents a kind of reverse heckler's veto--to the extent that Roman Catholic Church does something, or continues to do something, that makes vaguely defined external forces mad, then that is confirmation that it is doing the right thing.
Simply put, this is nonsensical, and even destructive. Without some much more clearly articulated sense of who the "they" are that are upset, as well as the basis for why "they" are upset with some particular action of the Roman Catholic Church, the fact that people are upset tells you precisely nothing about whether the thing in dispute is right or wrong. I mean, many people seem to be pretty mad about the Cardinal McCarrick stuff, but by Newman's rationale this reaction should be interpreted as confirmation that the Church's handling was right on the money. "Haters Gonna Hate" is not a coherent theological principle, especially since it basically acts as a built-in excuse to double-down on whatever it is you are currently doing, regardless of the nature of the action and its prudence.
The second principle, "continuity of principles," is defined by Newman to consist of four things--(1) the supremacy of faith, i.e. the notion that Christianity cannot be reduced to a purely intellectual, propositional program; (2) theology, understood to mean that reason plays a role in the apprehension of religious truth; (3) Scripture read in a "mystical," or non-literalist way; and (4) dogma, understood as the idea that there are correct answers to theological questions that must be asserted and contested for, as opposed to a kind of religious indifference. That's fine, but while that arguably does an O.K. job of distinguishing some of the classic First Millennium heresies from orthodox practice (though, I suspect you could raise objections to the way some of those views are characterized by Newman), it does little to help us with any modern questions. Nothing in this principle per se provides any insight into, let's say, women's ordination or LGBT questions.
Likewise number three, assimilative power, describes the degree to which catholic Christianity can and should incorporate the best ideas from outside of itself to enhance the whole. This is fine and unobjectionable, but it provides no guide for which ideas should be incorporated or which syntheses should be accepted, only a justification for incorporations or syntheses that have already occurred. If anything, this counsels in favor of a much more robust engagement with feminism and LGBT rights movements, as Newman seems to endorse the notion that there are ideas out there in the non-Christian world which can and should be reincorporated into the Christian faith. Maybe the dreaded "secular" culture has figured something out that the Christian world had not?
This backward-looking operation of Newman's work is equally at play in the next three principles--logical sequence, anticipation of its future, and conservative action on its past. Here he does a fine job of showing how various doctrinal ideas existed in a nascent state in the earliest years of Christianity. But all sorts of things could be said to exist in a nascent state in Christian history; the question is which of these nascent ideas can or should come to full flower. For example, one could easily construct a story as to why women's ordination can be found in a nascent state in the history of the Christianity. In the first thousand years of Christian history, there is an absolute insistence that religious women be exclusively cloistered and isolated. By the time you get to Claire of Assisi, you have women running federations of cloistered communities. Then you have Teresa of Avila, who was leading reform movements under her own umbrella, followed by the emergence in the 18th Century of purely apostolic religious women, teaching school or doing missionary work. Finally, you now have religious women doing basically everything there is to do in the life of the church except be ordained. Making that leap to ordained service would, on this reading, be a logical sequence which was anticipated in the past. But that's the problem; for almost any proposed change, and certainly all of the proposed changes that are on offer in the modern discourse, you can construct a narrative as to how the origins of the new thing can be found in the past. And, because every potential change can be so described, these principles don't really provide any reliable way to distinguish between proposed changes that should and should not be implemented.
Plus, and I hate to keep harping on this but for me it is the conceptual lynch pin of this discussion, you are going to have to look really hard to find the embryonic version of Nostra Aetate in the tradition. Let's be real--Nostra Aetate was written and agreed upon because the Council Fathers believed that the traditional anti-Judaism of the Roman Catholic Church was responsible for at least creating the conditions that made the Holocaust possible. The bishops at the Council were confronted by the legacy of that theology in the courtyards of Auschwitz and Treblinka, and decided that it must be repudiated. They were right and wise to do so, but that has little to do with some sort of internal process coming to flower and more being chastised by events for which they felt at least partially responsible. If anything, Nostra Aetate seems to run against the spirit of Newman's first principle, because it is driven by events that are in large measure outside the Church--"reading the signs of the times" as opposed to some solipsistic, wholly internal mechanism of a self-referential perfect body.
