Theories of Doctrinal Development in the Catholic Church 9781009272001, 1009272004

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Theories of Doctrinal Development in the Catholic Church The contemporary Catholic Church finds itself in deep crisis as it questions which elements are essential to the Catholic faith, and which can be changed. Bringing a longue durée perspective to this issue, Michael Seewald historicizes the problem and investigates how theologians of the past addressed it in light of the challenges that they faced in their time. He explores the intense intellectual efforts made by theologians to explain how new components were added to Christian doctrine over time, and argues that dogma has always been subject to change. Acknowledging the historical cleavage between ‘conservatives’, who refer to tradition, and reformers, who formulate their arguments to address contemporary needs, Seewald shows that Catholic thought is intellectually expansive, enabling the Church to be transformed in order to meet the challenges of the present day. His book demonstrates how theology has dealt with the realization that there is a simultaneity of continuity and discontinuity in doctrinal matters. Michael Seewald, who holds both German and French citizenship, became a full professor at the age of twenty-nine, and now holds the chair at the University of Münster once occupied by Joseph Ratzinger and Karl Rahner. He has won several prizes, including the Karl Rahner Prize and the German Research Foundation’s Heinz Maier Leibnitz Prize – the first theologian to do so.

Theories of Doctrinal Development in the Catholic Church

MICHAEL SEEWALD University of Münster

TRANSLATED BY DAVID WEST

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge 2 8, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York,  10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne,  3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009272001 : 10.1017/9781009271974 © Michael Seewald 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published in English by Cambridge University Press & Assessment 2023 as Theories of Doctrinal Development in the Catholic Church, translation by David West. Originally published in German by Verlag Herder 2018 as Dogma im Wandel: Wie Glaubenslehren sich entwickeln © Verlag Herder GmbH, Freiburg im Breisgau 2008. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data : Seewald, Michael, 1987– author. : Theories of doctrinal development in the Catholic church / Michael Seewald, University of Muenster, Germany, David West. : New York, NY, USA : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. :  2022044115 (print) |  2022044116 (ebook) |  9781009272001 (hardback) |  9781009271998 (paperback) |  9781009271974 (epub) : : Theology, Doctrinal. | Catholic Church–Doctrines. :  75.3 .419 2023 (print) |  75.3 (ebook) |  230/.42–dc23/eng/20230103 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022044115 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022044116  978-1-009-27200-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Translation funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), SE 2768/1-1

Theories of Doctrinal Development in the Catholic Church The contemporary Catholic Church finds itself in deep crisis as it questions which elements are essential to the Catholic faith, and which can be changed. Bringing a longue durée perspective to this issue, Michael Seewald historicizes the problem and investigates how theologians of the past addressed it in light of the challenges that they faced in their time. He explores the intense intellectual efforts made by theologians to explain how new components were added to Christian doctrine over time, and argues that dogma has always been subject to change. Acknowledging the historical cleavage between ‘conservatives’, who refer to tradition, and reformers, who formulate their arguments to address contemporary needs, Seewald shows that Catholic thought is intellectually expansive, enabling the Church to be transformed in order to meet the challenges of the present day. His book demonstrates how theology has dealt with the realization that there is a simultaneity of continuity and discontinuity in doctrinal matters. Michael Seewald, who holds both German and French citizenship, became a full professor at the age of twenty-nine, and now holds the chair at the University of Münster once occupied by Joseph Ratzinger and Karl Rahner. He has won several prizes, including the Karl Rahner Prize and the German Research Foundation’s Heinz Maier Leibnitz Prize – the first theologian to do so.

Theories of Doctrinal Development in the Catholic Church

MICHAEL SEEWALD University of Münster

TRANSLATED BY DAVID WEST

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge 2 8, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York,  10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne,  3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009272001 : 10.1017/9781009271974 © Michael Seewald 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published in English by Cambridge University Press & Assessment 2023 as Theories of Doctrinal Development in the Catholic Church, translation by David West. Originally published in German by Verlag Herder 2018 as Dogma im Wandel: Wie Glaubenslehren sich entwickeln © Verlag Herder GmbH, Freiburg im Breisgau 2008. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data : Seewald, Michael, 1987– author. : Theories of doctrinal development in the Catholic church / Michael Seewald, University of Muenster, Germany, David West. : New York, NY, USA : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. :  2022044115 (print) |  2022044116 (ebook) |  9781009272001 (hardback) |  9781009271998 (paperback) |  9781009271974 (epub) : : Theology, Doctrinal. | Catholic Church–Doctrines. :  75.3 .419 2023 (print) |  75.3 (ebook) |  230/.42–dc23/eng/20230103 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022044115 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022044116  978-1-009-27200-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Translation funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), SE 2768/1-1

Theories of Doctrinal Development in the Catholic Church The contemporary Catholic Church finds itself in deep crisis as it questions which elements are essential to the Catholic faith, and which can be changed. Bringing a longue durée perspective to this issue, Michael Seewald historicizes the problem and investigates how theologians of the past addressed it in light of the challenges that they faced in their time. He explores the intense intellectual efforts made by theologians to explain how new components were added to Christian doctrine over time, and argues that dogma has always been subject to change. Acknowledging the historical cleavage between ‘conservatives’, who refer to tradition, and reformers, who formulate their arguments to address contemporary needs, Seewald shows that Catholic thought is intellectually expansive, enabling the Church to be transformed in order to meet the challenges of the present day. His book demonstrates how theology has dealt with the realization that there is a simultaneity of continuity and discontinuity in doctrinal matters. Michael Seewald, who holds both German and French citizenship, became a full professor at the age of twenty-nine, and now holds the chair at the University of Münster once occupied by Joseph Ratzinger and Karl Rahner. He has won several prizes, including the Karl Rahner Prize and the German Research Foundation’s Heinz Maier Leibnitz Prize – the first theologian to do so.

Theories of Doctrinal Development in the Catholic Church

MICHAEL SEEWALD University of Münster

TRANSLATED BY DAVID WEST

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge 2 8, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York,  10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne,  3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009272001 : 10.1017/9781009271974 © Michael Seewald 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published in English by Cambridge University Press & Assessment 2023 as Theories of Doctrinal Development in the Catholic Church, translation by David West. Originally published in German by Verlag Herder 2018 as Dogma im Wandel: Wie Glaubenslehren sich entwickeln © Verlag Herder GmbH, Freiburg im Breisgau 2008. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data : Seewald, Michael, 1987– author. : Theories of doctrinal development in the Catholic church / Michael Seewald, University of Muenster, Germany, David West. : New York, NY, USA : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. :  2022044115 (print) |  2022044116 (ebook) |  9781009272001 (hardback) |  9781009271998 (paperback) |  9781009271974 (epub) : : Theology, Doctrinal. | Catholic Church–Doctrines. :  75.3 .419 2023 (print) |  75.3 (ebook) |  230/.42–dc23/eng/20230103 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022044115 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022044116  978-1-009-27200-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Translation funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), SE 2768/1-1

Contents

Acknowledgements

page vii

Introduction: What Is This Book About?

1

1

Defining Dogma and Development 1.1 What Is Meant by Dogma? 1.2 What Is Meant by Development?

2

The Bible: Both Product and Yardstick of Doctrinal Development 38 2.1 Scripture: Why Only Now? 38 2.2 The Bible as Product of Development 39 2.3 The Bible as Yardstick of Development 52 How the Early Church Reflected on Doctrinal Continuity and Change 59 3.1 A First Look at the Period 59 3.2 Natural Growth, Divine Pedagogy and Human Language 60 3.3 ‘Everywhere, Always, By All’: The Rule Laid Down by Vincent 70 of Lérins Discussions in the Middle Ages on Changes to the Unchanging Faith 85 4.1 ‘Nothing New Can Be Created Anymore’? 85 4.2 Deductive Reasoning and Doctrinal Development in the 86 Filioque Controversy 4.3 Implicit Faith, Explicit Faith and ‘Blind Faith’ 93 4.4 Advances in Knowledge, and Authority: Thomas Aquinas 101 4.5 The Reformation: Did Something Happen There? 105

3

4

v

6 6 24

Contents

vi

5

6

7

Theories of Doctrinal Development in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century 5.1 The Tübingen School: Romantic Spirit and Idealistic System-Formation 5.2 Newman: ‘To Live Is to Change, and to Be Perfect Is to Have Changed Often’ 5.3 The Issue of Dogmatic Development in Neo-Scholasticism 5.4 Culmination and (Provisional) End of Theories of Development: The Crisis of Modernism The Twentieth Century: From Anti-Modernism to the Second Vatican Council 6.1 Mary, the Pope and a ‘Neo-Modernism’ in the Church? 6.2 Karl Rahner: The Stasis of Literal Revelation and the Dynamics of Self-Revelation 6.3 Joseph Ratzinger: A Theorist of Continuity? 6.4 Walter Kasper: Dogma as a Service of Love to the Common Faith Overview and Outlook 7.1 Five Meanings of Dogma, and Two Forms of Dogmatic Development 7.2 Towards a Typology of Theories of Doctrinal Development: Eleven Distinctions 7.3 Continuity: An Ecclesial, Not Just a Doctrinal Matter Epilogue: An ‘Obituary’ to the Church?

Bibliography Index

108 108 120 127 136 143 143 147 154 164 170 171 174 178 186 189 209

Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to friends and colleagues in four places: Munich, Tübingen, Bonn and Münster. I would like to thank my academic teacher Bertram Stubenrauch at the University of Munich, and Gerhard Schneider at the Ambrosianum in Tübingen, for our many fruitful conversations. At the University of Bonn, I would like to thank my research assistant Matthias Tigges, as well as my student assistants Pia Rohloff, Felix vom Kolke and Florian Wagner, and Iris Hanita in the secretary’s office, for procuring literature and correcting texts for me. My team in Münster continued this task: Johannes Elberskirch as my research assistant, and Maximilian Mattner and Philip Sonntag as my student assistants, together with my secretary Agnes Wiedemeier, who all showed great dedication in helping the book project through its final phase. I am also grateful to Florian Schwarz, who checked the quotations from patristic sources. David West translated the book into English, and he was supported in this task by my student assistants Christine Nau and Florian Tiede. David West took great pains not only to translate a German book into English, but also to make an English book out of a German one. As a result, sections have been shortened and discursive footnotes dealing mainly with literature in German have been removed. The German Research Foundation and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research awarded me the Heinz Maier Leibnitz Prize in 2017, which allowed me to fund the English translation.

vii

Introduction: What Is This Book About?

In the new foreword to the 1965 edition of his novel Sword of Honour, Evelyn Waugh wrote: ‘On reading the book I realized that I had done something quite outside my original intention. I had written an obituary of the Roman Catholic Church in England as it had existed for many centuries. All the rites and most of the opinions here described are already obsolete. When I wrote Brideshead Revisited I was consciously writing an obituary of the doomed English upper class. It never occurred to me, writing Sword of Honour that the Church was susceptible to change. I was wrong and I have seen a superficial revolution in what then seemed permanent.’ These few lines – written by an artist who was also an authority – describe a problem better than the many pages of a writer who is certainly not an artist and perhaps not even an authority. Waugh sees change, senses decay, and thinks that he has written an obituary. If he is right, then this book is an obituary, too. But is he right? Christianity, which claims to be based on a historical revelation (i.e. a revelation that occurred in a certain place and at a certain time), largely draws its identity from looking back into the past. The notion that identity has something to do with looking back is not a specifically religious notion. However, this notion is particularly relevant to Christianity, with its belief that God not only spoke to human beings, but also spoke as a human being. The Christian becomes a Christian through their link to Jesus Christ – and this link is first and foremost a link back, since Jesus lived at a certain time in the past. The Christian faith is therefore unable to dispense with history. However, what happened to, and through, Jesus is proclaimed as a message of salvation that has an all-embracing relevance. There is a downside to this geographical, ethnic and historical unbounding of the good 1

2

Introduction

news of Jesus, which was undertaken when his imminent return did not occur as expected by his first disciples, and the early Church resolved to spread its influence beyond Israel: namely, the continual challenge of bringing the gospel revealed through the life of Jesus to the present, and thereby making it always credible and worthy of faithful acceptance. In other words, the task of the Church is to prevent the gospel from becoming a museum piece and to proclaim it always in the present as good news – a task that the Church sees itself as fulfilling as the instrument of the Holy Spirit. The present notion of dogma – which, at least in as far as the term is used by the papal magisterium, represents a nineteenth-century phenomenon – can be both an indispensable tool and an obstacle to fulfilling this task in an intellectually honest way. Defined provisionally, dogma is either a doctrine of faith regarded with a high degree of certainty as being true or, as a collective singular, the doctrine of faith in the sense of everything that the Church proclaims to be true in contrast to the legitimate diversity of disputed theological positions. Dogma is related to the gospel in that it attempts to define the gospel under specific historical conditions in ever more precise propositions. On the one hand, as Walter Kasper points out, ‘the gospel is not an entity that can be detached from the process of dogmatic tradition’; on the other, as little as the gospel can be detached historically from the process by which doctrine is formed, as little is it ‘dogmatically identical’ to that process. Rather, for Kasper, the gospel is ‘the power of the exalted Lord in and above the Church through his living Word’. The gospel, then, ‘is not a historical entity, but a power in the present that is always expressed anew in the faith and witness of the Church, without ever merging into this faith’ (Kasper 2015: 57). Kasper demonstrates that gospel and dogma are both associated with one another, and dissociated from each other. They are associated in that the doctrines of the Church provide the gospel with propositional clarity. As the philosopher John Searle (1969: 29) pointed out: a ‘proposition is what is asserted in the act of asserting, what is stated in the act of stating. The same point in a different way: an assertion is a (very special kind of ) commitment to the truth of a proposition.’ The Church formulates propositions that it proclaims to be true on the basis that they accurately express the objective content of the gospel. The fact that contemporary discourse sometimes suspects religious truth claims of being intolerant is problematical. The justified criticism of the intolerant way in which a truth claim is made cannot lead, in any meaningful way, to the demand that the formulation of religious truth claims be renounced in principle.

What Is This Book About?

3

Doing so would make any dialogue impossible, since any kind of discussion that is aimed at yielding knowledge requires the articulation of a truth claim in the form of an assertoric proposition (which claims to show what is the case); it is only then that the interlocutors can clarify whether the truth claim contained in a statement is justified or not, and whether what a proposition says is true or false. For the gospel to be understood in the first place, for it to be discussed critically, and rejected or accepted, it must therefore first be given propositional clarity. For Kasper, though, gospel and dogma are also dissociated from each other: although the gospel is always expressed anew in the ‘faith and witness of the Church’, the gospel is more than dogma, which is the reason that the gospel cannot fully ‘merge into this faith’ (Kasper 2015: 57). Because the signifier does not coincide with the signified, and because human knowledge is always finite and limited, dogma can never express the gospel exhaustively. Such a thesis is not theological relativism, but simply historical realism. In its claim to grasp propositionally the gospel proclaimed by Christ and revealed in him, dogma certainly contains an ‘essential’ truth, but this truth can only be grasped historically. Thus, dogmatics turns into a description of the act, and truth into a history of salvation. Because Christianity avows a God who as a person has done this and that with history, i.e. has lived truth, the memory of his historical existence now remains ‘erased’ in its faith. It is sunk into the linguistic form of narrative, or more aptly: into an ensemble of narratives, each of which is incomplete and requiring supplementation, but which are also always only approximate in their relationship to one another. . . . It is an expression of [God’s] humility that he reveals himself historically, in the limitation, but also in the unsurpassable density, of an encounter. Accordingly, he does not want the recitation of doctrines, but rather approval for his epiphany. (Stubenrauch 1995: 52–54)

Dogma is therefore a means to an end, and not an end in itself. It is indispensable as a means, but at the same time we must question whether in the course of time it still fulfils its task – namely, to present the gospel in the form of propositions, something that can only happen if the gospel is not only expressed, but also understood, as gospel. Thus, dogma must face two questions that, though distinct, can nonetheless not be clearly separated from each other. First, is the truth claim of Christianity, which finds its propositional articulation in dogma, justified? Second, does dogma express the gospel adequately? These two questions generate a dynamic that has brought about developments in the past, and that we can assume will also bring about developments in the future. Describing

4

Introduction

the developments already completed from a material perspective is a task that belongs to the history of dogma. Debating which developments are desirable is the task of a specialist discourse that varies according to the question posed. But interpreting change as change in relation to what remains the same is the task of a theory of doctrinal development, a theory that – in line with the definition that underlies the remainder of this book – should take account of the unstable simultaneity of continuity and discontinuity. This book is devoted to theories of doctrinal development (and only to them). It seizes upon a paradoxical situation. Rarely before in the history of Christianity has change been so much the subject of dispute as it is today. And rarely before has so little fundamental thought been given to how development can be interpreted from a theological perspective. That was not always the case. Sophisticated theories of dogmatic development were presented after the dogmatization of the doctrine of the bodily assumption of Mary to heaven, which Pope Pius XII proclaimed ex cathedra (Denzinger, No. 3903) in 1950, as well as in the context and aftermath of the Second Vatican Council. We could even say that those who had a certain status and renown in the theological landscape of the time – for example, Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar and Jean Daniélou, Karl Rahner, Joseph Ratzinger and Walter Kasper – were forced to express an opinion on this issue, since, given the upheavals that called for an interpretation, this is what theological discourse demanded. The dispute over the necessity or illegitimacy of change has not diminished today. However, the dispute is only rarely accompanied by fundamental reflection on the very phenomenon of doctrinal development. The reflections that follow do not contain a wish list of things that should change in the Church. Rather, they embed the discourses of reform within a dogmatic-historical and theological context. For, the Church is only what it is today because it has been able to combine continuity and discontinuity; in other words, because it has evolved so as to carry the gospel entrusted to it into the present, which is the place and goal of its mission. However, the fact that the Church has been able to do so in the past does not necessarily mean that it will continue to be able to do so in the future. Friedrich Nietzsche (1997: 69) rightly warns in Untimely Meditations – On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life that from the fact ‘that the greatness that once existed was in any event once possible’, we cannot simply conclude that it ‘may thus be possible again’.

What Is This Book About?

5

The history of dogma and the theories of doctrinal development must beware of drawing such a false conclusion. But they can show that the past was far less narrow than some claim, and that this ambiguity nourishes the hope that what was once possible will at least not be impossible in the future. The aim of this book is no more – but then again, no less.

1 Defining Dogma and Development

.      ? Without clear concepts, every discussion is bound to remain vague. This is a trivial observation. However, it is difficult to determine what role the history of a concept plays in its definition, since, whereas every definition aims for the greatest possible clarity, investigating the history of a concept often relativizes (if not undermines) such clarity. We could use an intensional definition and identify all the properties of the objects to which the term dogma applies; or we could use an extensional definition and look at all the objects that fall under the definition of ‘dogma’. The result of doing so would at best be a synchronous clarity that nonetheless conceals a diachronic ambiguity arising from the fact that the concept of dogma has not always been used in the theological context in the same way that it is used today. This is true for most of our concepts, and this is again a trivial observation. But, when it comes to the concept of dogma, the insight is also revealing, since, in its narrowest sense, the concept denotes a final and ‘irreformable’ (Denzinger, No. 3074) doctrine, while at the same time being itself the result of processes of change. Looking at the history of concepts therefore complicates theological reflection, but also prevents us from falling into the trap of underestimating the complexity of its themes. To adapt a concept from Ignaz von Döllinger (1863: 47–48), we can argue that theology would benefit from using both its eyes by taking a perspective that is both systematic and historical. In its commitment to linking and merging both perspectives, this chapter sees itself not as a tiresome treatise on terminological prolegomena but as a genuine theological introduction to the problem. 6

What Is Meant by Dogma?

7

1.1.1 The Prehistory of the Concept The term dogma originates from the ancient Greek, but only acquired the meaning that it has today in Christian theology in the course of the modern period.1 The Greek word dogma from dokeo (I seem) or from impersonal dokei (it seems good) already had a double meaning in the non-religious domain. Used semi-transitively, it stood for ‘believe’ or ‘think’; intransitively, it grew from ‘seem good’ the meaning of ‘decide on’. In philosophy, medicine and jurisprudence, the noun became ‘opinion’ and sometimes ‘doctrine’; in politics and legal language, ‘decision’ or ‘edict’, ‘verdict’. Thus, dogmatize means ‘to form an opinion’, ‘to establish a doctrine’, ‘to issue an edict’. As an attribute of things, the adjective dogmatikos meant ‘containing doctrines’; of persons, ‘establishing doctrines’ or ‘drawing conclusions from them’. (Söll 1971: 3)

The word is also used in a profane and diverse way in the New Testament, where it occurs five times. The ‘decree’ that a census be taken (Luke 2:1), which explains for the evangelist Luke why Joseph and Mary went to Bethlehem and why Jesus is said to have been born there, is in the Greek text a dogma, that is, a decree issued by the emperor Augustus. The same applies to the Book of Acts, where Luke reports that Paul and Silas had been accused in Thessalonica of violating the dogmata of the emperor because they had proclaimed Jesus, and not the emperor, as king (Acts 17:7). Third, the pseudepigraphic epistles of Paul understand dogma as a binding financial demand, the remission of which is intended to illustrate the grace that Christ obtained by ‘abolishing the law with its commandments and legal claims (dogmata)’ (Ephesians 2:15). Similarly, the Epistle to the Colossians states that Christ crossed through the promissory note and nailed it to the cross; on the note was the demand (dogma) that had stood against the human being (Colossians 2:14). While these four mentions do not anticipate that the concept of dogma would one day be used as a theological term in Christianity, a remark in the Acts of the Apostles (16:4) seems to constitute a borderline case: Paul and Timothy deliver to the cities the decisions (dogmata) that had been reached by the apostles and elders in Jerusalem at the assembly that would later become known as the Apostolic Council. According to this dogma, Gentile converts to Christianity were not obliged to observe in their everyday lives the

1

The reflections on the history of the concept of dogma draw on the following works: Becker (1976); Deneffe (1931); Elze (1964); Filser (2001); Kasper (2015); Rahner and Lehmann (1965); Söll (1971).

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Defining Dogma and Development

individual rules of the Law of Moses (e.g. those governing diet), and nor were the men obliged to be circumcised; rather, they were merely to abstain from ‘meat sacrificed to idols, from blood, from meats of strangled animals, and from unlawful marriage’ (Acts 15:29). Catholic theology held the opinion until the 1960s that this formulation (Acts 16:4) was the ‘archetype of dogma’ (Geiselmann 1962: 226), an opinion found above all, but not exclusively, in neo-scholasticism. It was only in neo-scholasticism that the concept of dogma was shaped by the magisterium, which set in motion a terminological shift that seemed all the more plausible the more venerable the witnesses were that it could call upon. Franz Diekamp, the author of an influential handbook deemed to be ‘the most important strictly Thomistic dogmatics’ (Freyer 2003: 432), which had been published thirteen times by 1962, saw the understanding of dogma of his time as being rooted in the Bible, since the Holy Scripture also understands by dogmas: ‘propositions of faith or moral laws as directly divine manifestations that are unconditionally binding for all and that exercise a perfect unifying force’ (Diekamp 1930: 11). The last few decades have sharpened awareness that such an understanding imposes interpretations on the Scripture that are alien to it (see Kasper 2015: 60–61). Understanding the dogmata (Acts 16:4) mentioned in relation to the Apostolic Council simply as decisions or decrees (and not more) is to provide a sufficiently precise translation, one that also corresponds to the two other mentions of dogma found in Luke’s two works (Luke 2:1 and Acts 17:7). The refusal to populate the Biblical text with later meanings of the word dogma has nothing to do with an ‘aversion to the concept of dogma’ (Söll 1971: 4). On the contrary, projecting the concept of dogma onto the Bible is to do justice neither to the Bible nor to the later meaning of the word ‘dogma’. For, the decisions of the Apostolic Council are precisely not definitions of clear, binding and irrevocable doctrines, but only an intermediate compromise whose content appears diffuse (Luke’s report (Acts 15:1–29) differs from Paul’s (Galatians 2:1–10)), and which would indeed be questioned again before long. For, Peter lags behind the Jerusalem decisions by refusing to share a meal with the Gentiles in Antioch (Galatians 2:11–21), while Paul exceeds them (at least as they are passed down by Luke) by, in effect, allowing the consumption of food sacrificed to idols (1 Corinthians 10:14–33). Ultimately, the dogma of the Apostolic Council prevailed in neither the teaching nor the practice of the Church. As Karl Rahner and Karl Lehmann write in summary, ‘The New Testament therefore in no way knows the later meaning of dogma’ (1965: 641).

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The same applies to the Christian authors of the first four centuries, who reflect the diversity that their pagan environment attached to the word dogma, and who use it neither in a particularly elevated way nor as a specifically Christian term. Some of the writings of the Apostolic Fathers – for instance, that of Ignatius of Antioch (Letter to the Magnesians 13:1) – speak of the ‘dogmas of the Lord and the apostles’ or, like the author of the Epistle of Barnabas (1:6), of hope, justice and love as the ‘three dogmas of the Lord’. The Didache (11:3), an early Church treatise that probably originated in the Syrian-Palestinian area, refers to the ‘dogma of the gospel’. In order to understand these three references, it is sufficient to know the profane meanings of the word. Ignatius and the Epistle of Barnabas speak of the doctrines of Jesus or the Apostles in the same way that they speak of the doctrines of other ancient philosophers. And the Didache uses a rule to solve a practical problem (namely, dealing with itinerant missionaries who abuse the hospitality shown to them by early Christian communities), which it interprets as an instruction given by the gospel: itinerant missionaries are to be received for only one day, and if necessary for two, but not for three days, and they are to be given bread, but not money. The patristic authors also reflect their environment when they attach to the word dogma a subjective component of opinion or conjecture; one that, far from being identical to the faith or authoritative doctrine of the Church, even shows a dangerous proximity to heresy. Origen characterizes his personal judgments and the doctrines of others, including those of Celsus, with whom he disagrees, as dogmata (Contra Celsum IV 39 and 85). Marcellus of Ancyra succinctly summarized this subjective meaning of the concept of dogma by declaring, ‘What is called dogma is part of human will and perception’ (see Eusebius of Caesarea: Contra Marcellum 1:4). Adolf von Harnack felt that this sentence had so much in common with his own programme that he placed it at the beginning of his History of Dogma (1894). Loaned from Greek, dogma then took a turn in meaning in the Latin West from the fifth century onwards. On the one hand, Augustine could continue to use dogmata ‘to denote heretical teachings’ (Söll 1971: 9). On the other, to identify the true, Christian doctrine of faith, Vincent of Lérins talked in his Commonitorium, written in 434 (three years after the Council of Ephesus), of divine dogma (dogma divinum), of heavenly dogma (dogma caeleste), of Church dogma (dogma ecclesiasticum) and of Catholic dogma (dogma catholicum). Although the concept of dogma in Vincent’s work can also be applied to heresies, they can be only if they

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are ‘novel dogmas’ in contrast to the ‘dogmas of the ancient faith’. It is important to note that the concept of dogma is usually a collective singular in Vincent’s terminology (see, e.g. Commonitorium 25:9), where it denotes the Church’s doctrine of faith as a whole; it also occurs, albeit more rarely, in the plural (see Commonitorium 31:5), where it then denotes – at least potentially – not only the doctrine of faith as a whole but also individual doctrines. Thus, it was not until Vincent of Lérins that a connotation of dogma emerged that largely corresponds to the modern meaning of the word: The term dogma underwent its first shift in meaning in Vincent’s work, inasmuch as it now, in contrast to its reserved use among the Latin Church Fathers (who often understood it as philosophical or heretical doctrine), tended to denote the Catholic doctrine of faith . . . The term is identical to the divine truth of revelation . . . entrusted to the Church as depositum fidei . . .. The later distinction between depositum fidei and dogma that was drawn especially by the First Vatican Council, i.e. between the epitome of the treasure of revelation entrusted to the Church on the one hand, and the authoritatively authentic, infallible proclamation or definition of a revelatory truth on the other, is not yet present in Vincent. (Fiedrowicz 2011: 192, fn. 2)

Vincent’s concept of dogma was groundbreaking for modern terminology, but it initially remained largely ignored. Vincent remained unknown to the Middle Ages, presumably because his works were interpreted as opposing Augustine and sympathizing with Pelagius – a reproach that Joseph Ratzinger also made his own when he branded Vincent a ‘Semipelagian’ and his theology an ‘antithesis to the late Augustine’ (1966: 9). ‘A silence prevailed over the Commonitorium that lasted for centuries – from the last mention by Gennadius in late antiquity (470/480) to the first printed edition (1528). We have not yet been able to find either statements on the work or actual borrowings from it’ (Fiedrowicz 2011: 125).

1.1.2 The ‘Modern’ Concept Emerges The rediscovery of Vincent in the early-modern period revived – and significantly altered – the concept of dogma. It now served in the conflict between Catholics and Protestants to distinguish positions ‘that have only the rank of school opinions’ from ‘what was regarded on both sides as official doctrine, as dogma or creed’ (Kasper 2015: 66). This understanding of the concept probably became tangible for the first time in the work of the

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Jesuit theologian François Véron (1674: 106), who compiled prescriptions that he called dogmes cértains de foi. In doing so, he followed Vincent in terms of terminology, but differed from him by giving the concept of dogma a particular function: ‘dogma’ is no longer used in the modern period to designate only the whole doctrine of faith, or a very specific part of it; it is used to structure the doctrinal complex. In other words, a dogma no longer denotes only materially one or the doctrine of faith, but also formally the quality of doctrinal propositions, their degree of certainty and the degree to which they are binding – namely, those doctrines that, as part of revelation, are regarded with the highest degree of certainty as being true and are proclaimed with the highest degree of authority, for which reason they are also to be believed with the highest degree of commitment. How can we explain this shift, which on the one hand draws on the ancient concept, but on the other extends it? It is possible that the medieval discussions that the modern period perceived as requiring clarification strongly shaped the extended function assigned to the word dogma when it was reintroduced later. Thomas Aquinas, for example, avoided the term. The fact that Thomas sings in his hymn Lauda Sion salvatorem of a ‘dogma datur christianis’ is described as being ‘almost a poetic freedom’ (Elze 1964: 437) in view of how language was otherwise used by Thomas and his contemporaries, although it would be an exaggeration to claim that the concept of dogma was completely absent in the thirteenth century (see Parent 1932: 141–163). The concept of articulus fidei is much more prominent in Thomas’ work, although what was meant precisely by an ‘article’ remained a matter of controversy. According to Thomas, the Latin word articulus is derived from the Greek arthron (joint). For Thomas (Summa Theologica II–II q. 1, a.6), joints have the goal of ensuring coaptatio, which we could perhaps translate inelegantly but precisely as ‘the creation of a perfect fit’. A joint ensures that different parts fit together and are connected to each other in such a way that they become a coherent whole. According to Thomas, the Christian doctrine of faith also contains different articles, since it comprises both diversity and unity: unity, inasmuch as ‘the Divine truth’ is the only truth; diversity, inasmuch as ‘things which in God are one, are many in our intellect’. The one divine reality thus becomes intellectually accessible to the human being only in a variety of doctrines of faith. It is the task of the articuli fidei to hold together this diversity (like joints hold together the individual parts of a body), and to help us think of the doctrine of faith both as one single doctrine and as comprising a number of different doctrines. This conception introduces a certain dynamism, since its starting-point is the one divine reality that mediates itself to the human being in the history of

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Israel and in the life of Jesus, a reality that, in order to be understood, must be divided into different doctrines, which in turn are connected like joints to form a single body. The question then arises as to which of these doctrines are so central that their absence would undermine the entire corpus, and which may be true, but are of rather less importance – a question that was contested in the late Middle Ages and the Reformation period, and that the concept of dogma was intended to clarify in the early-modern period. For example, there was a fierce debate in the late Middle Ages concerning the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, that is, the idea that Mary had been freed from original sin from the beginning of her existence. This dispute between more Scotistic and more Thomistic theologians reached a climax at the Council of Basel in 1439, when the Synod, opposing the papal transfer to Ferrara and remaining in Basel, defined the doctrina that Mary had never been subject to original sin and had therefore been ‘immune’ to all guilt as a doctrine with a binding power for all. This was an attempt to turn a theological position that until then had only been deemed an opinio pia (see Horst 1987: 17) – namely, an opinion held by the immaculists – into a doctrine that was binding for everybody. This act of turning an opinion held by a particular school into something binding found no resonance at first in the Church as a whole, since in the papal reading of conciliar theory a general council cannot come together without the pope as its head; thus, after its transfer by Pope Eugene IV to the city of Ferrara, and then later to Florence and Rome, the Basel Synod was no longer regarded as an assembly that had the status of a lawful council. The immaculata conceptio dispute shows how controversial it was in the fifteenth century to pick out from the web of opinions those that would now be binding for everybody. What for some (in this case, the maculists) was an outlandish opinion was for others (the immaculists) an irrefutable truth of faith. This predicament would soon become increasingly acute beyond the issue of immaculata conceptio, and would become part of the theological controversies of the sixteenth century – hardly surprising perhaps, given the Reformation and its questioning of the doctrine of the late-medieval Church. It was then – and not before2 – that the concept of dogma came into play in its specifically modern form. It now no longer described only a single 2

The Synod remaining in Basel did not yet speak of a ‘dogma’ with regard to the ‘Immaculata Conceptio’, but of the fact that it was defining and explaining a doctrine (doctrina). It is therefore anachronistic to speak, as some do, of a ‘dogmatization’ when it comes to the Basel decision. See Fromherz 1960: 170.

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doctrine (one dogma) or the doctrine of faith as a whole (the dogma), but also a specific quality of doctrines – namely, what was regarded as ‘official doctrine’ and as binding ‘creed’, in contrast to the legitimate diversity of positions that could claim ‘only the status of opinions belonging to a particular school’ (Kasper 2015: 66). Drawing on the work of the Jesuit François Véron, the Franciscan Philipp Neri Chrismann then brought system to the concept of dogma in the eighteenth century in a way that would have a future impact on the Church’s use of language. Chrismann (1792: § 5 (2)) named three features that characterize a dogma of faith (dogma fidei): it is firstly a doctrine and truth revealed by God, which was secondly presented publicly by the Church as something to be accepted with divine faith (fide divina), which means thirdly that positions contrary to this doctrine are to be condemned as heresies. Of central importance here is Chrismann’s distinction between the ‘internal justification’ of a dogma and its ‘formal conditions’ (Schulz 1996: 164). For Chrismann, dogma is believed purely and solely on the basis of God’s authority – fide divina. But not everything revealed or written in the Bible also has the status of dogma. For Chrismann, what is revealed becomes formally binding only by being presented by the Church. Thus, Chrismann invests dogma with the highest degree of certainty and obligation on the one hand, but limits it to very few doctrines on the other, thereby opening up spaces for speculation beyond dogma. Chrismann therefore largely limited ‘what has to be believed to what is defined under threat of anathema’ (Schulz 1996: 164). Chrismann’s concept of dogma could be criticized by current theology for illegitimately narrowing the Christian doctrine of faith, something that his contemporaries, and above all the neo-scholastic theology of the nineteenth century, also did, albeit for different reasons. For example, Joseph Kleutgen, one of the leading neo-scholastic theologians and someone who had a major impact on the First Vatican Council, criticized Chrismann’s concept of dogma not for its quasi-positivistic reference to authority, but – on the contrary – for underestimating Church authority and for granting individual believers too much freedom of thought: The past now also illuminates a misunderstanding that works such as the Regula fidei of Véron give rise to. The authors strive to show that much that is accepted and taught by Catholics does not in fact belong to actual dogma. It is certainly not wrong to try to define the domain of dogma as precisely as possible, but we should not as a result speak as if the domain of free opinion immediately begins where this domain ends, and as if everything that is not part of the doctrine of faith can be regarded as an opinion that belongs to a particular school or, as Chrismann

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does, is to be counted as adiaphoris. – If, furthermore, that separation of the dogmatic and the non-dogmatic is used to ease the yoke of obedience to the teaching Church, then this is a true deception. (Kleutgen 1867: § 88 (141))

Kleutgen’s position reflects how the concept of dogma would develop in the future. He continues the attempt also made by Véron and Chrismann of determining what was binding in as precise a manner as possible. Unlike Kleutgen, though, Véron and Chrismann were criticized when they attempted to limit the concept of dogma (for them, what is not clearly defined as dogma need also not be believed, but is something that can be contested). Although their version of the concept of dogma has had a profound impact on how the Church magisterium uses the term to this day, they were condemned and their writings placed on the Index (see Lang 1965; Schulz 1996: 168). This was above all a result of the pontificate of Pius IX, which, in its opposition to all kinds of innovation, was itself deeply innovative.

1.1.3 Pius IX: Innovation from Anti-innovation Intentions Before Pius IX, the word dogma was only rarely used in magisterial pronouncements; and, when it was used, it denoted not the unity of the truth of faith revealed by God and propounded by the Church, but a rather imprecisely defined, individual doctrine of faith (see Deneffe 1931: 521). For example, in Auctorem fidei, his papal bull of 1794, Pius VI condemned several doctrines of the Synod of Pistoia, which had taken place eight years beforehand under the protection of the Tuscan Grand Duke Leopold I (the later Emperor Leopold II), and spoke of the ‘dogma of transubstantiation’ (Denzinger, No. 2629), which the Synod of Pistoia had treated in a critical manner. What is meant here is simply a doctrine that the pope deems true and worthy of protection; he does not explain in detail the precise degree to which the doctrine is binding in view of its significance in revelation and its definition by the Church. With Pius IX, though, the concept of dogma became increasingly more precise. Thus, in 1851, the pope noted in an apostolic exhortation known under the misleading title Multiplices Inter,3 which condemned several 3

The source references given in the official publication of the Syllabus Errorum in the Acta Sanctae Sedis (1867/68: 171) refer for the condemnation of the phrase ‘Ecclesia non habet potestatem dogmatice definiendi religionem Catholicae Ecclesiae esse unice veram religionem’ to a letter from the Pope of 10 June 1851 called ‘Multiplices Inter’. This letter

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theses propounded by the Peruvian Francisco de Paula González Vigil, that the Church was able to ‘define’ certain doctrines ‘dogmatically’ – a formulation that also found its way into the Syllabus Errorum of 1864 (Denzinger, No. 2921), where Pius IX brought together doctrines that he had already condemned. His recourse to Vincent of Lérins (dogma as doctrine of faith) is explicit here, while the definitions provided by Véron and Chrismann (dogma as quality of a doctrine of faith in contrast to other doctrines) play an implicit, though significant, role. In the bull Ineffabilis Deus of 1854, in which he declares, pronounces and defines (‘declaramus, pronuntiamus et definimus’) the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, Pius IX states that this doctrine is revealed by God, is presented as binding by the Church, and that denying it means falling into heresy (see Denzinger, Nos. 2803–2804). This meets exactly the criteria for what Chrismann calls a dogma. The concept of dogma cannot be found in the definition itself, however, but appears in the bull as a citation of Vincent of Lérins. In order, apparently, to forestall the objection that he was proclaiming a novel doctrine (after his predecessors had rejected precisely this doctrine as something that could be binding for the whole Church), Pius IX formulates criteria for how the doctrine of faith could grow legitimately. For Pius IX, the Church is the guardian of the ‘dogmas’ deposited with it; it does not make substantive changes to these dogmas, but tries to ‘refine and polish’ them so that the ‘ancient dogmas’ gain in ‘clarity, light and precision’; but it does so while also strictly protecting the identity of what has existed in the Church from the beginning: ‘in eodem scilicet dogmate, eodem sensu eademque sententia’ – within the same dogma and in the same sense and in the same meaning (Denzinger, No. 2802). As a result of the renaissance of Vincent and the clarifications of the work of Véron and Chrismann, which had critical but considerable resonance in the Roman school of theology, the concept of dogma was increasingly developed by the magisterium and integrated into a new architecture of papal self-understanding. The letter Tuas libenter, which

condemned a work by Francisco de Paula González Vigil on the authority of (secular) governments in relation to the legislative power of the Roman curia. The naming of this letter is misleading not only because Pius IX published an encyclical dealing with liturgical questions in 1853 that bore the title ‘Inter Multiplices’, but also because an Apostolic Exhortation was issued in 1865 that, like the condemnation of Vigil, was called ‘Multiplices Inter’. The letter of 1865 has found a greater resonance than the letter of the same name of 1851 (which is immortalized in the Syllabus) because of the former’s open opposition to Freemasonry.

