An Essay on the Development of Christian DoctrineNewman, John Henry
Religion
An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine
Newman, John Henry
Catholic Church -- Doctrines; Dogma, Development of
Doctrines stand to principles, if it may be said without fancifulness,
as fecundity viewed relatively to generation, though this analogy must
not be strained. Doctrines are developed by the operation of principles,
and develope variously according to those principles. Thus a belief in
the transitiveness of worldly goods leads the Epicurean to enjoyment,
and the ascetic to mortification; and, from their common doctrine of the
sinfulness of matter, the Alexandrian Gnostics became sensualists, and
the Syrian devotees. The same philosophical elements, received into a
certain sensibility or insensibility to sin and its consequences, leads
one mind to the Church of Rome; another to what, for want of a better
word, may be called Germanism.
Again, religious investigation sometimes is conducted on the principle
that it is a duty "to follow and speak the truth," which really means
that it is no duty to fear error, or to consider what is safest, or to
shrink from scattering doubts, or to regard the responsibility of
misleading; and thus it terminates in heresy or infidelity, without any
blame to religious investigation in itself.
Again, to take a different subject, what constitutes a chief interest of
dramatic compositions and tales, is to use external circumstances, which
may be considered their law of development, as a means of bringing out
into different shapes, and showing under new aspects, the personal
peculiarities of character, according as either those circumstances or
those peculiarities vary in the case of the personages introduced.
3.
Principles are popularly said to develope when they are but exemplified;
thus the various sects of Protestantism, unconnected as they are with
each other, are called developments of the principle of Private
Judgment, of which really they are but applications and results.
A development, to be faithful, must retain both the doctrine and the
principle with which it started. Doctrine without its correspondent
principle remains barren, if not lifeless, of which the Greek Church
seems an instance; or it forms those hollow professions which are
familiarly called "shams," as a zeal for an established Church and its
creed on merely conservative or temporal motives. Such, too, was the
Roman Constitution between the reigns of Augustus and Dioclesian.
On the other hand, principle without its corresponding doctrine may be
considered as the state of religious minds in the heathen world, viewed
relatively to Revelation; that is, of the "children of God who are
scattered abroad."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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