Perhaps the most backward looking of the principles is that last one, which states that true doctrinal development will last while corruptions will fade away. Of course, this can only be seen in retrospect--it doesn't provide any guidance in the moment when a proposed change is up for consideration. Moreover, it has a distinctly circular quality. To return to the women's ordination example, how can we know whether the push to ordain women is a movement that will endure if the Church refuses to actually ordain any women? The track-record of an innovation is only meaningful if the innovation is actually implemented, which is precisely what we are trying to decide whether or not to do in the first place. The Episcopal bishop of Dallas, George Sumner, runs into the same problem in his pastoral letter regarding same-sex marriage--how can the "experiment" same-sex marriage ever be weighed by the wider communion if it is never approved in the first place?
It's easy to see why Newman is so beloved by people like Dr. Faggioli who are seeking to defend the Vatican II project. The fight, in that context, is between people who think that The Change is good and legitimate and should be preserved, versus the folks that think that The Change is illegitimate and heretical. If that's the argument, then Newman provides a tool-kit for explaining why this or that statement in the Vatican II documents that looks like a radical change is not actually a change that would imperil the fundamental ecclesiological claims of the Roman Catholic Church. Looking backward, every theological change was (or can be seen as) a natural and inevitable evolution of basic principles.
But none of that provides meaningful guidance as to what we should do going forward, nor even some concrete manner of approaching that question. For that, you need some sort of theology of doctrinal change itself, the mechanism by which legitimate changes can or do occur. Newman provides nothing remotely like that. Part of this lack is predictable from Newman's project as a whole. After all, the whole point of An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine is to show why theological changes are not actually changes if you look at it through the right lens. It's a way to talk about doctrinal change without really having to admit that doctrine actually changes. By adopting an entirely backward-looking focus, Newman is able to obscure how the sausage is made, presenting development as something that just emerges fully formed, like Aphrodite from the sea foam.
Whereas Newman perhaps sees this as a feature, I think this is an enormous bug. While An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine seems to be a progressive approach to church history, it actually breeds a kind of paralysis. All you can do is wait for Godot, hoping (or fearing) that some historical event will intervene and select one potential development from among the all but infinite number of doctrinal possibilities. This paralysis is, in my view, the defining feature of Pope Francis's pontificate--a whole bunch of people hoping that various substantive doctrinal positions will change, while those same people are unable/unwilling to actually go out and just make those changes, or even forthrightly advocate for those changes. I've talked before about how JPII-style conservatives like Douthat are caught in a fundamentally incoherent position. But the Pope Francis progressives like Dr. Faggioli are in exactly the same theological conundrum, separated only by policy preferences.
Teresa of Avila once famously said "Christ has no body but yours, no hand, no feet on earth but yours. . . ." I believe the Spirit moves in the church, no doubt. But it does so by and through the people of the church. Mechanisms for change are not the imposition of outside agendas on the church, but the creation of regularized and predictable levers by which the Spirit can do its work. Newman provides nothing like that, and doesn't even really try.
So, I went out and read it. It was a clarifying read, because it is clear to me that the hole that Douthat and Faggioli circle around in their talk is a product of Newman and his approach. Newman doesn't actually provide a theological basis for how and why doctrine changes over time; instead, he provides a theological framework for explaining how and why doctrinal changes reflect a deeper continuity after those changes have occurred. Said another way, Newman's work is wholly apologetical, attempting to defeat the claim raised by outsiders that the Roman Catholic Church doesn't really have continuity with apostolic teaching (and, thus, is not the "true church") because this or that doctrinal statement cannot be found in previous eras of the church. What it doesn't do, and doesn't even seem interested in trying to do, is to come with with a set of criteria or some sort of process for determining or evaluating whether to make a new doctrinal statement or to change an existing position. Newman is interested in tidying up things that have happened in the past, not providing any guidance going forward.
To see this, let's look at Newman's method. After a long historical and conceptual prologue, Newman articulates seven "notes" that delineate "genuine developments" from "corruptions." These are (1) "preservation of its type;" (2) "continuity of its principles;" (3) "its assimilative power;" (4) "its logical sequence;" (5) "anticipation of its future;" (6) "conservative action on its past;" and (7) its chronic vigour."