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Pius IX addressed to the archbishop of Munich and Freising (see Bischof 1997: 95–105) as a reaction to the assembly of scholars that took place in Munich and that was shaped decisively by Ignaz von Döllinger, understands dogmas of faith (dogmata fidei) as being ‘what the infallible judgment of the Church sets forth as dogmas of the faith to be believed by all’ (Denzinger, No. 2879) – a formulation that would also find its way into the Syllabus Errorum (Denzinger, No. 2922). Pius IX’s intention was of course to oppose innovation, and yet he now offered, for the first time, and in a highly innovative way, two forms for an infallible judgment to be submitted: through the extraordinary and the ordinary magisterium. Until Pius IX, the form that the magisterium took was what he himself described as solemn or extraordinary. Its task was to protect the central revealed truths of faith against distortions and acute dangers, and it did so by defining these truths ‘explicitly’ (expresse) where they were under threat (Denzinger, No. 2879). The solemn magisterium considered that something belonged to the deposit of faith ‘not because it was presented by the magisterium’; rather, the bishops were able to bear testimony to something ‘because there was substantive belief in it’ (Unterburger 2010: 180). The magisterium therefore did not set the pace of theological development, but limited itself to the role of protecting the deposit of faith, and only reacted to threats, without interfering in theological disputes to any great extent. While the ‘theological schools differed in terms of their fundamental methods and conceptual assumptions, they were free in how they thought through and justified this faith – that is, in the choice of methods’ (Unterburger 2010: 180). Pius IX was no longer satisfied with the magisterium’s rather passive role, and drew on a distinction first developed by Joseph Kleutgen that the magisterium had nowhere previously used: namely, between the solemn, extraordinary magisterium on the one hand, and the everyday, ordinary magisterium on the other (see Wolf 2010). Kleutgen developed this distinction to combat theological currents that, like the Tübingen School and Ignaz von Döllinger in Munich, were resisting neo-scholasticism. Kleutgen regarded these currents as being insufficiently oriented to ‘prehistory’, that is, to the epoch preceding the Enlightenment. Kleutgen developed his conception of the magisterium in contradistinction to Johann Baptist Hirscher, who complained of an ‘addiction to denunciation’ whereby those who merely ‘deviate from the accessible way that theologians present the faith’ or cultivate a ‘different way of expressing themselves’ without running counter to the ‘doctrinal concept (as laid down by the Church)’ are accused of heresy (1836: 249). As can already

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be heard in his criticism of Véron and Chrismann, Kleutgen deems it an ‘error’, based on a ‘misunderstanding’, that theology has a freedom beyond what has been proclaimed by the solemn magisterium. According to the oft-mentioned principle that we all agree on, it is only the Catholic doctrine of faith that the Church presents as revealed truth to all to believe. One now immediately assumes that the Church only presents something to believe when it solemnly decides as the highest judge on a dispute of faith. But the Church exercises a double magisterium. The one is the ordinary and everlasting . . . The other is the extraordinary, is exercised only at special times (namely, when false doctrines trouble the Church), and is not simply a magisterium, but at the same time a magistracy. In the latter [i.e. the extraordinary magisterium], the Church repels the hostile attacks on the sanctum that it preserves; in the former [i.e. the ordinary magisterium], it opens to its children the rich treasure that is deposited with it. (Kleutgen 1867: 98)

Kleutgen argues to begin with that what can be binding in the Church is only (first) what has been revealed, and (second) what the Church presents as having been revealed ‘to all to believe’. In doing so, he therefore adopts Véron’s and Chrismann’s concept of dogma. For Kleutgen, though, a dogma could in this sense be presented in two ways: through the solemn, extraordinary magisterium, and through the everlasting, ordinary magisterium. The former is reactive in that it responds to great threats. It is for this reason that Kleutgen even regards it as ‘not simply’ a magisterium, but above all as a ‘magistracy’; a body that helps the Church’s deposit of faith to prevail and that solemnly condemns false doctrines. It serves to defend the sanctum. In contrast, the ordinary magisterium is active, since within it the Church – and that means above all the pope – opens up ‘the rich treasure that is deposited with it’. This makes the magisterium a theological actor, and theologians – those who are not the pope – are bestowed with a new, subaltern status. Theology ‘no longer had the task of directly interpreting scripture and tradition independently; rather, papal doctrine was its regula proxima. It only had the secondary task of using scripture and tradition to prove that what the popes taught was correct’ (Unterburger 2013: 62–63). Pius IX first took up Kleutgen’s distinction in the letter Tuas libenter, where he asserted that what was to be believed were ‘not only the things expressly defined by decrees issued by ecumenical councils or Roman bishops or this Apostolic See’; what was also to be accepted with divine faith – fide divina – was what the ordinary magisterium prescribed (Denzinger, No. 2879). The First Vatican Council synthesized these two

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ways of establishing dogma – by the extraordinary and by the ordinary magisterium – as follows: Further, all those things are to be believed with divine and Catholic faith that are contained in the word of God, written or handed down, and which by the Church, either in solemn judgment or through her ordinary and universal teaching office, are proposed for belief as having been divinely revealed. (Denzinger, No. 3011)

Even if the Council did not make it clear that it was defining the concept of dogma here, this formulation would then become the magisterium’s standard definition of a dogma and would remain so even after the Second Vatican Council, as the declaration Mysterium ecclesiase, issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, shows (see Denzinger, No. 4536).

1.1.4 The Concept of Dogma in the Catholic Church Today The Second Vatican Council did not shake the idea that the Church could present its faith with doctrines that claimed infallibility. But the Council did endeavour to bring the exercise of the Church’s infallibility more into the episcopal structure, and thus provide, at least, a rudimentary answer to a question that the First Vatican Council had left indefinitely open after its adjournment: namely, how, in the exercise of the magisterium, was the relationship to be conceived between primatiality and collegiality, between the primacy of the pope and the community of bishops? According to Lumen gentium, individual bishops do not possess as teachers the infallibility that belongs to the pope; nonetheless, in ‘matters of faith and morals’, they ‘speak in the name of Christ and the faithful are to accept their teaching and adhere to it with a religious assent’ (Lumen gentium, No. 25). Even if individual bishops cannot present infallible doctrines, the College of Bishops as a whole does possess, according to the bishops gathered at the Second Vatican Council, the right to teach infallibly: Although the individual bishops do not enjoy the prerogative of infallibility, they nevertheless proclaim Christ’s doctrine infallibly whenever, even though dispersed through the world, but still maintaining the bond of communion among themselves and with the successor of Peter, and authentically teaching matters of faith and morals, they are in agreement on one position as definitively to be held. This is even more clearly verified when, gathered together in an ecumenical council, they are teachers and judges of faith and morals for the universal Church, whose definitions must be adhered to with the submission of faith. (Lumen gentium, No. 25)

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The Council thus recognizes two teaching subjects, with each being able to exercise its prerogative in two ways – in the ordinary and in the extraordinary form of its magisterium: namely, the pope, who can teach at his own discretion in both forms, and the College of Bishops ‘as the second subject in a twofold form’ (Lüdecke 1997: 245). The College of Bishops teaches in an ordinary form when it activates the bond of communion (nexus comunionis) that holds it together in order to present unanimously a doctrine ‘definitively’ as binding. It does so in an extraordinary form when it is assembled for an ecumenical council. Even if Lumen gentium names two subjects (the pope and the College of Bishops) who are entitled to infallibility in the exercise of their magisterium, it would be misleading to suppose that the College of Bishops could limit the absolute supremacy of the pope in questions of doctrine, or indeed represent a corrective to the pope. Rather, there is a fundamental imbalance in the relationship between the pope and the College of Bishops, since the pope can freely decide, at any time, whether, and how, he wishes to teach: according to the definition of the First Vatican Council, which was repeated by the Second Vatican Council (Lumen gentium, No. 25), he can do so in an ordinary form through his everyday magisterium or in an extraordinary form through ex cathedra decisions that are ‘irreformable of themselves, not because of the consent of the Church’ (Denzinger, No. 3074). The College of Bishops, on the other hand, can only act with, but never against, its head, which is the pope. This applies both to the ordinary exercise of its magisterium and to an ecumenical council whose decisions – at least according to the theory of papal councils that prevailed from the fifteenth century onwards – only come into force when they are recognized by the pope. The Codex Iuris Canonici, the book of canon law of the Latin Church that required revision after the Second Vatican Council, reversed (or, perhaps more accurately, simply ignored) the hierarchy envisaged in Lumen gentium. While the Council first mentions as subjects of infallibility the bishops and then the pope, the ‘head of the College of Bishops’ (Lumen gentium, No. 25), the Codex Iuris Canonici first mentions the pope (c. 749 § 1 CIC/1983), whose ‘position in the College of Bishops is deliberately omitted’ (Lüdecke 1997: 245), and then the bishops (c. 749 § 3 CIC/1983), but not without ‘expressing twice the connection with the successor of Peter and the Roman Pontiff’ (Lüdecke 1997: 245). There was a further feature of the language used by the Council that remained unnoticed in the post-conciliar activity of the magisterium: the Second Vatican Council avoided using the word ‘dogma’. Lumen gentium does not use the term

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at all, except in the formal classification of the document as a ‘dogmatic’ constitution. It talks instead of doctrina, sententia, veritas or definitiones. The same is true of Dei verbum, also according to its title a ‘dogmatic’ constitution, which does not use the term ‘dogma’ itself. While this is an observation worth making, we should also refrain from overestimating its importance, since the Council leaves no doubt that the Church has the right to present to its members, in a doctrinal form, what it believes it takes from revelation, and oblige them to believe in such a doctrine. But the Council Fathers apparently deemed the term ‘dogma’, which has rather negative connotations outside the Church, to be unsuitable for expressing this fact. However, the post-conciliar magisterium did not only eschew the term ‘dogma’, it also extended it in a highly innovative way. Published by Pope John Paul II in 1992, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states: The Church’s Magisterium exercises the authority it holds from Christ to the fullest extent when it defines dogmas, that is, when it proposes truths contained in divine Revelation or also when it proposes in a definitive way truths having a necessary connection with them. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 88)

What sounds unspectacular in comparison to previous statements actually contains a very significant expansion of the concept of dogma, one that initially went largely unnoticed by many theologians (and still is). The First and Second Vatican Councils were in agreement insofar as both believed that the Church could demand from its members the highest form of consent to all the doctrines that it presents, if these doctrines are ‘contained in the word of God, written or handed down’ (Denzinger, No. 3011), that is, are considered revealed. But this stipulation, which might initially sound maximalist, is also limitative: the Church can proclaim as dogma any doctrine that it considers revealed, but, conversely, it can also only proclaim such doctrines as dogmas that it believes to be revealed. In other words, if the Second Vatican Council teaches that the infallibility with which Christ wanted his Church to be endowed in ‘defining doctrine of faith and morals’ extends as far as the ‘deposit of Revelation’ (Lumen gentium, No. 25), the depositum revelationis, then this not inconsiderable claim also contains a double limitation. First, the infallibility of the Church relates exclusively to questions of faith and morals, and, second, it relates only to what has been revealed, and no more. It is this second limitation that the Catechism of the Catholic Church breaks through, and it does so quite imperceptibly by defining as possible objects of a dogma not only the dogmatic truths ‘contained in divine

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Revelation’, but also those doctrines that have ‘a necessary connection’ with such truths (Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 88). The Catechism, whose aim, according to John Paul II (1979: 1318) in Catechesi Tradendae, is merely to represent ‘the essential content of revelation’, and which in and of itself is certainly not the place for theological innovations, thus brought forth a new form of dogma: namely, a dogma that, although not belonging to the deposit of revelation, is nevertheless ‘definitive’ (Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 88). The consequences are profound. By omitting one of the two conditions specified by the First Vatican Council, the Catechism tacitly corrects the Council’s definition of a dogma as being exclusively a truth that the Church proclaims and that it believes to be revealed. According to the Catechism, a distinction would therefore have to be made between dogmas that derive from the so-called primary realm of the revealed, and dogmas that derive from the secondary realm of what is not revealed but is perceived by the magisterium as being inseparably linked to the deposit of revelation. Joseph Ratzinger speaks of this secondary realm as ‘the second level of faith, as truths to be held definitively, but not adopted with actual theological faith’ (1999: 169). Since John Paul II and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of his pontificate also include this realm in the concept of dogma, there are now dogmas that one cannot believe at all in the strict sense, because they – and this is precisely what Ratzinger says – belong not to the realm of fides credenda (i.e. theological faith to be believed), but to the realm of fides tenenda (i.e. non-theological faith to be held). However, these secondary dogmas also claim infallibility, with Ratzinger arguing in his debate with Ladislas Örsy that they belong to the ‘secondary objects of infallibility’ (1999: 420). The claim to teach infallibly in the secondary realm of dogma, too, is given a creedal form by the so-called professio fidei. Different groups of people, from participants at an ecumenical council to candidates for diaconate ordination, must make an extended profession of faith (c. 833 CIC/1983), which comprises the Nicene Creed and three addenda. The second addendum requires that everything that the solemn or the ordinary magisterium of the Church has presented ‘in relation’ (circa) to the doctrine of faith or morals is to be firmly embraced and maintained (firmiter amplector et retineo).4 The addendum’s circa is ambiguous, however. It is understood by the papal magisterium – at least according 4

For the official text of ‘professio fidei’ and its addenda, and that of ‘ius iurandum fidelitatis’, see Acta Apostolicae Sedis 81 (1989), 104–106.

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to John Paul II’s motu proprio Ad tuendam fidem and the commentary provided by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that follows this document – as meaning that all doctrines of a dogmatic or moral nature that are not themselves presented by the magisterium with the claim to be revealed, are nonetheless ‘necessary for faithfully keeping and expounding the deposit of faith’ (Denzinger, No. 5071). John Paul II mentions two ways that these dogmas from the secondary realm are connected to dogmas that are related to revelation (Denzinger, No. 5066): historically (historica ratione) and logically (logica consecutione). We shall return to the relationship between dogma and logic, as well as to the status of conclusio theologica. We are concerned here with those doctrines (‘dogmas’ in the Catechism) that are connected ‘historically’ with truths of revelation without themselves being revealed. This category includes the decision on the impossibility of ordaining women to the priesthood. In Ordinatio sacerdotalis, John Paul II declares: Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of Our ministry of confirming the brethren, We declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful. (Denzinger, No. 4983)

The extent to which this decision is binding is a matter of controversy. It is clear that this is not an ex cathedra decision, with the pope not exercising his solemn, extraordinary magisterium here. The statement that the doctrine presented in Ordinatio sacerdotalis is to be ‘definitively held’ by all the faithful suggests that the pope is trying to present a final decision regarding the secondary realm of dogma by virtue of the ordinary magisterium. In doing so, the pope sees himself as head of the College of Bishops and claims that he is merely formulating what all bishops had always already presented in uninterrupted continuity all over the world, and even before Ordinatio sacerdotalis. ‘The final and infallible character of the doctrine on the impossibility of ordaining women priests therefore stems not from Ordinatio sacerdotalis. Rather, it derives from the authentic doctrine of the bishops (and the pope) on this question, a doctrine that had already been presented unanimously and understood as final’ (Bier 2017: 46). It is interesting, though, that the magisterium itself should admit that the thesis of the impossibility of ordaining women cannot be taken directly from revelation, but actually derives from the secondary realm of what is connected to revelation historica ratione (Denzinger,

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No. 5041). Thus, Ordinatio sacerdotalis is not only an example of the exercise of the ordinary magisterium that was only introduced under Pius IX, it is also a prime example of the right to dogmatize doctrines from the secondary realm of what is connected to revelation without being revealed, which the pope only recognized in the second addendum of professio fidei and that he only began naming ‘dogma’ in the Catechism of 1992. Thus, work on the concept of dogma has continued into the recent past and is not necessarily finished. For, the claim made by the magisterium that it is able to take dogmas from the secondary realm of what is not contained in revelation was itself not presented as an infallible doctrine. Ordinatio sacerdotalis is a ‘fundamentally fallible declaration by the pope that there exists an infallible consensus of the ordinary and general magisterium’ (Pottmeyer 1999: 242). The situation is paradoxical. If one believes that it is the task of the magisterium to teach infallibly from the secondary realm of the unrevealed, and if, like John Paul II, one thinks that there is an unquestioned consensus in the College of Bishops on the issue of the ordination of women, then Ordinatio sacerdotalis is, within the magisterial logic of the Catholic Church, indeed infallible and has the status of a dogma according to the Catechism. But if one takes the view that it is not the task of the magisterium to demand the highest obedience of faith in matters beyond what is entrusted to the Church in revelation, or if one gains the view from conversations with some bishops that John Paul II’s claim that there is perfect unanimity among the many thousands of bishops all over the world is not entirely true (with the pope having succumbed to what Pottmeyer cautiously calls a ‘faulty ascertainment of facts’ (1999: 241)), then Ordinatio sacerdotalis remains a decision that is still open to theological reflection. We can draw an interim conclusion here: namely, that what at first sight appears to be a rigid conception of dogma on the part of the Catholic magisterium owes itself in fact to a dynamic of development and change that reaches into the most recent past. It is therefore difficult to deny the claim made by the Protestant theologian Gerhard Ebeling (1967: 54) that the ‘history of the Roman Church’ is marked ‘by a dual tendency’ – by ‘a radical conservatism and a no less radical evolutionism’. But what Ebeling sees as a weakness could also be a strength for the Catholic Church. For example, we can see how dynamic the Church can be in the formulation used by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in its comment on the controversial second addendum to the professio fidei, which broaches the issue of the claim of infallible teaching in

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the area of what is not revealed, but nonetheless connected to revelation. ‘It cannot be excluded’, the Congregation states, that at a certain point in dogmatic development, the understanding of the realities and the words of the deposit of faith can progress in the life of the Church, and the Magisterium may proclaim some of these doctrines [which have been presented as definitive and infallible, but not as revealed] as also dogmas of divine and Catholic faith [and thus as having the status of revealed truths]. (Denzinger, No. 5071)

The magisterium thus reserves the right to define, at some point, what it has already presented within the secondary realm, with the claim to finality and infallibility as belonging to the primary realm. In other words, the magisterium is, within its own logic, able to modify, if not to correct, its interpretation of revelation. For the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, this modification can only take the form of, so to say, a dogmatic ‘upgrade’, in the sense that a doctrine considered not to have been revealed in the past could at a later time be considered as having been revealed. But the counter-question must be allowed: if there is a dogmatic upgrade, could there not be the possibility of dogmatic ‘downgrades’? Or are there not also developments possible that allow a doctrine whose connection to the truth of revelation had previously been established as necessary for the ordinary magisterium to be assessed differently in the future with regard to its connection? Is not monogenism, the doctrine that the human is descended from one human couple, an example of this? Pius XII in his encyclical Humani generis logically connected this doctrine to the dogma of original sin and therefore considered it open to being defined as infallible; but this doctrine is no longer mentioned in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. (Pottmeyer 1999: 240)

Whatever position we may take, the logic of the magisterium is fixed, but it nonetheless offers us plenty of room to think about development if we know how it works.

.      ? 1.2.1 A First Attempt at a Definition The concept of development is understood here as the unstable simultaneity of continuity and discontinuity. When something develops, it does not change by leaps and bounds, but instead glides from one state to another. The beginning not only brings the (provisional) end into

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existence; it is also relevant to understanding the end, since the (provisional) end can only be explained in relation to its beginning. It is, however, much more difficult to decide whether the end is already completely laid out in the beginning. If that were the case, then a process of development would merely be the execution of a programme that simply runs by itself regardless of external factors. This would mean from a Christian point of view that doctrinal development be seen in terms of a core element, once bestowed by God through revelation unfolding in line with its own inner teleology, unaffected by all contingencies. Such an understanding of dogmatic development is unconvincing not only theologically, but also in the face of historical evidence. For, looking at the history of the concept of dogma has shown how great the change has been in how the Church has tried to formulate the gospel. What is said of the Church in general – namely, that, as the Second Vatican Council avers, it ‘coalesces from a divine and a human element’ (Lumen gentium, No. 8) – is, seen with the eyes of a faithful person, true also of the phenomenon of dogmatic development. However, while the human element of this phenomenon finds its reflection in sources that are accessible to a generally comprehensible analysis and can therefore be made into forms of knowledge, the divine element manifests itself in the mode of faith. The task of the theologian is to keep both together while ensuring that they do not mix: to believe in a historically evolved doctrine is one thing; to conduct a rigorous investigation of its historical, and therefore contingent, shaping is another. We can clarify this definition of development in theological terms: if development in general denotes the unstable simultaneity of continuity and discontinuity, then the development of doctrine denotes in particular a kind of discontinuity that relativizes previous relations of continuity for the sake of a greater continuity. In other words, if a doctrine develops, then an innovation emerges that appears to be a discontinuity: an innovation that makes the claim that it can ensure a greater degree of continuity than there would be without the innovation. Augustine (In Iohannis evangelium tractatus 97:4) mentions a pertinent example to which we shall return later: although the Fathers of Nicaea confessed that the Son is of the essence of the Father (homoousios to patri), this new concept, which was completely alien to the Bible and to the language of the Church, ‘did not signify a new reality by such a name; for they called Homousion this which is “I and the Father, we are one thing” [John 10:30]’. Augustine believes that the discontinuity represented by terminological innovation, as found in Nicaea, preserves continuity and is

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necessary to ensure that the gospel remains comprehensible in the present day and avoids falling into obscurity. What remains disputed is the claim made by every doctrinal development, namely, that discontinuity really can serve continuity. Development and criticism of development therefore go hand in hand.

1.2.2 Development of Dogma as a Response to the History of Dogma The concept of development as used by Catholic theology when it speaks of ‘dogmatic development’ is predominantly a child of the nineteenth century, when it appeared in three contexts: in the context of a more detailed knowledge about the history of Christian doctrine; in the context of absorbing Romantic or idealistic ideas (as the Tübingen School did, for example); and in dealing with Darwin’s theory of evolution theologically. The reason that the concept of development was able to gain such a prominent position in theology was due to the project developed within the Protestant Enlightenment of a ‘history of dogma’, which claimed to show how greatly the Christian doctrine of faith of the time (and above all that of Catholicism, of course) had deviated from the roots of Christianity. Unlike doxography, which was based on an apology of dogma, the history of dogma, which was based on a criticism of dogma, suspected Church doctrine of a radical discontinuity with Jesus and the apostles. The theories of dogmatic development that emerged in the nineteenth century were a belated reaction to this suspicion. The term historia dogmatum was probably used for the first time in a letter that the Protestant Enlightenment theologian Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Jerusalem wrote to his teacher Johann Christoph Gottsched on 12 January 1747: If God gives me life, I still wish to crown my old age with heresy, that I may show the justness of the Christian religion in all its true propositions. Since the testimony of the oldest Church should not thereby be neglected, I already made a start on it a few years ago with a historia dogmatum ex prioribus saeculis, which could be the prodromus to it. (cited in Aner 1928: 76)

Jerusalem places his project, to which he gave the name historia dogmatum, in two contexts: that of ‘heresy’ and that of apology. With self-irony, he denotes as heresy his intention not to write a doxography, that is, a historical derivation and justification of the claims to validity made by his own confession, which would only have the aim of exposing other

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religious parties as having deviated from the tradition (see Filser 2001: 292). Such works were popular in theological debate and used history primarily as a means of legitimizing their own confession (see Lipps 1983: 9). Jerusalem, though, does not wish to follow suit. He also judges harshly doctrines that are of central importance to Protestantism, arguing, for example, that he is ‘not positive’ towards Augustine and Jerome, ‘because they often did wrong to Pelagius and so confused the doctrine of grace that is so clear in itself, the one by his unruly temper and the other by his artistry, that we do not yet know quite what we are’ (cited in Aner 1929: 223). Jerusalem’s sympathy for the Pelagian doctrine of grace may be difficult to reconcile with the Protestant traditions of faith, but he nevertheless sees himself not only as a heretic, but also as an apologist. As he explains to Gottsched, he wants to show ‘the justness of the Christian religion in all its true propositions’. Jerusalem thus sees behind the apparently problematical dogmatic complications a true core of Christianity, which he tries to uncover. But this only seemed possible through a fundamental criticism of everything that deviates from the original and apparently simple proclamation of Jesus – including Church dogma and its philosophical assumptions. Protestant Enlightenment theology now also adopted and expanded a critical approach that had already been used in some currents of Catholic theology from the seventeenth century onwards – for example, in Richard Simon’s work, which of course is a polemic against the principle of sola scriptura (see Reiser 2007) – and linked it to the criticism of Church dogma.5 Johann Salomo Semler plays a central role here, both in developing this methodology and in interpreting historical-critical work theologically, be this the Bible or the Church’s doctrinal tradition (see Hornig 1996). Semler foreshadows a theory of development, even if he does not yet introduce the concept of development as a technical term. Thus, his Versuch einer freiern theologischen Lehrart (Attempt at a freer theological teaching method), which he published in German in 1777, begins with the thesis: A constant growth has its place in Christian theology. If we presuppose the correct concept of Christian theology, that a skill inherent to teachers of the Christian religion is actually both to recommend the Christian truths to their contemporaries in the best way possible, and to judge correctly their different ideas and 5

On the significance of the Protestant Enlightenment of the eighteenth century to the development of Catholic approaches to dogmatic development in the nineteenth century, see Walgrave (1972: 179–211).

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connections (which have given rise to special sects or parties of the Christian religion), then there can be no doubt that this theology, which again recognizes different skills, is capable of changing itself and undergoing constant growth, but is therefore as a result also always exposed to certain flaws. (Semler 1777: 1)

Semler gives theology two tasks, which are similar to what Jerusalem had termed apology and heresy. On the one hand, the theologian has to prove themselves a teacher of religion and to convey ‘the Christian truths’ to their contemporaries. On the other, their understanding of this activity should not be simplistic or unsustainable when faced with historical criticism, but should be aware that theology is ‘mutable’ and ‘capable of constant growth’. For Semler, the theologian must therefore acknowledge the imperfection (in the sense of incompleteness) of their thoughts without thereby abandoning their mission of teaching and preaching. Semler, therefore, carries out a deconstruction of static and ahistorical validity claims, arguing that ‘no specific point of Church history, and certainly not its early period, can be regarded as being perfect’ (Schröter 2012: 205). Semler thus sees the history of Christianity not as one of decay, but as one of improvement and completion. He applies the Enlightenment idea of perfectibility to Christianity, and sees it as being on the path from a lower to a higher level. This implies a radical criticism of what has gone before and what now exists, and even a dissolution of the confessional churches, which for Semler are not part of the essence of Christianity and should, as institutes of public religion, simply serve the private, individual practice of religion (see Spehr 2002: 365). This link between criticism of the past (history of dogma) and hope for the future (perfectibility) was important for the Enlightenment theory of the late eighteenth century. But what the right balance was between criticism of the past and hope for the future remained a matter of dispute within Enlightenment theology, too. Thus, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1839: § 2 (218)) sees revelation as being on the one hand an educational process that God bestows on the entire human race, but on the other, as a process that implies an ever more radical criticism of past stages and their misunderstandings – something that Lessing also put into practice when he published Fragments from Reimarus, in which Hermann Samuel Reimarus radically criticizes, for example, the Church’s belief in resurrection. Semler regarded this degree of criticism to be exaggerated, however, which is the reason why he intervened in the fragments controversy and argued vehemently against the thesis that belief in the resurrection owes its origin to a deception by the disciples (see Semler 1780: 429–432). But awareness was growing of a discontinuity between the teaching and language of Jesus on the one hand,

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and dogmatics and the Church’s way of thinking on the other. For example, the Enlightenment philosopher Andreas Riem argued that Christianity has ‘several founders. Christ and his apostles initiated the same thing. In part, the former taught to a different purpose than some apostles, who departed from this teaching and introduced changes in doctrine’ (1794: 3). Riem, therefore, saw already a break between the teaching of Jesus and the proclamation of the apostles, and not to mention later doctrinal development, which he saw as being too dependent on Platonism, and which, using the example of Justin Martyr, Riem accused of searching for the ‘logos of Christ in Plato’ (1794: 176). It is only against the background of these conflicts in the late eighteenth century that we can understand the emergence of theological theories of development. They first emerged, though, with large delays in the Catholic domain, since the discussions that resulted from an increasingly nuanced awareness of the actual changes and thus the fundamental mutability of the Christian doctrine of faith took place initially without Catholic participation. These discussions were a speciality of the Protestant Enlightenment, which Catholic theology usually reacted to in only two ways. Either it turned aggressively and apologetically against the Enlightenment, like Jesuit-influenced scholasticism, with the Augsburg Jesuit Alois Merz, for example, describing in 1773 (a few months before Pope Clement XIV’s canonical dissolution of the Society of Jesus) the ideas of the Enlightenment philosopher Jerusalem as a ‘sickness’ that had ‘already become an epidemic’ among Protestant scholars, and insulting the Enlightenment philosophers as ‘Arminian latitudinarii’ and religious ‘indifferentists’ (1773: 32). Or Catholics, who saw themselves as Enlightenment philosophers, took on the ideas of their Protestant counterparts, but often without grasping their full implications; one example is Franz Oberthür, who in 1808 (more than sixty years after Jerusalem’s letter to Gottsched and at a time when the idea of dogmatic history had already become an established part of Protestant theology) suggested timidly that, when dealing with the doctrine of original sin (which was a great nuisance for the Enlightenment philosophers in general), one should not simply circumvent the ‘history of dogmas’ (Oberthür 1808: 330). 1.2.3 Approaches in the Early Nineteenth Century Only in the early nineteenth century did Catholic theology take up the challenge laid down by the Protestant history of dogma – and it did so through historical research that could compete with the Protestants and

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that took the form of a speculative examination of the issue of doctrinal development and change. Thus, what could be heard for the first time in Johann Sebastian Drey’s lecture on the History of the Catholic System of Dogma in the winter semester of 1812/13 was the following: If there is a system in the dogmas of the Catholic Church, then also possible is at least a systematic history of it, or a history of the system of dogma; but, if there were no system in our dogmas, then no systematic treatment of its history would be possible. The latter is self-explanatory, since things emerge in only two ways – either they emerge separately themselves by developing from an inner core and germ, or they simply line up randomly and without internal connection over time. With the former, a systematic treatment, or systematic history, of its development is possible; no actual history of the latter can be written, since it owes its origin to chance and there is nothing necessary in it – for who would want to undertake a history of chance? (Drey 2015: 134–135)

Drey is distinguishing here between a history of individual dogmas and a history of the system of dogma. He, therefore, has to clarify whether the concept of system is at all applicable to Christian doctrine – that is, whether it can be ‘seen in connection to a whole’, and whether ‘Catholic dogmas are a whole, and indeed a systematically connected whole’ (Drey 2015: 131). The concept of system had been endemic to theology since the early seventeenth century, and denotes – in, for example, talk of the theologia systematica first found in Bartholomaeus Keckermann’s work (see Stock 2005: 223) – the whole coherent body of religious and moral doctrine. The concept of system plays an important role in the idealistic context that influenced Drey; Kant defining it in 1787 in his method of transcendentalism in the Critique of Pure Reason thus: By an architectonic I understand the art of systems. Since systematic unity is that which first makes ordinary cognition into science, i.e. makes a system out of a mere aggregate of it, architectonic is the doctrine of that which is scientific in our cognition in general, and therefore necessarily belongs to the doctrine of method. Under the government of reason our cognition cannot at all constitute a rhapsody but must constitute a system, in which alone they can support and advance its essential ends. I understand by a system, however, the unity of the manifold cognitions under one idea. This is the rational concept of the form of a whole, insofar as through this the domain of the manifold as well as the position of the parts with respect to each other is determined a priori. (Kant 1998: 691)

The concept of system denotes for Kant the unity of numerous individual insights within a unifying idea. For Kant, it is only when individual insights

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come together as a system, and the many concepts come together as a unity of ideas, that it is possible to speak in terms of science. If a system does not form, then individual insights remain merely rhapsodic and stand in sharp juxtaposition to each other as mere ‘aggregates’. This helps us to grasp more precisely what Drey means and what is at stake for him as a theologian, when he asks whether the dogmas fit together to form a system. If they do not form a system, and their ‘systematic treatment’ is impossible because they exist side-by-side, ‘randomly and without internal connection’, then theology cannot be a science. Conversely, if theology wants to be a science, then it must expose the system, that is, it must draw out the central idea that holds the individual dogmas together. But this means that theology also has to address the question of development, since, for Drey, what is not connected – and thus not capable of belonging to a system – has only arisen through an unconnected sequence ‘over time’. What is systematically connected, on the other hand, can only have arisen through ‘development’, with the individual parts of the whole unfolding from the unifying idea that constitutes what is connected as, precisely, connected, ‘from an inner core and germ’. We shall return to this issue later. Here, where we are concerned primarily with definitions of concepts and with their historical context, we should note that Drey was probably the first Catholic theologian to address the challenges laid down by research in the history of dogma, and he did so by formulating a theory of dogmatic development that he also named according to this term (‘development’). We can see how innovative Drey was by looking briefly at Georg Hermes, whose approach was brought together posthumously under the concept of Hermesianism and condemned for its alleged scepticism and rationalism (Denzinger, No. 2738). When Hermes moved from Münster to Bonn in around 1820 (some years after Drey’s lectures on the History of the Catholic System of Dogma), he stated that he would follow the wishes of the Prussian government and also lecture on the history of dogma in Bonn – but not without a feeling of unease, since, ‘as a Catholic, he could not recognize a history of dogma in the usual sense of the word, because dogmas had always been what they are’. Thus, for Hermes, it made no sense to speak of a history of what had always been identical with itself – an attitude that Hermes tried to convey to his listeners, in what his pupil Wilhelm Esser (1832: 110) called ‘the clearest terms’, when he was finally forced to lecture on the history of dogma ‘at the repeated request of the High Ministry’. Drey, on the other hand, managed to question the notion that dogmas have always been what they are in two ways. It is important for Drey to determine whether the

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issue concerns a single dogma or the idea that holds all dogmas together, since it allows him to consider at the same time both change and continuity in Christianity: continuity consists in the idea that unfolds historically, and change in the variety of forms that the idea takes historically. This allows us to broaden the definitions given at the beginning of this section: if development is contrasted with arbitrariness, then it must be measurable against something that is not completely identical with its current manifestation. Drey denotes this yardstick of development, a yardstick that only appears historically in the form of development, as an ‘idea’. Could we say that the idea underlying dogmatic development is the gospel, which does not completely determine the historical development of Christian doctrine, but standardizes it by ensuring that the legitimacy of a development is always tested according to it – something made more difficult, though, by the fact that the gospel is historically tangible not as an ahistorical factor, but only in the form of dogmatic development? We will have reason to return to this question later. 1.2.4 Theology in the Shadow of Charles Darwin It is significant to note that Drey had already related the terms ‘development’ and ‘dogma’ to each other in the early nineteenth century, since the concept of development took an important turn in the last third of the century, a turn whose impact on theology can barely be overestimated. For, in 1859, Charles Darwin published his epochal work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Even though the term evolution does not appear in Darwin’s study (except for the last sentence, where it is used in its verbalized form (evolved) and is the very last word of the book), Darwin’s opus is the starting-point for those approaches that would later be grouped together as evolutionary theory, and that would have an influence on culture far beyond biology. Attempts to think of the history of life on earth as a process of development already existed before Darwin, and even found their way into the works of Catholic theologians. For example, as early as 1808, and more than fifty years before Darwin’s book on the origin of species, the Catholic Enlightenment theologian Franz Oberthür spoke of a ‘system of evolution’ that can be used to ‘explain natural history’ and claims that the entire human race ‘was already contained in Adam’s loins, as spermatic animals, or monads, or whatever else’ (1808: 340). Behind Oberthür’s statement is Leibniz’s idea of pre-stabilized harmony, which claims that, as Leibniz (1951: 172) argues in his Theodicy,

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it is of the essence of God’s wisdom that all should be harmonious in his works, and that nature should be parallel with grace. It is thus my belief that those souls which one day shall be human souls, like those of other species, have been in the seed, and in the progenitors as far back as Adam, and have consequently existed since the beginning of things, always in a kind of organic body.

Leibniz is claiming that all humans were already enveloped in their biological ancestor Adam, and that they then developed in the course of time. Behind this theory is a concern to extract the monad as a bodily and spiritual unity from the process of becoming and passing away. Change can, therefore, only be understood as the changing state of one and the same unchangeable entity. Such a doctrine may seem unusual from the point of view of Christian orthodoxy, but it is not heretical. On the contrary, the doctrine gained a certain attractiveness because it seemed to explain why (according to the fundamental claim of the doctrine of original sin in Ambrosiaster’s interpretation of Romans 5:12) all people sinned in Adam and had therefore already sinned before their birth. This was not the case with the theory of evolution, which grew in theoretical sophistication, and which could draw on observations from natural history such as fossil finds. While – at least according to Ernst Haeckel (1891: 33), who was a little younger than Darwin – Leibniz and the theorists that he influenced wanted to guarantee ontological stability by presuming that what was already metaphysically enveloped was determined teleologically and developed externally, Darwin and his followers transferred the idea of change into the essence of things, without metaphysically charging this change with a teleology that met the requirements of Church orthodoxy. Darwin’s understanding of how species develop is shaped instead by three factors: variation, selection and reproduction. Darwin argues that members of a population differ slightly from each other. If these differences make it possible for a living being to adapt better to its environment, then it has a greater chance of survival (the survival of the fittest), whereas other beings that are less adapted have a lower chance of survival. (The concept ‘survival of the fittest’ is derived from Herbert Spencer, and was used by Darwin from 1869 onwards, in the fifth edition of his book; see Beer 2008: xix). This sets in motion a selection process that is also reflected in the number of offspring: so-called fits, which for Darwin are creatures that are relatively better adapted to their environment and find it easier to raise their offspring, whereas less fit members of the population find it more difficult to raise offspring, so that the number of offspring of the fits exceeds that of the less well adapted. In addition, some offspring of the fits inherit the characteristics of their

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Defining Dogma and Development

parents genetically, so that they in turn also have a higher chance of survival, until their offspring again show favourable variations that set a new round of selection in motion. ‘The longer this process lasts, the more fantastic and unforeseen the result will be. After millions of years and many, many generations, the original population will have changed into a completely new species’ (Buskes 2010: 180). Such an idea presented two kinds of challenges to how the Christian faith was propounded in the nineteenth century: a material challenge and a formal challenge. In material terms, there were numerous contradictions between genesis, as presented in the Bible, and the emergence of species as reconstructed by the theory of evolution. The Bible and Christian teaching saw the order of the world and the creation of the human being as a sovereign act of God, an act that, according to the first of the two narratives of creation in the book of Genesis (1:1–2:4a), took place in the space of seven days, with the Biblical version of history operating with a much smaller time frame than the idea of the development of species would have required. At the formal level, which for orthodox theologians of all confessions seemed to be almost even worse than the material contradictions, since the latter could have been overcome by an interpretation of scripture that distanced itself from the literal sense, one had to deal with the fact that nothing was excluded from the course of development: everything that is alive is, along with everything that constitutes it, a product of evolution, including culture, customs and even religion. ‘The view of life and the world of the modern human is dominated in its entirety by the idea of development. The proposition that every being can be completely known only by the exploration of its history has become an inalienable principle of scientific work’ (Schmidt 1918: v). In his 1871 publication The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, in which Darwin (1871: 2) now also explicitly spoke in terms of the ‘principle of gradual evolution’, he embedded the phenomenon of religiosity alongside numerous other ‘mental abilities’ of the human in his theory of development. In doing so, he understands the ‘feeling of religious devotion’ as ‘a highly complex one, consisting of love, complete submission to an exalted and mysterious superior, a strong sense of dependence, fear, reverence, gratitude, hope for the future, and perhaps other elements’; in short: No being could experience so complex an emotion until advanced in his intellectual and moral faculties to at least a moderately high level. Nevertheless, we see some

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distant approach to this state of mind in the deep love of a dog for his master, associated with complete submission, some fear, and perhaps other feelings. (Darwin 1871: 65)

Darwin sees religion entirely in terms of the evolutionary process. Although religious feelings presuppose, for him, some highly developed mental abilities and are, particularly when they take the form of monotheism, morally beneficial, they are nonetheless in their basic biological structure similar to the behaviour of dogs. In other words, canine behaviour is an evolutionary precursor to religiously motivated action. The difference between the two is only one of gradation for Darwin. This radically questions the theological proposition that the human is chosen and addressed by God, and is enabled to respond to the authority of the revealing God with the obedience of faith. The ability to believe in the theological sense no longer seemed to be inscribed by God in human nature or to be an act of grace granted by God. Rather, it seemed to be a skill acquired through evolution, a skill that saw its preliminary stage in the behaviour of dogs, with dogmas then having to be seen as contingent, cultural manifestations of a constantly changing humanity. As a result, the concept of evolution and development was deemed, in theology, to be contaminated by heresy, and those using the concept had to endure the accusation that they had ‘transferred a concept from biology to revelation’ (Hammans 1965: 2). That the terms ‘dogma’ and ‘development’ had once been used together long before Darwin faded into the background. Instead of using these theories (and we can think of Drey here) to assess the implications of evolutionary theory for our view of the world in such a way that they do not signal the end of all theology, the rejection of the theory of evolution also discredited the idea of dogmatic development. A minority opinion remained, though, with John Henry Newman (1970: 158) writing as early as 1863 (four years after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species) that ‘the idea of a creation of distinct species’, as Genesis teaches it in its literal sense, is just as unacceptable as the claim of a creation of trees in full growth, or of rocks with fossils in them. I mean that it is strange that monkeys should be so like men, with no historical connexion between them, as that there should be no history course or facts by which fossils got into rocks. . . . I will either go whole hog with Darwin, or, dispensing with time & history altogether, hold, not only the theory of distinct species but that also of the creation of fossil-bearing rocks.

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Defining Dogma and Development

Newman sees no challenge to religion in Darwin’s theory. On the contrary, he sees the claim that God is supposed to have hidden fossils in rocks during the Creation to be inappropriate from a theological point of view, too, and he is positive towards the idea of development, an idea that he had already considered from a theological perspective in the 1840s. His remained largely a lone voice, however. For, as the theory of evolution was increasingly elaborated, gained broader acceptance and achieved cultural hegemony, the view that Catholic theology had of the concept of development darkened. The concept seemed to require theological purification – to the extent that Catholic theologians even saw themselves as competent enough to participate in biological debates. For example, in a series that bears the now ironic title Armour of the Present, the Secretary General of the Görres Society and Professor of Apologetics in Bonn, Arnold Rademacher, accused the long deceased Darwin of applying his theory of evolution to human beings and thereby ‘dissolving the barrier between man and animal, and making man descend from the higher species of monkeys’ – a thesis that the theologian Rademacher considers scientifically untenable, arguing that ‘the idea of development in this extension has no support in the material’ observed by Darwin. It is for this reason that Rademacher bitterly deplores the ‘mixing of a fanciful, albeit purely scientific, hypothesis with the religious view of the world’ (1914: 16). Rademacher does not want to shelve the concept of development itself, however; rather, he is convinced that ‘Darwinism will go under, while the doctrine of development will remain’, but only if it frees itself from the implications of the so-called monism of development that ascribes the existence of soul and consciousness to no selective act of creation, but sees it as a product of evolution (1914: 22). The use of the idea of an evolution left to itself without God’s intervention formed a focal point in the conflict between theology and biology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as some theologians feared ‘the dispensability of the concept of God for science’ (Schmitt 1923: 34), that is, what would later be called methodological atheism. Such a model did not seem suitable of course for a theory of dogmatic development, with Rademacher therefore attempting to purify the (for him) biologically misguided concept of development. Rademacher (1914: 28) named four criteria to make the concept useful theologically: 1. 2. 3. 4.