The first principle, "preservation of its type," is basically defined in terms of what outside observers of the church would say about it:
Let us take it as the world now views it in its age; and let us take it as the world once viewed it in its youth; and let us see whether there be any great difference between the early and the later description of it. The following statement will show my meaning:—
There is a religious communion claiming a divine commission, and holding all other religious bodies around it heretical or infidel; it is a well-organized, well-disciplined body; it is a sort of secret society, binding together its members by influences and by engagements which it is difficult for strangers to ascertain. It is spread over the known world; it may be weak or insignificant locally, but it is strong on the whole from its continuity; it may be smaller than all other religious bodies together, but is larger than each separately. It is a natural enemy to governments external to itself; it is intolerant and engrossing, and tends to a new modelling of society; it breaks laws, it divides families. It is a gross superstition; it is charged with the foulest crimes; it is despised by the intellect of the day; it is frightful to the imagination of the many. And there is but one communion such. (207-08).
Every bit of this is problematic. If we look to Newman's ultimate home, the Roman Catholic Church, arguably it doesn't even claim all of those things for itself anymore after Vatican II, specifically the idea that "all other religious bodies around it heretical or infidel" (see, e.g. Lumen Gentium, paragraph 8, which explains that all other Christian bodies "subsist in" the Catholic Church in some inchoate sense). And the idea that the Church was somehow always and everywhere "a natural enemy to governments external to itself" is hard to make sense of in light of medieval Europe, and is in any event not necessarily something to be celebrated. But Newman's key point is that it has always been the case that external forces (however defined) have hated the Church, and so to the extent that external forces hate the Church then this hatred is a sign that the Church is doing something right. Taken literally, this principle represents a kind of reverse heckler's veto--to the extent that Roman Catholic Church does something, or continues to do something, that makes vaguely defined external forces mad, then that is confirmation that it is doing the right thing.
Simply put, this is nonsensical, and even destructive. Without some much more clearly articulated sense of who the "they" are that are upset, as well as the basis for why "they" are upset with some particular action of the Roman Catholic Church, the fact that people are upset tells you precisely nothing about whether the thing in dispute is right or wrong. I mean, many people seem to be pretty mad about the Cardinal McCarrick stuff, but by Newman's rationale this reaction should be interpreted as confirmation that the Church's handling was right on the money. "Haters Gonna Hate" is not a coherent theological principle, especially since it basically acts as a built-in excuse to double-down on whatever it is you are currently doing, regardless of the nature of the action and its prudence.
The second principle, "continuity of principles," is defined by Newman to consist of four things--(1) the supremacy of faith, i.e. the notion that Christianity cannot be reduced to a purely intellectual, propositional program; (2) theology, understood to mean that reason plays a role in the apprehension of religious truth; (3) Scripture read in a "mystical," or non-literalist way; and (4) dogma, understood as the idea that there are correct answers to theological questions that must be asserted and contested for, as opposed to a kind of religious indifference. That's fine, but while that arguably does an O.K. job of distinguishing some of the classic First Millennium heresies from orthodox practice (though, I suspect you could raise objections to the way some of those views are characterized by Newman), it does little to help us with any modern questions. Nothing in this principle per se provides any insight into, let's say, women's ordination or LGBT questions.
Likewise number three, assimilative power, describes the degree to which catholic Christianity can and should incorporate the best ideas from outside of itself to enhance the whole. This is fine and unobjectionable, but it provides no guide for which ideas should be incorporated or which syntheses should be accepted, only a justification for incorporations or syntheses that have already occurred. If anything, this counsels in favor of a much more robust engagement with feminism and LGBT rights movements, as Newman seems to endorse the notion that there are ideas out there in the non-Christian world which can and should be reincorporated into the Christian faith. Maybe the dreaded "secular" culture has figured something out that the Christian world had not?
This backward-looking operation of Newman's work is equally at play in the next three principles--logical sequence, anticipation of its future, and conservative action on its past. Here he does a fine job of showing how various doctrinal ideas existed in a nascent state in the earliest years of Christianity. But all sorts of things could be said to exist in a nascent state in Christian history; the question is which of these nascent ideas can or should come to full flower. For example, one could easily construct a story as to why women's ordination can be found in a nascent state in the history of the Christianity. In the first thousand years of Christian history, there is an absolute insistence that religious women be exclusively cloistered and isolated. By the time you get to Claire of Assisi, you have women running federations of cloistered communities. Then you have Teresa of Avila, who was leading reform movements under her own umbrella, followed by the emergence in the 18th Century of purely apostolic religious women, teaching school or doing missionary work. Finally, you now have religious women doing basically everything there is to do in the life of the church except be ordained. Making that leap to ordained service would, on this reading, be a logical sequence which was anticipated in the past. But that's the problem; for almost any proposed change, and certainly all of the proposed changes that are on offer in the modern discourse, you can construct a narrative as to how the origins of the new thing can be found in the past. And, because every potential change can be so described, these principles don't really provide any reliable way to distinguish between proposed changes that should and should not be implemented.