The containment or investment of perfection in a thing; the temporary concealment of this arrangement; the tendency for this arrangement to emerge; and the self-activity of this emergence.

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Rademacher thereby names the standard version of the theological concept of development, as it was formulated in contrast to the doctrine of evolution and how it could be applied according to the narrow criteria of Church orthodoxy: each stage in the development of a thing must already be fully laid out in that thing. It is already there, hidden potentialiter, and is only activated over time, but this cannot be fostered from the outside in the sense of the Aristotelian potentia passiva; rather, it emerges only from the inside in the form of a potentia activa. This leads back to the question already posed: can – or should – there not be a theological theory of development that sees the development of dogmas not merely as the course of a pre-programmed process, but as a historical event in which the human is actively involved insofar as they try to appropriate the gospel devoutly and to express it meaningfully?

2 The Bible: Both Product and Yardstick of Doctrinal Development

. :   ? Should a theological treatise like mine not begin with the Bible instead of with a history of concepts – after all, the Second Vatican Council demands that dogmatic theology ‘be so arranged’ that ‘biblical themes are proposed first of all’ (Optatam totius, No. 16)? According to the wish of the Council Fathers, scripture is to provide dogmatics with themes, and not vice versa, with the Council thereby criticizing the tendency to constrain and exploit the Bible for reasons of dogma. This was something that neo-scholasticism had done, for example, when it treated the Bible as a reservoir of dicta probantia, of statements proving the truth of dogmatic propositions. It threw in quotations from scripture where it was deemed they would help the argument. Franz Diekamp, the neo-Thomist already mentioned in the previous chapter, expresses this in almost disarming clarity when he states that because the magisterium is ‘the closest and most direct guide to the Catholic faith’ (regula proxima fidei), and the Bible, which always needs the ‘magisterium to safeguard and interpret it’, is only the regula remota fidei, reference to scripture is only of secondary importance in theology and could indeed be dispensed with completely (see Diekamp 1930: 64–65). For Diekamp, if the magisterium of the Church has made the infallible decision to proclaim a doctrine, then its truth and our duty of faith towards it are fixed without further ado. Strictly speaking, there is no longer any need to examine the regulae remotae fidei of the holy scripture and tradition to prove the validity of the proposition to the faith. Nonetheless, achieving a favourable result from such an examination can increase the Catholic’s joy of faith and show the non-Catholic who believes in scripture that it really does represent a truth revealed by God. (1930: 77) 38

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Diekamp is confirming all the prejudices here that Protestants could harbour with regard to Catholic dogmatics: the magisterium replaces reference to scripture or reduces it to a strategic tool that can be used when it produces ‘a favourable result’ to motivate pious Catholics who like to read the Bible for devotional reasons, or to convince other Christians who believe in scripture of the veracity of Catholic doctrine. It was precisely such a method of theological work and argumentation that the Second Vatican Council opposed, its constitution on revelation, Dei verbum, arguing that ‘sacred theology rests on the written word of God, together with sacred tradition, as its primary and perpetual foundation’, and that ‘the study of the sacred page is, as it were, the soul of sacred theology’ (Dei verbum, No. 24). Treating the Bible in a theologically serious manner does not mean, however, writing handbooks on dogma that merely change the order of its chapters, putting the scriptural interpretation at the beginning, and preparing it in such a way that one comes out at exactly the place where one wants to go in terms of dogma. It is the case, rather, that the Bible and dogma are in a relationship of irresolvable tension, since dogma strives for a propositional-doctrinal clarity that the Bible undermines through its narrative-historical ambiguity. If, as the Council claims, the study of the Bible really is to be ‘the soul of sacred theology’, then a theology inspired by the Bible cannot avoid the ambiguities present in a collection of books that emerged over many centuries and that thereby comprise a plurality of social, political, cultural and religious interpretative approaches. The Bible is ‘a genuine plurality. The unity of scripture is not that of a uniform doctrine’, which is the reason why dogmatics that take scripture seriously ‘should not relativize, but instead communicate, the multiplicity of its positions and perspectives, the duality of its testaments, and the long period of time in which it emerged’ (Söding 2013: 509). Just as we should not read clarities into the Bible, so we should not read clarities from it.

.       2.2.1 Christ: Found in the Text and Confirming the Text? The Christian Bible, comprising Old and New Testament, not only (and perhaps least of all) thinks through the problem of development theoretically, but also demonstrates it in practice, providing, as it does, knowledge that is not merely reflexive, but also performative. The

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bringing together of various texts into a small library that has come to be known under the plural biblia (books) is also called canon formation.1 The Greek word kanon means rod or, by extension, rule or measure, from which the later meaning – guide or benchmark – is derived. Christian literature speaks from the second century at the latest of the ‘canon of Truth’, the ‘canon of Faith’ and the ‘canon of the Church’, by which was meant not the Bible, but the doctrine of faith proclaimed in the Church and recognized as binding. Irenaeus of Lyon, for example, says that baptism, which manifests the acceptance of faith and initiates the person into the congregation, gives Christians the ‘canon of Truth’ that enables them to absorb and criticize elements of pagan teaching, but also to adapt these elements ‘to the body of Truth’ (Adversus Haereses I 9:4). Irenaeus gives examples of what he understands exactly as the ‘canon of Truth’, such as the dictum, ‘There is one God Almighty, who created all things through His Word; He both prepared and made all things out of nothing’ (Adversus Haereses I 22:1). For Irenaeus, the ‘canon of Truth’ is preserved unadulterated only in the Church, but itself remains unavailable: it is a good entrusted to it, which the Church must administer faithfully without possessing it. It is a sign of heresy for Irenaeus ‘to deprave the canon of Truth and preach himself’ (Adversus Haereses III 2:1). There is a further meaning of canon in the early Church, but it is not clear how exactly it is related to the meaning just sketched: namely, canon as a list or directory. This meaning is present when we speak of the Biblical canon. Whether the normative (guide) and descriptive (list) meanings are connected etymologically and historically is a question that remains contested (see Zahn 1892). From the mid-fourth century onwards, the notion of canon no longer referred only to the Church’s binding doctrine, but also to the entirety of books that Christians regarded as their Holy Scripture, even though in some regions there was still considerable disagreement beyond the fourth century about which books actually belonged to this canon. The Pauline epistles are the oldest texts in the collection that is today called the New Testament. They provide – often better than the later Gospels – insights into the life and faith of the early Christians. In the First Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul passes down a short creed, whose 1

This section draws on the following works: Becker and Scholz (2012); von Campenhausen (1972); McDonald (2007, 2017); Paul (2003); Plümacher (1980: 8–22); Sand (1974); Schneemelcher (1980). Zahn (1888, 1892) is still worth reading for the history of concepts and the wealth of material that it provides.

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implications show how complex the relationship between the problems of referring to scripture and the development of Christian doctrine are: For I handed on to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve. (1 Corinthians 15:3–5)

Paul is citing here a formula that derives from Judaeo-Christian circles; he did not coin the formula himself, but found it already in existence, with Antioch or Jerusalem, and more rarely Damascus, usually being regarded as the places of origin (see Häußer 2006: 151–153). The creed interprets the death and resurrection of Jesus in the light of what are vaguely called ‘the scriptures’, with two authorities thereby being cited as sources for the first Christians when formulating their beliefs: stories passed down about the figure of Jesus, and ‘the scriptures’. The former were initially passed down orally, then partly in writing (e.g. in the form of the so-called Q source), and then worked on narratively and theologically, as happened in the Gospels. But the indispensable space for interpreting the fate of Jesus was what would later be called – probably following Melito of Sardis, who evidence suggests first used this term – the Old Testament (see Eusebius: Historia ecclesiastica IV 26). This terminology is alien to Paul, though. When he speaks of diatheke, which would later be translated into Latin as testamentum, he means a covenant made by God and not a collection of texts. Instead, he speaks of ‘the scriptures’, ‘the holy scriptures’ (Romans 1:2) or ‘scripture’ (Galatians 3:22). But what exactly is meant by this? ‘Paul’s Bible was the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint. But not all of his scriptural citations can be traced back to the LXX [Septuagint]; in particular, his citations from Job and Isaiah are close to the Hebrew text’ (Schnelle 2014: 100). The situation was even more complex for his readers from the Judaeo-Christian environment than it was for Paul himself: Jesus himself was already involved in the conflict between the so-called Sadducees, who only accepted as scripture the first five books of Moses (‘the Torah’), and the Pharisees, who also recognized the Books of the Prophets and other texts. Different from these again are apocalyptic movements, which had such a broad understanding of everlasting revelation that they rejected limiting revelation to the tripartite division of the canon into Law, Prophets and Writings that was customary with the Pharisees – not to mention the limitations

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The Bible: Product and Yardstick of Development

imposed by the Sadducees (see Wanke 1993: 1–8). It was still not clear within Judaism even at the end of the first century, decades after the Pauline epistles were written, how many books and which structure the canon had exactly. Josephus speaks of twenty-two books that are considered ‘divine’ (see Gussmann 2012), and divides these books into three groups, each covering different historical periods: the first five books of Moses cover the time from the creation of the world to the death of Moses; the thirteen books of the prophets who followed Moses cover the period from his death to the reign of Artaxerxes, which for Josephus was the end of the period of prophecy in Israel; and four books contain what Josephus (Contra Apionem 1:8) calls ‘hymns to God and instructions for people on life’. The number twenty-two was attractive because the Hebrew alphabet has twenty-two letters, a coincidence that is not without significance. For Origen, just as the 22 letters seem to be an introduction to wisdom and to the divine teachings written by these letters for use by men, so the 22 God-inspired books are a fundamental instruction on the wisdom of God and an introduction to the knowledge of all that is. (Eusebius: Historia ecclesiastica VI, 25)

Competing with the identification of twenty-two canonical texts, though, is the number twenty-four. This number is mentioned, for example, in the Fourth Book of Ezra, which originated in around the year 100 AD, although the corpus of the canon comprising twenty-two or twenty-four texts might have been largely identical and the different numbering due only to a different way of organizing the material. The matter is made even more complex by the way in which a Christianity that was oriented towards the Septuagint passed down the Hebrew scriptures, since it divided some books into two (Samuel, Kings, Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles), and subdivided the so-called minor prophets (such as Hosea, Joel and Amos) into twelve books, so that the canon that would later become known as the Old Testament actually comprises a total of thirtynine books. Thus, even before the creation of the New Testament canon, early Christianity was not a religion without scripture, since it drew on the Jewish scriptures, although it was unclear what exactly belonged to these scriptures, and which version of these scriptures was binding and valid. Ultimately, the Septuagint that was widespread in the Jewish diaspora prevailed as the scripture of the Gentile Christians, in an event that would become a model of doctrinal development. Why?

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According to a legend handed down in the Letter of Aristeas, the Greek translation known as the Septuagint had been commissioned by Ptolemy II, who also wanted to preserve the scriptures of the Hebrews in the library of Alexandria. A total of seventy-two (and in other versions, seventy) scholars translated the Hebrew Law separately from each other and, according to legend, arrived at exactly the same wording, a coincidence that was used to imply the correctness of the newly created text and was later regarded as proof of the divine inspiration of the Septuagint (see Aejmelaeus 2012). The Christian authors believed that the Septuagint – and only the Septuagint – contained prefigurations of Jesus Christ. As Justin Martyr (Apologia Maior 31:7) explained: Well then, in the rolls of the prophets we found our Lord Jesus Christ, proclaimed ahead of time as drawing near, being born of a virgin, and growing to manhood, and healing every disease and every illness, and raising the dead, and being resented, and not acknowledged, and being crucified, and dying and rising again, and going to the heavens, and being, and being called, the Son of God, and we found certain people sent by him to every race of people to proclaim these things, and that it was people from the gentiles rather who believed in him.

That Justin derived this interpretation exclusively from the inspired text of the Septuagint can be seen in the vehemence with which he rejected new translations such as those of Theodotion or Aquila. ‘But I certainly do not trust your teachers’, he says (Dialogus 71:1), ‘when they refuse to admit that the translation of the Scriptures made by the seventy elders at the court of King Ptolemy of Egypt is a correct one, but attempt to make their own translation’. What Justin criticizes particularly harshly is the questioning of the fact that the virgin birth of Jesus, as told by Luke and Matthew, can be traced back to a prophecy made by Isaiah. Justin has Trypho the Jew mouth the thesis that Isaiah 7:14 speaks not of a virgin but of a young woman, which Justin (Dialogus 67:1–2) claims to be wrong by pointing to the authority of the Septuagint. There is a similar line of reasoning in the work of Irenaeus of Lyon (Adversus Haereses III 21:2–3), who sees the Septuagint as having been ‘translated through the inspiration of God’, and who deems ‘impudent and bold’ those that ‘wish at present to make other translations’. His belief in the divine inspiration of the Septuagint on the one hand, and the attempt by Jewish scholars to create new translations to refute the idea that the text identifies Jesus as the Messiah on the other, leads Irenaeus to formulate a polemical argument: the scriptures of the Jews had been preserved unadulterated in Egypt, the country whose Pharaoh had commissioned the

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translation, just as the house of Jacob had survived in Egypt when there was a famine in the land of Canaan, and just as Jesus had found shelter there, when he had been persecuted by Herod (Matthew 2:13–23). In contrast, the Jews, according to Irenaeus (Adversus Haereses III 21:1) ‘would never have hesitated to burn the Scriptures that make it clear that the rest of the nations all have a share in life, and that show that those who boast that they are the house of Jacob and the people of Israel, are disinherited from the grace of God’. Irenaeus is making a strange claim here: for him, Egypt is a haven of security and preserves the correct faith, while this faith is threatened by the Jews, who would rather falsify or even destroy their own scriptures than acknowledge Jesus as the Christ, a rejection that, according to Irenaeus, leads to their disinheritance from the grace of God. But this grace and its written testimonies had passed to the Church, and were now faithfully preserved in the Church in the form of the Septuagint. For, as Irenaeus (Adversus Haereses III 21:3) argues, since the apostles are much earlier than all of these [heretics], they agree with the above mentioned translation [the Septuagint], and the translation agrees with the tradition of the apostles [apostolorum traditioni]. For Peter and John and Matthew and Paul, and the rest after them, and also the followers of these, preached all the prophetical writings, just as contained in the translation of the elders.

The Christians, therefore, adopted the Septuagint as the scripture, which did not prevent other individual Christian authors who were proficient in Hebrew, such as Origen, from continuing to be interested in the Hebrew text. What, then, does this tell us about the issue of doctrinal development? What it tells us is that to look for a fixed starting-point for doctrinal development is to look in vain. Also, if we take the history of Israel seriously – as the first Christians did – and see a line of continuity between Christianity and this history, then the work, the death and the resurrection of Jesus cannot be seen as the zero hour of the development of Christian doctrine or, to be more precise, of doctrine relevant to Christian faith. On the contrary, that Jesus could be recognized as the Christ or, in the language of Paul, that the gospel of the Son of God could appear credible, was only possible because the first Christians assumed that God had promised the gospel ‘previously through his prophets in the holy scriptures’ (Romans 1:2). However, as outlined above, these holy scriptures were themselves not a static corpus, but a dynamic entity both in their scope and their exact wording, as well as in their interpretation – an entity that on the one hand

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preceded faith in Jesus as Christ, but on the other was also standardized by this faith, as shown by the insistence of early Christian authors on the Septuagint. Thus, of the many possibilities regarding what was meant by the scripture, and what the scripture meant, one possibility was singled out and other possibilities were excluded, with the scripture thereby giving meaning to faith in Christ, and faith in Christ giving meaning to the scripture. 2.2.2 From the Canon of Truth to the New Testament Canon If it is a matter of dispute what the scriptures comprise exactly that Paul refers to in his First Letter to the Corinthians (15:3–4), then it is not difficult to imagine how laden with conflict the situation became when a new body of writing emerged from the pens of Christian authors, namely, the Christian Bible, consisting of the Old and New Testaments. We should again make a distinction here between the emergence of the texts that would later be seen as belonging to the New Testament at the individual level, and to the New Testament canon as a whole. As the oldest writings of the later New Testament, the Pauline epistles are texts written by the apostle himself or, in the case of the pseudepigraphs, by his disciples to entire congregations or individual persons; these texts were probably read out publicly in the congregations, preserved and also disseminated beyond congregational borders. They could be invoked in disputes (2 Peter 3:14–16). In addition, there were oral traditions of Jesus in which Paul was already schooled. When the expected return of Christ did not occur and the eyewitnesses themselves passed away, these oral traditions were then also written down in various forms: in the rudimentary form of collections of sayings, or in the narrative form of the literary genre that would later be called ‘Gospel’. Besides the epistles, which usually claimed the nominal authority of an apostle, and the gospels, there were other genres, too, namely, the Acts of the Apostles and the Revelation to John as an apocalyptic text. Numerous clarifications were required before the first Christians attributed a similar kind of inspiration that they believed of the Septuagint to the Christian scriptures. Thus, the authoritative distinction between the works that would later belong to the New Testament canon and other texts that were produced during the same period of time or shortly thereafter was a distinction made retrospectively. The author of the First Epistle of Clement (47:1), in which the Roman congregation admonished the Corinth congregation for

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deposing presbyters from the bishop’s office,2 refers the Corinthians to the letter that had been written to them by ‘the blessed Apostle Paul’. Paul had charged them with a truth ‘in the Spirit’ (First Epistle of Clement 47:3) – pneumatikos rather than psychikos (1 Corinthians 2:13–15) – when intervening in the quarrel that was then overshadowing the congregation. The exhortation to do now as then, and to respond to external intervention, presupposes that the Pauline epistles were known both in Corinth and in Rome (where the First Epistle of Clement was written), and that they could be consulted in matters of dispute. The First Epistle of Clement also makes the claim that it had been written ‘through the Holy Spirit’ (63:2). The Pauline epistles were, therefore, held in such esteem not because they had an exclusive understanding of inspiration that elevated them to the level of holy scripture. Rather, the author of the First Epistle of Clement also thought that he belonged to an inspired event through his teaching, and was thereby empowered to intervene in the affairs of another congregation, just as Paul had worked ‘in the Spirit’ before him. Other than various letters in the Pauline corpus, letters that were known and accepted in Rome at the time when the First Epistle of Clement was written, there does not seem to be a written gospel available to the author. When the Epistle speaks of ‘the Gospel’ (47:2), it is following Pauline usage and referring not to a text or a literary genre, but to the subject of what it is proclaiming (Romans 1:1–4). With regard to canon formation, the second century is marked by the coexistence, and sometimes also by the competition, of oral and written traditions. In his Letter to the Philadelphians, Ignatius of Antioch dealt with currents of what was possibly a docetic Christology that he deemed problematical. False teachers were apparently claiming ‘that they could only accept what was written in the Old Testament “documents” – the mere message of the gospel was not enough as evidence’ (Campenhausen 1972: 71), since it had been mainly passed on orally, and, where it had been written down, it still did not have the same status as the Scripture. Ignatius criticizes as dangerously Judaizing the tendency to reject what he considers to be orthodox teaching on the basis that such teaching cannot be found in the Scripture. He warns the congregation (‘But should anyone expound Judaism, do not listen to him. It is preferable, surely, to listen to a circumcised man preaching Christianity than to an uncircumcised man 2

What is terminologically informative for the nomenclature of the offices and ministries in early Christianity is that the First Epistle of Clement (44:3–5) assigns the episcopal service (episkope) to the presbyters (presbyteroi).

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preaching Judaism’ (To the Philadelphians 6:1)), and urges it to show unity with the bishop. The ‘Spirit’ preaches: ‘Apart from the bishop do nothing’ (To the Philadelphians 7:2). Ignatius reacts almost defiantly: I exhort you never to act in a spirit of factiousness, but according to what you learnt in the school of Christ. When I heard so say, ‘Unless I find it in the official records – in the Gospel I do not believe’; and when I answered them, ‘It is in the Scriptures’, they retorted: ‘That is just the point at issue’. But to me the official record is Jesus Christ; the inviolable record is His Cross and His death and His Resurrection and the faith of which He is the Author. These are the things which, thanks to your prayer, I want to be my justification. (To the Philadelphians 8:2)

Ignatius considers the relationship of the Christian faith to the archeia, the documents, by which he means, at first, the texts (‘It is in the Scriptures’) of Judaism; he, just like Paul, is convinced that these texts already announce the gospel in advance (Romans 1:2). But it is exactly this that his opponents doubt: ‘That is just the point at issue’. It is interesting from a terminological point of view that Ignatius should use the same term, that is, archeia, to denote not only the ‘documents’ of Jewish texts, but also Jesus Christ, his cross, his death, his resurrection and the faith awakened by him. For Ignatius, the gospel is transmitted through two types of documents – through Jewish scripture (which by definition is written) and through (as paradoxical as it may seem) ‘oral documents’ that contain the lores of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and are witnessed in the faith of the Church. What was still contested in the second century was how useful it was to give these ‘oral documents’ a written form, and how binding the written form of the story of Jesus was in comparison to the Jewish texts. The writings of Papias of Hierapolis, for example, bear remarkable testimony to the way that writing and orality intertwined, coexisted and contradicted each other. Papias knew the Gospels according to Mark and Matthew, but was sceptical as to their value. For him, the author of the Gospel of Mark (whom he identifies as Peter’s interpreter) did not know Jesus personally, but wrote his Gospel from what Peter had told him – and only from what Peter remembered later. For this reason, Papias argues, Mark wrote down the words and deeds of Jesus, but ‘not, indeed, in order’ (Eusebius: Historia ecclesiastica III 39). This does not make the Gospel of Mark unusable for Papias, but shows his scepticism towards the lores available in written form. He is therefore interested primarily in oral reports: If ever anyone came who had followed the presbyters, I inquired into the words of the presbyters, what Andrew or Peter or Philip or Thomas or James or John or

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Matthew, or any other of the Lord’s disciples, had said, and what Aristion and the presbyter John, the Lord’s disciples, were saying. (Eusebius: Historia ecclesiastica III 39)

His preference for orality does not prevent Papias himself from writing, though. He provides in five books (now lost) an Interpretation of the Lord’s words, presumably summarizing what the elders that he had asked had told him. The relationship between writing and orality is, then, complex. On the one hand, Papias questions the value of written testimonies in the story of Jesus, while on the other writing them down in his own work. Such ambiguity only became a problem when people who were considered heretics, from the point of view of a position that would later prove to be orthodox, transformed it into an unambiguity that the rest of the Church could not accept. Marcion, who was born in Pontus but lived in Rome, and who had his heyday under Anicetus (bishop of Rome probably from 154 to 165), is the prototypical heretic (from hairesis, make a (wrong) choice). In extending the statements found in the Pauline epistles (e.g. Galatians 2–4) about observing the law and having faith in the gospel, Marcion constructed a dualism between the Creator God as described in scripture and the God of Jesus Christ. For Marcion, Christ had, through his death, bought the freedom of humankind from the rule of the Creator God, so that this God could no longer make any claims regarding the fulfilment of the law. Marcion sees the old law as having been replaced by the Beatitudes, in which Jesus expresses the core and the singularity (proprietas) of his teaching, without himself becoming legislator. The duality of Creator God and Redeemer God, as well as of law and gospel, meant not only that Marcion no longer needed the scriptures, as created by Judaism and taken over by Christianity in the form of the Septuagint – indeed, he considered them harmful – for him, they are no longer (as they were for his apparently chief witness Paul) ‘holy scriptures’ (Romans 1:2), but rather obsolete works that darken faith in God. Thus, for probably the first time in the history of Christianity, Marcion established a fixed canon in the form of a list of texts that he found expressed his doctrine of faith adequately, with this canon comprising a version of the Gospel of Luke that he himself had edited, and ten Pauline epistles. In doing so, he gave clarity to the ambiguity that prevailed in the second century due to the coexistence of oral and (diverse) written traditions, the validity of which was often disputed depending on region or theological provenance. However, the clarity of Marcion’s canon was

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such that it could not go unchallenged by the rest of the Church, with his dogmatic premises and dualistic worldview coming under particular attack – the canon issue only came into focus as a result of this attack,3 since the selection of sources underpinning Marcion’s doctrine was, like the doctrine itself, called into question. The dialectic that ensued – with justification having to be given for why not only Luke’s, but also other Gospels, were authentic manifestations of the one gospel proclaimed by Christ, meaning that theologians also had to take a position on texts not regarded as faithful mirrors of this gospel – drove the process that would later be referred to as canon formation. Adolf von Harnack even claims that Marcion was, and mainly due to the counter-reactions that he and his rapidly expanding community provoked, ‘the creator of the Christian Holy Scripture’ (1990: 98). As so often with Harnack, the irony of this statement makes it more subtle than it might otherwise seem. For, Marcion would have had his issues with both concepts (that of the Creator and that of the Christian Bible, as it would later become), which in turn reveals the counter-factual force through which Marcion shaped the theology of the rest of the Church. We cannot deal here with the question of whether Harnack (and, later, Hans von Campenhausen) is right to claim that the formation of the Christian canon was a counterreaction to Marcion, or whether doing so underestimates the conflict with other heresies (such as with Montanism and its idea of permanent revelation). But we can draw an important interim conclusion here: ambiguities in how the doctrine of faith is manifested, and in the question of its sources, where these sources themselves become the object of faith (like scripture), are not a fundamental dogmatic problem: Christianity and its relationship to scripture have long coped with such ambiguities. But if an ambiguity is transformed into a contested clarity, then this clarity cannot be countered by insisting on the previous ambiguity. A rejected clarity itself evokes through the very act of its rejection a reactive clarity. The result of this reactive clarity in the conflicts with Marcion, and 3

Thus, the editing of texts, such as Marcion did with the Gospel of Luke, was not unusual for the second century, because the idea that Christian texts were sacrosanct and thus unchangeable had not yet become established. Tatian, a pupil of Justin Martyr, whom Irenaeus accused of gnostic tendencies, presented in his Diatessaron a gospel harmony that remained in use in Syria at least until the fifth century. Eusebius (Historia ecclesiastica IV 29) reports that Tatian had not only presented a harmony of the gospels, but also reformulated Pauline epistles – an act that Eusebius commented on with indignation in the fourth century.

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probably other heretics, is the commitment to the canon of the Christian Bible. Although, or precisely because, the congregation that had formed around Marcion after his expulsion from the Roman Church spread quickly and widely (according to Barbara Aland (2000: 93), the teachings of Marcion may have been known everywhere in the Church in the second century), there were sharp distinctions made. Clement of Alexandria (Stromata VI 15 128:1–2) reports from the so-called Kerygma Petrou that the Jewish texts name Jesus Christ ‘partly in parables, partly in enigmas, partly expressly and in so many words’, which is why, despite the doubts of Marcion, one could believe ‘in God in consequence of what is written respecting Him’. Thus: ‘we say nothing apart from the Scriptures’. The term gospel can be found in the plural in the work of Justin Martyr, who, like Marcion, belonged to the Roman congregation. This shows that Justin understood gospel to mean not only the object of proclamation (Romans 1:1), but also a text, and that he knew several such texts. It is important to note that in his description of Sunday service Justin reports that this involves the reading aloud of ‘the memoirs of the apostles’, which he had previously introduced as a synonym for the Gospels, or of ‘the writings of the prophets’ (Apologia Maior 67:3). The Gospels, therefore, appear alongside the Books of the Prophets in their liturgical use, a process that would lead in the long term to a reconfiguration of the collective singular ‘scripture’, since further texts were now added to the Jewish texts that had previously been regarded as the scripture. Precisely which scriptures these were to be remained contested, even though there emerged in the second century a preference for the four Gospels that would later find their way into the New Testament canon. Irenaeus, whom Campenhausen (1972: 203) describes as ‘the first catholic theologian’ to ‘know and acknowledge a New Testament both in theory and in practice’, testifies that the single gospel of Jesus Christ had been handed down in four forms, the number four thereby becoming the object of theological speculation: It is not possible that there be more Gospels in number than these, or fewer. By way of illustration, since there are four zones in the world in which we live, and four cardinal winds, and since the Church is spread over the whole earth, and since the pillar and bulwark of the Church is the Gospel and the Spirit of life, consequently she has four pillars, blowing imperishability from all sides and giving life [vivificantes] to men. From these things it is manifest that the Word,

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who is Artificer of all things and is enthroned upon the Cherubim and holds together all things, and who was manifested to men, gave us the fourfold Gospel, which is held together by the one Spirit. (Irenaeus: Adversus Haereses III 11:8)

The Canon Muratori, a list probably originally written in Greek but only available in a rudimentary Latin translation, reflects the situation of the canon in Rome in around the year 200 (see Roukema 2004: 96–97). Besides the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, it also contains the Acts of the Apostles, thirteen epistles attributed to Paul, the Epistle of Jude, two Epistles of John and the Book of Revelation. Excluded from this canon are the Epistle to the Hebrews, the two Epistles of Peter, a missing Epistle of John and the Epistle of James. The canon differed somewhat in other places. The canon in Alexandria, for example, was handed down by Origen, who divided the texts into three categories (a taxonomy that Eusebius adopted with slight terminological alterations in the fourth century): the texts generally accepted (homologoumena) were distinguished from the fake texts that could not be used for official reading (pseude or notha), and there were also texts that were neither clearly accepted nor to be rejected, but whose validity remained contested (amphiballomena or antilegomena) (see Eusebius: Historia ecclesiastica III 25). The Book of Revelation remained contested for a particularly long time. The emergence of the Imperial Church and its unwillingness to tolerate the old diversity in this area led from the fourth century onwards to a convergence between the various congregations and between the language areas of the East and the West regarding the last details of the scope of the canon, with the Syrian Church retaining a special role here (see Bauer 1903; Schneemelcher 1980: 47). The claim made at the beginning of this chapter should now be clearer: before questioning what scripture has to say on the subject of development, it is important to stress how much it is the product of doctrinal developments avant la lettre. This shows that it is not possible to speak of the canon asserting itself, rather, ‘binding decisions were necessary’ to form the New Testament canon (Fiedrowicz 2010: 61). The central criterion here was not a systematized concept of inspiration, which, as the self-interpretation of the First Epistle of Clement shows, was still too broadly defined in early Christianity to be able to demarcate the boundaries of the canon. And nor was it the simple appeal to an apostolic author, since all sorts of works were appealed to in this way in the second century. Instead, a text was examined as to whether it corresponded to the existing faith of the congregation as developed either reflexively in

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formulas handed down (e.g. 1 Corinthians 15:3–5), or in the regula fidei. This can be seen very clearly in the dispute between Serapion, who was bishop of Antioch at the turn of the second to the third century, and some members of the congregation of Rhossus. As Eusebius reports, the latter had asked the bishop during a visit to allow them to read the Gospel of Peter publicly in Church services. Assuming that they ‘clung to the true faith’, Serapion allowed them to read the work (which he did not know). Later, however, he learned from ‘what has been told’ him that their ‘mind was lurking in some hole of heresy’, which presumably refers to docetic tendencies in Christology; Serapion then announced that he would visit Rhossus again, but announced in advance his judgment on the Gospel of Peter, which he had read in the meantime: most of it ‘was in accordance with the true teaching of the Saviour’, but ‘some things were added’ (Eusebius: Historia ecclesiastica VI 12). Eusebius does not tell us exactly what Serapion found to fault in the work, and it is of little importance to us here. What is important, though, is that Serapion prevented a text from being used in worship and thereby from assuming the quasi-canonical position of a text that can claim the authority of Peter, and that he did so on the grounds that, for him, this text did not correspond to the doctrine of faith. Faith as the ‘canon of Truth’ therefore precedes the ‘canon of scripture’ in the form of the New Testament. The Church’s doctrine of faith that forms the New Testament has a yardstick of its own, however, namely, the text of the Old Testament, whose exact configuration also depended on the faith that one wanted to find in it. In other words, the absolute beginning of doctrinal development, the zero hour, is historically intangible. Wherever theological reflection begins, it encounters a development already in progress, one that can be reconstructed in individual stages, but that can never be fixed irrevocably.

.       2.3.1 Jesus Christ in the ‘Form of God’ and ‘Form of Servant’ Jesus of Nazareth, who placed the proclamation of the kingdom of God at the centre of his public ministry (Mark 1:15), himself became after his death the object of proclamation for the circle of disciples that he had gathered around him. How the pre- and the post-Easter Jesus are connected to each other is a matter of controversy in New Testament research. There seems to be a consensus that ‘Jesus had a sense of eschatological authority. He saw the dawn of a new world in his actions’. But there is also

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consensus that ‘Christians said more about Jesus (i.e. greater and more significant things) after Easter than the historical Jesus said about himself’ (Theissen and Merz 1998: 512–513).4 For example, Paul talks about a dual model of cross and resurrection, and a triple model of death, burial and resurrection of Jesus as the central message of the gospel that he himself had received and passed on to the congregation (1 Corinthians 15:1–5). Such a model centred around death and resurrection was extended in two directions in the course of the early-Christian formation of faith: forwards, in the direction of an eschatology or a congregational theology that preserved continuity; and backwards, in the direction of a pre-existence Christology (see Ernst 1972: 61–62). An example of the former can be found in the Acts of the Apostles, where Peter introduces the resurrected Jesus thus: ‘exalted at the right hand of God, he received the promise of the holy Spirit from the Father’, ‘poured it forth, as you both see and hear’ (Acts 2:33). An example of the latter can be found in the Epistle to the Philippians, in which Paul quotes a hymn (Philippians 2:6–11) that he had already found in an advanced form and that was possibly used in the context of baptismal celebration or the Lord’s Supper. This ‘early-Christian psalm’ (Hofius 1991), with a structure and unity that remains contested, claims that Jesus Christ had lived in ‘the form of God’ (morphe theou), but did not adhere to the form in a self-centred way, but instead emptied himself and took the ‘form of a servant’ (morphe doulou) (Philippians 2:6–7). In doing so, he became equal with the human being, and led a human life up to his death – ‘becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross’ (Philippians 2:8), which is possibly an addition made by Paul. ‘Because of this’ (and the word conceives of Jesus’ degradation as the logical prerequisite of his exaltation), God exalted Jesus above all others and gave him a name (i.e. a position of honour) that is above every other name (Philippians 2:9). ‘At the name of Jesus’ (Philippians 2:10) every knee should therefore bend, ‘in heaven and on earth and under the earth’, and every tongue should confess that ‘Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father’ (Philippians 2:11). Thus, this hymn replaces the ‘Christological model “death – resurrection”’ with a ‘three-step model “pre-existence – degradation – exaltation”’, with ‘the ancient Christological model – God exalted his servant Jesus’ thereby gaining ‘a new background’: 4

The reflections on New Testament and early Christian Christology draw on Ernst (1972); Schröter (2001); Theissen (2000).

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The ‘servant Jesus’ is by no means just one in a long line of the many obedient and humble who now receive their just reward; rather, he is the one who like no other was ‘in the form of God’ and is therefore uniquely exalted. Here, the hymn takes up an expression (hyperupsoun) reserved for God in the Septuagint (see Psalm 96:9). The exaggerated language also reveals that it is not only about regaining the old position that the pre-existent gave up in voluntary degradation; it is also about a position of honour that being a servant always keeps in mind. (Ernst 1974: 66, 69–70)

The hymn thus opens up a different perspective on the man Jesus of Nazareth and his lasting significance. As is testified by the congregation praying this psalm of Christ, he manifests a divine reality. He came from God and, being in the ‘form of God’, had ‘equality with God’ (Philippians 2:6); he lived as a human being a human life up to his death on the cross, and was exalted by God, even to the point that all tongues should address him as kyrios: a term that replaced the Tetragrammaton in the Septuagint and was thus a designation of God. Thus, with the man Jesus of Nazareth, who ‘no longer stood on the side of creation alone, but also on the side of God’ (Hengel 1976: 76), there appeared a plenitude that was unparalleled, that had not existed before, and that would not be repeated again in history. This plenitude was to be explained and explored more deeply, but in constant reference back to the man Jesus of Nazareth, who, as the humble person now, remains the one exalted forever (‘Jesus Christ is the Lord’). This hymn, which is one of the oldest traditions that the New Testament has to offer, shows both the normative boundary and the driving force of Christian doctrinal development. The fact that there is no zero hour of doctrinal development (which means that there is no historically tangible beginning from where it started) does not imply that – seen from a theological point of view – doctrinal development represents a matter of indifference. A certain development is Christian when – and only when – it beholds in the historical Jesus both the degraded and human-like, as well as the exalted and God-like, Lord. The avowal made by this hymn may be formulated in different ways, but in substance it can no longer be surpassed and is, from a Christian point of view, not open to debate. A development that believes that it can surpass Christ and achieve a greater plenitude than he himself represented is unacceptable from the perspective of the New Testament. The same applies to developments that try to undercut Christ and thereby relativize the historical Jesus, something that would also no longer be genuinely Christian. But the plenitude expressed in Jesus provides a yardstick for theological development not only by limiting it, but also by

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acting as its driving force. For, what the Church believes about Christ is what it tries both to preserve as well as to proclaim in a comprehensible way in changing contexts.

2.3.2 ‘Guard What Has Been Entrusted to You’ (1 Timothy 6:20) The need to guard what had been passed down grew as the distance from the time of Jesus increased; his expected return did not occur, eyewitnesses died, and positions regarded as heresies began to emerge within congregations. It is therefore not surprising that the more recent texts of the New Testament, such as the Pastoral epistles, should focus more strongly on this need than the older parts, or the parts dealing with older traditions. The end of the First Epistle to Timothy has become the locus classicus here. The author of this pseudepigraph claims Paul’s authority and ends his epistle by telling Timothy to ‘guard what has been entrusted to you’, and to avoid ‘profane babbling and the absurdities of so-called knowledge. By professing it some have deviated from the faith’ (1 Timothy 6:20–21). What has been entrusted is classified in ancient depositary law as paratheke, which denotes a good or an asset that is handed over to an individual or an institution with the legally binding condition that it be preserved undamaged, i.e. a deposit. Especially in Roman and Greek depositary law, the idea comes to the fore that the giving of a deposit establishes a relationship of trust between the depositor and the entity receiving the deposit, which finds its expression in a temporal contract. A transfer of this idea to spiritual goods and values is well documented. (Roloff 1988: 371)

Drawing on the authority of Paul, the author believes there to be a legal relationship between Paul and Timothy because the former has handed Timothy a deposit that he receives not as his own property, but as something that he has to guard faithfully. Paul has therefore deposited something for which the recipient must one day be accountable. The deposit is not completely identical with the gospel (see Steimer 1992), but the gospel is part of what Paul, according to the theology of the Pastoral epistles, left to the Church leaders whom he appointed. For, the gospel is ‘entrusted’ first of all to Paul himself (1 Timothy 1:11), and, by appointing Church leaders such as Timothy, he in turn passes on to them what has been entrusted to him. In doing so, he also passes on to them the obligation that he sees himself as being under – there is not ‘another’ gospel (Galatians 1:7). Paul feels himself bound in proclaiming the one

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gospel: ‘an obligation has been imposed on me, and woe to me if I do not preach it!’ (1 Corinthians 9:16). This obligation passes to Paul’s successors through the legal context of the paratheke. They have a duty to Paul, one that they can only fulfil by guarding the gospel that he has handed down. It is not difficult to imagine that the call to Timothy – depositum custodi! – became an oft-quoted warning in patristic theology to remain true to the faith that had been passed down. Irenaeus of Lyon (Adversus Haereses III 4:1) even describes the entire Church as a depositorium, as a place where a depositum must be kept safe and guarded. The ‘carefully introduced metaphor’ of the paratheke or the depositum was intended to express ‘the binding definition of tradition through its origins’ (Roloff 1988: 372). 2.3.3 Paraclete and Spirit: Teacher of All Truth With the increasing temporal distance from the historical Jesus, the need arose to reflect more not only on guarding the tradition, but also on making it dynamic so that the congregations could adapt to changing circumstances, be they cultural, political or geographical. This effort to understand the plenitude expressed in the human Jesus not only as completing, but also as developing, revelations is illustrated by the Gospel of John, which is also a recent New Testament text, and in particular by the Paraclete sayings that are often used in the context of doctrinal development (see Kothgasser 1969). In the valedictories described in the Gospel of John, Jesus promises his disciples the Paraclete.5 Who or what exactly this is intended to be is not clear. Jesus says he will ask the Father to ‘give you another Paraclete, to be with you always. The Spirit of truth, which the world cannot accept, because it neither sees nor knows it’ (John 14:16–17). From the viewpoint of the later dogmatic tradition, which makes a strict distinction between the Spirit as its own hypostasis and the Logos, it is easy to understand the Paraclete simply as the Holy Spirit – and thus as being distinct from the person of Jesus. But that is not clear in the corpus of John. Jesus does describe the Paraclete as the ‘Spirit of truth’ and the ‘holy Spirit’ (John 14:26), but promises ‘another’ (i.e. a second) Paraclete, which means that those whom he addresses must already have a point of reference: namely, Jesus himself, whom the First Epistle of John explicitly describes as a Paraclete (1 John 2:1). There is, 5

For a detailed interpretation of the Paraclete sayings, see Frey (2000: 179–222); Thyen (2007: 663–688).

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therefore, a fundamental continuity between Jesus the Paraclete present in the congregation, and the Spirit as the future Paraclete, who, like Jesus himself in the Gospel of John (John 5:37), is sent out by the Father – elsewhere, accompanied by the exalted Christ (John 16:7) – to teach the disciples ‘everything’ and ‘remind’ them of everything that Jesus had told them (John 14:26). The Paraclete therefore assumes from Jesus the responsibility for teaching, and in a certain sense does so even better and more comprehensively than Jesus himself: ‘it is better for you that I go. For if I do not go, the Paraclete will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you’ (John 16:7). The Johannine Jesus would have had even more to teach his disciples, but believes that they cannot bear so much at the present time. ‘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. He will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you’ (John 16:13–14). Jesus says of himself in the Gospel of John that he himself is the truth (John 14:6), but also promises the ‘Spirit of truth’, who will guide the congregation into ‘all truth’. The Paraclete will therefore continue and complete the work of Jesus in continuity with Jesus, because he too – like Jesus – will not speak on his own, but only proclaim what he hears, which is why the Father can act as guarantor for what the Spirit teaches (John 8:26). By assigning both Jesus and the Spirit a paracletic function, John tries to connect the unique and unparalleled nature of what was expressed in Jesus with the openness and incompleteness of this happening in the future. The distinction between the revelation given definitively and completely in Christ on the one hand, and the activity of the Spirit in the Church in introducing and explaining the entirety of truth on the other – this can give rise to a theologically sound justification a) for the nature of the theological tradition, and b) for a theological understanding of dogmatic development. (Blank 1964: 331 fn. 46)

The Spirit guarantees both the faithful guarding of the tradition, as well as its progressive unfolding. We should not forget, however, that the Biblical texts often arose from a dilemma that sought to deal with a changed situation in a congregation. These texts first mirror development, before they can then address this development reflexively. The Paraclete theology of the Johannine school is not simply a Jesuanic prediction of the phenomenon that would later be called dogmatic development; it is already an early-Christian reaction to this phenomenon avant la lettre. Whoever, like

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Paul, is firmly convinced that the return of Christ is imminent (1 Thessalonians 4:15) does not have many questions to ask, since ‘time is running out’ (1 Corinthians 7:29). A climate of heightened expectation of Jesus’ imminent return certainly did not require an elaborate theology of doctrinal development. It was the delay of this return that made reflections on doctrinal development necessary (see Hanson 1981: 37–39). Paul lived in the awareness that the gospel that had been given to him through a revelation of Christ (Galatians 1:11–12) and that he had received (1 Corinthians 15:3) is to be passed on uninterrupted, until the return of Christ, which Paul expects to see in his own lifetime (1 Thessalonians 4:15). Such an assumption of identity and continuity became much more difficult decades later, after the death of the eyewitnesses and of the first generation of Christians, and could no longer only be asserted by the author of the Gospel of John, but had to be shored up theologically. That was precisely the role of Paraclete theology. The Johannine school may have connected the awareness of the presence of the Spirit-Paraclete with the fact that it is also (and precisely) in the further development of the Jesus tradition that the word of Jesus relevant to the present comes to the fore; that, in spite of all discontinuity in linguistic form (and partly also in factual content), continuity with the word of Jesus is nevertheless preserved. Talk of the Spirit-Paraclete that developed in the Johannine school therefore forms an extremely efficient theological conception to cope theologically with the ever-widening temporal distance to the fundamental Christ event, and with the fundamental and inescapable break between the post-Easter period of the congregation and the work of the earthly Jesus. (Frey 2000: 162)

According to Frey, the starting-point for the notion of the Paraclete who ensured continuity and introduced the full truth was the perception of a ‘discontinuity’ between Jesus and the early Church, which moved further and further away in time from the historical Jesus. Not the other way round: for instance, a prior theory of continuity into which perceived changes could simply be fitted. We can conclude something fundamental here: namely, that theories of doctrinal development mostly result from necessity, since discontinuity is perceived where continuity should actually be, and this discrepancy results in the need to relate factual discontinuity and normative continuity to each other. This is exactly what theories of development do in seeking to deal with the unstable simultaneity of continuity and discontinuity.

3 How the Early Church Reflected on Doctrinal Continuity and Change

.       ‘As fundamental, wide-ranging and diverse as the contribution of the patristic epoch was to the history of dogma, so little was the process of doctrinal development reflected upon in its possibilities and limits, its forms and laws. Practice preceded theory’ (Fiedrowicz 2010: 329). However, the temporal primacy of practice does not mean from today’s point of view that the theology of the early Church made no contribution to a theory of dogmatic development. On the contrary, what is true of the Biblical texts is just as true of the early Fathers: namely, that the issue of dogmatic development, which came to a head in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, was alien to both in the intensity with which the issue is raised in the modern period with its awareness of discontinuities and of the need to explain them. Nevertheless, patristic theologians were also faced with the challenge of combining their loyalty to the origins of their religion with the desire to do justice to their time. Maurice Wiles (1967: 19) distinguishes three motives that led the early Church ‘along the path of doctrinal development’: first, the apologetic desire when faced with the inquiries of opponents to present the Christian faith plausibly, comprehensibly and rationally; second, the conflict within Christianity with socalled heretics, which necessitated a more precise and sharper formulation of the Church’s doctrine of faith; and, third, ‘the natural desire of some Christians to think out and to think through the implications of their faith as deeply and as fully as possible’.

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This chapter will bring together some scattered thoughts of patristic authors that are important for a theory of doctrinal development.1 The notion that doctrinal development is analogous to the natural growth of living beings, or that dogmatic development is based on the historical unfolding of a divine pedagogy, can be found again and again in the modern period, but the notion is actually based on patristic ideas. It was probably Vincent of Lérins, the Gallic monk of the fifth century to whom we have already referred several times, who produced the first elaborate theory of doctrinal development, and his approach will therefore be discussed in more detail.

.  ,      The factors shaping the formation of the New Testament also shaped the thinking of Christian authors of the first few centuries. There was on the one hand the conviction that the truth of God had already found its fullest and most perfect expression in Jesus Christ, and that it was therefore necessary to maintain doctrinal continuity with these origins. And, on the other, the notion that doing so also required the progressive development of doctrine. The motives outlined by Wiles – primarily, the conflicts over the right doctrine of faith ad intra, and the defence of Christianity ad extra – made it necessary to reformulate the Christian faith so that it appeared plausible against the background of the increasing temporal distance from Christ and the changing intellectual context in which Christ was thought about. The fact that the form in which Christ was thought about influenced how he was thought about largely escaped reflection, at least as far as the patristic authors were concerned. They were actually concerned only with expressing the same thing in a different way. For them, faith should be expressed in a new way without its original identity being affected, and without any substantive innovations being introduced. It was precisely this balancing act – saying things anew without saying new things – that was the main theological challenge. Thus, according to Origen (De principiis, Preface 1), ‘all who believe and are assured that grace and truth came through Jesus Christ, and who know Christ to be the truth, according to his saying, I am the truth, derive the knowledge which leads human beings to live a good and blessed life 1

The section draws on Fiedrowicz (2010); Milburn (1954); Söll (1971: 70–84); Wiles (1967).

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from no other source than from the very words and teaching of Christ’. Origen understands the teaching of Christ as not only what the historical Jesus passed on, but also the teaching of the prophets, whose words he interprets as the words of Christ by combining Platonic speculation on the Logos with prosopographical exegesis: ‘Christ, the Word of God, was in Moses and the prophets’. According to Origen (De principiis, Preface 2), though, the exact substance and meaning of Christ’s teaching is contested even among the faithful: a state of affairs that he makes the starting-point of his work. Since, however, ‘many of those who profess to believe in Christ differ not only in small and trivial matters, but even on great and important matters – such as concerning God or the Lord Jesus Christ or of the Holy Spirit’, it is ‘necessary first of all to lay down a definite line and clear rule regarding each of these matters’; the rule for distinguishing between true and false in the diversity of opinions that exist even within Christianity is ‘the ecclesiastical and apostolic tradition’. For Origen, the teaching of the apostles contains everything necessary for salvation. According to Origen, however, the soteriological sufficiency of the apostolic doctrine is not accompanied by an intellectual sufficiency. Even if the apostles ‘delivered’ doctrines ‘with utmost clarity to all believers’, they left the ‘grounds of their statements’ to be ‘inquired into by those who should merit the excellent gifts of the Spirit’ (De principiis, Preface 3). As an example of a doctrine that, although vouched for in revelation, nonetheless requires a deeper explanation and description, Origen cites the idea of the freedom of the rational soul. While Origen is certain that this soul is free and not subject to the laws of causal necessity, he thinks that, when it comes to the more precise structure of the soul, as well as its origins and emergence (of which there were competing theories in Middle Platonism), the apostles provide no answers whatsoever in their teaching, and that these questions are thus left to scholars to find the answers. In other words, while for Origen it is a fact that the central truths of faith are already laid down in revelation, the why, where and how remain a matter of intellectual endeavour that is given over to studiosiores, or the more educated among the faithful. What Origen intends with this intellectual task is not to develop the doctrine of faith in the sense of changing it, but instead to provide an ever deeper and more advanced understanding of it. This dialectic between the claim of Christianity that ‘it possesses an incomparable truth’ (Fiedrowicz 2000: 39) on the one hand, and its endeavour to justify this claim in a way that is both appropriate to the time and in accordance with its identity on the other, is a dialectic that can be found not only in Origen; it was actually at the heart of apologetic endeavours in the second and third century.

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With the increasing awareness of contemporary philosophy, which means in the language of later historiography above all Middle Platonic philosophy,2 this endeavour became in its twofold objective both increasingly successful and increasingly precarious: successful, because Christian authors managed to make their religion intellectually attractive, too; precarious, because the Platonic influence on Christianity also entailed a distancing from the language of the Bible and from the early-Christian tradition, thereby (and this became the object of dispute) threatening to transform the content of the doctrine. The twentieth century discussed this issue as the question of the ‘Hellenization of Christianity’. This means in a broader sense the way in which Christians dealt with ‘the norms of contemporary rationality and science, as well as with the institutional models’ of the Greek cultural domain; and, in a narrower and more precise sense, ‘the specific transformation of Alexandrian ideals of education and the scientific culture practised there by the theological reflections of ancient Christianity’ (Markschies 2009: 398–399, 416). Whether or not we wish to call it Hellenization, this transformation process bestowed intellectual value on Christianity on the one hand, while on the other leading it into an identity crisis in the so-called Arian controversy, which, paradoxically, it only escaped from by drawing on Platonic notions. Following the nous

2

‘Neo-Platonism’ usually denotes the form of Platonic thinking in late antiquity that was influenced by Plotinus, whereas ‘Middle Platonism’ denotes the approaches of the Platonists in late antiquity who either became established before Plotinus, or who, even if they lived after Plotinus, did not absorb his thinking. An important characteristic of Middle Platonism, and one reflected in the controversy over Arius, is for Jens Halfwassen (2015: 167) ‘nous theology’, which neo-Platonism no longer practised in like manner: ‘Remarkable after all is Proclus’ clear emphasis on the epochal significance of Plotinus for the historical development of Platonism. Proclus therefore sees the decisive turning-point that for us today marks the transition from Middle Platonism to neo-Platonism as lying in Plotinus’ renewal of Plato’s metaphysics in the Academy, i.e. of the theory of principles that derives the totality of being from the One as the absolute principle that justifies everything, and that itself neither needs nor is capable of justification. By renewing this metaphysics of the One, Plotinus succeeded in creating a unified and systemically founded interpretation of Plato’s philosophy, one that was also the first to unlock the true meaning of the Platonic dialogues. The Middle Platonists who preceded Plotinus, on the other hand, managed neither one nor the other, with their interpretation of Plato remaining largely experimental. Thus, Proclus does not simply assert the existence of a unified and uninterrupted tradition of Platonism from the Academy to Plotinus, but is also fully aware of the innovative character of Plotinus’ Platonism compared to the preceding Middle Platonism. But, historically quite rightly, he interprets the innovation of Platonism through Plotinus’ metaphysics of the One as the resumption of Plato’s henological philosophy of principles, which in Middle Platonism had very much receded into the background in favour of a nous theology oriented both to Plato’s Timaeus and to Xenocrates’.

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theology of Middle Platonism, the Alexandrian presbyter Arius sought to define the relationship of the pre-existent Logos that became human in Christ to God the Creator on the one hand, and to the created world on the other. In doing so, Arius assigned the Logos to a middle area between God and creation. The Son is ‘the perfect creation of God’, but not ‘like one of his creatures’; he is begotten, ‘but not like one of the begotten’ (cited in Ricken 1970: 85); he is divine, but not God. Arius thus transformed the often diffuse and subordinationist tendency of the apologists (according to which, the Son is subordinate to the Father in the history of salvation) into an ontological-ousiological definition, one that unambiguously identifies the Logos as not-God (see Marcus 1963: 171–173). Even though Arius’ position did not prevail (with this only becoming apparent after decades of struggle), it did provoke a response that had to be pitched at the same level of reasoning as Arianism itself: namely, at the Platonic and ontologicalousiological level of discussion. The same pattern that marked the formation of the New Testament canon in the conflict with Marcion thus emerges: where an old ambiguity is transformed into an apparently problematical new unambiguity, it is not enough to cleave the original ambiguity. Those opposing Arius, therefore, had to describe the relationship of the pre-existent Logos to God the Father in as precise a manner as Arius. This development, which culminated in the Council of Nicaea’s commitment to homoousios (Denzinger, No. 125), that is, the essential (not personal) identicalness of Father and pre-existent Logos, made contemporaries aware of the need for ever more sophisticated explanations to show that the creeds of the fourth century were in line with the faith of the first Christians. Reference ‘to the providential use of heresy to advance theological knowledge’, which is justified by the words of Paul (‘there have to be factions among you’ (1 Corinthians 11:19)), had formed a topos of patristic heresiology ‘since the earliest times’ (Fiedrowicz 2010: 327). But it now had to withstand an incredible weight of terminological innovations in the fourth century, with these innovations apparently serving only to conserve the old, but at the same time threatening what was to be conserved. Thus, Hilary of Poitiers (De Trinitate II 2) lamented: But we are forced by the sins of the heretics and blasphemers to deal with things which are not permitted to scale steep heights, to speak what is indescribable, to presume thoughts which have not been granted to us. And whilst we ought to fulfil only by faith what is commanded, to worship the Father, to give reverence to Him with the Son, to abound in the Holy Ghost, we are forced to stretch our humble language towards what is indescribable, we are forced to sin by the sin of others,

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so that what should have been contained in the piety of our minds is now exposed to the danger of human speech.

Hilary is aware that the reflexive and terminological unfolding of doctrine runs a certain risk: namely, that, when a person defends themselves against the errors of others, they can themselves err by saying more about the ineffable God than can actually be said, and thereby saying something wrong. It was of course not possible to interpret the difference between the autonomous, Platonic language and the language of the New Testament as constituting a substantial change; rather, this difference had to be defended as an advance that preserved identity or as organic development, with comparisons with natural processes being used to illustrate this. It was Basil of Caesarea who ‘disseminated the first analogy for the process of dogmatic progress’ (Söll 1971: 76), when he wrote to Eustathius of Sebaste: ‘For just as the seed, in developing, becomes larger instead of small, but is the same in itself, not changing in kind but being perfected in development, so I consider that also in me the same doctrine has been developed through progress’ (Basil: Epistula 223). Hieronymus refines this image in his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew by associating it with Jesus’ parable of the mustard seed (Matthew 13:31–32). For Hieronymus, the proclamation of the gospel, which began in such a small and inconspicuous way, has grown into a tree whose branches offered the birds a place to nest, with the many branches representing ‘the diverse kinds of dogmas’ (Hieronymus: Commentatorium in Matheum II 13), and the birds being the souls of the faithful. Another powerful analogy to illustrate dogmatic progress is the human body, with Vincent of Lérins (Commonitorium 23:4–9) writing that dogmatic progress takes place ratione corporis, that is, in the manner of the body: The growth of religion in the soul must be analogous to the growth of the body, which, though in process of years it is developed and attains its full size, yet remains still the same. There is a wide difference between the flower of youth and the maturity of age; yet they who were once young are still the same now that they have become old, insomuch that though the stature and outward form of the individual are changed, yet his nature is one and the same, his person is one and the same. An infant’s limbs are small, a young man’s large, yet the infant and the young man are the same. . . . In like manner, it behooves Christian doctrine to follow the same laws of progress, so as to be consolidated by years, enlarged by time, refined by age, and yet, withal, to continue uncorrupt and unadulterate, complete and perfect in all the measurement of its parts, and, so to speak, in all its proper members and senses, admitting no change, no waste of its distinctive property, no variation in its limits.

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These comments show both the potential and the problem of illustrating doctrinal development through analogies taken from the growth of the human body. Vincent’s image has on the one hand a dynamic that allows us to think of processes that he explicitly refers to as progress (profectus); on the other, though, it has a certain rigidity, since it excludes the fact that something new can be added in the process of growth and advancement. What is already there is simply unfolded – the arms of the child are small, and those of the adult are large, but the adult does not grow additional arms. Similarly, for Vincent, the Christian doctrine of faith is always the same ‘in all the measurement of its parts’, since from the beginning it was complete ‘in all its proper members’. However, the need to reflect on the issue of doctrinal development was fostered not only by Christology, but also by the dispute over the divinity of the Holy Spirit. The Council of Nicaea left aside the question of the personality and divine nature of the Spirit, and formulated a trinomial creed: it begins with ‘we believe’; its middle, Christological part contains numerous anti-Arian insertions; and its third part consists of only one sentence: ‘also in the Holy Spirit’ (Denzinger, No. 125). The later creed recognizing the Spirit as Lord (to kurion) and life-giver, as an entity worshipped and glorified with the Father and the Son, was an addition to the Nicene Creed made by the Council of Constantinople (Denzinger, No. 150); it stated not a homoousia, as the later systematization of the doctrine of the Trinity presupposed, but a homotimia. Theologians such as the Cappadocians, who on the one hand defended the fides nicaena against the Arians, but on the other stood up for the divinity of the Holy Spirit against the Pneumatomachi, were, therefore, forced to fight on two fronts. They had to show why the Nicene Creed was both binding (with regard to Christology) and requiring additions (with regard to pneumatology). ‘We can add nothing to the Creed of Nicaea’, said Basil of Caesarea (Epistula 258:2), ‘not even the slightest thing, except the glorification of the Holy Spirit, and this only because our fathers mentioned this topic incidentally, since the question regarding Him had not yet been raised at that time’. Basil is making an apparently trivial, but nonetheless significant, observation here: every issue belongs to its time, and cannot be arbitrarily transported to previous epochs. Put anachronistically, Basil distinguishes between contexts in which something is valid and contexts in which something is discovered. The Spirit has always been God, but that fact was only formulated in a binding creed in light of the debates of the fourth century, since the issue had not previously been deemed a problem. As uninteresting as this train of thought may seem, it does open

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up a perspective on the problem of doctrinal development that is hermeneutically useful: just as the answer given depends on the question posed, the formulation of a binding creed depends on the time in which it is written, and on the disputes to which it reacts. The unfolding of doctrine therefore seems to be inscribed with an undeniable measure of historical contingency – unless one circumvents this contingency through a supreme providence that employs heresies to help the eternal truth already recognized in heaven to break through on earth, too (see Frank 1988). But, if Christ really does represent the plenitude of revelation because he himself is God, then why did God not reveal himself so clearly that he would have been understood once and for all? Gregory of Nazianzus provides in his Orationes theologicae an answer here that ‘can only be found in this form in his work’ (Fiedrowicz 2010: 334): namely, that the Old Testament had proclaimed the Father ‘clearly’, but the Son only ‘less definitely’, whereas the New Testament had revealed the Son clearly, but had implied the Holy Spirit only obscurely. As Gregory explains (Orationes theologicae 31:26): It was dangerous for the Son to be preached openly when the Godhead of the Father was still unacknowledged. It was dangerous, too, for the Holy Spirit to be made (and here I use a rather rash expression) an extra burden, when the Son had not been received. It could mean men jeopardizing what did lie within their powers, as happens to those encumbered with a diet too strong for them or who gaze at sunlight with eyes yet too feeble for it.

For Gregory, Jesus had heeded this maxim when dealing with his disciples by revealing himself to them, while also telling them that there were still things that they could not yet bear, but which they would be introduced to by the Spirit of truth (John 16:12–13). ‘One of these truths’, writes Gregory, ‘I take to be the Godhead of the Holy Spirit’ (Orationes theologicae 31:27). For Gregory, revelation thus follows a pedagogical plan that gauges what can be imparted according to what the recipients of the message can bear. When the early Church still had to ‘digest’ the divinity of the Son, it would not have been able to cope with the doctrine of the divinity of the Holy Spirit, too. But, after Nicaea clearly formulated the divinity of the Son, and the Nicene Creed found itself after a long period of confusion in a period of consolidation in 380, the year that Gregory delivered his Orationes, God obviously saw the time as ripe to give clarity to the divinity of the Spirit, too. Even if this figure does not lead to an infinite regress for Gregory and cannot be stretched arbitrarily (since only ‘the Father, the Son and the

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Holy Spirit belong to a single divinity’, i.e. after the revelation of the Spirit as God, no further knowledge about the nature of God that is equally fundamental can be expected), it does offer an explanation for the phenomenon of doctrinal development: dogmatic progress is a consequence of divine pedagogy, and can be seen as analogous to the progress of a pupil, with the teacher being the Spirit promised in the Gospel of John who decides, according to God’s plan and the maturity of her pupils, which mystery is to be part of the curriculum at which point in time. This explanation has a different emphasis to the heresiological derivation of the necessity for doctrinal development. While arguing that doctrinal development in the sense of a more precise unfolding of what has always been believed is necessary to ward off false teachings emphasizes the defensive character of development, the pedagogical idea of such development foregrounds its positive aspect, with the Church thereby showing itself to be a listening and learning entity in contrast to the Spirit that leads the Church more deeply into the truth. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive: it is perfectly possible to claim that the more precise unfolding of the doctrine of faith is a reaction to heresies, and also that the Holy Spirit helps the congregation of true believers to understand itself in this process of unfolding. The anti-heretic thrust and divine pedagogy each represent an instance that emphasizes different viewpoints on the sources of doctrinal development. The meaning of the promised Spirit who will guide the disciples ‘to all truth’ (John 16:13) invited the Church Fathers to reflect on the issue of dogmatic progress, with Augustine providing in his lectures on the Gospel of John one of the most widely known interpretations of this passage. According to Augustine (In Iohannis evangelium tractatus 94:2), the Church’s ministry rests on two pillars: one internal and the other external to the human being, with the latter, though, also pursuing the goal of leading the listeners of its message from the outside to the inside. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit enables Jesus’ disciples to ‘bear testimony’ to Christ, while the Spirit ‘from within’ bears ‘testimony about Christ . . . among them’, that is, when the Spirit comes, writes Augustine, interpreting the words of Jesus in the first person, it will ‘bear testimony about me, so that you [i.e. the disciples] will not out of fear be silent about these things’, and ‘it will come about that you too bear testimony’. The Holy Spirit functions here as an inner teacher, one who, by being present in the soul of the human being, helps us to understand ever more deeply the God who revealed himself as a human being in Jesus Christ. But the Spirit is not only a teacher who offers knowledge, but also a comforter who gives

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courage. Both knowledge and courage come from within, and are necessary in providing the Christian proclamation with an external form. But why did the role of teacher and comforter that Jesus himself performed for his disciples have to pass to the Holy Spirit after Pentecost? Would it not have been better for Jesus to have guided the Christians himself, as he did with his disciples? Augustine interprets the words of the Johannine Jesus – ‘it is better for you that I go. For if I do not go, the Paraclete will not come to you’ (John 16:7) – in terms of the Platonic duality of spirit and flesh. The hierarchy of being leads from the material to the intelligible, and the path of knowledge therefore goes from the fleshly to the spiritual. Through the incarnation of the Son, God showed himself to humans in the flesh, and even in the lowliness of the servant’s form. ‘It is expedient to you’, Augustine (In Iohannis evangelium tractatus 94:4) says, putting words into Jesus’ mouth, that the form of a servant be taken away from you. I do indeed dwell among you, the Word made flesh, but I do not want you to love me still according to the flesh and, satisfied with this milk, to desire to be infants always. . . . If I do not remove the soft nutriments with which I have nourished you, you will not hunger for solid food; if you stick fast to flesh according to flesh, you will not have the full capacity for receiving the Spirit. . . . What, then, is ‘If I do not go, the Paraclete will not come to you’ [John 16:7], except, ‘You cannot receive the Spirit as long as you persist in knowing Christ according to the flesh’? And for this reason he who had now received the Spirit said ‘Even if we know Christ according to the flesh, but now we no longer know’ [2 Corinthians 5:16]. For indeed, he who spiritually knows the Word made flesh does not according to the flesh know even the flesh of Christ itself.

As the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ can thus be acknowledged and loved in two ways: in the flesh and in the spirit; in the direct encounter with the earthly Jesus, which is reserved for the first disciples, and in the realization of Christ through the Holy Spirit, to which all subsequent generations of Christians are pointed. Augustine considers the latter – the knowledge and love of Christ in the Spirit – to be superior, and draws on Pauline motifs to explain his evaluation, such as the distinction between people imprisoned in the flesh (psychics), to whom the wisdom of God can only be administered in the form of infant milk, and spirit-filled people (pneumatics), who can also tolerate solid food (1 Corinthians 3:1–3). Thus, for Augustine, the ascension of Jesus also has a gnoseological value, since it leads the Church from a fleshly to a spiritual vision, and thereby represents an advance in knowledge, since Father, Son and Spirit now live in a pneumatic form among human beings and can be recognized and loved by them spiritually.

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For Augustine, love is a striving that is closely related to the striving for knowledge. The Holy Spirit causes the believer to increase in that love, by which he both loves what is perceived and longs for what is to be perceived in such a way that he knows that even those things that he now to some extent perceives, he does not yet know as they are to be known in the life that neither eye has seen nor ear has heard nor has it entered in the heart of man. . . . Therefore, in the mind, that is, in the inner man, one grows in a certain kind of way, not only so that one may go from milk to solid food, but also so that one may more and more take solid food itself. But one does not grow in the expansion of size, but in the enlightenment of intellect; for in fact the solid food itself is intellectual light. Therefore that you may grow and may grasp him, and that you may grasp ever so much more and more as you grow more, you ought to see and hope to learn not from the teacher who fills your ears with sounds, that is, who by working from outside plants and waters, but from that one who gives increase. (In Iohannis evangelium tractatus 97:1)

The dwelling of the Holy Spirit within the human being creates a dynamic of loving and knowing, which provides an ever-deeper insight into the essence of God. Augustine constructs a rhetorically elegant dichotomy between the external (and, ultimately, always external) speech of God and inner testimony, which he understands as a gift of the Holy Spirit. While God is on everyone’s lips (on the lips of those who ask and those who answer, of those who praise and those who blaspheme), real knowledge of God can only flourish within, in the interaction between the Holy Spirit and the spiritual human being. However, Augustine also reflects on the testimonium externum, on the Church’s external testimony of faith written in language. He quotes the warning of the pastoral epistles to avoid ‘the profane chatter and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge’ (1 Timothy 6:20), but emphasizes that this is not a general reservation towards terminological innovation, but rather a rejection of unholy, or profane, innovations of a linguistic nature. ‘There are also novelties of words in perfect harmony with religious doctrine’, which Augustine illustrates by pointing to the word ‘Christians’, which was not coined by Jesus himself for his disciples, but first appeared as a term in Antioch (see Acts 11:26), and to the term homoousios, a Christological neologism of the fourth century. Whether a new word is permitted or deemed unholy is for Augustine a question of whether what is denoted by a ‘new name’ adequately describes what already existed before that name and was merely called something else or was unnamed: for, ‘the realities themselves existed even before their names and are certified by the truth of religion’ (In Iohannis evangelium tractatus

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97:4). In modern epistemological terms, Augustine is formulating here a realistic theory of knowledge: a statement is true if what it claims corresponds to the objective reality to which the statement refers. The truth content of a statement thus depends on whether the proposition, that is, the fact claimed to be true in the statement, corresponds at the ontological level to what-is. A statement is true, in other words, if the what-is that it denotes in a linguistic form corresponds to the what-is that it claims to be at the ontological level. For Augustine, the homoousios of the Council of Nicaea is merely a new linguistic form to express what had always been the case at the ontological level. Doctrinal development could therefore be seen as the improvement of the Church’s skills in language: what is plain and simple is expressed with ever more precision. The words may change, but the substance remains the same. ‘Likewise against the ungodliness of the Arian heretics they instituted a new name, the Homoousion of the Father, but they did not signify a new reality by such a name; for they called Homoousion this which is “I and the Father, we are one thing” namely, of one and the same substance’ (In Iohannis evangelium tractatus 97:4). Thus, for Augustine, orthodoxy is not bound to a fixed linguistic code, the violation of which amounts to heresy. His concern is with substance and not with words. The terminological leeway that Augustine opens up is vast.

. ‘, ,  ’:         É  The statements made by patristic theologians on the issue of doctrinal development are ‘rare, brief and context-dependent’. With one exception: Vincent of Lérins, who was ‘the first to pose the question of doctrinal development in the Church explicitly, and to provide a nuanced answer to the question. His extensive and profound reflections on the issue allow us to see Vincent as the first theorist of dogmatic development’ (Fiedrowicz 2011: 114). According to Vincent himself, he wrote the text that would later become known as the Commonitorium under the pseudonym Peregrinus three years after the Council of Ephesus, that is, in 434. This is important because Vincent was then able to look back on the Arian turmoil of the fourth century and on the decades following the Council of Nicaea from a largely stable and clear perspective. Equally important is that Vincent lived as a monk on the island of Lérins in the Mediterranean, since this location may explain why Vincent’s work was read in the context of the conflicts that Gallic monasticism had with Augustine’s radicalized doctrine of grace, and why his Commonitorium has been interpreted as an anti-Augustine

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text, which in turn might explain why Vincent was not read in the Middle Ages (see Söll 1971: 16). Indeed, it was only in the sixteenth century that his writings began to be read again, and the influence that they have, even today, on the language of theology cannot be overestimated.

3.3.1 The Criteria of the Vincentian Canon and the Problems with These Criteria Vincent’s work is so fertile from the point of view of a theory of doctrinal development, because he explicitly assumes doctrinal ‘progress’ (profectus), which he nonetheless strictly distinguishes from doctrinal alteration (permutatio) (Commonitorium 23:1). In order to distinguish legitimate progress from illegitimate alteration, Vincent develops a criteriology of doctrinal development. It is striking how vehement Vincent is in his defence of the idea of progress: only those ‘envious of men, so full of hatred to God’, he says, can deny the reality of progress. For Vincent, profectus means ‘that the subject be enlarged in itself’, while permutatio means ‘that it be transformed into something else’ (Commonitorium 23:2). This choice of terms seems reasonable, but is in fact also problematical, since every instance of progress also, of course, implies transformation and with it a certain degree of change, otherwise there would be stagnation. But Vincent is seeking to point out that there are developments that preserve identity, which he calls profectus, and changes in which the old is not contained in, but rather replaced by, the new, which he terms permutatio. The task of the Church community is to prevent such a permutatio without thereby obstructing a profectus. Vincent asks who might be Timothy today, who was told to ‘guard what has been entrusted to you’ and to avoid ‘profane babbling and the absurdities of so-called knowledge’ (1 Timothy 6:20). He interprets the entire Church and the corpus praepositorum, that is, the body of overseers and, above all, of bishops, as being like Timothy, who wandered through history and who had to act according to the advice of his teachers. For Vincent, administering the deposit entrusted to the Church and especially to its bishops has both a negative and a positive dimension. Negative, because those guarding the deposit of faith should be aware that they themselves are not the originator and creator of the faith, that is, that they are guarding a good that is not their own: What is ‘The deposit’? That which has been entrusted to you, not that which you have yourself devised: a matter not of wit, but of learning; not of private adoption,

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but of public tradition; a matter brought to you, not put forth by you, wherein you are bound to be not an author but a keeper, not a teacher but a disciple, not a leader but a follower. (Commonitorium 22:4)

The deposit of faith is on the one hand unavailable: a permutatio is not permitted to its administrators. For faith to undergo a profectus, however, human activity is certainly required, and Vincent illustrates this through the figure of Bezalel. According to the Old Testament, Bezalel is the master craftsman who carries out the precise instructions given to Moses by God to build his tabernacle. Filled ‘with a divine spirit of skill and understanding and knowledge in every craft’ (Exodus 31:3), Bezalel builds the tabernacle commissioned by the Lord and furnishes its interior according to the most precise descriptions of the divine plan. Marginal though his role in the Old Testament is, Bezalel serves Vincent as a model of how to unite human skill and creativity on the one hand, and the pedantic fidelity to God’s command and will on the other. ‘Oh, Timothy’, Vincent writes, addressing the bishops, writers of tracts, and teachers, be thou a Bezalel of the spiritual tabernacle, engrave the precious gems of divine doctrine, fit them in accurately, adorn them skillfully, add splendor, grace, beauty. Let that which formerly was believed, though imperfectly apprehended, as expounded by thee be clearly understood. Let posterity welcome, understood through thy exposition, what antiquity venerated without understanding. Yet teach still the same truths which thou hast learnt, so that though thou speakest after a new fashion, what thou speakest may not be new. (Commonitorium 22:7)

Teachers of the faith thus participate in building the tabernaculum spirituale by taking what God announced in his revelation and giving it a comprehensible form: namely, the form of dogma, which is intended to enable people to understand more clearly what Christians have always believed obscurely. This gives the freedom to say things anew, but not to teach anything new. To illustrate this identity that develops and yet remains itself, Vincent draws on the analogy already mentioned of how the body grows. Although the body of the young person differs significantly from that of the old person, the latter remains how they were as a child; ‘though the stature and outward form of the individual are changed, yet his nature is one and the same, his person is one and the same’ (Commonitorium 23:5). In like manner, Christian doctrine follows the ‘laws of progress’ (leges profectus) and is ‘consolidated by years, enlarged by time, refined by age’, but nevertheless remains ‘uncorrupt’ and ‘unadulterate’ (Commonitorium 23:9), which is the reason that doctrine increases in ‘proof, illustration, definiteness’, while preserving its eternal

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‘completeness’, ‘integrity’ and ‘characteristic properties’ (Commonitorium 23:13). In order to distinguish the required profectus from an illegitimate permutatio, Vincent developed a criteriology that was designed to show how ‘a sure and so to speak universal rule’ can distinguish ‘the truth of the Catholic faith from the falsehood of heretical pravity’: ‘first, by the authority of the Divine Law, and then, by the Tradition of the Catholic Church’ (Commonitorium 2:1). By the former, Vincent understands the Bible, which means that for him there are two criteria by which every doctrine has to prove its orthodoxy: namely, scripture and tradition. Scripture contains the entire doctrine of faith in a complete form; it is perfect and ad omnia satis, but nonetheless ambiguous in its possible interpretations, which Vincent sees not as a flaw but as an expression of its depth (Commonitorium 2:2–3). For Vincent, this depth of meaning makes it necessary to draw on a criterion of interpretation that is outside scripture: ‘the standard of Ecclesiastical and Catholic interpretation’ (Commonitorium 2:4). For Vincent, the Church has an undefined ‘understanding’ of what the right doctrine is. But what criteria can be used to determine unequivocally this criterion that is designed to standardize scriptural interpretation? All possible care must be taken in the Church to ‘hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all. For that is truly and in the strictest sense “Catholic”’ (Commonitorium 2:5). Ubique, semper et ab omnibus – universality, antiquity, consensus, are for Vincent what characterize Catholic doctrine. Vincent uses various examples to demonstrate how Catholic doctrine can be distinguished from heresies. He begins with Donatism. During and immediately after the end of the Diocletianic persecution, the Church faced the question at the beginning of the fourth century of how to deal with lapsed Christians and traditores who had handed over sacred objects or holy texts. This problem was exacerbated when clerics were themselves guilty of such offences: should they retain their standing and their authority in the Church? There had been since the days of Cyprian of Carthage a theological current in North Africa that made the validity of the sacraments dependent on their being administered within the Church congregation and in full accordance with Church creed. Thus, salus extra ecclesiam non est (Cyprian: Epistula 73 XXI:2) – there is no salvation outside the Church, since the Church is the only place of salvation. Heretics, that is, persons who held positions opposite to the Church’s doctrine, and apostates, that is, persons who had fallen away from the Church, could no longer have a salvific effect when it came to the

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sacraments (e.g. through performing a baptism). Although Cyprian’s attitude did not prevail across the whole Church in the third century, its logic came into its own in the fourth century when theology dealt with the Diocletianic persecution (see Kriegbaum 1986). The North African Church split in 309, when Caecilian, a deacon close to the bishop Mensurius (who was accused of being a traditor) was nominated, with the help of bishop Felix of Aptunga (also regarded as a traditor), as bishop of Carthage in succession to Mensurius. The Donatist group, named after the bishop Donatus, established a parallel structure, and saw itself as the true Church, claiming that neither baptisms nor ordinations performed by the main Church were valid if traditores were involved. Donatism had little impact outside Africa. The Roman bishop Miltiades and several synods (e.g. in Arles in 314) condemned Donatism (Denzinger, No. 123). The emperors who came after Constantine followed suit in principle, but in practice tolerated the Donatist Church for political reasons until the beginning of the fifth century, when it was finally officially declared heretical by Emperor Honorius in 405. This, together with the theological conflicts that came to a climax at the Conference of Carthage in 411, led to its marginalization (see Hogrefe 2009: 270–329). Vincent looked back at these events from a distance of almost two decades and from a perspective in which the Donatists were also in a minority position in North Africa and were ostracized both by the state and within the Church itself. In purely numerical terms, Vincent can thus easily distinguish between a renegade, Donatist sect on the one hand, and the universality of the victorious, Catholic mainstream Church on the other. Ignoring the fact that the Donatists enjoyed a certain degree of dominance and strength in Africa for a period of time, he projects this situation back onto all stages of the conflict, which is the reason that he can use the rejection of Donatist doctrines as a prime example to show how a doctrine’s lack of universality exposes its heretical nature and ultimately undermines it. The Christians of North Africa who belonged to the mainstream Catholic Church on the other hand provide an example for Vincent of how ‘the soundness of the whole body should be preferred before the madness of one, or at most of a few’ (Commonitorium 4:2). Fiedrowicz stresses that the three characteristics – ubique, semper et ab omnibus – are for Vincent criteria that should be fulfilled successively and not necessarily simultaneously. Thus, if the first criterion already produces a clear result, then this should suffice. ‘Where the universal character of the current faith of the Church possesses such evidence’, as Vincent believes there to be in the conflict with the Donatists, then ‘it is not

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necessary to appeal to antiquity in order to find there an attestation of the doctrine under question’; but, if ‘the universal character of a certain doctrine is not evident, then it is necessary to move to the second criterion, antiquitas, i.e. the tradition of the past’ (2011: 83). Vincent sees this necessity in the conflict with Arianism, whose ‘poison had infected not an insignificant portion of the Church but almost the whole world’ (Commonitorium 4:3). The doctrine of Arius had by no means been eliminated with the homoousios of the Council of Nicaea, that is, with the creed that the Son is of the same essence as the Father. From 328, Emperor Constantine, without whom this Council would never have taken place and who initially enforced the decisions made at Nicaea, took an anti-Nicene turn. While bishops who rejected the Nicene Creed or its anathematisms were allowed to return from exile, bishops who supported the Creed, such as Athanasius of Alexandria, were deposed at the First Synod of Tyre of 335. The anti-Nicene faction gained the upper hand in the episcopate of the East, a turn of events that was viewed critically in the West. This was not only because of the West’s formal loyalty to the decisions of the Nicene Council, which were still unknown in some parts of the Western half of the empire, such as Gaul, decades after the Council (see Ulrich 1994: 136–158); it was also because of theological and legal reservations concerning the doctrine and actions of the anti-Nicene faction. For example, a synod in Rome declared in 340 that the decisions on expulsion that the Synod of Tyre had made were unlawful; this was then overturned at the Synod of Antioch in 341, with a Roman synod then affirming in turn that larger synods could overrule the decisions of smaller synods, and that it was above all the three apostolic seats of Rome, Antioch and Alexandria that could settle important matters not autonomously but in coordination with each other. Attempts at the Synod of Serdica to settle the differences after the death of Emperor Constantine and the division of the empire between his sons Constantius II and Constans failed. After the restoration of imperial unity, Constantius II made a further attempt to resolve the conflict by calling a double synod, which met in 359 in Seleucia in the East and in Rimini in the West. This did not resolve the dispute, however, but actually doubled it, since from this double synod emerged four parties. The extreme poles were represented by the Homoousians, that is, the followers of the Nicene Creed, and the Anomoeans, the classical Arians. Between these were the Homoiousians, who believed that the Logos had a similar, though not identical, essence as the Father, and who also failed to gain the ascendancy, and the Homoians, who adhered to the

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formula asserted under imperial pressure, according to which the Son was ‘similar to the Father according to scripture’ – that is, they preferred language rules that circumnavigated all dangers and omitted the concept of being. It was only with the rule of Emperor Julian the Apostate, who, in his attempts to re-paganize the empire, and from a lack of interest in Christian theological disputes as well as from political calculation, allowed pro-Nicene bishops to return from exile in order to foster confusion in the Church, that the Homoousian current was able to establish itself. This current was in turn supported by Julian’s successor in the West, Valentinian, while the Eastern Emperor Valens continued his adherence to the Homoian current of Seleucia-Rimini. With the emperors Gratian in the West and Theodosius in the East, the Church slowly re-established unity (at least within the Roman Empire). The Church was tired of the many formulas and factions that had formed, and returned to the Nicene Creed, which was now put into effect once more and enforced by the emperor. Several synods took place between 379 and 382 (including the Synod of Constantinople in 381, which would later be considered the second ecumenical council), with these confirming the Nicene Creed (see Drecoll 1996: 1–20; Schatz 2008: 36–44). For Vincent, this entangled history of the Nicene Creed, which he regarded as the true creed, meant that the first criterion of his Canon – namely, synchronous universality, which he believed could unmask Donatism as a false doctrine once and for all – could not be easily applied to the conflict with Arianism. For, there were periods in the fourth century when, and especially in the East, pro-Nicene bishops (whom Vincent deemed the only orthodox bishops) were in an apparently hopeless minority position. ‘The whole world groaned, and was astonished to find itself Arian’, according to Jerome (Altercatio Luciferiani et Orthodoxi 19). Since the criterion of universality could not be used, Vincent had recourse to the second criterion: antiquitas, that is, the age of a doctrine, which is intended to show what has always been believed. The Arian doctrine is a novel dogma, argues Vincent (Commonitorium 4:4), a profane innovation that has replaced ‘heavenly doctrine’ with ‘human superstition’, and ‘subverted well-established antiquity by wicked novelty’; the Arians have ‘set at naught’ the ‘institutions of former ages’, rescinded ‘the decrees of our fathers’, and ‘torn to pieces’ the determinations of our ancestors (Commonitorium 4:7). For Vincent, the Nicene Creed, on the other hand, which states that the Logos is of the same essence as the Father, expresses the old and the true, and what the Church has believed from the very beginning.