Plus, and I hate to keep harping on this but for me it is the conceptual lynch pin of this discussion, you are going to have to look really hard to find the embryonic version of Nostra Aetate in the tradition. Let's be real--Nostra Aetate was written and agreed upon because the Council Fathers believed that the traditional anti-Judaism of the Roman Catholic Church was responsible for at least creating the conditions that made the Holocaust possible. The bishops at the Council were confronted by the legacy of that theology in the courtyards of Auschwitz and Treblinka, and decided that it must be repudiated. They were right and wise to do so, but that has little to do with some sort of internal process coming to flower and more being chastised by events for which they felt at least partially responsible. If anything, Nostra Aetate seems to run against the spirit of Newman's first principle, because it is driven by events that are in large measure outside the Church--"reading the signs of the times" as opposed to some solipsistic, wholly internal mechanism of a self-referential perfect body.
Perhaps the most backward looking of the principles is that last one, which states that true doctrinal development will last while corruptions will fade away. Of course, this can only be seen in retrospect--it doesn't provide any guidance in the moment when a proposed change is up for consideration. Moreover, it has a distinctly circular quality. To return to the women's ordination example, how can we know whether the push to ordain women is a movement that will endure if the Church refuses to actually ordain any women? The track-record of an innovation is only meaningful if the innovation is actually implemented, which is precisely what we are trying to decide whether or not to do in the first place. The Episcopal bishop of Dallas, George Sumner, runs into the same problem in his pastoral letter regarding same-sex marriage--how can the "experiment" same-sex marriage ever be weighed by the wider communion if it is never approved in the first place?
It's easy to see why Newman is so beloved by people like Dr. Faggioli who are seeking to defend the Vatican II project. The fight, in that context, is between people who think that The Change is good and legitimate and should be preserved, versus the folks that think that The Change is illegitimate and heretical. If that's the argument, then Newman provides a tool-kit for explaining why this or that statement in the Vatican II documents that looks like a radical change is not actually a change that would imperil the fundamental ecclesiological claims of the Roman Catholic Church. Looking backward, every theological change was (or can be seen as) a natural and inevitable evolution of basic principles.
But none of that provides meaningful guidance as to what we should do going forward, nor even some concrete manner of approaching that question. For that, you need some sort of theology of doctrinal change itself, the mechanism by which legitimate changes can or do occur. Newman provides nothing remotely like that. Part of this lack is predictable from Newman's project as a whole. After all, the whole point of An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine is to show why theological changes are not actually changes if you look at it through the right lens. It's a way to talk about doctrinal change without really having to admit that doctrine actually changes. By adopting an entirely backward-looking focus, Newman is able to obscure how the sausage is made, presenting development as something that just emerges fully formed, like Aphrodite from the sea foam.
Whereas Newman perhaps sees this as a feature, I think this is an enormous bug. While An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine seems to be a progressive approach to church history, it actually breeds a kind of paralysis. All you can do is wait for Godot, hoping (or fearing) that some historical event will intervene and select one potential development from among the all but infinite number of doctrinal possibilities. This paralysis is, in my view, the defining feature of Pope Francis's pontificate--a whole bunch of people hoping that various substantive doctrinal positions will change, while those same people are unable/unwilling to actually go out and just make those changes, or even forthrightly advocate for those changes. I've talked before about how JPII-style conservatives like Douthat are caught in a fundamentally incoherent position. But the Pope Francis progressives like Dr. Faggioli are in exactly the same theological conundrum, separated only by policy preferences.
Teresa of Avila once famously said "Christ has no body but yours, no hand, no feet on earth but yours. . . ." I believe the Spirit moves in the church, no doubt. But it does so by and through the people of the church. Mechanisms for change are not the imposition of outside agendas on the church, but the creation of regularized and predictable levers by which the Spirit can do its work. Newman provides nothing like that, and doesn't even really try.
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