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Here, too, it becomes clear that, from a position of retrospective clarity, Vincent reconstructs the past in a way that stresses the absence of ambiguity. As already shown, there are in the New Testament forms of pre-existence Christology that are partly of pre-Pauline origin (e.g. Philippians 2:5–11), or that explicitly denote the Logos as God (John 1:1); but it is nevertheless problematical to read the homoousios of the Nicene Creed into the Biblical texts and to pass on what it says in ontological terminology simply as the older creed that predates that of Arius. The Christology of the first few centuries, including that of important theologians such as Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria and Origen, was shaped by a way of thinking that can be accurately characterized by the working concept of subordinationism. It is important to distinguish here between pre-Arian subordinationism, which was considered legitimate and orthodox in its time and which argued, above all, in terms of salvific history and economy, and Arian subordinationism, which took ontological-ousiological paths (see Marcus 1963: 171–173). The proNicene Fathers saw in the latter a distortion of the Church’s faith in Christ, which they opposed, in line with the challenge posed by Arius, also at an ontological-ousiological level through their homoousios. But it is anachronistic to project this level of argumentation that theological discussion had attained at the beginning of the fourth century onto the Bible, and to claim that what the Nicene Creed proclaimed is what the Church had always implicitly believed. As for the third criterion, if universality and antiquity do not yield a clear result, then, according to Vincent, it is necessary to seek the consensus of the Church. He sees the ideal case of such consensus in a concilium universale, in which ‘the decrees, if such there be, of an ancient General Council’ will be preferred to ‘the rashness and ignorance of a few’ (Commonitorium 3:3). Vincent recognizes only one Council as satisfying this requirement: the Nicene Council. The Council of Constantinople (381), later regarded as the second ecumenical council, initially saw itself only as confirming the fides Nicaena after decades of bitter dispute, and what formal standing Vincent conceded to the recent Council of Ephesus (431) is not clear – he recognized its decisions and took an anti-Nestorian position, but seemed to interpret the Council of Ephesus only as a subaltern continuation of the Council of Nicaea (see Sieben 1979: 158–159). But Vincent saw the latter as a clear criterion that could have shown participants even in the turbulences of the mid-fourth century that the Homoousians – and only they – were right: it was only their creed that manifested ‘the Ancient Church’, not ‘a part’, but ‘the whole body’; it was

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only they who adhered to ‘the decrees and definitions of the universal priesthood of Holy Church, the heirs of Apostolic and Catholic truth’; and only they who ‘chose rather to deliver up themselves than to betray the faith of universality and antiquity’ (Commonitorium 5:5–6). Because a universal council was rare, if not unique, Vincent extended the criterion of consensus from the synchronous level, which emerged through a council decision, to a diachronic level. If some new question should arise on which no such decision has been given, they should then have recourse to the opinions of the holy Fathers, of those at least, who, each in his own time and place, remaining in the unity of communion and of the faith, were accepted as approved masters; and whatsoever these may be found to have held, with one mind and with one consent, this ought to be accounted the true and Catholic doctrine of the Church, without any doubt or scruple. (Commonitorium 29:6)

Vincent believed that, even though living at different times, the orthodox Fathers were connected to one another by a uniform doctrine. When deviating from this consensus, they merely represented occult and private opinions of less importance, and no longer represented the faith of the whole Church. Vincent seems to have been aware of the methodological difficulty of applying such a criterion, and therefore emphasized that the Fathers should not be involved in every ‘little question’, in every quaestiuncula, but should intervene only if the first two criteria – universalitas and antiquitas – do not produce a clear result and there is no consensus in the form of a general council. As with the argument of universality and antiquity, there is a critical objection to be made regarding the criterion of consensus, namely, that it presupposes a clarity that can only be achieved in retrospect. To identify the Nicene Creed with the sealed scroll from the Book of Revelation, and to regard a creed that deviates from this as an outrageous breach of the seven seals (Revelation 5:1–5), as Ambrose of Milan does in his text addressed to Emperor Gratian, towards the end of the post-Nicene turmoil, a text that Vincent referred to approvingly some fifty years later (see Ambrose: De fide ad Gratianum III 15:128), required a temporal and reflective distance that the participants simply could not have had in the first few years after Nicaea. The Council of Nicaea was unprecedented in several respects: with its 318 Fathers, it was the largest synod to date; it was the first to take place at the invitation and under the dominance of the emperor; and it was the first council that not only excluded those branded as heretics, which had already been synodal practice, but that also laid down the right faith in writing in its

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own Creed. Decades passed before this historically unique event was given a theologically unique validity. Hilary of Poitiers, for instance, was a fervent defender of the faith proclaimed in Nicaea, but, even after his exile, he refused to grant the Council of Nicaea a singular and thus unsurpassable standing in his De synodis, which was written in around 358. He did not see the post-Nicene councils as competing with Nicaea, but as expressing a lasting ‘quest for truth’ in the Church, which meant that the fides Nicaena ‘is in a certain sense outdated or at least not of a higher rank than the councils that followed’ (Sieben 1979: 202). Hilary (De synodis 27:63) praised the bishops of Gaul as being blessed in the Lord, because – more than thirty years after the Council of Nicaea – they did not yet know any written Creed (and thus also not the Nicene Creed). It was not until the last third of the fourth century that this situation shifted in favour of the Council of Nicaea, which now became the unavoidable milestone of orthodoxy and thus also the touchstone of every theological approach. In the conflicts of the fifth century between Cyril and Nestorius, which constituted the temporal context in which Vincent wrote his Commonitorium, it was no longer a question of who was for or against the Nicene Creed, but of who correctly interpreted it as the correct and true faith. ‘Both sides argue not only with scriptural texts (which goes without saying), but also with the fides Nicaena in their hand’ (Sieben 1979: 212). Nestorius (Epistula ad Caelestinum I) initially withheld the title of theotokos from Mary because it had not been mentioned at the Council of Nicaea, whereas Cyril propagated this title because Nicaea had taught that the one born of the Virgin Mary is essentially God, which is the reason that the Virgin must be addressed as the bearer of God. Given this situation, it is no surprise that Vincent should have also assumed that the orthodoxy of a doctrine could be proven by its conformity with the universal Council of Nicaea. However, Vincent in fact presupposes an idea of the Council that did not yet exist in this form, and that even theologians (such as Hilary of Poitiers) who defended the Nicene Creed in substance had not yet supported in theory. To bestow a criteriological function on the Council of Nicaea presupposes a temporal distance and a retrospective position of clarity that the parties in the Arian dispute simply could not yet have had in the midfourth century. The second part of the criterion of consensus, that is, the appeal to the orthodox Fathers, is similarly open, for the Arians could also have drawn not only on Biblical passages that were open to being interpreted as supporting subordinationism, but also on Fathers who represented subordinationist positions, who were pre-Nicene, and who were regarded in their time as orthodox. Of course, neither Justin Martyr nor Clement of

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Alexandria were Arians, but nor were they Homoousians. Rather, the theological questions that Arius raised, and the philosophical tools that he used to answer them, belonged very much to the fourth century. It was not enough simply to draw on previous epochs, be it in the form of Biblical texts or pre-Nicene Fathers, to reject Arianism as illegitimate. Ultimately, the three features that Vincent identifies to distinguish an instance of progress that is justified from changes that are problematical fail in their criteriological function. For, wise heresies such as Arianism would claim to be just as able to call on the universality, the antiquity and the consensus of the Church as the faction that imposed itself as orthodox retrospectively, and that was then able to determine what exactly constituted heresy. The history of Arianism is the best example. In the mid-fourth century, the Nicene faction could point just as little to the universality of their doctrines as Arius. Arius also had good arguments on his side in subordinationist scriptural passages and through the works of several preNicene Fathers. And linking the consensus of the Church to the uniqueness of the Council of Nicaea was something that was only possible retrospectively, once the Council had indeed been identified as unique. Vincent’s criteria thus fail in their aspiration to show us ‘the safe haven of truth, in which we can be calm during the dispute between opinions’ (Gengler 1883: 592; my emphasis). They can explain why the haven chosen is the right one after the dispute, once the situation has become clearer; but they cannot point criteriologically to the haven in the fog of dispute, since the features that Vincent claims for orthodoxy can be claimed just as well for heterodoxy. Thus, there is a certain truth to the criticism that Sieben makes of Vincent, namely, that he held the ‘naive, impractical conviction that one could solve for all time the difficult problem of distinguishing between heresy and orthodoxy by observing a “rule”’ (1979: 169). This criticism is not designed to belittle Vincent’s value and standing. On the contrary, his explicit recognition of the existence of theological progress and his attempt to present a precise criteriology that distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate developments were groundbreaking and, in terms of their awareness of the problem, ‘unique’ for their time (Harnack 1897: 203, fn. 1). We should remember this in the light of modern criticisms of Vincent. 3.3.2 Appropriating, Criticizing and Saving the Honour of Vincent To assess the contribution made by Vincent, we need to move forward in time a little. Between the last mention in the work of Gennadius of Massilia

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(470/480) in the late antiquity and the first printed edition of the Commonitorium in 1528, ‘centuries of silence reigned’ over Vincent’s text (Fiedrowicz 2011: 125). But the rediscovery of Vincent in the early-modern period led to a heated theological controversy concerning his work. Then, in the nineteenth century, the magisterium also turned its attention to Vincent and to the concept of dogma that he had shaped. For example, in the bull Ineffabilis Deus (1854), which elevated the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception to the level of dogma, Pius IX made reference to Vincent’s statement that the ‘ancient doctrines of heavenly philosophy should, as time goes on, be cared for, smoothed, polished; but not that they should be changed, not that they should be maimed, not that they should be mutilated’ (Commonitorium 23:13), so that a growth ‘within the same dogma, in the same sense and the same meaning’ can proceed (Denzinger, No. 2802). For reasons not mentioned, the Pope deems this to be the case in the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. That Vincent’s rule fails in its objective is demonstrated by the fact that he could also be invoked by those opposed to defining the Immaculate Conception as dogma. In 1849, Pius IX, then in Gaeta where he had had to flee after uprisings in Rome, contacted the episcopate to ask it to organize a vote that would clarify whether the Holy See should proclaim the doctrine of the immaculata conceptio, which until then had only been deemed a pia sententia, as dogma. The response of the German-speaking bishops, for instance, was mostly, and sometimes vehemently, negative, with only the dioceses of Passau, Rottenburg, Würzburg and Linz giving their unreserved support. Opponents referred, according to a vote from Bamberg, ‘to the rule of St. Vincent of Lérins . . . in which can be seen an obstacle to defining pious faith as dogma’ (Gruber 1970: 32). Thus, not only did many German bishops and theologians deem defining this doctrine as dogma to be temporally inopportune; they also deemed the doctrine to be indefinable objectively, that is, not capable of being defined as dogma at all, and also because the doctrine could not be shown to be a legitimate profectus in line with Vincent’s rule. Something similar can be found in the discussions surrounding the First Vatican Council: like Pius IX in Ineffabilis Deus, the Council refers in Dei Filius to the same formulation from Vincent (Denzinger, No. 3020). But opinions divide again when it comes to applying Vincent’s rule to the question of the primacy of jurisdiction and of papal infallibility. The Council’s pro-infallibility majority believed that Vincent was not an obstacle to turning this doctrine into dogma, while its anti-infallibility minority (whose most theologically prominent spokesperson was Ignaz von Döllinger, for whom Vincent ‘played a central role’

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(Neuner 1979: 23)) claimed that dogmatizing the doctrine was incompatible with the Canon of Vincent. In the end, it was the magisterium’s favoured reading of Vincent that prevailed, with Vincent’s ideas thereby being integrated, at least as an abstract formula, into the neo-scholastic conception of theology (see Diekamp 1930: 19). This in turn provoked late but vehement counterreactions from those (like the young Joseph Ratzinger) who opposed neoscholasticism and demanded a new beginning in theology, with Ratzinger accusing Vincent of developing an ‘unhistorical concept of tradition’ in ‘antithesis to the late Augustine’: The semper-ubique-ab omnibus with which the semipelagian Vincent defined the tradition meant not only the ingenious rejection of the Augustinian unfolding of the Pauline approach, but at the same time (as we will see) a re-bending of the dynamic concept of development of the paternal era into an unhistorical rigidity, which, since the rediscovery of Vincent at the end of the Middle Ages, has become a serious burden on the concept of tradition and a barrier to understanding Christianity historically. (1966: 9)

The sharpness of Ratzinger’s criticism can probably be explained in the light of Vincent’s appropriation by neo-scholasticism. As a result of his concept of revelation, Ratzinger’s own approach to dogmatic development is extremely critical of Vincent’s. Despite the failure of his aim to state clear criteria for the profectus of doctrine, Vincent does not deserve the negative reputation that his appropriation by neo-scholasticism has given him. This becomes apparent if we consider a criticism that the Bamberg theologian Adam Gengler, who is largely forgotten today, levelled at Vincent in his 1833 essay ‘On the rule of Vincent of Lérins’: But now, if an advance takes place, if Christianity really is subject to change in the course of time, and has in its own interests to be subject to its organic development, how can one, in the conflict of opinions of any time (a conflict which is a condition of development), take into account the faith of prehistoric times in such a way that one presupposes, for instance, that in tradition one will find the twofold answer to the controversial question? For, if it is a matter of progress in development, then the same cannot be found again in antiquity that is supposed to be progress; otherwise, progress would not be such! (Gengler 1833: 591)

Gengler believes that progress – profectus – is really only progress if it is not already contained completely in what has been passed down. Otherwise, the new would merely be a modulation of the old, with the latter having

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within it a predetermined programme that simply runs determinatively over the course of time. For Gengler, on the other hand, tradition does not provide a ‘single answer’ to all questions, and there is therefore an unavoidable factor of contingency in the development of Church doctrine. This problem has already been mentioned, and I will return to it again later. However, Gengler does not diagnose the problem (namely, that Vincent’s rule failed at least in its criteriological objective) without also suggesting a solution. According to Gengler, the ‘deficiency of Vincent’s rule’ lies ‘in the fact that it refers us to our direct individual knowledge . . . and that it does not lead us instead to an external authority that complements and expands our direct knowledge’ (1833: 587). The decisive point of criticism is therefore that Vincent trusts the rational scrutiny of the individual to decide whether a doctrine represents a legitimate advance or not. This is after all the aim of his Commonitorium: namely, to discover ‘how and by what sure and so to speak universal rule I may be able to distinguish the truth of Catholic faith from the falsehood of heretical pravity’ (Commonitorium 2:1). How great Vincent’s methodological optimism was that he could make dogmatic development the subject of rational and discursive clarification is reflected in Gengler’s criticism that Vincent’s approach is far too subjective and, although he explicitly includes Church authority, far too loosely linked to authority. In Gengler’s judgment, Vincent is naive if he thinks that the individual could decide which development is legitimate by their own use of reason. Gengler, therefore, supplements what he calls Vincent’s ‘inner’ rule, that is, a rule based purely on reason, with an ‘outer rule’, one that operates beyond individual judgment. It is a rule by which we can be sure of the truth, with this external rule consisting essentially in the fact that, when there is an opposition of opinions that has arisen in the Church itself, and that itself furthers the development of Christian consciousness in the Church, we always submit ourselves to the guidance of legitimate authority constituted in the Church. – That is the rule by which we deal with every conflict of opinions, and by which we can safely attain the truth at any time. This rule – it is nothing other than the Catholic principle of faith itself, in its most complete outcome! (Gengler 1833: 594–595)

Because the reason of the individual is ultimately incapable of making a judgment about legitimate developments in the Church, it has to be standardized by the authority of Church officials. According to Gengler, consulting this authority means that we can ‘safely attain the truth at any time’. Vincent, on the other hand, did not question Church authority, but

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nevertheless regarded dogmatic development as something that rational people who were not Church officials could also discuss. Due to this methodological optimism, which makes the problem of dogmatic development open to rational discussion in the first place, all thinkers who are not the pope or a bishop are in Vincent’s debt, even if they do not consider the solution that he offers to be sustainable.

4 Discussions in the Middle Ages on Changes to the Unchanging Faith

. ‘     ’? The millennium that stretched approximately from the year 500 to the year 1500, and that we call the Middle Ages, is marked by a paradox. There was on the one hand an aversion among theologians to the idea of the new, and on the other the development of what are considered today often underestimated and highly innovative approaches in theological thought. The formula nihil innovetur nisi quod traditum est (be there no innovation beyond what has been handed down), which Cyprian (Epistola 74:1) discussed in the context of the rebaptism controversy, and which has been attributed to the Roman bishop Stephen I, became a set phrase during the period. The term ‘innovator’ was an insult, and innovations in theology were to be avoided, since they entailed the risk of deviating from the old, true doctrine. ‘From the ancestors everything is excellently ordered; nothing new can be created anymore; yes, God hates innovators’, the canon Adelmann of Liège told his creative contemporaries. This sentence, written around the turn of the 12th century, is significant for the Middle Ages as a whole. The belief in authority and the high estimation of the proof of the Fathers in scholastic theology have the same source. A careful distinction is made between the dicta authentica of the Church Fathers, who enjoy precedence, and the dicta magistralia of modern theologians. (Spörl 1930: 307)

Patristic authors became, as the ‘Fathers’, the binding interpreters of scripture. Scripture documents the plenitude expressed in Christ, with these documents finding their correct interpretation in the Fathers. This can be seen in a hierarchical stance to authority in medieval theology: while 85

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scripture was deemed the primary authority, the Church Fathers were the secondary authority that could be relied upon to interpret scripture correctly. In contrast, the originality of contemporary authors had to take a back seat, or at least to relate positively to the Fathers. In this constant measuring of one’s own time against the past, progress can therefore only mean: reformatio of the old, never revolutio or evolutio of the existing. The ideal state to which one wants to return is in the past. Recreatio, reformatio, regeneratio, reparatio, restauratio, revocatio are the ever recurring and very clear slogans. But it is very important that this ‘return’ is based not on a general, vague concept of the ‘good old days’, but on a concrete, historically comprehensible point in time. This ideal state that one wants to renew is for all religious reforms the ancient Church. (Spörl 1930: 309)

Nonetheless, this orientation towards the past was accompanied by an original reflection on development and change that is often underestimated today. The Middle Ages reflected on this problem not with terms that suggested innovation, but under the guise of preserving the old. They did nevertheless face, in various contexts, the need to think about a progressive unfolding of the doctrine of faith. In the following, I will outline four contexts that show the subcutaneous power of innovation that medieval thinking also had when it came to doctrinal development: the controversy over the filioque addition to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed; the reflections on the problem of ‘implicit’ faith; the synthesis of these questions in the work of Thomas Aquinas; and the discussion on whether the Reformation brought with it new impulses for a theory of dogmatic development.

.          The Council of Nicaea took over a tripartite creed, and made anti-Arian additions to it in order to position itself in the controversial Christological questions at the beginning of the fourth century. Although the Holy Spirit was mentioned in the third section of the Nicene Creed, its nature and significance for the faith of the Church were not explained in detail. After decades of conflict, the Council of Constantinople confirmed the Nicene Creed and, to ward off the Pneumatomachi, extended the third section by describing the Spirit as Lord (to kurion) and giver-of-life who ‘proceeds from the Father’ (Denzinger, No. 150). Anachronistically speaking, two modes of divine constitution were therefore named, both of which originate in the Father as the sole source (arche): the begetting of the Son and

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the procession of the Spirit. Thus, the Son is not involved in the constitution of the Spirit, which proceeds from the Father alone. What is significant for the later controversy is that the Council of Constantinople thereby made no judgment on the Spirit’s mission in the history of salvation, which, according to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, can also be undertaken by the Son. A reference in the Gospel of John to the resurrected Jesus seems to suggest this: ‘“As the Father has sent me, so I send you”. And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit”’ (John 20:21–22). The Council of Constantinople was concerned not with the outpouring of the Spirit in the history of salvation, but with its divine, immanent constitution. In the eternity of God, the Spirit proceeds exclusively from the Father. During the early Middle Ages, however, the belief came to prevail in the Western Church that, within the Trinity, the Spirit proceeded not only from the Father, but also from the Son. The Spirit thus became known as the one qui ex patre filioque procedit (who proceeds from the Father and the Son), which added the filioque (which would become shorthand for the dispute between East and West) to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. It was believed that this addition could call on patristic authors of Latin, especially Tertullian, Hilary of Poitiers and Augustine, and that the filioque represented a Christological and anti-Arian belief: if the Son is indeed equal to the Father in everything, and is of the same essence, then he must also have participated in the emergence of the Spirit. Or, conversely, the filioque implies a homoousios of the Son, thereby excluding Arian Christologies. This probably explains why initially the filioque was widespread in the Iberian, Gallic and Franconian regions, where there were Arian currents that had to be dealt with until into the early Middle Ages. Rome, which did not have this problem, was, like the Eastern Church, hostile to the filioque. However, Charlemagne rejected all proposals aimed at compromise, such as the proposal put forward by Tarasios of Constantinople, who deemed it acceptable to confess that the Spirit proceeded ‘from the Father through the Son’. Charlemagne insisted instead on an equal and coordinated ‘from the Father and the Son’, which, interestingly, he considered to be ‘in line with the Nicene Creed’ (Epistolae Karolini Aevi 3 (7)); an opinion that we can only interpret as being Christological and anti-Arian, since, as already mentioned, there is nothing in the Nicene Creed about the emergence of the Spirit. Rome did not follow Charlemagne to begin with. Pope Leo III, who had crowned Charlemagne emperor, had two silver plates with the

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text of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed in Greek and Latin hung up at Saint Peter’s without the filioque addition (see Böhnke 2011: 39–53). After several centuries of conflict between the Roman and Franconian Churches, a conflict that also occupied several synods (above all, Frankfurt in 794 and Aachen in 809), the popes relented and allowed the Franconian practice of reciting the creed not only at baptisms (where it had its original place in the early Church), but also during mass. This led to the gradual adoption of the Franconian version of the Creed with the filioque addition by the entire Western Church. At what precise date and in what circumstances Rome received the filioque into the creed remains a mystery. The theory which has been widely accepted is that the decisive occasion was the day when . . . Benedict VIII consented to have the Constantinopolitan Creed at the Holy Eucharist. The guess is plausible: it is hard to believe that the Pope could have been so tactless as to flourish in the emperor’s face a text of the symbol which lacked the phrase to which the church of Charlemagne and his successors attached so much importance. (Kelly 1972: 367)

From the first third of the eleventh century at the latest (Benedict VIII died in 1024), the Western Church was therefore faced with the problem that it had altered a binding creed by making an addition. This was unacceptable to the Eastern Church and also posed challenges to the theologians of the Latin Middle Ages, who were very conscious of continuity. Although, as stated at the beginning of this chapter, the old was held to be true in principle, there was now the need to think about why old formulas had to be supplemented occasionally, and discontinuities accepted for the sake of a more comprehensive continuity. One of the most prominent theologians to face this challenge was Anselm of Canterbury (see Gemeinhardt 2002: 479–486). Anselm pointed out that the terminology of the doctrine of God recognized as orthodox by East and West – one substance or ousia, three persons or hypostases – was neither in scripture nor in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. ‘Where do we in so many words read in the prophets or the evangelists or the apostle’, Anselm asks, that the one God is three persons, or that the one God is the Trinity, or that there is God from God? And neither do we find the name ʻperson’ or ʻTrinity’ in the creed, in which the procession of the Holy Spirit is not mentioned. (De processione spiritus sancti 11)

These statements alone were unspectacular and did not exceed what Augustine had already taught in his speeches on the Gospel of John: as

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long as new terms are not ‘profane’ (1 Timothy 6:20), but express the state of things better than they have hitherto been expressed, then terminological innovations are not a problem. But Anselm goes further, and points out that scripture presents the Spirit as both the Spirit of the Father and of the Son. Regarding the Father, Anselm points out that no distinction is made between the Spirit’s divine constitution of being and his mission in the history of salvation: the Spirit receives his being from the Father, who also sends him out into the world. It is not clear to Anselm why there should be a distinction between Trinitarian-immanent constitution and salvific-economic mission with regard to the Son, since the Spirit is also called the Spirit of the Son (e.g. Acts 16:7), but not with regard to the Father, although scripture, which is not familiar with these terms, does not say anything about either question (De processione spiritus sancti 12). If ‘the Spirit of God’ is also ‘the Spirit of the Father and the Spirit of the Son’ (De processione spiritus sancti 12), then, for Anselm, it is illogical to argue that the Spirit is also sent out by the Son with regard to the history of salvation, but only proceeds from the Father with regard to immanence. In other words, if it is true that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as from the Father, it follows that the Holy Spirit is the spirit of the Son as well as of the Father, and that He is sent and given by the Son as well as by the Father (both of which things Divine Authority [i.e. scripture] teaches and from which things no falsity at all follows). (De processione spiritus sancti 14)

Anselm claims to have used a logical procedure with regard to scripture and the Creed, both of which are silent on this question, to prove the validity of the doctrine that the Spirit is also derived from the Son both economically and immanently. He is aware of the methodological implications of employing such a procedure. We ‘ought to accept as certain’, he writes, ‘not only the things that we read in Holy Scripture but also the things that follow from them with logical necessity, with no other argument to the contrary’ (De processione spiritus sancti 11). This may sound unspectacular, but is certainly not a ‘minor contribution’ to the issue of dogmatic development (Söll 1971: 86). On the contrary, what Anselm is demonstrating would become the dominant approach in late-medieval and modern scholasticism, which would also see the issue of doctrinal development as primarily a logical challenge. The position of the conclusio theologica – of the conclusion that is itself not revealed, but that has been inferred from a doctrine considered as revealed – would remain contested until the twentieth century, and is still contested today, even

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though this approach to questions of dogmatic development has gone out of fashion somewhat. Anselm provides in his response to the filioque issue an exemplary demonstration of what the claim actually means, ‘that faith is not only open to rational reflection, but also requires it’: namely, that the results of rational reflection can, ‘assuming their logical correctness and coherence with scripture, then be regarded as adequate and insofar necessary interpretations of the faith’ (Gemeinhardt 2002: 485; my emphasis). Thus, the need for rational explanation does not leave unspared a text deemed as canonical as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. For Anselm, the Western Church did not corrupt this Creed when it translated the original Greek text into Latin; rather, it ‘set it forth, transcribed in the Latin idiom with the aforementioned addition’ (De processione spiritus sancti 13), which means not only a linguistic but also a theological tradition, one in which, as a result primarily of Augustine, filioque tendencies prevailed. This was not an arbitrary decision, but came about because need urged this addition (rationes cogitae is an early-medieval term for rational reasons that are necessary and compelling (see Perkams 2006)), with the ‘Latin Church’ thereby faithfully asserting ‘that it knew that we should believe and confess it’ (De processione spiritus sancti 13). Knowledge in the strict sense therefore has for Anselm a compelling component: what is recognized as true at a certain point in time is to be accepted as true, even if it has not yet been recognized in the tradition up to then. This means that creeds are incomplete, even one as central as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. ‘For’, Anselm writes, ‘we know that the creed has not expressed everything that we ought to believe and profess, nor did those who prescribed the creed wish that the Christian faith to be content to believe and profess the things that the creed posited’ (De processione spiritus sancti 13). Since Anselm believes that he has come to the rationally necessary conclusion that the Spirit also proceeds immanently from the Son, and since he does not see this conclusion as being contrary to or contradicting the Creed (which does not claim that the Spirit does not proceed from the Son), he considers justified the amendment made to the Creed by the Latin version. For him, the Greek version is not so much incorrect as simply incomplete. We cannot clarify here whether this line of reasoning is convincing in the context of the filioque controversy. But what is significant is that, without of course knowing the term, Anselm sketches with the greatest precision one possibility for dogmatic development: namely, development through procedures of logical deduction, which, furnished with the self-confidence of rational necessity, do not spare even beloved texts.

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This tendency to think through the doctrine of faith by means of logic or dialectics grew increasingly during the twelfth century. One of its most prominent representatives was Peter Abelard, who tried to define faith on the basis of a phrase from the Epistle to the Hebrews: ‘Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen’ (Hebrews 11:1). The Latin version available to Abelard saw faith as the ‘substance of things hoped for’ (substantia sperandarum rerum) and the ‘reason for what is not seen’ (argumentum non apparentium). Abelard endeavoured to transform this definition in a way that matched his interest in conducting a logical investigation of doctrine. In doing so, he understood the concept of argument in the same way as Boethius: namely, as ‘something certain that lends credibility to something doubtful’ (Super Topica Glossae 205:8–9). To grasp faith as argumentum in this way made little sense to Abelard, since, as a logician, he was committed to defending doctrine against heretical distortion by formulating it in terms of propositions. He, therefore, replaced argumentum with existimatio, the latter meaning ‘assumption’ in common parlance, but actually denoting something more specific in scholastic teaching. Faith, according to Abelard, is ‘an assessment of things that one does not see; that is, of things that are not subordinate to the physical senses’ (Theologia Scholarium 1:2). Dismissing existimatio as a mere assumption, as Abelard’s opponents occasionally did, is to misjudge the setting in life that this term marks out. In scholastic teaching, an existimatio is ‘the intellectual attitude of the auditor (one of the two actors in the dialectical disputation) with regard to the propositions submitted to him for approval’ (Jolivet 1963: 25–26). Faith is for Abelard, therefore, not blind speculation on things that cannot be seen; rather, it comes from what is heard (Romans 10:17): from listening to scripture and the Church. This faith holds no evidence, though, and deals with things that cannot be seen, which is the reason that faith must first prove its credibility. Faith is presented to the listener like a scholastic existimatio and is also to be treated as such, that is, it is to be examined with the means of logic, which, although it cannot prove the doctrine of faith a priori, can certainly check whether it is free of contradiction in a rational way. The same rules therefore apply to doctrines presented to the listener in the form of propositions, as to all other profane statements in which something is claimed to be true, with Abelard not allowing for a separate area of religious logic or an area of faith sheltered from the laws of logic. Thus, if statements claiming to express something true about invisible things contradict each other, meaning that both cannot be true at the same time, then one statement

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must be false. And, conversely, necessary conclusions arising from what belongs unequivocally and logically to the doctrine of faith must also be accepted. The precise value of the conclusio theologica would occupy theology for a long time to come, but at its outset were Anselm of Canterbury and Peter Abelard, the latter deemed an enfant terrible for his varied and dramatic life, and for his condemned doctrine of the Trinity (see Denzinger, Nos. 721–739). The filioque controversy not only stimulated reflection on the relationship between faith and logic, but also led to a speculative deepening of the doctrine on the Holy Spirit. A little-known but nonetheless outstanding example of the link between pneumatology and the development of faith is provided by Anselm of Havelberg, who claims in his Anticimenon to have had a dialogue with the Greek Archbishop Nicetas of Nicomedia. Whether, or to what extent, this dialogue is historical and actually took place in the way that Anselm of Havelberg says it did cannot be clarified here (see Lees 1998: 48–69; Sieben 2010). What is interesting, though, is the doctrine on the Holy Spirit that this text formulates. Anselm of Havelberg calls the Spirit panepiskopos (Anticimenon 2:13), the universal bishop of the whole Church who had presided over the councils of the early Church, including all assemblies of bishops. Anselm uses the close link that exists in the Johannine corpus between Jesus and the promised Paraclete to promote the filioque: since the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Son, he can teach all that Christ wanted to teach, but that the disciples could not yet bear to hear during Jesus’ lifetime. The close link between Son and Spirit enables Anselm of Havelberg to attribute to the Holy Spirit actions traditionally attributed to Christ. Thus, the Spirit had ‘founded’ the gospel and ‘explained’ in greater detail, in the course of later councils, what Jesus ‘still had to say’ there, so that ‘the whole church, spread over all the world, could at once sustain what before the apostles alone were unable to bear’ (Anticimenon 2:23), headed by the Holy Spirit as its supreme bishop. Anselm of Havelberg believes that the Church structure of his time was not founded by Jesus, but established by the Holy Spirit in the course of history. For Anselm, it is the Holy Spirit – not the historical Jesus, but the Spirit who is nonetheless the Spirit of Christ – that established the sacraments (sacramenta ecclesiastica instituit (Anticimenon 2:23)), as well as the ministries of the Church and the celebration of the Eucharist. How fraught was Anselm’s claim can be seen in the fact that, in the course of later developments, a central characteristic of a sacrament was that it was introduced by the historical Jesus, until the Council of Trent pronounced

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that denying that Jesus Christ himself had introduced all the sacraments of the Church was anathema (Denzinger, No. 1601). Anselm of Havelberg was still free of these prescriptions and could therefore see the Holy Spirit as having founded the structure and sacraments of the Church, which only developed in the course of time. The charm of such an explanation lies from today’s point of view in the fact that it can deal with the findings of historical-critical exegesis in a dogmatically informal way, since it does not have to insist that the Church structure must have been established by the historical Jesus in its entirety. Conversely, Anselm of Havelberg has the problem that his model largely lacks a critical function of scripture that could delegitimize non-scriptural developments. Even if his line of reasoning can be read against the background of the filioque dispute, and his transferring of the properties of Jesus to the Spirit serves ultimately to convey to the Greeks that one can ‘assuredly say’ (Anticimenon 2:23) that the Spirit also proceeds from the Son, we should not underestimate Anselm’s innovative power, which extends beyond this dispute. Anselm of Havelberg makes clear ‘the rule of the Holy Spirit in the Church as the deepest reason for the progress of dogma’, and his bold theses were ‘unique’ at the time (Beumer 1952: 214–215).

.  ,    ‘ ’ Early scholasticism had a great interest in the question of what it means precisely to believe. Which mental or affective acts play a role, and how do they relate to the doctrine of faith, that is, to the content of what is believed? This problem was often dealt with in a way taken over from Augustine. In his speeches on the Gospel of John, Augustine asks himself how we are to understand Jesus’ statement, ‘All who came before me are thieves and robbers’ (John 10:8). Are, then, the prophets of the Old Testament, who came before Jesus, all thieves and robbers? To deny this, Augustine makes a distinction. On the one hand are those who came before Christ and praeter illum, that is, passed him by or came apart from Christ, and are therefore called thieves and robbers. On the other are those who also came before Christ, but cum illo, that is, together with him as prophets (In Iohannis evangelium tractatus 45:8). The accusation of being thieves and robbers is not valid for the latter. But how can a prophet appear with Christ even though he appeared before Christ? Augustine identifies the historical Jesus with the Logos of God, which is from eternity – ‘always’. ‘Of course, he took his flesh in time. Therefore, what is he always? “In the beginning was the Word”. Therefore, they who came with the Word of

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God came together with him. “I am”, he said, “the way, and the truth and the life”. If he himself is the truth, they who were truthful came together with him’ (In Iohannis evangelium tractatus 45:8). Since the Old Testament prophets sent by God truly proclaimed the Word of God, they came ‘with’ Christ, even before the incarnation of the divine Word and the divine truth in Jesus of Nazareth. This coexistence of simultaneity and non-simultaneity prompts Augustine to reflect on the time and history of salvation: Before the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, whereby he came humbly in flesh, just men went before him, believing in him who was to come just as we now believe in him who has come. The times are varied, not the faith. For the words themselves are also varied in accord with the time, when they are variously inflected. ‘He will come’ has one sound; ‘he came’ has another sound. The sound has changed: he will come, and he came. Yet the same faith joins both together, both those who believed that he would come and those who believed that he had come. We see that both have entered, at different times, indeed, but through the one Gate of faith, that is, through Christ. (In Iohannis evangelium tractatus 45:9)

Augustine is presenting an analysis rich in the philosophy of language and ontology here. Verbs and what their listeners associate with them (which Augustine calls the ‘sound’ (sonum)) change, but faith remains the same. While for Augustine the faithful of the Old Testament believed in Christ as he was to come, the Church believes in him as he who has come. The tense of the verb may have changed, but the state of affairs indicated by the verb, the advent of Christ, is the same. Augustine illustrates this by referring to Paul (1 Corinthians 10:1–4) and interprets the exodus from Egypt (Exodus 12–14) as pointing ahead to Christ. Moses appears here as the model of Christ, the Israelites as the Church, the procession through the Red Sea as baptism. For Augustine, different signs express the same faith, which again can only be understood against the background of his philosophy of language. He believes that every doctrine has to do either with things or with signs, with ‘things’ being ‘learnt by means of signs’ (De doctrina christiana I 2:2). Signs (which for Augustine also include words) can change, but the true things that they designate cannot. Even if Augustine’s exegetical statements seem strange from today’s point of view, we should not ignore with how much ingenuity he succeeded in establishing a continuity based in faith between the Old and the New Testament, between Israel and the Church, and ultimately between Jews and Christians. ‘The times are varied, not the faith’ (In Iohannis evangelium tractatus 45:9) – tempora variata sunt, non fides.

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Augustine was an authority that no medieval theologian could circumnavigate, and he bequeathed scholasticism with a contrast that Peter of Corbeil was probably the first to make into a conceptual distinction between an explicit and an implicit faith (see Schultes 1920: 20). For the latter, explicit faith (fides explicita) is the reflexive avowal of clearly defined and intellectually adopted ideas, whereas implicit faith (fides implicita) is a less reflexive belief that relates affirmatively to something without being able to grasp fully everything that this object of reference contains, with the content of such faith, therefore, being believed not explicitly but implicitly. The idea of implicit faith would be used subsequently by the Church in the axiom credere quod ecclesia credit (believe what the Church believes), and commented on polemically in the Reformation tradition. Although not yet aware of the term ‘implicit faith’, Hugh of Saint Victor provided one of the most important treatises on the issue in his main work, On the sacraments of the Christian faith, which contains ‘the central point of the issue dealt with so much and so diversely today of the formation and development of dogmas’ (Grabmann 1988: 277). According to Hugh, God wants to remain to human consciousness neither ‘entirely manifest’ nor ‘entirely hidden’ (De sacramentis christianae fidei 1:3). It is this juxtaposition of revelation and concealment that makes faith possible: if God were fully revealed, he would be perceptible, and this would then be a question of knowledge rather than faith; if, on the other, God were fully concealed, then everything said about him would be mere opinion, and therefore the opposite of knowledge. But faith for Hugh is a ‘certainty of the mind in things absent, established beyond opinion and short of knowledge’ (De sacramentis christianae fidei 1:10). To believe something therefore means not only having an opinion on something that cannot be known; nor does it mean having certain knowledge about facts for which there is no evidence. For Hugh, faith in the theological sense is a separate epistemic level that is situated between opinion and knowledge. The human being comes to faith through a combination of their own rationality and the divine action of revelation, both of which are, in turn, accessible to them in two ways. As Hugh explains with reference to a text version of the Epistle to the Romans often quoted in the twelfth century (‘what can be known about God is revealed in them’ (Romans 1:19)), reason possesses knowledge of God inwardly, that is, a priori, beyond experience (see Fidora 2000). At the same time, reason is also able by contemplating the external world to see the Creator ‘in what he has made’ (Romans 1:20). Revelation also

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approaches the human being both from within and from without: from within, ‘by illuminating within by aspiration’ (De sacramentis christianae fidei 1:3), as would be bestowed upon the Biblical prophets, but also later individual believers; and from without, through instruction in doctrine, as practised by the Church. The invisible God was thus ‘shown to the human heart’ by ‘two modes and two ways and two manifestations’: in part of course by human reason, in part by divine revelation. And human reason indeed discovered God by a twofold investigation; partly, to be sure, in itself, partly in those things which were outside it. Similarly, also divine revelation by a twofold indication revealed Him as unknown who was unknown or doubtfully believed in, and declared him to be partly believed in. For now by illuminating within by aspiration, it taught human ignorance; then indeed either it instructed it from without by the medium of teaching or confirmed it by the manifestation of miracles. (De sacramentis christianae fidei 1:3)

One contribution that Hugh made to the development of a theological ‘psychology of faith’ (Engelhardt 1933) can barely be overestimated in the effect that it had, namely, his distinction between the act of faith, which Hugh calls affectus (not to be interpreted in the emotional sense), and the content of faith, which Hugh calls cognitio. There are two things in which faith consists: cognition and affection, that is, constancy or firmness in believing. It consists in the one, because faith itself is that; it consists in the other, because faith itself is in that. For in affection the substance of faith is found; in cognition, the matter. For faith by which there is belief is one thing; that which is believed by faith is another. Faith is found in affection; that which is believed by faith is cognition. (De sacramentis christianae fidei 10:1)

Hugh defines affect as the essence, or substance, of faith, and thereby interprets the formulation mentioned in the Epistle to the Hebrews (Hebrews 11:1) in a completely different way to his contemporary Peter Abelard. For Hugh, the content of faith, that is, what is believed, is the material of faith; in other words, the material that needs to be worked upon, the result of which is called knowledge. Having made this distinction, Hugh can now turn his attention to the growth of faith. He does so initially within the framework established by Augustine: the words may have changed over time, but what the words try to describe has always been, and will always remain, the same. Hugh, though, links this to a different theological problem, namely, the standing of so-called simplices, that is, those who are Christians, but who are not familiar with theological questions and can therefore hardly reflect on what they believe,

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that is, the cognitive aspect of their religion. According to Hugh, there are some scholars who proceed from the assumption that ‘he must by no means be called faithful who does not know, as it were, the great and numerous and sublime sacraments of faith and who has not grasped within his mind the disputation, the profundity, the series of accomplishments of certain men on the majesty of the Creator and on the humility of the Saviour’ (De sacramentis christianae fidei 10:1). Like Augustine, Hugh first directs his attention to the pious of the Old Testament. They also could not know all the things at a reflective level that Christian theology would later bring to light, and yet they were accepted and saved by God in their faith. Hugh applies exactly the same argument to the uneducated among the faithful of his time. Thus, as we confess things more befitting salvation and nearer truth, and, just as at one and the same time according to the different capacities of various people we recognize the cognition of those things which pertain to faith, so also let us not doubt that from the beginning through the succession of the times faith has grown in the faithful themselves by certain increases. Yet that the faith of the preceding and the subsequent was one and the same, in whom, however, there was not the same cognition, we thus unhesitatingly confess, just as in these whom we recognize as faithful in our time we find the same faith and yet not the same cognition of faith. (De sacramentis christianae fidei 10:1)

Although Hugh is ultimately interested in preserving the continuity between the Old and New Testament, and in recognizing uneducated Christians as believers, his line of reasoning opens up a broad space for theories of doctrinal development. If faith as affectus can be thought of as immutable and always identical with itself, but faith as cognitio, as capable of growth over time (and even of substantive additions), then this solves the fundamental problem facing theories of development, which is the unstable simultaneity of continuity and discontinuity: there is strict continuity in faith when it comes to faith as affect, but discontinuities can exist when it comes to faith as knowledge formulated in propositions. The bond that holds the two together through time and also in their simultaneous coexistence – an affective but intellectually weak faith on the one hand, and a highly intellectual but perhaps affectively weak faith on the other – is the community of salvation that gives home to the faithful: that is, the Church, which, for Augustine and for Hugh, also includes Israel in the form of the ecclesia ab Abel (see Congar 1952). Thus, for Hugh, all who, even if only implicitly, believed in the past or believe in the present what the Church believes, without knowing exactly what all this may entail intellectually, share in the single and unchanging

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faith of the Church, which changes in its material, but always remains identical to itself in its substance, that is, its essence. Hugh’s concerns may have been elsewhere, but his line of thought, which attracted much attention in the Middle Ages due to its inclusion in the Sentences of Peter Lombard (see Schultes 1920: 27–34), nonetheless offered an approach that would become the standard Catholic model in the nineteenth century, when the issue of dogmatic development became particularly contested. This can be seen, for example, in the inaugural university lecture that the Münster pastoral theologian Bernhard Dörholt gave in 1892. In the lecture, entitled On the Development of Dogma and Progress in Theology, he spoke of progress in a way that was almost suspicious for the theological context of his time: of progress not only in the external formulation of faith that always remains the same, but also in the very principles on which the doctrine of faith is based. In order to recognize and appreciate the full legitimacy, the nature and the manner of theological progress, we must even go one step further and say that not only theology as a science has its legitimate progress, but that even with regard to the principles from which this science proceeds and upon which it is constantly based, namely with regard to dogmas, a progressive development over time should be recognized and asserted. (Dörholt 1892: 6)

Dörholt can make this daring claim because he has in the background the idea of the fides implicita, an idea that preserves continuity while always enabling the faithful to embrace the whole of revelation without knowing exactly everything contained in it. Under the activity of the Church magisterium, led and inspired by the Holy Spirit, the material object of faith becomes ever richer, and that is precisely the movement that takes place in dogma itself and that gives dogma a history. Neither the revealed truth nor faith, which always encompasses the whole revealed truth, changes with this movement and development; rather, our knowledge of the revealed truth grows and becomes more perfect, because it now encompasses with the certainty of faith something of which it did not have such a knowledge before it was given definition by the Church. (Dörholt 1892: 22–23)

Thus, if a person identifies in principle with the faith of the Church, then they implicitly encompass in this faith the whole of revelation, even if this revelation is only made explicit when the teaching of the Church provides it with a dogmatic form, one that can change over time. On the one hand, dogma therefore seems to be an important, but nonetheless temporally contingent, manifestation of revelation. On the other, the role of the

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Church becomes ever greater as a depositorium, or storehouse, of the truth of revelation (Irenaeus of Lyon’s image that we have already mentioned, see Adversus Haereses III 4:1): the Church makes explicit what the faithful already affirm implicitly in their affective faith, without them being fully aware of this faith cognitively. It is not difficult to imagine the criticism that the Lutheran reformers levelled at this line of reasoning. In his Open Letter to Those in Frankfurt on the Main, which was written against the followers of Zwingli, Martin Luther (1533) drew on an anecdote to criticize ‘the Papists’, who simply believe ‘what the church believes’. According to this anecdote, a theological scholar (a ‘Doctor’) asked a charcoal burner standing on a bridge in Prague what he believed, to which the charcoal burner replied: ‘What the church believes’. When asked what the Church believed, the charcoal burner then replied: ‘What I believe’. Now close to death, the doctor had been so challenged in his faith by the devil that he was no longer capable of explicit faith, and therefore said, ‘I believe what the charcoal burner believes’. Thus, while the charcoal burner sees his faith in the faith of the Church without knowing exactly what this faith means, the dying scholar who is challenged in his own faith identifies with the faith of the charcoal burner in order to gain through him a share in the faith of the Church. After scoring a point against Thomas Aquinas, who according to Luther is said to have suffered the same fate at the end of his life, Luther comments on this anecdote with the words, ‘May God not grant us too much of that sort of faith’, since both the charcoal burner and the scholar (and presumably also Thomas Aquinas, although Luther does not say this explicitly) ‘believed themselves into the very pit of hell’, where such spirits come who say, ‘Believe the body that Christ meant. That is enough’ (Open Letter § 15). Even if Catholic authors point out, and not without a certain smugness, that Luther himself might, in some sermons, have given advice that came close to the conception of fides implicita (see e.g. Schultes 1920: 7), Luther dismissed as blind faith or the ‘charcoal burner’s faith’ (Köhlerglaube) the idea of an affective, but cognitively indeterminate, faith. Such faith, he argued, replaces faithfulness to the Word of God with faithfulness to the Church, the latter being (and here Luther pointed his finger at the ‘Papists’) no longer bound to the Word of God. Thus, such blind faith opened the doorway to all sorts of doctrinal changes – changes made by the Church in the name of a deeper knowledge, but that actually spelled a falling away from the Word of God. The tool that Catholic authors used in their attempt to solve the problem of dogmatic development was therefore denounced by Protestant theologians as

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a machinery of innovation that operated under papal aspirations to power, one that deviated from scripture as the only yardstick of faith. For example, Albrecht Ritschl, one of the most influential Protestant theologians of the nineteenth century, distinguished between ‘two different types of faith’: ‘the Catholic and the Protestant’. What Ritschl denoted as the Protestant kind of faith was for him ‘the more valuable level of faith from the point of view of the formal authority of holy scripture’, while ‘the lower Catholic level’ in the form of fides implicita had an intellectually weak fixation on the Church (1890: 95–96). And Adolf von Harnack (1898: 41–42) argued that the history of Catholicism, with its idea of regarding ‘the Church primarily as an institution whose holiness and truth were inalienable, however melancholy the state of its members’, was also a history of ‘implicit faith (fides implicita)’ (as well as a history of hierarchy and ‘sacramental magic’, of course). In short, the idea of fides implicita did not see itself as an answer to the problem of doctrinal development, since the authors of the twelfth century did not yet address this problem in the way that it is addressed today (see Beumer 1952: 209). The theory of implicit faith, nonetheless, provided a model of thought that mainly Catholic authors used to solve the unstable simultaneity of continuity and discontinuity in such a way that safeguarded continuity through the Church and the affective faith bestowed upon it, while leaving open the possibility of change in how this faith was developed dogmatically and intellectually. Protestant authors saw this as licensing the ‘radical evolutionism’ (Ebeling 1967: 54) inherent in Catholicism, which, under the guise of continuity, introduced dogmatic innovations that deviated from scripture. Rudolf Bultmann, probably the first theologian to distinguish an implicit from an explicit Christology, was to a certain extent an exception to this Protestant assessment (see Danz 2013: 186). Bultmann was aware of the discrepancy between the image of Jesus in the New Testament and the dogmatic Christology of later centuries. According to Bultmann, Jesus ‘presented no specific teaching’ about ‘his own person’, but nonetheless ‘a Christology is implicitly contained in the call to decision in respect of his own person’, a Christology that, should it ‘be made explicit’, can only have ‘its meaning’ in ‘the decision for or against him in it’ (1969: 205–206; my emphasis). Since Bultmann cannot simply pass off the Christology of later councils as having already been contained in scripture, as they are also important for the Protestant commitment to Jesus Christ, he distinguishes between an implicit Christology (which exists in Jesus’ call to decision) and an explicit Christology (which develops reflexively in the existential acceptance of this call). Dogmatic development

Advances in Knowledge, and Authority: Thomas Aquinas

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could therefore be seen as the historical unfolding of this call of Jesus, a call to which the Church has always belonged and in which it has always believed, but one that it has developed in the form of dogma in different ways at different times.

.   ,  :   Thomas Aquinas was without doubt the most influential theologian of the Middle Ages, and no account of this epoch can ignore him. The reason for his central importance lies in the originality of his theology, but also in the syntheses that he made. Thomas knew how to perfect the reference to authority of medieval thought in such a way that he combined many older approaches, be they of theological or philosophical provenance, to create a new overall picture. This ability made him interesting for centuries to come since he knew how to combine speculative skills with references to tradition that ensured continuity. For example, Leo XIII wrote in his encyclical Aeterni Patris, which was intended to make the primacy of a new scholasticism based on Thomas binding for theology as a whole, that Thomas, ‘because he venerated the ancient Doctors of the Church, in a certain way seems to have inherited the intellect of all’ (Denzinger, No. 3139). This is of course an assertion that seeks to justify the narrowness that is accompanied by an exclusive, magisterial preference for neoscholasticism. According to Pope Leo XIII, the binding reference to Thomas does not deny the diversity of theological traditions, but as it were pools and channels them. Despite the ideological interests that motivate this statement, it still has a certain truth: freed from the grip of neo-scholastic system-building, Thomas is a synthesizer of ideas, someone who is both conscious of tradition and original. This can also be seen in how he deals with the question of the growth of faith. Thomas deals with this question in two main contexts: in his commentaries on the Sentences, where he addresses the question taken up by Peter Lombard (Sententiarum libri quatuor 3:25) of ‘the faith of the ancients’, that is, that of the pious living before Christ; and in the Summa Theologica, an unfinished textbook. It is also worth looking more closely at two articles from the Quaestiones in which Thomas deals with the object of faith. Let us recall what has already been said about Thomas’ concept of the article of faith (articulus fidei): he derives articulus from arthron (joint), and claims that the one Christian doctrine is divided into different articles that relate the individual doctrines precisely to each other

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and thus form a whole in their difference (Summa Theologica II–II q. 1, a. 6). Thomas questions whether the articles of faith have ‘increased in course of time’. Like Hugh, Thomas is also concerned with the faith of the pious of the Old Testament in relation to those who came after Christ. However, Thomas uses this opportunity to reflect fundamentally on the growth of the doctrine of faith. He first mentions two reasons that seem to speak against such growth. First, the Epistle to the Hebrews defines faith as the ‘realization of what is hoped for’ (Hebrews 11:1), and the hope of people has been directed to the same thing at all times, so that this assurance has not been subjected to any change. Second, every advance in science that has been achieved at any given time has been based on a lack of knowledge on the part of those previously involved in that science. But, for Thomas, that could not be the case with questions of the Christian faith, since the apostles could not have suffered from such a lack of knowledge. The originator of faith at the very beginning was ultimately God, who, according to Thomas’ reference to the Epistle to the Ephesians (2:3), made the Christian doctrine of faith a gift to the human being. The beginning of faith can therefore not be deficient, but takes its course from a perfectly ordered origin. Thomas contrasts this with a statement from the sermons of Gregory the Great on Ezekiel (Homiliae in Hiezechihelem prophetam II 4:12), who says that knowledge of the Holy Fathers has grown with the growth of time, so that those closer to the advent of the Redeemer knew more of him than those further away. Thomas compares doctrines of faith with the principia per se nota, the self-evident principles that underlie all knowledge, but that themselves cannot be proven. These principles are given to the mind before all experience and are immediately obvious, such as the principle of avoiding contradiction. Some of these principles are linked by logical conclusions and can be deduced from one another, so that some principles are ‘contained implicitly in others’. Similarly, Thomas explains, ‘all the articles are contained implicitly in certain primary matters of faith, such as God’s existence, and His providence over the salvation of man’ (Summa Theologica II–II, q. 1, a. 7). For Thomas, these two basic truths contain everything that has developed into various articles of faith in the course of time; the existence of God encompasses everything that is believed about God eternally, that is, beyond the history of his work of salvation, and the providence of God encompasses everything that is believed about God temporarily, that is, with regard to the history of God’s activities in the salvation of the human being. This chain of implications continues for

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Thomas; he sees that faith in human redemption implicitly contains Christ’s incarnation, which is necessary for redemption. However, Thomas refers to the definition from the Epistle to the Hebrews (11:1) to stress that he does not want this to be understood as a change to the substance of faith, since the substance of what is believed (namely, the existence and the activity of God for the salvation of humankind) has at all times been, albeit only implicitly, a component of faith. But there has certainly been growth when it comes to the unfolding of what is folded, the ‘explicatio’ of what is implied, since the more recent is simply a more precise unfolding of the same substance already present in the less recent. Thomas distinguishes between two kinds of ‘progress in cognition’ (profectus cognitionis) (Summa Theologica II–II, q. 1, a. 2). One kind is measured by the teacher’s ability to comprehend, with the teacher always teaching according to the best knowledge that they have, and the knowledge that they gain growing in line with their studies, so that this teaching may change. This is the kind of growth that is to be found in the sciences. In addition, however, there is also progress that is oriented towards the learner and their ability to comprehend. A wise teacher teaches according to the power of comprehension displayed by their students. This kind of progress is to be found in faith, where people have made progress in the knowledge of faith according to the ability to comprehend of their time. Here, God as the teacher is the one who acts, who acts on the person, while the person acts in this event like a ‘material’ (Summa Theologica II– II, q. 1, a. 3) shaped by God, an indeterminacy that can be formed into an ever-greater determinacy. At the same time, though, the plenitude shown in Christ and witnessed by those closest to him in time has never been surpassed, even though those who witnessed this plenitude may not have been as far advanced as those in later times in terms of explaining what they saw. Thomas does not leave these reflections abstract, but also considers their ecclesiological implications when it comes to distinguishing a legitimate advance in knowledge from an illegitimate, heretical innovation. He therefore, somewhat surprisingly, concludes his question on the object of faith by discussing the doctrinal authority of the pope. May the pope change a creed of faith that is binding? There is again in the background the issue of the filioque, where the Western Church intervened to change a binding creed, initially only in some areas and in spite of the pope’s opposition, and then later across the board and with the pope’s support. In formal terms, and without at this point coming out either for or against the filioque addition in terms of content, Thomas believes that the pope

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has the right to organize (ordinare) the Creed and to issue it anew, that is, to prepare a nova editio, a procedure already described by Anselm of Canterbury. It is therefore clear to Thomas that ‘to publish a new version of the creed pertains to that authority which is empowered to decide matters of faith finally, so that they may be held by all with unshaken faith’ (Summa Theologica II–II, q. 1, a. 10). This phrase shows how much the magisterium of theologians and the magisterium of the pope are linked for Thomas, or, in other words, how much Thomas tries to explain the task of the pope from the activity of the magisteria of his time. The statement that the pope has the authority to ‘fix’ questions of faith is taken from scholastic teaching, where students can present all kinds of arguments in a disputation, until the master decides and ends the dispute with his determinatio magistralis. Thus, when Thomas attributes to the pope the right to determine the doctrine of faith, he draws a picture of him as a teacher of the Church according to the analogy of the relationship between a master and his students (see Klausnitzer 2004: 230–231). When it comes to the unfolding of the articles of faith, Thomas thus grants the pope the right to decide on theological discussions, and to end them with a binding prescription. It is interesting from the point of view of dogmatic history that Thomas does not mention the later locus classicus of papal self-understanding here – ‘you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church’ (Matthew 16:18). Much more important for him is a passage from the Passion of Luke in which Jesus foretells Peter’s betrayal, but then gives him the task of strengthening his brothers after his renewed conversion, which Jesus accompanies with his prayer, ‘I have prayed that your own faith may not fail’ (Luke 22:32). For Thomas, it is in this prayer that Jesus roots the Biblical justification for papal primacy in questions of doctrine. In contrast, Thomas connects the mention of the rock in the Gospel of Matthew not to Simon, but by linking it with a Pauline phrase twisted out of context, ‘and the rock was the Christ’ (1 Corinthians 10:4), to Jesus himself. In the Middle Ages, the so-called petra-lithos Christology (Betz 1960: 8) stood in the way of interpreting the words of Matthew’s Jesus as referring to the office of the pope. With regard to early scholasticism, ‘even an exegete of the standing of Peter Comestor understands by the rock on which the Church is to be built either Christ himself, whom Peter avows, or the firmness of faith that Peter will have’ (Landgraf 1952: 36), but not Peter as a person. This hesitancy also characterizes Thomas, although he configures the primacy of the pope in such a way that the latter has to decide whether a doctrine can be regarded as a legitimate explication of what is implied in faith, or whether it represents a heresy.

The Reformation: Did Something Happen There?

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.  :    ? Demarcating the Middle Ages from the modern period is a historiographical construction that sees the Reformation as its main caesura. The term ‘reformatio’ already appeared in the late Middle Ages to denote programmes intended to bring about a fundamental renewal of the church (reformation of the de-formed). . . . The Reformation movement itself initially understood the term only in the sense of individual transformations, with the underlying Latin meaning of re-formatio always referring to the fact that the legitimate reason given for these transformations was that they led the church back to its origins so that it could regain what it had lost – and in a way that did not destroy what had grown . . .. ‘Reformation’ only then became a concept to describe an epoch in the self-reflection of the predominantly Protestant view of history in the earlymodern period, with processes internal to the church continuing to be foregrounded. It was only research in the 19th century that turned ‘Reformation’ into a historiographical concept that also encompassed processes across society as a whole, and that used the concept to establish the epochal boundary at around 1500. (Leppin and Sattler 2014: 34–35)

To think that the Reformation period might have dealt with the issue of doctrinal development differently is to be disappointed. For, those orthodox authors who were now called Catholic in the denominational sense merely gave speculative refinement to the issues that Thomas Aquinas had already broached: the issue of fides implicita; the status of the so-called conclusio theologica, which deals with the significance of doctrines not contained in revelation but gained through deductive reasoning; and the role of Church authority and the papal office, which in the early-sixteenth century, after long schisms in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as well as a blossoming of conciliar ideas, now sought to lead the Church with renewed vigour. In contrast, Protestant authors were not faced with the problem of doctrinal development in the same way, since their Scriptural principle gave them a different methodological framework. Luther accepted the ancient Church councils as being in accordance with scripture, but fundamentally rejected the Church institutions that could not be found in scripture, be it the primacy of the pope or the number of sacraments (seven), so that, unlike his Catholic counterparts, he did not need a theory of doctrinal development. As we have already seen, his criticism of the ‘blind faith’ of fides implicita was particularly harsh. For Luther, scripture is, as he explains in his reaction to the bull issued by Leo X that threatened him with excommunication, ‘by itself highly certain, extremely easy to

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understand, quite obvious, its own interpreter, examining everything for everyone, judging and illuminating’ (Assertio omnium articulorum 97: 23–24). Luther is making this point not only to the Roman Church, but also to certain currents within the Reformation, the so-called Schwärmer, ‘who in one way or another see the Holy Spirit as an authority higher than scripture’. This Luther rejects by forging a close link between letter and Spirit, making ‘the human word itself’ the ‘bearer of the divine Spirit’, and enclosing this Spirit as it were ‘actually wrapped in the swaddling cloth of the human word’ (Lohse 1999: 191). Scholastic reflections on conclusions implied in revelation, which the Church could then proclaim and thereby make them binding; pneumatological speculations, as presented by Anselm of Havelberg (whom Luther probably did not know); the papal prerogative supported by Thomas, which allowed the pope to decide on questions of faith, end disputes, and thereby steer doctrinal development – all these were rejected by Luther. For Luther, it is purely and simply a case of checking whether a Church doctrine is in accordance with scripture: if it is, then it is legitimate; if it cannot be found in scripture, then it is illegitimate. The theological reasons for why the Roman Church did not share this assessment seemed, in contrast, to be constructs of legitimation that obscured the clarity of the gospel. In its propaganda war against the papal Church, the Protestant camp claimed to have on its side ‘the Bible, the “truth of the gospel”, Christ, and the testimony of early Christendom’, and it ‘condemned the “Papists” as illegitimate “innovators” who, by means of an (entirely negative) canonical law, had established a repressive system that deprived people of salvation’ (Kaufmann 2016: 308). Thus, the writings of the Reformers are not particularly useful for a theory of doctrinal development. ‘The beginning of the modern period does not constitute a decisive caesura for the unfolding of the issue of dogmatic development’ (Söll 1971: 135). When, as described in my second chapter, the Protestant Enlightenment then raised the issue of doctrinal development in all its clarity in the eighteenth century, in the face of the emerging history of dogmas, the ground of strictly Lutheran theology had already been abandoned at least in terms of content. Despite its rigid Scriptural principle, Protestantism had shown itself to be extremely dynamic, an entity that sidelined ‘early Protestantism’, or even replaced it entirely with ‘modern Protestantism’ (Troeltsch (2013: 27)). Early Protestantism ‘has to be conceived as a strictly ecclesiastical supernaturalistic civilization’; it has brought about theological changes, but is committed from a formal point of view to ‘the hierarchically

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constituted Church of the Middle Ages’. ‘The place of this hierarchy, as perpetuating the incarnation of Christ, was taken by the miraculous, allaccomplishing power of the Bible – the Protestant perpetuation of the Divine incarnation’. In modern Protestantism, on the other hand, Protestantism has connected itself ‘with the subjective individualistic representatives of a religion of feeling and conviction’; this ‘now makes Protestantism as a whole appear as the religion of conscience and conviction, without compulsorily imposed dogma’ (Troeltsch 2013: 111). Taking up this working concept (which, though open to criticism, is also very plausible) produces a paradoxical picture of the role that Protestantism plays in shaping a theory of dogmatic development. ‘Early Protestantism’ (to use Troeltsch’s terminology) was averse to this question in the form in which it was posed by scholastic theology, since it saw in it an instrument to legitimize papal claims to power when it came to removing reference to scripture; on the other hand, ‘modern Protestantism’ made this theory necessary in the first place through its critical attitude towards its own tradition of belief and through its historical research.

5 Theories of Doctrinal Development in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century

We should remind ourselves to begin with of the central claims made in the second chapter of this book, namely, that, with the emergence during the Enlightenment of an approach to Church doctrine that no longer saw itself as apologetic doxography, but as a history of dogma that took a critical stance towards creed, the theology of the nineteenth century faced the challenge of thinking through the unstable simultaneity of continuity and discontinuity in an unprecedentedly radical way. This chapter will deal with some attempts that were made in the nineteenth century: the socalled Tübingen School in the shape of Johann Sebastian Drey and Johann Adam Möhler; John Henry Newman, who, despite his public activity, remained a solitary player in Catholic theology; the neoscholastic controversies surrounding the concept of tradition and the conclusio theologica; and Alfred Loisy, who was an important representative of a position denigrated as modernism.

.  ü :     - Like many other historiographical categories, the concept of the Tübingen School has also been fundamentally criticized. As Walter Kasper points out, there is ‘even serious discussion about whether it is at all justified to talk about a single Tübingen School’, which relates less to a lack of originality on the part of those at Tübingen and the associated difficulties of distinguishing the School from other theological currents, and more to the great heterogeneity that marked the Tübingen theology of the nineteenth century (2003: 7–13). The term ‘Tübingen School’, which is 108

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suggestive of unity and presupposes ‘a continuous doctrinal tradition’, is misleading, since ‘the “idea” of a “Tübingen School” is only possible if certain theological groups and individual departments remain wholly or partially excluded’ (Reinhardt 1977: 18–19). As the title of an edited volume suggests, we should therefore talk not about ‘the Tübingen School’, but instead about Tübingen theologians and their theology, since, ‘if a School was created in Tübingen, it was created in the schools that arose around the greats of the faculty – Drey, Hirscher, Möhler, Kuhn, Hefele, Aberle’ (Reinhardt 1977: 42). Although criticized by those defending the idea that there was in fact a ‘School’ at Tübingen (see Kustermann 1982), this argument is helpful in correcting the tendency to over-systematize. We can doubt but not clarify here whether the argument renders completely superfluous talk of a Catholic Tübingen School, one that should not be confused with the older Protestant Tübingen School associated with Gottlob Christian Storr or the younger branch associated with Ferdinand Christian Baur. Thus, if in the following we talk about the Tübingen School, then this is a working concept that can be applied, for example, to Johann Sebastian Drey, Johann Adam Möhler and Johannes Kuhn, who, despite their differences in terms of theological approaches, do share two characteristics: none belong to scholasticism, but instead seek alternative theological approaches; and, unlike other non-scholasticists of their time, all are linked with the diocese of Rottenburg and the University of Tübingen (or the faculty in Ellwangen) because they studied and taught there. 5.1.1 Johann Sebastian Drey: ‘… There Is Nothing to Fear From the Growth of Christian Dogmas’ If there was a Tübingen School, then its founding father was Johann Sebastian Drey. As we have already seen in the second chapter, Drey was one of the first Catholic theologians to provide a theological response to the findings of historical research, with a theory that talked explicitly about ‘development’. ‘At the very beginning of his academic teaching career at the Friedrich University in Ellwangen in 1812’, that is, in the year that the Fridericiana was founded, ‘Drey dealt in his work Ideas on the history of the Catholic system of dogma (which emerged from his lectures on the history of dogma) with the problem of dogmatic development in a depth that would have placed him alongside Newman and Möhler among the classic figures in the theology of development – had the work not remained in manuscript form only’ (Geiselmann 1942: 147).

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While this may be right, we should not ignore the fact that Drey condensed his ideas on doctrinal development in another early work, namely, in his lecture on the growth of Christian dogmas, the Oratio de dogmatum christianorum incremento, which he probably gave in 1817, and which was published by Wessenberg in 1819 in the Archive for the Pastoral Conferences in the Rural Chapters of the Diocese of Constance. Still almost completely neglected in research on Drey, this lecture and its prehistory are nonetheless worth looking at, since they show how thin the ice was for Catholic theologians at the beginning of the nineteenth century – not for those working doxographically and thus apologetically in the sense desired by Rome, but for those who took note of the findings provided by the critical history of dogmas, or even used its methods. Drey’s lecture on the growth of Christian dogmas has been seen as being closely related to his treatise on the origins and transformations of confession in the early Church, a treatise that caused Drey considerable difficulty at the very outset of his career (see Seckler 2015). In this ‘dissertatio historico-theologica’, Drey traces the development of Church penance, from the public confession of sins to private confession. He is careful when it comes to drawing conclusions about dogma, and remains at the level of historical investigation, but his reflections nevertheless seem to have conflicted with the doctrine of the Council of Trent, since the latter made into an anathema (i.e. a reason for excommunication) its conviction that the secret and individual confession of sins before the priest, which happens in private confession, had been practised in the Church ‘from the beginning’. Anathematized are those who deny that the verbal confession is of divine law and necessary for salvation, and that this (as the Council presupposes) eternal practice of the Church is ‘at variance with the institution and command of Christ’ (Denzinger, No. 1706). A priest from the Ellwangen area considered Drey’s remarks to be heretical, and denounced him in a letter addressed to the pope (see Wolf 2004). Despite the persistence of Roman demands, Drey was not condemned, and his text was not placed on the index of prohibited books. But the rumour alone that he had a trial pending in Rome threatened his reputation in Church circles. For, even if Drey was not condemned formally, there can be no doubt about the displeasure that his utterances had caused in Rome, with Pius VII complaining in a letter from 26 March 1817 of the notorious errors committed by the Ellwangen professors, and the Cardinal Secretary of State, Ercole Consalvi, stating in a letter to Provicarius Keller, one day later, that this criticism applied first and

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foremost to Drey. According to Consalvi, Drey ‘had committed various errors against auricular confession’, whereas the vicar-general, following the Cardinal’s wish, ‘should have resisted and made amends for the offence given’ by way of a statement, ‘a public revocation’ (quoted in Miller 1933: 368). It is within this charged atmosphere that Drey’s lecture on the growth of Christian dogmas can be placed. Probably delivered before the plenum of the Friedrich University in Ellwangen in the summer of 1817, this lecture was ‘the second, systematic part of the text on confession’, intended ‘to refute publicly the suspicion of heresy’ (Seckler 2015: 348). What is surprising is that Drey does not do this by relativizing his historical findings or by playing down their implications for dogma, but by putting forward a thesis that must have sounded outrageous to those that had already detected heresy in Drey’s text on confession; for Drey, there is ‘a certain growth’ (incrementum) of Christian dogmas that not only should be recognized de facto since it is obvious, but that was also embedded in Christianity by its divine founder (Drey 2015: 363). But this growth does not mean that Christianity moves from a deficient early history to an outstanding perfection, with Drey distancing himself from the idea of perfectibility that, for example, Semler used to deal theologically with the findings yielded by dogmatic history. Rather, Drey presupposes not a deficient beginning, but a plenitude that is expressed in Christ and in his proclamation of the kingdom of God, a plenitude bestowed upon all people. It was for this purpose that Christ sent out his disciples. This mission is not achieved simultaneously in all places, however, since different cultures are receptive to it in different ways; rather, for Drey, ‘different conditions demand different means of salvation, different states of mind demand different kinds of light, different needs demand different means of help’ (2015: 365). For Drey, Christ had ‘intended, created and founded’ the Church in such a way that it took these demands into account. The Holy Spirit builds the Church in such a way that it does justice to its mission at different times, while at the same time guaranteeing the Church’s link to the origins of its mission. There is therefore ‘nothing to fear from the growth of Christian dogmas’ (Drey 2015: 367). According to a note that Drey wrote on 24 April 1816, he sees the ‘progressive development of Christianity’ as a ‘basic principle’ of Catholicism, one that Catholicism must also recognize as being ‘one of its main characteristics’ in contrast to the static scriptural principle of Protestantism (1997: 339). It is important at this point to link this to what has already been said about Drey’s concept of system: Drey believes that

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‘things emerge in only two ways – either they emerge separately themselves by developing from an inner core and germ, or they simply line up randomly and without internal connection over time’ (2015: 135). The idea that the dogmas of the Church only line up randomly together is inconceivable for Drey. Rather, for him, they constitute a system and are connected to one another internally, which is the reason that they can only be understood from the point of unity that connects them, that produces them as individuals and joins them together as a whole. Drey distinguishes between two perspectives from which we could perceive such a system: as a ‘purely human’ system, or as a system ‘received originally in the eternal mind of God, and partly and gradually shared with human reason’ (2015: 138). Although he is somewhat unflattering about the first, purely human perspective, it is important to note that Drey affirms the legitimacy and even necessity of both perspectives, with each requiring the other. Seeing the history of dogma only as a work of human power, Drey argues, is to see it as a collection of lucky or unlucky, successful or unsuccessful, attempts to discern the truth and to distinguish it from error. It is this all too human side of dogmatic history that critical research has to examine, free of theological demands. Drey believes, however, that this perspective requires something else, since, seen from a different point of view, this striving on the part of reason will look completely different to how it looks when conceived in a purely human way. For, once one has gained the belief that the highest, i.e. religious, development and formation of reason requires direct, divine teaching, a direct, divine revelation, then one has also taken the next step and can indeed no longer avoid it – namely, the belief that there is in the development of revelation (since it itself is only a revelation continuing in secret) the same divine plan, the same divine competition, as with the origin of revelation itself. This point of view gives rise not only to the foundation or core of our system of dogma, but also to its whole development as the work of God and his Spirit; this opens up completely different views for the field of dogmatic history than the viewpoint that regards it as the pure work of human reason. (2015: 139)

Drey believes that the defining feature of a theological approach to dogmatic history lies in it being more than just a histoire scandaleuse; it may also be such a history, but that would not adequately express its theological significance. The Church’s system of dogma only becomes clear theologically when consideration is given to its ‘punctum saliens’, its ‘life principle’ (2015: 136–137). This ‘life principle’ of the Church is, for Drey, God, who revealed himself in Jesus Christ and whose Holy

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Spirit animates the Church. Such an approach prevents the findings of a critical history of dogma from being falsified by theological premises, with ‘all historical data retaining their value’. These data are nonetheless placed within the overall system of belief, and are therefore to be taken seriously in dogmatic terms, but should not take the form of dogmatic theories. From this, Drey expects to take on board the findings of a critical history of dogma, without allowing these findings to destroy the confessional tradition of the Church: It remains true, as I said: human activity is just as it has been represented by time and history, but this human activity is under a higher divine direction; the freedom and randomness of human research remains, but it is regulated and held together by the secret principles of divine reason, from which even the most profligate investigations, even gross errors, cannot lose themselves irrevocably. There remains for the usual contemplation a to-and-fro of opinion, a seeming advance and retreat, but in the midst of these oscillations in the struggle and change of opinions, the invisible spirit of Christianity achieves its purpose, an ever more perfect unfolding of revelation, an ever more coherent system of faith – whose light reflects back on all branches of human knowledge. (Drey 2015: 139)

Drey thus claims that dogmas form a system that is constituted by God and held together by his spirit. This spirit guarantees the progressive development of the system, which already existed in its fullness when it was founded through Christ, but which must constantly evolve in order to fulfil the universality of God’s goal, namely, to lead all people to salvation. This development takes place at two levels, each of which operates according to its own law. There is the human level, which is often repellent and full of scandal, something that historical research should bring to light without embellishment and without dogmatic blinkers. But there is also a genuinely theological approach to the system of dogma, one that understands this system according to its life principle, the spirit that permeates it as a punctum saliens. This perspective allows even the shallows of dogmatic history to emerge as part of the history of salvation, a history in which a living spirit enables the Church and its dogmas to grow in such a way that the Church becomes more and more what it already is: namely, according to Drey, ‘the outer, well-organized manifestation of religious providence or of the kingdom of God’, and the ‘organ of divine revelation as an embodied system that is continuously formed and shaped from within by the impulse of an invisible spirit. A large and indeed the largest part of this secret activity is revealed to us in the unfolding of the system of dogma’ (Drey 2015: 141–142). For Drey, though, this system is built on a dialectic

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whereby the true is presented only through its opposite, the false, and orthodoxy only through its opposite, heresy. This idea, which is indebted to the patristic topos of the ‘providential use of heresy to advance theological knowledge’ (Fiedrowicz 2010: 327), would be adopted by Drey’s pupil, Johann Adam Möhler, who would also refine the idea and identify its problems. 5.1.2 Johann Adam Möhler: Dead Concepts and Divine Life Although Drey was almost twenty years older than his pupil Möhler, and had more teaching experience at university and would shape the Tübingen faculty long after Möhler’s departure, it was the latter who was regarded as the intellectual leader of the Faculty of Theology from the 1830s onwards. In 1837, two years after Möhler’s move to Munich and one year before his death, the Tübingen faculty was ‘firmly in the hands of the Möhlerians’ (Reinhardt 1977: 26). Möhler changed his ideas in the course of his work more than Drey, who seems to have remained true to the system of ideas that he outlined at the beginning of his academic career (see Geiselmann 1964: 74–91). Möhler attempted in his 1825 publication Unity in the Church or the Principle of Catholicism, Presented in the Spirit of the Church Fathers of the First Three Centuries, to provide a pneumatological conception of ecclesiology, which, as he mentions in his preface, was unusual in the context of Church conceptions at the time: his book ‘begins with the Holy Spirit. That I did not begin with Christ, the centre of our faith, may appear strange’ (Möhler 1996: 77). According to Möhler, the Spirit precedes the faith of the individual, first bringing about faith in Christ and then dwelling in the soul of the believer, with the individual thereby becoming a part of the Church, which itself is animated by the same Spirit to become a unified whole. Möhler understands the Spirit as the life principle of the Church, but also sees it in this role as bound exclusively to the Church: the ‘Spirit would never again leave believers, would never come again, but would continually be present. Because the Spirit fills her, the Church, the totality of believers that the Spirit forms, is the unconquerable treasure of the new life principle, ever renewing and rejuvenating herself’. This is the reason, says Möhler, echoing Irenaeus of Lyon, that ‘none can have a part in the Spirit who have not been nourished to life at the breasts of the mother [i.e. of the Church]’ (Möhler 1996: 84). Thus, the fundamental thesis of Möhler’s work on the Unity in the Church is that Christianity is not a ‘dead concept’, but ‘a new divine life given to the

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people’, and, since life is always linked to development in Möhler’s organological framework, Christianity must also be capable of ‘development and cultivation’. The identity of the consciousness of the Church in the various moments of its existence thus in no way needs a mechanistic protection: The inner unity of life must be preserved, or it will not always be the same Christian Church; but the same consciousness develops, the same life unfolds itself ever more, is always more specific, makes itself clearer. The Church attains the humanity of Christ. These forms are the characteristic developments of the life of the Church, and tradition contains these successive unfoldings of the higher seed of life by protecting the inner unity of life itself. (Möhler 1996: 111–112)

Like Vincent of Lérins, whom Möhler discussed in some of his early essays and whose Commonitorium he focused upon in one of his first lectures (see Lösch 1917/1918: 129–131), Möhler uses the living organism in the form of the human body as a metaphor for dogmatic development, although he focuses less on the manifestation of existing body parts, and more on the continuity of consciousness that marks out living beings of a higher order. Even if the human undergoes all kinds of physical changes, they will always remain the same through their consciousness. The elderly person may be fundamentally different physically from how they were as a young human being, but they remain one and the same person through their one and the same consciousness. We will return to this idea later: continuity is not (or not only) a material question, but rather a question of consciousness; not only a doctrinal, but also an ecclesial phenomenon. Where the Church of a particular period lives in the consciousness that is in continuity with previous periods of the Church, there exists (at least a certain form of ) continuity for Möhler, one that can also bridge material discontinuities. On the other hand, though, consciousness cannot exist without matter, without a body. A disruptive discontinuity would therefore also result in the end of consciousness made possible by an organism. This explains, for Möhler, the exclusive attachment of the Spirit to the Church, since the Spirit has no other historical location than the Church. Möhler is using ‘Spirit’ here as a theological synonym for consciousness, but the concept has two meanings for him: the ‘one spirit of believers’ is ‘the action of the one divine Spirit’ (Möhler 1996: 83). Thus, the term ‘Spirit’ can mean theologically both the Holy Spirit and the spirit that inspires the Church. Möhler is adopting here ‘the romantic idea of the Volksgeist in the

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version provided by Schleiermacher, when he [i.e. Schleiermacher] sees the Holy Spirit as the common spirit’ (Rohls 1997: 452). This Spirit in the double sense is, for Möhler, the driving force behind doctrinal development. The Spirit develops the Church, according to God’s providence (Holy Spirit) and according to the consciousness of the Church members (common spirit). Möhler, therefore, explains the formation of Church offices and hierarchy according to this principle. ‘The continual existence of the divine Spirit among human beings’ began in fact ‘with the apostles, who received it directly’, writes Möhler (1996: 85; my emphasis); this remains their historically unique privilege, for the ‘life principle’ communicated to them will in the future be conveyed by them where ‘such reception was present’, so that ‘individuals no longer obtained it directly as the apostles did, but engendered new lives in others similar to the new life that had begun in them’ (Möhler 1996: 85). For Möhler, dogma can only be understood against the background of the principle of the Spirit that permeates and inspires the Church. ‘The inner, spiritual life of the Christian, the work of the divine Spirit living in believers, must seek an expression, press outward, and express itself’, which takes place ultimately through the judicious expression of Church doctrine, that is, dogma (Möhler 1996: 96). What is problematical from today’s point of view, but was logical from his own, is that Möhler sees the exclusive binding of the Spirit to the Church as also giving rise to an exclusive – and therefore exclusionary – claim to knowledge: the truth of Church doctrine can only really be understood in the Church, since the Spirit encounters himself in the manifestations of dogma, the first manifestation being, for Möhler, the formation of the New Testament canon. But similarity can only be recognized by similarity (similis simili cognoscitur), which is the reason that people outside the Church and thereby not part of the Spirit are also unable to pass any kind of judgment on the credibility of dogma. If we read Möhler consistently, then a dialogue between believers and non-believers about faith is either impossible or only conceivable through the Holy Spirit, who wants to draw non-believers into the unity of his body, the Church. At the same time, though, the link between Spirit and dogma also has a critical function with regard to dogma, for, according to Möhler (1996: 111): ‘dogmas have value only insofar as they express the inner life that is presented with them’. A dogma that is a dead letter and that does not express Church life cannot be a dogma for Möhler. But he leaves no doubt that a pneumatologically inspired Church must also have dogmas. ‘If tradition had not thus been at the same time embodied’, as happens in scripture, but also in the teaching of the Church, Möhler (1996: 118)

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writes, then ‘no historical consciousness would have been possible, and we would have lived in a dreamlike state, without knowing how we came to be, indeed not knowing what we are and are to become’. Dogma, therefore, reifies the Spirit in two senses, as the Holy Spirit and as the common spirit that animates the Church. But the Spirit also constantly strives to transcend this reification and to achieve a fuller catholicity: One can truly say: so exalted is the Church, the totality of believers was never Christian enough to portray the idea of the Catholic Church purely in life. Moreover, believers would never be unchristian enough to make the essence of heresy a thing of value, so lowly is heresy! . . . Indeed one can say: if the idea of the Catholic Church is realized, then the Holy Spirit has conquered the world. (Möhler 1996: 158)

For Möhler, the Spirit given to the Church by God constantly tries to transform the Church into a catholic, that is, the all-embracing, phenomenon, one that can only be realized historically in the Church at its outset. Dogma is a means for the Church to achieve catholicity, according to Möhler, and this gives an inescapable significance to dogma; at the same time, however, dogma is incomplete and remains fragmentary, since catholicity can never be fully achieved historically, but must always be striven for. Once the catholicity of the Church has been realized fully, then the human being finds themselves in the kingdom of God; the Spirit has then conquered the world. But, for as long as that is not the case, the catholicity of the Church must always develop in connection with and demarcation from its opposites, and distinguish itself more sharply from them. Like his teacher Drey, Möhler draws here on the idea that heresy has a providential role: ‘there have to be factions among you’ (1 Corinthians 11:19). Möhler elaborates on what the exact significance of heresy is in the emergence of orthodoxy, that is, to what extent catholicity, the all-encompassing nature of the Church, takes shape when faced with the selective and particular phenomenon of heresy by attaining consciousness of itself only through its opposite (see Geiselmann 1956: 619–620). While Möhler claimed in a review of a book by Johann Theodor Katerkamp (a Church historian who belonged to the circle around Princess Gallitzin), published in the Theologische Quartalschrift, that the ‘concept of the Catholic Church is as old as Christianity; it came to a clear consciousness through its opposite, heresies’ (1823: 508),1 he

1

Until 1832, contributions to the journal were published anonymously. Lösch (1938) nonetheless identified Möhler as the author of the review mentioned.

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refined this position in the course of working on his Unity text. In a book chapter written retrospectively, Möhler (1996: 196–197) argues ‘that we should not have designated heresies as antitheses to the Church but always as contradictions’. For Möhler, the difference between the two lies in the fact – and here he is clearly borrowing from Romantic thinkers such as Novalis and from idealists such as Schelling – that contrast can exist within the Church and is its dynamic driving force, whereas contradiction is located outside the Church and ultimately denies its catholicity. For, it is true that religion begets various views of the world according to different periods, cultures, races, families, individuals, indeed according to its various stages of development. In fact, religion can make itself known completely only in an infinity of such variations. As a result this infinity in unity is possible insofar as it expresses itself in true antitheses, since unity is also in infinity. . . . Since these true antitheses are possible, they must become actual, because true life consists only in the penetration of that which opposes it. Therefore, as we said earlier, true Christian life is not possible in any heresy because there are no antitheses in heresy, and there are no antitheses because there is no unity. . . . What in the Church has the true nature of an antithesis, appears outside the Church not as an antithesis but as standing by itself alone, because it cannot reach its completion, but destroys itself out of sorrow and anger, and dies. (Möhler 1996: 196)

For Möhler, then, the dynamism of the Spirit that inspires the Church is reflected in the fact that there are contrasts within the Church that, in their struggle with each other, produce dogmas without relinquishing the unity that holds them together in their differences and thereby becoming a contradiction. There is a fine line between contrast and contradiction, but, Möhler (1996: 198) argues, ‘[t]hrough evil’, that which, ‘according to its nature, is called to be an antithesis becomes a contradiction’, and thus destroys the unity that the contrast should actually deepen through the dynamics that it unleashes. Through its dual concept of the Spirit, Möhler’s notion of doctrinal development succeeds in combining the divine and the human element of this development. In seeing the spirit of Christianity as both the Holy Spirit and the collective consciousness of Christians of their own togetherness, a togetherness that is in motion due to its contrasts, Möhler is able to make some startling claims. For example, he understands the ordained ministry not as an entity that Christ established statically. Rather, for Möhler, Christ sent his Spirit to the apostles, with this Spirit then shaping the structure of the Church and its ministers according to the requirements of

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each particular period. The Church hierarchy (and Möhler means here the bishops, the metropolitans, the episcopate and papal primacy) owes itself not to a one-off appointment by the historical Jesus, but to the historical unfolding of the Spirit, who in the increasing differentiation of Christianity had searched for increasingly differentiated offices of unity. This was a consistently theocentric approach for Möhler, since it saw the Spirit that shapes the Church as the Holy Spirit, and it was an approach that allowed him to make claims that a narrowly orthodox dogmatism would regard (as it had regarded Drey’s arguments about confession only a few years beforehand) as heresy. Thus, Möhler (1996: 221) claims that the episcopate is ‘an offspring of the congregation’. To argue thus was beyond the pale from a Roman point of view, since the idea that the Church ministry had arisen to meet congregational needs and had not been installed directly by Christ was regarded as one of the main points of contention between Catholicism and Protestantism. But in Möhler’s framework there is no contradiction between the divine, or pneumatological, establishment of the ministry, and the idea that the ordained ministry only developed historically from the demands that congregations had. For, the principle animating the Church is one and the same Spirit: the Spirit of God and the spirit of dynamic movement. But this also points to the major problem underlying Möhler’s concept of development. Möhler’s organological model, which claims that the Church has at all times ‘the form and shape that it deserves’, protects the Church from any criticism: In spite of all development and change of appearance, the Church always remains in essence the same and true to itself, which means that no past epoch can be considered an ideal time. Church reform in the strict sense is no longer possible if we accept Möhler’s claims; what remains is only a reform of individual members. Thus, Möhler takes the decisive step from criticizing the Church to legitimizing it. (Reinhardt 1977: 24)

This tendency, which Reinhardt only seems to notice in Möhler’s Symbolism, is already evident in his Unity. For, even if this patrological work takes the Church of the first three centuries as its model, the fact that Möhler deals with the Church Fathers ultimately serves only to extract his systematic thesis: the Spirit shapes at all times the dogma of the Church in order to lead it to an ever-fuller catholicity. Möhler did not intend to criticize this dogma. On the contrary, the objection made to his claim that there was no papal primacy in the Church in the first few centuries is ‘not possible according to the law of true development’, since primacy represents ‘the

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personalized reflection of the unity of the total Church’; a unity that could only become ‘an object through self-contemplation’ once it had permeated the different local churches, which for Möhler had not been the case in the Church’s early days (Möhler 1996: 257). This apologetic tendency is also present in Möhler’s Symbolism, although here the pneumatological element is far less strong than it is in Unity. Möhler is more conventional in the former when he asserts that the certainty of Church doctrine is ‘immediate’, since the Church ‘received her dogma from the lips of Christ and the apostles’, with the Spirit then being only the force that reminds the Church of this obvious dogma; for, Möhler (1997: 296) argues, if ‘the Church were to endeavour, by learned investigation, to seek her doctrines, she would fall into the most absurd inconsistency and annihilate her very self’. Möhler took a less speculative, though clearly more conventional, perspective in Symbolism than he had done in Unity. It was the latter and its wildly romantic courage that established Möhler’s early reputation.

. : ‘    ,         ’ Because Newman wants to make it easy for his readers, he makes it difficult for them. While Drey and Möhler use sometimes unwieldy argumentations and abstract concepts, which nonetheless help the reader once they have understood them, Newman cultivates an essayistic and associative style that makes it difficult to organize his ideas. Yet, Newman should not be underestimated: he was an exception in the nineteenth century, and is today one of the most discussed theologians of that period. Like Möhler, whom Newman (1845: 27) mentions alongside Joseph de Maistre in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Newman also deals intensively with patristic theology.2 He believes that the (allegedly) undivided Church of the first five centuries is the Church that was founded by Christ and that grew under the leadership of the apostles. Contrary to the claims made by the Protestant history of dogma of the eighteenth century, Newman sees the doctrinal decisions of the early Church councils as posing no problem at all from the point of view of 2

On the influence that Möhler’s thought might have had on Newman’s theory of development, see Chadwick (1957: 111); Walgrave (1957: 20). On the development of Newman’s theology, see Ker (2009); on his early Catholic period, see Shea (2017). An overview of Newman’s theory of doctrinal development is provided by McCarren (2009).

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preserving continuity with Christ and the apostles. Newman claims that, should a divine revelation have occurred, then it is possible that this revelation was the only one; he also believes that, announced by God for the salvation of humankind, the revelation endures under God’s providential guidance and must, according to God’s plan for salvation, always be accessible in the form of an ‘authentic, adequate and authoritative embodiment’ (Toon 1979: 8). The linchpin of Newman’s thought can therefore be defined as the question of which of the many confessional churches of his time is identical with the Church of antiquity (according to his interpretation of history) and therefore functions as the bearer of the revelation issued by God. According to Newman: Christianity is not a matter of opinion, but an external fact, entering into, carried out in, indivisible from, the history of the world. It has a bodily occupation of the world; it is one continuous fact or thing, the same from first to last, distinct from everything else: to be a Christian is to partake of, to submit to, this thing; and the simple question was, Where, what is this thing in this age which in the first age was the Catholic Church? (1876: 308; my emphasis)

Christianity appears to Newman to be something historically objectifiable, and it found its exclusive objectification in patristic times in the one Catholic Church of antiquity. But which Church now objectifies Christianity after the many divisions, and especially after the Reformations of the sixteenth century? According to Newman, this question had become urgent prior to his conversion, which itself had been preceded by a personal and theological ‘crisis’ (Ker 2009: 213). Following this crisis, Newman was able to provide the following solution: ‘The answer was undeniable; the Church called Catholic now, is that very same thing in hereditary descent, in organization, in principles, in position, in external relations, which was called the Catholic Church then’ (1876: 308; my emphasis). Thus, Newman concluded that, as an Anglican, he was in the wrong church. To try to reshape the Church of England, as he had done for years as an Anglican priest, no longer seemed adequate to do justice to the ‘thing’ (the ‘thing’ being Christianity in the form of the ‘Church called Catholic’ then and now). Newman had previously been one of the main initiators of Tractarianism, a movement in which various authors expressed in the Tracts for the Times their opposition to state interference in Church affairs, which they saw as a threat to the Church’s mission. Newman’s first tract of 1833, and John Keble’s sermon on National Apostasy, were the impetus for the so-called Oxford Movement, whose goal of revitalizing Church life first met with

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approval among many bishops, but whose ideas about the sacramental structure of the Church and about apostolic succession were later criticized for being too Catholicizing. In the last of these tracts, which deals with the interpretation of the thirty-nine articles of the Anglican faith, Newman claimed in 1841 that it is ‘a duty which we owe both to the Catholic Church and to our own [i.e. the Church of England] to take our reformed confessions in the most Catholic sense they will admit; we have no duties toward their framers’ (Newman 2013: 471). Newman’s demand provoked an outcry in the Anglican episcopate and at Oxford University, with the governing bodies of the Oxford colleges condemning Newman’s tract before he had even had the chance to explain himself, and then issuing their own statement a few hours before Newman’s explanation – a ‘violent act’ of religious zeal for Newman (cited in Ker 2009: 219), and one that may have increased his alienation from the Anglican Church. He preached as an Anglican priest for the last time in 1843, before withdrawing from Oxford to Littlemore for retreat and intensive study. Newman was accepted into the Catholic Church by an Italian priest in October 1845, and a month later he published his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, which explains how he had reached the conclusion that the one Catholic Church of antiquity survives in the Roman Catholic Church, although the Roman Church seems to deviate from the early Church in so many ways. At the beginning of his book, Newman (1845: 27) formulates the fundamental ‘hypothesis’ of his theory of development, which (and he sees himself as agreeing with Möhler here) is that the increase and expansion of the Christian Creed and Ritual, and the variations which have attended the process in the case of individual writers and Churches, are the necessary attendants on any philosophy or polity which takes possession of the intellect and heart and has had any wide and extended dominion; that, from the nature of the human mind, time is necessary for the full comprehension and perfection of great ideas; and that the highest and most wonderful truths, though communicated to the world once for all by inspired teachers could not be comprehended all at once by the recipients, but, as received and transmitted by minds not inspired and through media which were human, have required only the longer time and deeper thought for their full elucidation. This may be called the Theory of Developments.

Newman does not begin with the specifics of Christian doctrine, be they the Holy Spirit, the concept of divine providence, or the Church ministry. Rather, he compares the faith embodied in the Church with an idea that is in the human mind. Just as an important idea that the human being

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carries around with them for a long time works, grows, matures and corrects itself in the human mind, so also in the course of time has the idea of Christianity grown, matured and sometimes become sharper through correcting itself. Newman’s approach could be characterized as transcendental and idealistic: structures and processes of the human mind tell us something about structures and processes of a non-mental nature. For Newman, analyzing how an idea develops over a longer period of time in the human mind enables us to understand how the idea of Christianity has developed in the consciousness of the Church. By an idea, however, Newman understands not just a passive object that is thought of by a thinking being, but an active entity that arranges, shapes and transforms the thinking of the person who grasps it – a ‘living idea’ (Shea 2017: 5–6) operating within humans that is hidden and not always open to conscious reflection. Newman then attempts to clarify precisely how an idea develops in the mind, so that he can find criteria to distinguish between when an idea is developed in such a way as to preserve continuity, and when an idea is distorted or destroyed. Newman aims to clarify some terms, but in the end, he does not order them systematically. For Newman (1845: 44), the ‘defect of our language’ means that the concept of development denotes three different things: firstly, in the descriptive sense, a process; or, secondly, the result of a process; and, thirdly, in the normative sense, the positive result of a process, that is, a development ‘deserving the name’ and opposing a ‘corruption’ as a ‘false and unfaithful development’. Newman distinguishes eight forms of development: mathematical, physical, material, political, logical, historical, moral and metaphysical. Exactly how they relate to the development of Christian doctrine remains unclear, however. Newman can exclude only mathematical development from the theological field, since its concern is with deductions and equations; these do not concern him, as, based on strict necessity and therefore demonstrably certain, they are not open to ‘corruption’. He then arrives at seven forms that, according to the first edition of the Essay (1845), serve as a ‘distinctive test’ for recognizing ‘legitimate developments’ (Newman 1845: 57–58). In a revised edition of the work, published in 1878, Newman describes his seven forms no longer as a ‘test’, but only as ‘notes’ designed to show retrospectively that what the Church teaches is indeed a legitimate development (see McCarren 2009: 124–125). The following comments are related to the first edition of the Essay. Newman (1845: 64) begins his criteriology with the thesis that a development is characterized by the fact that it preserves the ‘essential idea or

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type’ of its original form. Newman cites as negative examples the loss of the original idea of a monastic community that corrupts itself by abolishing the vows that constitute it, and a judge who allows themselves to be bribed even though their office binds them to the law. Newman (1845: 66) sees the second ‘test’ in the ‘continuity of principles’. For Newman, for example, the sacramental structure of the Church is already preformed in the principle of incarnation, although this structure was not as pronounced at the time of the apostles as it would be in later epochs. The third criterion is what Newman (1845: 73) calls the ‘power of assimilation’ of an idea, which he explains by comparing it to the physical development of living organisms. For Newman, growth is only possible through the organism’s absorption of foreign materials, which maintain and enlarge the organism, with the organism processing and transforming these materials in such a way that it can incorporate them. Similarly, the Church has dealt with different cultural and philosophical ideas at different times, and has absorbed them as a part of itself. The fourth criterion is that of the ‘early anticipation’ of a later development, which constitutes a logical break from the first three criteria. According to Newman (1845: 77), the observer can, from a retrospective viewpoint, find early (though obscure and incomplete) traces of what would in time reach fuller development, with such a vaticinium then serving as a criterion to legitimate this development. The fifth criterion is what Newman (1845: 80) calls ‘logical sequence’, which can also only be applied retrospectively, and which Newman understands not as the progress of premises to conclusions, but as the tracing back of conclusions to premises. Thus, for Newman, it is possible to derive the Church’s practice of penitence from a deeper understanding of baptism, with the former developing from baptism as a restoration of baptismal grace (see McCarren 2009: 126). As the sixth characteristic of authentic development, Newman demands that additions always be of a preserving, and never of a destructive, nature; that, in other words, discontinuity must always serve a greater continuity. For Newman (1845: 86), they must therefore be ‘preserving additions’ that ‘illustrate, not obscure, corroborate, not correct’ the tradition. Newman’s final criterion, ‘chronic continuance’, is the most puzzling of all. For Newman (1845: 90–91), as long as ideas live in men’s minds, they are ever enlarging into fuller development; they will not be stationary in their corruption any more than before it; and dissolution is that further state to which corruption tends. Corruption cannot, therefore, be of long standing; and thus duration is another test of faithful development.

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This thesis shows very clearly how essayistic Newman’s Essay really is; he touches on many crucial matters that seem intuitively plausible, but does not explain them rigorously. For, if his seventh criterion were correct, then the survival for centuries of the Churches that emerged from the Reformation would be a miracle, since they are for the Catholic Newman simply corrupt manifestations of the original idea of Christianity. Nor does Newman make clear whether his criteria are to be applied successively, with the lower-ranking criterion only being applied if the previous one fails, or whether they must all be applied simultaneously. Newman does not explain how his theory can be applied consistently; showing great erudition, he quotes hundreds of pages of patristic examples to illustrate this and that, but nowhere does he show concisely how his criteria (which, in the first edition, he explicitly claims have the character of a test) are to be applied exactly. We can therefore agree with Newman (1845: 64) when he claims that the ‘seven tests of a development’ that he outlines are ‘of varying cogency and independence’. Much more rigorous than his Essay are the ideas that Newman wrote for the Roman theologian Giovanni Perrone in 1847, two years after his conversion. He did so in order to bring his own thinking, which was largely unfamiliar with the Catholic terminology of his time, into conversation with a luminary of Roman theology. Perrone annotated Newman’s theses, and these comments show how idiosyncratic and imprecise he found Newman’s terminology, despite his best feelings towards the convert and his motivation. At the same time, it is only the interplay between Newman and Perrone (the so-called Newman-Perrone paper) that reveals the full, groundbreaking originality of Newman’s approach (see Kasper 2011), for he is aware from his patristic studies that it is not tenable to assume that there is a storehouse of constant and more or less explicitly formulated dogmas. Newman claims, for example, that, before pouring the deposit entrusted to it ‘into a dogmatic form’, the Church could ‘not have been fully aware’ of ‘what it should feel with regard to this matter’, which means that, although it has always been in possession of the depositum fidei, the Church ‘knows more in theology today than in previous centuries’ (cited in Lynch 1935: 414–415). Perrone comments on this negatively, and implies that it almost amounts to heresy: hoc dicere non auderem (‘I wouldn’t dare to say that’) (cited in Lynch 1935: 414). Perrone also disagrees with Newman’s thesis that ‘a new dogma is born after many difficulties’, commenting: ‘No new dogma arises; rather, the old truth is presented by a new definition as something to be explicitly believed’. This means that ‘the dogma does not grow in itself, but quoad

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nos’, in the sense of a ‘more precise knowledge of the articles that are defined’. In short, ‘Nulla veritas crescit’, a truth does not grow, but it is what it is – always and independently of all historical factors (cited in Lynch 1935: 420). Even if Newman’s terminology lacks clarity, his interaction with Perrone does show how innovative the former’s fundamental theses are. Newman manages to see Christianity as a phenomenon whose unfolding, like the unfolding of an idea, is embedded in, but at the same time not reducible to, human contingencies, uncertainties and profundities. For, according to Newman (1845: 37–39), an idea not only modifies, but, as has been implied, is modified or at least influenced by the state of things in which it is carried out, and depends in various ways on the circumstances around it. . . . But, whatever be the risk of corruption from intercourse with the world around it, such a risk must be undergone, if it is duly to be understood, and much more if it is to be fully exhibited. . . . It is indeed sometimes said that the stream is clearest near the spring. Whatever use may fairly be made of this image, it does not apply to the history of a philosophy or sect, which, on the contrary, is more equable, and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and broad, and full. . . . In a higher world it is otherwise; but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.

It is almost a miracle that the magisterium of his time did not censure Newman for these remarks, since he is demanding nothing less than that the Church always takes full risks to do justice to the idea entrusted to it, even the risk of distorting this idea in the attempt to express it in a contemporary way. In other words, not every attempt to make Church doctrine contemporary is successful, but the ‘risk must be undergone’ nonetheless. Conversely, Newman also acknowledges that, should the Church believe that it has gone too far (or remained too narrow?) in trying to formulate the gospel in such a way that it matches a particular period, then it has the chance to correct itself. What Newman actually finds problematical is not that some things may contain corruptions, since these create the space for further developments. Rather, what he sees as being fatal for the Church is if it abandons its attempt to make its idea contemporary, and allows its idea to fall into a state of torpor in which it can be experienced in the present as a museum relic, but not as something that can move people’s hearts. For, in ‘a higher world it may be different, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often’. Thus, what no longer changes, dies. A rigid Church no longer takes any risks, but, for Newman, faces death.

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.       - The dominant strand of theology in the nineteenth century was without doubt a form of scholasticism, which its opponents called ‘neo-scholasticism’, a pejorative term that its proponents then adopted. Its influence was enormous, due to the privileged status that it was afforded by the magisterium, particularly under the pontificate of Pius IX. Pope Leo XIII also formally bestowed upon neo-scholasticism the monopoly that it had in reality already enjoyed in previous decades when he called for every theology to align itself with Thomas Aquinas (Denzinger, No. 3140). Its unprecedented marginalization and incrimination of other kinds of theology earned neo-scholasticism a negative reputation in the nineteenth century, which suffered again when theology liberated itself from neo-scholasticism during and after the Second Vatican Council. Neoscholasticism understands itself as a philosophy or theology of ‘the prehistorical period’, one that bypasses the Enlightenment, which Joseph Kleutgen sees as being ‘inimical’ to Christianity (1867: 3–4), to connect seamlessly with the scholasticism of the Middle Ages and its tradition in the schools of the early-modern period. On the other hand, postconciliar theology, which distances itself from neo-scholasticism, often adopts the version of history provided by those who had been denounced by neo-scholasticism during the previous century. The term ‘neo-scholasticism’ therefore has something of a nefarious ring to it today. It is associated with ‘ideas of the use and misuse of power to implement ecclesial, philosophical and theological goals’, and accused of ‘abstractedness, formalism and especially of lacking Biblical and historical work’, all of which led to the isolation of Catholic theology, since it could in no way ‘match the standards of historical and exegetical science, as they had developed in the 19th century’ (Neuner 2016: 229). As justified as this criticism is, and as inadequate as neo-scholastic approaches to solving current problems may be, we should not forget that neo-scholasticism was in itself a thoroughly heterogeneous current, one that – as so often in the history of theology – was also able to formulate original ideas while appearing merely to be interested in restoring the tradition. There are, when it comes to the issue of dogmatic development, two thematic complexes of neo-scholastic thought of particular importance: the teaching of the tradition and the dispute over the status of the conclusio theologica.

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If we speak of tradition in the theological context, then a distinction must be made between the tradition in the singular and traditions in the plural. Used in the plural, traditions are purely and simply customs or practices that have developed during the life of the Church. Traditions are as they are, but they could also be completely different without the Church losing its identity. Used in the singular, the concept of tradition is different: it denotes what has been passed down as binding, something intended to create a line of continuity between the Church at its beginnings and the Church at different points in time. One merit of the scholastic theology of the nineteenth century is that it gave precise thought to the concept of tradition, and therefore also reflected upon the issue of doctrinal development. An important figure here is Johann Baptist Franzelin, who, according to Yves Congar (1967: 198), ‘largely inspired the modern [i.e. neoscholastic] manuals’ and made them aware of how important was ‘the idea of dogmatic development’, an idea that is ‘now an accepted fact in theology’. Franzelin is associated with the Roman School, a term that is of course just as problematical as that of the Tübingen School. The term denotes the thinking of the Jesuits, whom were again given leadership of the Collegium Romanum ten years after their order was readmitted to the world Church (in some countries, like Prussia or Russia, it had never been formally dissolved), that is, in 1824. Prominent representatives of this School are Giovanni Perrone (whom we have already mentioned), Carlo Passaglia, Clemens Schrader and Franzelin himself. According to Kasper, Franzelin, who was made a cardinal by Pius IX, ‘was influenced by the ideas of his teachers Passaglia and Schrader, and at the same time gave these ideas a classical expression’ (2011: 94). His Tractatus de divina traditione et scriptura is regarded as a synthesis of his work. Franzelin denies that the deposit of faith entrusted to the Church can undergo ‘objective growth’ (obiectivum incrementum depositi fidei), since the act of revelation, when this deposit was given to the apostles by Christ and in the Holy Spirit, is concluded (1870: 228). A ‘third economy’, that is, a salvific action of God that goes beyond what Franzelin calls the Old Covenant, and what he calls the New Covenant, is ‘impossible’ (1870: 231). So-called private revelations, which Franzelin clearly anticipated given the fervent belief in miracles that was sweeping Rome at the time (see Wolf 2015), and which he dealt with in detail, cannot add anything to the Church’s deposit of faith. Nonetheless, for Franzelin, God could very well reveal the ‘true meaning of a dogma’ to the pope or to individual

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‘Council Fathers’, with this being an ‘extraordinary modus of pronouncing dogmas’ (1870: 235); a delicate remark given that Franzelin’s tract appeared in print in 1870, during the First Vatican Council, which saw the dogma of papal infallibility becoming the object of fierce struggle, and which was led by a pope who was extremely receptive to supernatural interventions (or whatever he deemed these to be). Despite arguing for the constancy and absolute immutability of the depositum fidei, Franzelin is also aware of the difference between how ‘revealed truths’ are in the object and in the mode of their proclamation. Franzelin therefore claims that ‘in the objective state of revelation’ (1870: 238) there may be truths that: 1. 2. 3.

were not always and everywhere contained explicitly in Catholic understanding [intellectus] and in the revelatory proclamation of the Church, which thus were themselves questioned at some time even within the Church, without being considered heresy, until revealed truths can exist that at some point were obscured, but without their being so obscured that a consensus contrary to them and denying them could prevail.

Franzelin develops his argument by using two opposing sets of terms, each with three parts: explicit, clear and articulated (disertus) on the one hand, and implicit, obscure and relatively unarticulated (minus disertus) on the other (see Franzelin 1870: 240–241). He argues that what all Christians were to believe in order to gain salvation was at all times known explicitly, clearly and in a form articulated by the Church. On the other hand, issues that do not fall into the area of what everyone is to accept explicitly at all times, but instead belong to what Franzelin calls an advanced ‘gnosis or Christian wisdom’ can also only be contained implicitly in the deposit of faith passed down, and it is for this reason that they may appear theologically unclear, or obscure, and that the Church has not yet articulated them as binding (1870: 240). But if, according to Franzelin, ‘things’ and ‘circumstances’ make such an articulation necessary, then what can follow is an explication of what is implied, an illumination of what is obscure, and an authoritative articulation of what has so far not been said – a process led by the Holy Spirit and accomplished by the magisterium (1870: 241). Franzelin therefore distinguishes three stages of dogmatic development: explicatio, declaratio, praedicatio (the theological unfolding, the accompanying illumination of what has been unclear, and the Church’s proclamation of the newly unfolded and illuminated). It is significant, though, that,

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unlike Drey, Möhler and Newman, Franzelin expressly rejects the concept of growth (incrementum) when it comes to dogmas, since for him the deposit of faith given to the Church in revelation is in itself perfect and unchanging, and all that can develop is the human understanding of what has always been contained in the faith of the Church. While for Newman it is crucial that the Christian faith engages with human history (even where there is a risk of possible misdevelopments), Franzelin subsumes history simply under the external ‘things’ and ‘circumstances’ that are more or less helpful for our understanding of what has always already actually been present in the objective tradition of the Church. Franzelin’s pupil Matthias Joseph Scheeben also considers the issue of doctrinal development from the point of view of the concept of tradition, but sees the process of transmission much more dynamically than his teacher, since he gives greater weight in this process to the human element. Although Scheeben argues that ‘the ecclesial tradition as such is not merely a human and natural tradition, but one that is supernaturally organized, animated and guided by God’, he also stresses that it is ‘mediated and implemented by people and by human activity’, and, what is more, by people who ‘are not as completely filled and infused by the Holy Spirit as the apostles were’; from this, Scheeben concludes that those qualities that the tradition should have in the divine idea, and that are also made possible by the organism of the Church organized and guided by God, are in reality modified by the influence of the human element and do not necessarily emerge in their ideal and absolute perfection. Thus, the tradition does not necessarily possess at every point of its flow the whole ideal perfection of certainty and decisiveness in the testimony of the deposit of faith according to its entirety and its full integrity, as this perfection was realized in the apostles, and should also be striven for by the Church. (1899: 71)

Because the continuity and universality with which the deposit of faith handed down by the apostles is not ‘absolutely perfect’ and ‘constant’ enough in the Church that ‘no change and no fluctuation’ can be seen, Scheeben argues that the integrity of the tradition is only negative, since it protects the Church from gross error. Scheeben sees a surprising amount of leeway in the positive unfolding of the transmitted deposit of faith and its establishment in dogmas. Despite the exclusion of a restructuring or alteration of earlier dogma . . . there is still room not only for the later ecclesial ascertainment of truths belonging indirectly to the doctrine of faith, but also, with the reshaping, renewal and expansion of the apostolic deposit, for

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the further formation and development of the doctrine of faith itself or of church dogma in the narrower sense than the public model of the divine-apostolic deposit. (Scheeben 1899: 106)

Thus, on the one hand, Scheeben does not go beyond Franzelin’s claims – the deposit remains absolutely static in the divine idea. On the other, though, Scheeben gives more weight than Franzelin to the historical conditions in which the deposit is handed down, in that he not only limits these conditions to the individual’s ‘subjective appropriation’ of faith, but also extends them to the Church’s ‘authoritative presentation’ of dogma (Scheeben 1899: 274). Scheeben disapproves of what he characterizes as a ‘progressive’ view of dogma, one that emphasizes ‘in the wrong way the developing and mutable’, just as he disapproves of what he calls a ‘reactionary’ viewpoint, one that overestimates ‘the permanent and immobile in the development of dogma’ (1899: 276). Scheeben understands by the latter precisely those positions held by Giovanni Perrone in his dialogue with Newman, namely, that the Church has always ‘had the same full and clear consciousness of all doctrines of faith’ (Scheeben 1899: 277), and has merely advanced from assuming them implicitly to formulating them explicitly. For Scheeben, such a position contradicts the nature and history of doctrinal development in the Church, which he sees as being entirely guided and safeguarded by God’s providence, but also as being conveyed through human history, with the magisterium not being merely opposed to this history, but also part of it. Scheeben is an example of the innovative power that can also be found in a movement such as neoscholasticism, a movement that actually supported conservation, but whose great minds were more than just conservators.

5.3.2 Logic and Advances in Dogma Logical reasoning takes statements that are accepted as true and relates them to each other in such a way that further statements can be derived from them that have not yet existed (at least not manifestly) and that are also true. Probably beyond dispute is that, when trying to understand the faith of the Church rationally and clearly, theology cannot do without deductive reasoning. What was and is disputed, though, is the question of the implications that arise for the faith of the Church from theological deductions. As shown in the fourth chapter, this was a problem that was already the subject of controversy in the Middle Ages. Some neoscholastic authors saw in the old discussions an instrument that they

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could use to address the issue of dogmatic development, an issue that gained full urgency in the nineteenth century. The phenomenon of doctrinal development was traced back here to ‘rational deductions from the original circumstances of revelation’ (Hammans 1965: 119), which is the reason that such theories are called dialectical, logical or intellectualistic. The Dominicans Reginald Schultes and Francisco Marín-Sola were two protagonists, and at the same time antagonists, of this tendency in the early twentieth century. The starting-point for both is an understanding of revelation that could be described as ‘instructional-theoretical’, since it is an understanding that is exclusively concerned with the ‘doctrinal information’ provided by divine messages (Seckler 2000: 45). According to Schultes (1922: 167), a ‘divine revelation occurs through propositions and through concepts or terms that correspond to our knowledge’. Since propositions are ultimately what a statement claims to be true, Schultes can relate Church doctrines to propositions of revelation. For Schultes, something is immediately or formally revealed when it has been revealed ‘in itself’, that is, when it has been revealed ‘through the proposition or the terms of the proposition’; what has been revealed ‘in its principles or causes’ is regarded as indirectly or virtually revealed, with the thought of the recipient of the revelation being left to form these principles into clear propositions (1922: 167). In turn, Schultes divides the directly or formally revealed into propositions that are revealed formaliter explicite or formaliter implicite. The former designate what they designate precisely by their own power (vis significationis propria), whereas the latter can encompass several things equally. For example, for Schultes (1922: 168), it is revealed formaliter explicite that Jesus derives from the genealogy of David, since this statement is found in the New Testament (Matthew 1:1–18). On the other hand, it is revealed formaliter implicite that ‘God wishes so-and-so to be saved’. This is not written in the Bible (otherwise it would be revealed formaliter explicite), but, if so-and-so is a human being, then it necessarily results from the statement, God ‘wills everyone to be saved’ (1 Timothy 2:4). For Schultes, revealed truths that are formally explicit differ from those that are formally implicit, only in terms of their logical form. In order to grasp what has been revealed formaliter explicite, it is necessary to understand the terms through which it has been revealed. In order to grasp what has been revealed formaliter implicite, it is necessary both to understand the terms of what has been revealed formaliter explicite, and to have certain abilities in deductive reasoning. However, the logical operation that establishes a connection

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between what is revealed formaliter explicite and what is revealed formaliter implicite is for Schultes an ‘improper (explicative) syllogism’, whereas the acquisition of an indirectly and virtually revealed proposition requires a ‘proper (illative) syllogism’ (1922: 184). Something said virtualiter places something said formaliter not only in a different logical form; it also represents an advance in knowledge. Schultes then applies these distinctions to the issue of the definability of theological deductions. He is concerned with the question of which propositions can be made into dogmas at all. Following the First Vatican Council, he understands by dogma what is revealed by God and presented by the Church as being revealed by God for people to believe, which is the reason that it is to be believed with divine faith (since revealed by God) and with Catholic faith (since presented by the Church) (Denzinger, No. 3011). Propositions revealed formaliter explicite fulfil these conditions easily, and propositions revealed formaliter implicite can also become dogmas since they simply represent a different logical form of what is known formaliter explicite. However, whether propositions revealed virtualiter can also be defined as dogmas is a matter of controversy, with Schultes denying that they can. For him, a dogma is fide divina, that is, to be believed on the authority of the revealing God. The activity of the Church, which establishes the fides catholica, lies for Schultes only in determining that something is revealed. But if the Church itself is involved in what it is supposed to determine in the form of a proper-illative syllogism (the advantage of which lies in the possible acquisition of new knowledge, but the disadvantage of which is that a conclusio could also be wrong), then, according to Schultes, the Church exceeds the role intended for it in the process of formulating dogma. It is for this reason that the Church cannot proclaim a conclusio theologica quoad se as dogma, but merely a conclusio theologica quoad nos, which, as a proposition revealed formaliter implicite, is for Schultes only a different logical form of representation of a doctrine revealed formaliter explicite. The most prominent opponent that Schultes faced was his Spanish counterpart Francisco Marín-Sola, who taught in Fribourg. Marín-Sola (1924: 86) also recognized three categories of proposition, but arranged them differently to Schultes. For Marín-Sola, there is first of all what is contained in revelation explicitly. By this, he meant (somewhat confusingly) what Schultes had categorized as propositions revealed formaliter explicite and formaliter implicite. But Marín-Sola sees both as being contained explicitly in revelation, since the latter differ from the former

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only in their logical form. The second group of propositions for MarínSola are those that are contained in revelation implicitly, and have not (yet) been presented by the Church as binding. This second group corresponds to what Schultes calls virtualiter or indirectly revealed propositions. Third, Marín-Sola recognizes implicit propositions that are infallibly taught by the Church as being contained in revelation, and that are therefore equal to the first group when it comes to how binding they are, that is, to the propositions explicitly contained in revelation (to use the language of Marín-Sola), and to the propositions revealed directly and formaliter (to use the language of Schultes): they must be believed with divine and Catholic faith. Schultes denies that this is possible, that is, that the infallibility of the Church also refers to the conclusio theologica of what is revealed virtualiter. It is in this assessment, and less in the diverging terminology, that Schultes differs from Marín-Sola. Ultimately, the difference between them lies in how they see the relationship between theological speculation and Church magisterium, as well as the scope of Church infallibility. Marín-Sola greatly widens the range of this infallibility. Unlike Schultes, Marín-Sola believes that the Church has the truly divine authority to explain everything that is contained in the deposit of revelation in a real-implicit [i.e. indirect-virtual] way. The meaning of the implicit revelation made explicit by the Church (of the third category) and explicit revelation (of the first category) is the same. It is based on the authority declared by God. When it comes to new revelations or truths that are not implicitly contained in the original deposit of revelation, then the authority of the Church is certainly less than divine authority or apostolic authority. But the authority of the Church is equal to divine and apostolic authority in all that is truly implicit in the deposit of revelation, as long as its explication is not extended into a new revelation. (1924: 87)

For Marín-Sola, a divine authority was required to found the Church, to pass on to it the depositum fidei and thus establish a new order of salvation. But part of this order of salvation is that the authority of the teaching Church is equal to the authority of God, in the sense that God exercises his authority instrumentally through the Church. The dogmadefining word of the Church is thus also the word of God when something is defined that is only implicitly (according to Marín-Sola) or indirectlyvirtually (according to Schultes) contained in revelation. As a consequence of this position, Marín-Sola (1924: 402) must completely reject the existence of a fides ecclesiastica, that is, a loyalty that the faithful maintain towards the Church, even if the Church teaches things that are

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not considered to have been directly revealed. For Marín-Sola, everything that is defined in the Church is fide divina, that is, to be accepted with the authority that the believer owes to God. The consequences of the approaches taken by Schultes and Marín-Sola are ambivalent. Schultes succeeds in restricting ecclesial arbitrariness in how dogma is formed by setting high hurdles before a theological doctrine can be defined as a dogma. However, Schultes needs to find an explanation when it comes to what has actually been defined as such (e.g. the Immaculate Conception and the infallibility of the pope). He must either claim that these two doctrines are revealed formaliter and immediately, which is likely to be extremely difficult to prove. Or he would have to regard these two dogmas as indefinable conclusiones theologicae, which he does not do. Conversely, Marín-Sola has no problem at all with the actual course of the history of dogmas, but opens the door to the possibility that everything could potentially be defined as a dogma that the magisterium claims, with divine authority, is a revealed (even if only implicitly) doctrine of faith or morals. This shows that, for all their astuteness, both Schultes and Marín-Sola are located in an artificially sterile area of the ahistorical, which makes their approaches difficult to use from today’s perspective. But they are excellent examples of the profound changes undergone by Catholic theology during and after the Second Vatican Council. While Herbert Hammans could still state in his 1961 dissertation that ‘the influence of the extensive work produced by Marín-Sola cannot be overestimated’, and that ‘it can certainly be said that a growing majority of theologians consider what has been revealed virtually as being definable as dogma’ (1965: 144–145), today, more than fifty years after the end of the Council, hardly anything has remained of this idea. The efforts of the magisterium under Pope John Paul II to extend the concept of dogma from what has been revealed to what is logically or historically connected to revelation are actually part of the discussion begun by Schultes and Marín-Sola, but no longer use the distinctions that they made. Whether these distinctions are valuable depends on whether we share their basic claim that revelation communicates conceptually formulated and syntactically structured information. The Second Vatican Council had different emphases. While we should not make a crude opposition between how the First and the Second Vatican Council understood revelation (with even Dei Filius talking in terms of how God ‘reveals himself’ (Denzinger, No. 3004)), the Second Vatican Council did give a twist to God’s selfrevelation, which it understood not as a communication of the written

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‘decreta’ of his will, but rather as a mediation of the ‘sacramentum’ (Dei Verbum, No. 2), that is, as the historically unfolding event of salvation according to his will. A Catholic theory of doctrinal development has to take this into account.

.   ()     :     The magisterium sees itself as being responsible for repelling false doctrines. In doing so, it is sometimes so creative that it even constructs false doctrines. What Pope Pius X described in 1907 in the decree Lamentabili sane exitu and a little later in the encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis is one such ‘genuinely Roman invention’, since ‘the modernism that haunted the Curia was something that no one seriously supported’ (Müller 2012: 32). The Roman reaction to the perceived threat of modernism (so-called anti-modernism) placed the last remnant of non-scholastic theology, which had survived its gradual marginalization in the course of the nineteenth century, in the realm of the potentially heretical once and for all, and thus also brought a temporary end to discussions about doctrinal development in a non-neo-scholastic context. The fiction of a modernist system has come about through the merging of two different notions of modernism, Weiß mentioning first of all, a relatively clearly outlined ‘heretical’ concept of modernism: for the Dutch conservative Calvinist Abraham Kuyper in 1871, modernists were the followers of modern agnosticism and Darwinian ‘naturalism’; and, similarly, for the Catholic philosopher Carl Braig in 1889, the advocates of an epistemological subjectivism and psychologism, who denied the possibility of an objective-rational justification of religion. But there has always been another concept of modernism . . . This term, which derived from the word modernista (‘innovator’), and which Rousseau also used in 1769, can be found, for example, in Charles Périn’s 1881 text directed against Lamenais, ‘Du modernisme dans l’Église’, which defines modernists as all those who want to modernize the Church – ultimately to its detriment. (Weiß 1998: 110)

Thus, the Roman magisterium considered any approach that made the unseemly attempt to adapt Church doctrine to the zeitgeist as modernist. Several characteristics of modernist heresy were named in order to impose some order on the diversity of positions thus incriminated: agnosticism, immanentism, symbolism and evolutionism. Anyone advocating a thesis that could be assigned to one of these buzzwords was assumed to approve of the others implicitly, and was considered a modernist. This was ‘a

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theological-historical novelty’, since ‘it was the first time that the magisterium itself had discovered a new all-encompassing heresy – namely, modernism itself – and presented it in its structural context’ (Arnold 2005: 203). One of the most tragic figures among the many theologians discredited as being modernist is Alfred Loisy, who, as a Catholic apologist, presented a counter-proposal to Adolf von Harnack’s understanding of Christianity, and who, as a result, was much vilified within the Church. Harnack (1901: 55), the Protestant historian of dogma, differentiated in his lectures on What Is Christianity? between the gospel as the object of Jesus’ proclamation, and Jesus as the object of the gospel’s proclamation. The gospel proclaimed by Jesus, ‘so simple and on the other hand so rich’, unfolds only through ‘three spheres’ of his teaching: ‘the kingdom of God’, ‘God the Father and the infinite value of the human soul’ and ‘higher righteousness and the commandment of love’. Harnack (1901: 154) adds a secondary – and transformative – gospel to this primary gospel of Jesus, one in which Jesus himself moved illegitimately from the subject to the object of proclamation: ‘The Gospel, as Jesus proclaimed it, has to do with the Father only and not with the Son’. Harnack states at the beginning of his lectures on What Is Christianity? that, as just a historian with the desire to lecture, he intends to sift through and arrange the source material, and to make it accessible to his listeners. Elsewhere, though, he makes clear that behind this activity is a theological purpose. Since, for Harnack (1893: 7), the history of dogma clarifies ‘the process of the origin and development of dogma’, it ‘offers the very best means and methods of freeing the Church from dogmatic Christianity’. Harnack of course sees the epitome of dogmatic Christianity in the Catholic Church. Alfred Loisy reacts to this challenge with an apology of the dogmas proclaimed by the Church, but combines this external defence with a fierce criticism of neo-scholasticism within the Church. This criticism may even have been the primary intention of his work, while the controversy with Harnack could have been merely an external motive that induced Loisy to publish his thoughts. Loisy’s good intentions were in any case not appreciated within the Church, and his work on The Gospel and the Church became the ‘Magna Charta of modernism’ (Neuner 2009: 60–61). Loisy concedes to Harnack that Jesus himself had revealed no dogmas, and had therefore not already depicted the dogmatic structure of the Church in the gospel (understood as the proclamation of the historical Jesus). ‘But’, Loisy (1976: 180–181) argues, ‘it does not follow that the dogma does not proceed from the gospel, and that the gospel has not lived

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and lives still in the dogma as well as in the Church’. Formulated positively, this means that dogma is based on the gospel, and dogma keeps the gospel alive at all times, just like the Church, since ‘the teaching and the appearance of Jesus have had perforce to be interpreted’. This interpretation is performed by dogma as a ‘commentary’ on the gospel, a commentary that is formulated by the Church as a community of interpretation, although, for Loisy, care must be taken to ensure that this commentary is ‘homogeneous’ rather than ‘heterogeneous’. By referring to the concept of homogeneity, Loisy is taking up a term that was widespread in the theology of his time, when a distinction was made between a homogeneous and a transformistic development. MarínSola, for example, starts from the material world, where every being consists of two elements: ‘its matter and its specific nature’, whereby natura means here the essence of an object determined by its form. A development is also homogeneous for Marín-Sola when there are changes to a being’s matter, but not to its ‘specific nature’; on the other hand, a development is ‘transformistic’ when it changes the essence of an object. Applied to the doctrine of faith, ‘the words or formulas’ denote the matter, and ‘their sense or their meaning’, the specific nature of the being (1924: 20–21). A change to the words and formulas when the sense remains the same denotes a homogeneous development, and a change to the words and formulas when the sense changes is a transformistic mutation. From the viewpoint of the magisterium, only a homogenous development of doctrine – ‘in eodem scilicet dogmate, eodem sensu eademque sententia’ (Denzinger, No. 2802), as Pius IX outlined – was legitimate. Using a slightly different terminology, Loisy sees the constant as being the ‘sense matériel’, which he understands to be the opposite of what Marín-Sola calls ‘la matière’; the material sense is for Loisy the central content of a doctrine, and is distinguished from the doctrine’s ‘formula’, its ‘external image’ (1976: 216). For Loisy, homogeneous constancy is to prevail in the area of the sense matériel, whereas the image extérieure can – and, indeed, has to – change. He therefore shares with the scholastic theology of his time the demand that homogeneity be a criterion of dogmatic development, but illuminates a different aspect of this development. While Marín-Sola, for example, understands the possible change to ‘words and formulas’ through which developments take place as a crisis in which it is necessary to ensure that the new ‘words and formulas’ continue to transport the old ‘sense’ and the old ‘meaning’ seamlessly, Loisy believes that the danger of a transformistic or – in his terminology – heterogeneous development can also emanate from words and formulas

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that remain the same. As a vivid example, he cites the Apostolic Creed’s description of the descent of Jesus into the underworld (descendit ad inferos) and his ascent to heaven (ascendit ad caelos). This doctrine is only plausible in view of a multilayered view of the ancient world, and needs reformulating if its constant, soteriological sense is to be understood by people living in succeeding periods. By making such changes to the images while preserving their meaning, the Church, argues Loisy (1976: 217–218), continues in the way she has walked from the beginning, she adapts the gospel to the constantly changing condition of human life and intelligence. It is not indispensable to the authority of belief that it should be rigorously unchangeable in its intellectual form and its verbal expression. Such immutability is not compatible with the nature of human intelligence. Our most certain knowledge in the domains of nature and of science is always in movement, always relative, always perfectible. It is not with the elements of human thought that an everlasting edifice can be built. Truth alone is unchangeable, but not its image in our minds. Faith addresses itself to the unchangeable truth, through a formula, necessarily inadequate, capable of improvement, consequently of change.

Loisy is taking up a position here that is neither relativistic nor sceptical. He is not saying that there is no truth or that the truth remains fundamentally imperceptible. Rather, he is claiming that what has been correctly perceived from the truth always needs deepening and improving, which he understands not as a correction that creates discontinuity, but as a homogeneous development, that is, one that preserves the original sense. Loisy outlines what this actually means in a manner that contrasts with Harnack and opposes neo-scholasticism. He can therefore admit that the dogmatic Christology of the early Church would not have been possible without the appropriation of Hellenistic philosophy. But he does not see in this a transformistic change to the preaching of Jesus, as Harnack’s Hellenization thesis suggests, but a homogeneous, legitimate development that springs from the intellectual penetration of Christian soteriology. Thus, Loisy (1976: 184) can say: ‘The great factor of this [i.e. Christological] dogma was a special conception of redemption which came into prominence in the third century’. Christian soteriology had, as it were, appropriated Greek metaphysics so that it could describe Jesus Christ in such a way that the salvation given by him to the human being was represented intellectually. Thus, Christological dogma, as well as the doctrine of grace, is for Loisy (1976: 208) ‘an interpretation of the salvation of the Messiah and of the theology of the heavenly kingdom’ that had been made necessary ‘by the circumstances in which the gospel was perpetuated and by the problems

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presented by the conversion of pagans’, problems that had to be resolved by the Church ‘by drawing inspiration much more from the Spirit of Jesus than from His formal declarations’. Here, in contrast to Harnack, Loisy wants to guarantee the continuity between the dogmas proclaimed by the Church and the gospel of Jesus, but at the same time he opposes the apologetics of neoscholasticism, which claimed that Jesus reveals himself expressis verbis as Son of God, and confirmed this through his miraculous acts of power (‘proof by miracles’). Loisy’s concept is much more dynamic. ‘All the development of Trinitarian and Christological dogma’, Loisy (1976: 191) writes, is ‘a vital manifestation, a great effort of faith and intelligence, which enabled the Church to link her own tradition to the science of the age’, so that, even in circumstances that no longer correspond to those in which the historical Jesus lived, Christianity can remain ‘the religion of Christ’. Nor does Loisy spare criticizing the theories of development formulated by neo-scholasticism, which focus on questions of formal logic and the scope of syllogisms. For Loisy (1976: 196), the actual development of dogma ‘seems to lack logic and rational consistency’, by which he does not mean that this development as such came about irrationally, but rather that it did not result from formal-logical deductions, and cannot be predicted by them in the future, either; he even places such an understanding – which neo-scholasticism might well have had difficulty with – into the realm of heresy: ‘May it not be said that all heresies are born of deductions followed out in a special sense, starting from one principle of tradition or of science isolated from all the rest’? According to Loisy (1976: 213), dogmatic development that is homogeneous always entails syllogistically non-exhaustive reference to the whole of the gospel and to the whole of the time in which the gospel is to be proclaimed and whose concepts it has to make use of in order to become comprehensible and thus credible. Loisy criticizes the magisterium for the fact that the Catholic Church has ‘no official theory concerning the philosophy of her own history’. If it had such a theory, Loisy (1976: 210) argues, then the Church would not need to fear the insight that ‘revealed dogmas are not truths fallen from heaven’. For, it is precisely this insight that for Loisy justifies the need for the Church, since the gospel can only survive if it can be understood and made credible in the form of dogma; the Church as an ‘infallible’ teacher is indispensable to the activity of formulating dogmas and presenting them to the faithful. Loisy’s approach created intense intellectual and magisterial controversy. One of Loisy’s most prominent critics was Maurice Blondel (1964:

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226, 231), who, although also opposed to neo-scholasticism (which he accused of ‘Extrinsicism’), claimed that Loisy’s approach was part of a problematical ‘Historicism’. A year after the publication of the first edition of L’Évangile et l’Église saw the election to pope of the Patriarch of Venice, who is said to have seen in Loisy’s work ‘at least one theological book that is not boring’ (Neuner 2009: 72). Loisy, who reacted in detail to the accusations of heresy directed against him (which actually made the situation even worse), was nonetheless forced on the instructions of Pius X himself to submit completely. In the years that followed, all approaches that the pope regarded as too committed to the zeitgeist of modernity came under magisterial scrutiny. Roman heresiologists brought all these approaches together in 1907 in the decree Lamentabili sane exitu and in the encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis, and made them into a metaheresy that bore the name ‘modernism’. Also affected were theories of dogmatic development, which, according to Pius X, were ‘the tip’ of modernism. Condemned was the idea of an intima evolutio dogmatis, an ‘intrinsic evolution of dogma’ (Denzinger, No. 3483), which assumes that the linguistic form of dogma is subject to change, which the pope obviously equates with arbitrariness, without taking note of Loisy’s differentiations that this statement was probably directed against. Papal anti-modernism led to an unprecedented poisoning of intellectual discussion in the Church that lasted for decades. A climate of denunciation was promoted, the spearhead of which was a small sectarian secret service (‘servizio informazioni’ (Götz 1998: 408)), organized under the auspices of Pius X, called Sodalitium Pianum. Its monitoring and reporting of suspicious persons, and its general ‘misanthropic search for heresy’ (Weiß 1995: 492), had an impact on the Church as a whole, and especially in seminars and at faculties. This has even been described as the ‘most serious crisis of the Catholic Church since the Reformation’ (Neuner 2009: 11). Even though the anti-modernist struggle against a phantom heresy, a heresy that was not supported by anyone in the form in which the magisterium condemned it (which is why its followers were accused of being all the more cleverly camouflaged and potentially omnipresent), calmed down somewhat after Benedict XV’s election, the traces of this controversy remained visible for decades to come. The antimodernist oath, which all clerics had to take from 1910 to 1967, described the idea of ‘evolution of the dogmas’ (evolutio dogmatis) as a ‘heretical theory’ (commentum haereticum), if it meant that a doctrine of faith could ‘change from one meaning to another’ (Denzinger, No. 3541). Even if no one, and especially not Loisy, represented this idea in the

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arbitrariness suggested by Pius X, all those who dealt with the problem of doctrinal development were from then on walking on extremely thin ice. For, that was exactly where the danger of anti-modernist persecution lay; because the criteria of modernism did not apply to anyone in real life, they could potentially apply to anyone that dealt with issues deemed only partially prone to modernism. They were wisely advised to stay away from these issues, and especially from the issue of dogmatic development.

6 The Twentieth Century: From Anti-Modernism to the Second Vatican Council

. ,     ‘-’   ? Although the election of Benedict XV brought to an end the intense phase of the so-called modernism crisis, the narrowing of discussion that an anti-modernist magisterium imposed on the Church far outlasted the pontificate of Pius X. Taking the form of the anti-modernist oath, which was not officially abolished until 1967, it shaped theological discussions until the Second Vatican Council. As a result, the respected theories of development of the nineteenth century, which were all apologetic in tendency (i.e. all wanted to defend the legitimacy of Catholic doctrine against the inquiries of a critical history of dogma that suspected dogma of radical discontinuity), could barely find their feet in the first half of the twentieth century. As a prototype of the theologian who fell from apologetics to heresy, and finally to excommunication, Alfred Loisy served as a negative example to everybody. From the point of view of what was then current orthodoxy, it was only neo-scholastic ideas that seemed unproblematical. These ideas should not now be denounced prematurely from an anti-scholastic reflex that is widespread today; as we have seen with Franzelin, Scheeben, Schultes and Marín-Sola, such ideas are extremely diverse. But they nonetheless remain historically sterile, since they do not delve into the depths of a history that has simply been too uneven to be interpreted according to the laws of logic. Neo-scholastic theories of development reflect in their ahistoricity what also took place in other areas of theology as a result of the Church’s anti-modernism; namely, a decoupling of 143

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theology from other branches of knowledge, and especially from the critical science of history, whose methods Catholic exegetes and Church historians or historians of dogma either could not use at all, or could use, but only at the expense of ‘de-theologizing’ these disciplines (Wolf 1999: 73). Historical research was allowed, but only where it did not come too close to dogma. But it was only Church history that was capable of such a process of ‘de-theologizing’, and Church history was in any case deemed largely irrelevant to dogma in the wake of the First Vatican Council. As the dictum attributed to Archbishop Henry Edward Manning claims, a dictum often heard in Rome during the Council (see Quirinius 1870: 443), ‘the dogma must conquer history’. By ‘retreating into positivism’, Church history subsequently succeeded in largely freeing itself from dogmatic prescriptions and participating in the ‘general historical discussion’ of its time, but at the price of ‘theological marginalization’ (Wolf 1999: 93). Exegesis and dogmatics did not have this opportunity of retreat, since a theologia dogmatica positiva is understood not just as work based on historical sources, but as an elevation of what is deemed valid in revelation – a revelation whose dogmatic interpretation is in turn given an antimodernistic shape by the magisterium. Thus, in the wake of antimodernism, the magisterium did not welcome research in dogmatic history that went against this interpretation; it did not welcome research that was not purely doxographic and that brought with it a theory of development that did not adhere to formal logic. Theologians such as Henri de Lubac, who criticized neo-scholastic ideas for being ‘doubly reductive’ in the sense that they ‘reduced the fact of development to the mechanism of conclusiones theologicae’, and ‘reduced the issue of development to one of purely human logic’ (1948: 140), were banned from teaching, as were Jean Daniélou and Yves Congar, before all three became cardinals. (There is a pattern here: theologians are first silenced and then later praised for their far-sightedness; they are first marginalized, and then reabsorbed as truly Catholic men who were only a little ahead of their time). According to de Lubac, the history of Catholic dogma is ‘far from being only a history of conclusions drawn by theologians who, beginning with certain principles, thought about how to understand these principles and the meaning that could be inferred from them’ (1948: 139). For de Lubac, dogmas are historical, since they are specifically human formulas that reflect on God’s history of salvation without them being external to history and thus subject to change. Pius XII found such a position unacceptable and, in a speech to the twenty-ninth General Congregation of the Jesuit Order, pilloried a ‘theologia nova’, thereby

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echoing the originally pejorative concept of nouvelle théologie. If Catholicism were to adopt such a theology, one ‘developed in harmony with constantly developing things’ (cum universis semper volventibus rebus, una volvatur), then ‘what’, he asks, ‘would become of the everlasting Catholic dogmas, of the unity and stability of faith?’ (1946: 385). In other words, because Pius XII understands his service to unity above all as a service to the stability of the Church, a stability based on the firmness of immutable dogmas, he sees as dangerous and undesirable a construction that sees Christian doctrine as a historical – and therefore mutable – phenomenon. Paradoxically, though, Pius XII himself exceeded the boundaries that a theory of dogmatic development based purely on syllogism and conclusions ascribed to his office. Such a theory turns the magisterium into a ‘formally external regulative body that tends to lack influence with regard to the dynamics of tradition and actual development’ (Schulz 1969: 121). However, by proclaiming the dogma of Mary’s bodily Assumption to heaven, Pius XII was abandoning the conclusio theologica and turning a doctrine into a dogma, not because the doctrine could be deduced from what had already been made into a dogma, and could therefore be considered as having been revealed, but because Pius XII (1950: 755) believed, as he expressed in Munificentissimus Deus, that there was overwhelming approval for this doctrine among bishops as well as among theologians and laity, and that it therefore belonged to ‘the deposit of Christian faith entrusted to the Church’. Since there is no evidence for this doctrine in scripture or patristic theology (an issue to which we shall return), the pope was thereby making the dynamics of history the reason for infallibly proclaiming a dogma and bestowing upon it the character of irreformability. Many of those who had not urged Pius XII in a ‘contention of prayers’ (contentio precum (1950: 755)) to proclaim a new Marian dogma greeted his plans with incredulity, if not horror. Thus, the faculty of Protestant Theology at the University of Heidelberg wrote a preemptive report under the auspices of Edmund Schlink, who was regarded as an ecumenically distinguished theologian and who would later teach Wolfhart Pannenberg, with the participation of Hans von Campenhausen, who has already appeared in this book as a patrologist with his study on The Formation of the Christian Bible. The Heidelberg faculty tried to beat the pope at his own game by detailing the approaches to doctrinal development that the magisterium recognized, arguing that the idea of the assumptio Mariae could not be ‘regarded as an apostolic doctrine’, and that ‘none of the three criteria in the formula elaborated

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by Vincent of Lérins’ could be applied to this doctrine: a deficiency that could not be ‘compensated for’ by ‘theological conclusions’, since they could in any case not be found here. Summing up, the Heidelberg authors therefore argue that a Church authority that proclaims the doctrine of Mary’s Assumption to heaven to be a dogma is not obeying the authority of apostolic doctrine, but detaching itself from it. It acts without apostolic legitimacy and thus without divine mandate, and defines what is necessary to believe for salvation on its own authority. It claims that it can produce apostolic doctrine, while its mission is to preserve and interpret in purity the apostolic teaching passed down through history. It produces facts of salvation when it itself can only be based on them and continue to testify to them. It places itself above the apostles. (cited in Heiler 1951: 81–82)

The attack could not have been more severe; the pope was detaching himself from apostolic doctrine and even placing himself above the apostles, he was acting without divine mandate and trying to ‘produce’ a pseudo-apostolic doctrine instead of preserving in purity the correct apostolic doctrine. The Heidelberg statement shows how the newly proclaimed Marian dogma forced Catholic theology to develop a theory of development that was able to justify this doctrine, with the neo-scholastic-intellectualistic variant favoured by previous popes no longer appearing sufficient. It was necessary instead to widen again the scope that had been restricted by anti-modernism, and even to allow ideas that had previously remained largely ignored (such as Newman’s) or been condemned as modernist (like Loisy’s). Thus, Friedrich Heiler accused the papal magisterium under Pius XII of indulging a ‘neo-modernism’, and argued that, since the idea of Mary’s Assumption can find no Biblical or patristic support, the Roman theologians are translating the concept of tradition into the concept of evolution, and thereby drastically changing how the emergence of dogmas is conceived. The concept of development used in the history of dogma, which Pope Pius X had condemned in the strongest terms in his anti-modernist encyclical ‘Pascendi’, is now called upon to help justify the new dogma and to protect the doctrine of papal infallibility from being discredited. Therefore, an unbiased Capuchin theologian was not wrong to declare with regard to the definition of the ‘assumptio’: ‘The Pope has become a modernist’. One of the principles of the modernist conception of dogma was not only joyfully adopted overnight by Roman Catholic apologetics; it was far exceeded. (1952: 233)

Heiler’s somewhat exaggerated analysis contains a core of truth: Loisy, denigrated as a modernist, would probably have had much less problem

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with the dogmatization of the doctrine of the bodily Assumption of Mary than a neo-scholastic theologian denying the definability of the conclusio theologica quoad se, or a theorist of development reducing the role of the papal magisterium to that of a mathematician only interested in syllogisms. Little room for argument is left to defenders of Mary’s bodily Assumption by theses such as those found in the work of the Dominican Marcolinus Maria Tuyaerts, who claimed that ‘the boundary of theological conclusions is also the boundary of dogmatic development, and that this development cannot include anything that cannot be traced back to the framework of these conclusions’ (1919: 192). This results in a strange tension; the pope wanted a theory of dogmatic development that could use a method denoted as ‘regressive’ – ‘theology starts from today’s Church doctrine and seeks to prove it from the sources of revelation’ (Hammans 1965: 6) – to explain why the assumptio dogma is justified. Yes, theology even had to explain that this dogma is justified, since denying an irreformable doctrine of faith solemnly and infallibly proclaimed by the extraordinary magisterium was the most serious offence with which a Catholic theologian could be charged. Paradoxically, though, the theories of development recognized as undoubtedly orthodox, such as those put forward by Tuyaerts, were not able to provide the dogma with a convincing underpinning. De Lubac, on the other hand, who mocked Tuyaerts’ theory and said that it was ‘difficult to take seriously’ (1948: 131), and whose approach to justifying the new dogma would have been much more fruitful, was in 1950, the year that this dogma was proclaimed, banned from publishing because of his views on the theology of grace. In short, the new dogma caused a stir in theology, with Pius XII indirectly and presumably unwittingly reviving the theories of development outside neo-scholasticism that had been on ice since the crisis of modernism.

.  :          - The most prominent theologian to develop his thoughts on doctrinal development with regard to the dogma of Assumption is probably Karl Rahner, for whom Mariology is, as it were, a ‘concrete dogmatics’ (Matuschek 2012: 231), since the specific case of the Blessed Mother illustrates all the questions that concern theology in general. Rahner approached the new dogma with what is certainly an apologetic interest. For, a ‘new dogma obliges a Catholic theologian and Jesuit to commit

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himself to it’, especially if, as Rahner writes to the assistant general of his Order, ‘the acceptance of the dogma before and after the definition was not accompanied by that positive and cordial faith’ that actually ‘should be there’ (cited in Meyer 2004: xxiv). The Mariological implications of Rahner’s studies on the dogma of Assumption cannot be dealt with in more detail here. However, it would be worth carrying out further analysis on the context in which his Assumptio work of 1951 fell victim to the Roman censorship of the Jesuits (the censor, for instance, complained that Rahner’s Mariology was ‘minimista’ (cited in Meyer 2004: xxv), and that it did not sufficiently appreciate the role of Mary as CoRedemptrix), since it shows that not every defence of the new dogma met with approval in Rome, and that there was no precise distinction made in the censorship proceedings between the binding doctrine of the Church and the private opinion of the censor. This resulted in an internal arbitrariness that had the appearance of following strict rules, since the doctrine of Mary as Co-Redemptrix was nowhere defined as a binding truth of faith. A theological debate could have arisen from this silence; in any case, it should not have led to an authoritative intervention. In response to Rahner’s reply, the leadership of his Order sent him a nota explicativa with remarks on ‘which improvements would actually be necessary, with the censor clearly insisting on his advice only in the question of dogmatic development’ (Matuschek 2012: 40). This shows that, despite the pressure to explain that the dogma of Assumption had brought about, the issue of dogmatic development remained tightly regulated. When Rahner claims that ‘the sense, possibility and limits of dogmatic development . . . cannot be derived with the necessary precision and sharpness from general theological considerations alone’, but are to be read ‘from the real facts of such a history of dogma’, he is not expressing a fundamental criticism, but rather arguing that the neo-scholastic-logical theories of development are insufficient. For, we ‘recognize the possible from the actual. We recognize the laws of development of something living, and also of a spiritual being, of a spiritual process of unfolding, from its actual unfolding’ (2004: 20–21). For Rahner, a theory of development is only possible retrospectively. It must make use of what was in Rahner’s time called a regressive method, one that attempts, by observing what exists, to derive the laws that led to its emergence. The strength of such a method lies in the fact that it can – and indeed should – engage in historical processes, since a theory of dogmatic development can only be derived from knowledge of the history of dogma. One danger, though, is

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that the regressive method becomes a pure instrument of legitimation by adapting the theory to any possibly questionable practice, thereby depriving the theory of the opportunity to object to this practice. In other words, such an approach does not question whether making the Assumption of Mary into a dogma is justified or not, but takes this dogma as given and tries to develop a theoretical substructure or superstructure (depending on the circumstances) that seeks to justify the existence of this dogma. This in turn has the advantage that the history of faith can be thought of as a nonpredetermined and future-oriented domain that cannot be squeezed by logical prognoses into a corset that seems compellingly rational and that claims to be absolutely necessary. Even though Rahner considers it possible to establish certain laws to explain ‘some’ of the process of development, he points out that the ‘final law of dogmatic development’ only reveals itself once the whole unprecedented process is over. Since this process is real history, and one driven by the Spirit of God, who is never completely accessible to the laws that can be grasped by people, it is never merely the application of a formula and of a fixed general law. The attempt to construct such a formula, and thereby to control how this history unfolds once and for all and to disclaim possible ‘deviations’ as erroneous developments, is wrong from the outset. The history of dogmatic development itself is only the gradual disclosure of its mystery. (2004: 21)

For Rahner, it is pointless for a theory of development to search for a universal formula to explain dogmatic history, since the actual always precedes the theoretical, and the theoretical always has to grasp the actual, which on the one hand frees historical research from dogmatic prescriptions, while on the other leaving open the question of why the ‘deed’ was actually done in the first place. If the deed does not want to be a blind, arbitrary act, then its occurrence must also have followed certain pre-existing rules, the application of which had shown the deed to be justifiable, and perhaps even necessary. A theory of dogmatic development should therefore show not only why an already completed act (i.e. the dogmatization of a doctrine) is justified, but also whether it was justified. If it does not do the latter, then it risks becoming a pure theory of legitimation. Rahner’s claim is based on three arguments. First, there are for Rahner certain ‘sub-parts’ of developmental laws that are known and can be applied criteriologically; second, the principle of organic growth, in which the new must emerge from the old, ‘limits future possibilities’; third, the ‘danger from people remains a danger’, but ‘the promise of the Spirit and it alone’ ensures that ‘the ever present danger is never actually realized’

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(2004: 22). Rahner assumes that dogma, whose formulation involves both the human being (which is undeniable phenomenologically) and God (which the Church believes), is in principle not exempt from the danger of corruption. For Rahner, the human element brings with it this possibility; but trust in the divine element justifies the conviction that this danger will not lead to a total loss of the deposit of faith entrusted to the Church. For Rahner, this trust built on the support of the Holy Spirit in the credibility of what the Church proclaims is indispensable. At the same time, however, this Spirit, and the future that it offers the Church in history, also prevent the laws of dogmatic development from being known at any point in history. To gain a complete insight into the rules and mechanisms of this process, we would have to see it as already having been completed in all its details. For Rahner, this is possible only once the history of faith has achieved its goal and faith has transformed itself into an act of seeing, a state that is completed in the eschaton, but not under the conditions of earthly and immanent existence, which is always historically determined, but therefore also unfinished and open to the future. As a historical entity, dogma participates in this status viatoris, in the constant mobility of the Church. Rahner stresses that his thesis should not be misunderstood as ‘historical relativism’; rather, it is based on the fact that ‘all human propositions, including those in which faith pronounces the divine truth of salvation, are finite propositions’ (2004: 22–23). This idea is full of metaphysical presuppositions and can only be understood against the background of Rahner’s interpretation of Thomas. In his philosophical dissertation Spirit in the World (which, incidentally, was not accepted as a doctoral thesis), Rahner (1968: 406) had already taken the view that the human being is ‘essentially ambivalent’. ‘He is always exiled in the world and is always already beyond it’. The human spirit possesses a longing for infinity that reaches beyond itself, which leads it into a dialectic of turning to the world, and at the same time transcending the world. Rahner outlined the consequences of this in a lecture on ‘The Concept of Truth According to Aquinas’: Truth is for the human being only in judgment. Judgment presupposes abstraction and self-consciousness: both are only possible by virtue of the transcendental a priori of the Spirit, which opens up the horizon of being in the first place. Thus, a true individual judgment about an existence is only possible in and through an implicit, even formal, judgment of being in general, only in an embracing of being itself, and thus in the last understanding in an implicit affirmation of pure being, God himself. (1996: 314)

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What, then, does this mean for dogma? By claiming to testify what is the case for the salvation of the human being, dogma presents itself to the human spirit as a finite proposition, one that indeed points beyond itself to being per se, that is, God, but that never ultimately grasps this being as infinite in the form of a judgment, but always has to give the infinite a finite form and can therefore never say ‘everything’ about it. For Rahner, this does not mean that dogmas are ‘half wrong’, but remain quite true. ‘But if we want to regard such doctrines as adequate in themselves to the matter at hand, i.e. as expressing this matter exhaustively, because they are completely true, then we would be falsely equating human truth to God’s simple and exhaustive knowledge of himself and of everything that emanates from him’ (Rahner 2004: 23). Rahner therefore attaches great importance to differentiating between the truth of dogma (in which it is claimed that something about God is the case) and the truth of God (which is the case), and thus between what the Church knows in its belief in God, and what God knows about himself in his self-knowledge. Ignoring this difference is, in Rahner’s very words, to lie one’s way to God. But respecting the difference expresses not the falseness of dogma, but the fact that a formula of faith, ‘though remaining true, can be overhauled, i.e. in general, at least replaced by another’, a formula that ‘says the same thing, but in a more nuanced way’, by ‘showing the same reality from a point of view, a perspective, from which it had not yet been viewed’ (Rahner 2004: 23). In other words, the historical encounter (through incarnation and the mission of the Holy Spirit) between the immutable divine truth and the human being as a historical entity results in a dialectic that produces true propositions, which in their highest binding form are dogmas. For Rahner, however, this truth, which is implied in judgment but always strives to transcend it, is a truth in motion. Rahner does not want this movement to be understood as ‘progress’ in the sense that ‘a quantitative advance in knowledge is achieved (as if the Church, so to speak, always became “smarter”)’; rather, this movement is ‘the different view of the same reality and truth, as it corresponds to this precise moment of the Church’ (2004: 24). For Rahner, then, what remains constant is the reality to which dogma refers, and what is mutable is the perspective and therefore also the linguistic form that judgments about this reality assume. Rahner is therefore arguing here that a dogma is irreformable in its substance, but can be reformulated in the perspective from which it looks at this substance, and in the language in which it expresses this substance. This is a significant thesis that required great courage for

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Rahner’s time and might explain why the Roman censor had difficulties with Rahner’s approach. Rahner sees such a reformulation not only as a phenomenon of changing theological fashions and school formations, but also as a dynamic that touches on the event of revelation itself. For Rahner, there is ‘not only a developing and growing theology around a word of revelation pronounced statically once and for all. There is not only a development of theology, but also a development of dogma’, one that is based ultimately on the fact that ‘each historically conditioned mode of appropriation of revelation does not lie absolutely outside this revelation’, but is itself part of the event of revelation – provided that by this event is understood not only the occurrence (and possibly unheard echoing) of a divine Word, but also its faithful and salvation-giving acceptance by the human being (2004: 25–26). (The young Joseph Ratzinger would pick up on and develop the same idea in his habilitation thesis.) Rahner does not see his argument as contradicting the doctrine inculcated by Pius X to oppose so-called modernism, the doctrine that revelation had ended with the death of the last apostle (Denzinger, No. 3421). In Christ, whom the apostles witnessed, God had made the unsurpassable promise to the human being of salvation; thereafter, according to Rahner, ‘nothing more could come: no new time, no new eon, no other plan of salvation’; revelation was ‘complete’. But, ‘complete, because open to the veiled present fullness of God in Christ. . . . The closure of revelation is a positive, not a negative, statement, a pure yes, a closure that includes everything’ (2004: 27). The revelation of God expressed in Christ is not a period that can be closed, but is instead the prelude to God’s lasting presence in the world and in the Church, through which God continues and completes the work of salvation expressed in Christ. The God active in the Church and the world is therefore not only the object of dogmatic development, but also its subject. ‘Because faith takes place in the power of the Spirit of God’, Rahner argues, ‘but this Spirit . . . is in one the thing itself that is believed – the object of faith is therefore not merely a passive object that is indifferent to its position on this object, but at the same time a principle by which it itself is grasped as an object’ (2004: 29). Rahner is trying to find a middle way here between the idea of a revelation that continues in history (which the magisterium regards as problematical), and the idea of a mere assistentia negativa of the Spirit (which means that, when a dogma is formulated, the Spirit only protects the Church from error, and not that it provides it with positive insights). Rahner claims that the Spirit also has a

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positive effect in the Church in that it communicates knowledge, and not just a negative effect in helping the Church to avoid errors, without it thereby exceeding the order of salvation manifested in Christ. Rahner derives from this a criticism of logical theories of dogmatic development. He does not deny the validity of logic and its indispensability for theology. For Rahner, though, a ‘theological naturalism’ is at work, one that restricts ‘the power of “movement”’ through which this development takes place to logic, and neglects the activity of the Spirit working in the Church and guiding it to the truth (2004: 31, 33). This dynamic leads Rahner in turn to extend the range of what can be defined as dogma. Formulated in logical language, Rahner affirms the position outlined in this book when discussing Marín-Sola’s approach; namely, what is contained only virtually in revelation is also therefore a possible object of dogma, which must be believed in with divine faith, that is to say, on the authority of the self-revealing God (see Rahner 2004: 35–37, 46–48). This widening of the concept of dogma is the price paid for Rahner’s dynamic concept of development. Because Rahner transcends the boundaries of logical theories of development methodologically, he also transcends the substantive boundaries that can be drawn against church arbitrariness and the fury of theological speculation by such a type of theory of doctrinal development, as became clear in the work of Reginald Schultes. These boundaries are less sharp in Rahner’s concept of tradition and development than they are in the logical theories of a restrictive kind. However, Rahner presented a personalistic approach that would prove groundbreaking. Rahner criticizes logical theories for the fact that ‘the starting-point of a dogmatic explication is always an actual proposition. But that this is always the case is very much open to contestation’. Rahner mentions, as an example, a lover who is given a deep insight into their love without being able to articulate this insight reflexively and to clothe it in appropriate propositions. It is therefore important to distinguish ‘simple fundamental knowledge’ from what Rahner calls ‘reflexive knowledge’ (2004: 38–39). Logical theories of development can only emanate from reflexive knowledge formulated as propositions. But the human being, as the counterpart of the God that they encounter in history, possesses not only a reflexive, but also a simple fundamental knowledge of this God, which for Rahner is contained not in a communication of propositions but in a ‘global experience’, one that is the ‘inexhaustible source for articulating and explicating faith in propositions’, and is itself ‘part of the original revelation’ (2004: 40–41). Such an understanding of

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revelation, for which Rahner does not draw here on the concept of selfrevelation thought personally, but describes it in terms of its substance, entails a different way of gaining theological knowledge. Dogmas are no longer derived primarily from logical deductions; rather, for Rahner, the believer ‘first measures a proposition offered as a conceptual expression of experience against the original experience, and finds it correct in such measurements. However, this experience is still dependent on telling itself what it knows’, with dogma thereby no longer being only a ‘logical explication of propositions’, but ‘lively self-explication’ (2004: 41). Rahner does not limit this process merely to the disciples and their experiences with the historical Jesus, but also extends it to the Church of the post-apostolic age, which received as its inheritance not only propositions from the apostles (i.e. their word and the word of Jesus), but also the Spirit (their Spirit and the Spirit of Jesus). For Rahner, ‘Spirit and Word together form the permanently effective possibility of an experience that is fundamentally the same as that of the apostles’, even if it always has to refer back to the apostles and must prove this at the verbal level by means of logically correct deductions (2004: 42). The experience does not exhaust itself in this logical operation, however, but requires the experience of the Spirit, who is alive in the Church and teaches the Church to reveal ‘the same reality’ of God ‘from a point of view, a perspective, from which the matter had not yet been regarded’ (Rahner 2004: 32). For Rahner, this does not preclude changing what is cherished and reformulating dogmatic formulas. Unfortunately, though, he leaves open what exactly he means by this, which doctrines this could affect, and what a reformulation might look like.

.  :    ? The context in which Ratzinger reflected on dogmatic development was not as strongly shaped by the dogma of Assumption as the context in which Rahner made his observations, since Ratzinger was still a student when the new definition was being prepared. He therefore belongs neither to the theologians who had taken a position on the dogma beforehand, nor to those who, like Rahner, had to strive for a justification and pastoral acceptance of the dogma afterwards. However, the young student was not theologically indifferent to the dogma, either. ‘Before Mary’s bodily Assumption into heaven was defined’, Ratzinger (1998: 58–59) reports retrospectively in his memoirs, ‘all theological faculties in the world were consulted for their opinion. Our teachers’ answer was emphatically

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negative’. And Gottlieb Söhngen, who would later play a significant role in Ratzinger’s academic career, also ‘held forth passionately against the possibility of this Marian dogma’. Ratzinger (1998: 58) attributes this opposition (perhaps not with respect to Söhngen, but with respect to other opponents of the dogma) on the one hand to a neo-scholastic understanding of history that from his point of view is much too narrow theologically, and on the other to the ‘one-sidedness not only of the historical, but also of the historicist method in theology’. Ratzinger had his difficulties with both: a neo-scholastic ahistoricity and a historicist asystematicity. It is above all his distance from neo-scholasticism that distinguishes Ratzinger from Karl Rahner. While Rahner comes from the neoscholastic tradition of his Order (see Rahner 2009), a tradition that, as his first work Spirit in the World shows, he wanted to lead to a new contemporaneity through dealing with Kant, Hegel and above all with the approach of Martin Heidegger, Ratzinger was fundamentally sceptical towards neo-scholastic systems, and also rejected carrying out what his pupil Hansjürgen Verweyen calls a ‘bypass operation’ on them to make them up-to-date (2007: 33). Ratzinger (1998: 44) reports about his student days in Freising on ‘difficulties in penetrating the thought of Thomas Aquinas, whose crystal logic’, says Ratzinger, ‘seemed to me to be too closed in on itself, too impersonal and ready-made’; Ratzinger did not know how to begin working theologically with a ‘rigid, neo-scholastic Thomism’, and looked instead for an alternative form of theology. Ratzinger attempted in his studies on Augustine’s ecclesiology and on Bonaventure’s theology of history (Bonaventure was a contemporary of Thomas, but represented the Augustinian current of the Middle Ages much more strongly than Thomas) to bring dynamism to the theological approach to history, something that is also reflected in how he viewed doctrinal development. Ratzinger (1971: 160–161) believes that he can detect in Bonaventure’s thinking a ‘prophetic anti-Scholasticism’ that contains ‘a historical dimension’: ‘For the present, speculative thought – philosophical and theological – is justified. But in the higher state that is to come, this will be transcended and will become superfluous’. Without adopting this notion in its entirety, Ratzinger did gain from his dealings with Bonaventure a fundamental attitude towards the practice of theology that was critical of scholastic speculation, while also being oriented to historical realities. He therefore understands revelation not as a process concluded once and for all, the legacy of which can be evaluated in a logical-deductive manner,

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but as a historically ongoing event that includes the present. According to Ratzinger (1998: 108–109), revelation is for Bonaventure always a concept denoting an act. The word refers to the act in which God shows himself, and not the objectified result of this act. And because this is so, the receiving subject is always also a part of the concept of ‘revelation’. Where there is no one to perceive ‘revelation’, no re-vel-ation has occurred, because no veil has been removed. By definition, revelation requires a someone who apprehends it. These insights, gained through my reading of Bonaventure, were later on very important for me at the time of the conciliar discussion on revelation, Scripture, and tradition.

Such an understanding of revelation was not orthodox enough for the Munich dogmatist Michael Schmaus. As long as the exact reasons for which Schmaus rejected Ratzinger’s habilitation thesis remain unclear, since the expert opinions are not published, Ratzinger’s claim remains valid that Schmaus saw in the thesis ‘a dangerous modernism that had to lead to the subjectivization of the concept of revelation’ (Ratzinger 1998: 109). If this is true, then Ratzinger was a late victim to the poisoned atmosphere of anti-modernism that had spread in the Church following the pontificate of Pius X. Ratzinger felt this in the form not of official Church intervention, however, but of a theological self-censoring that Schmaus possibly inflicted on his faculty. It is of course entirely ahistorical to locate Ratzinger’s positions even in the vicinity of modernism; it is striking, however, how frankly and openly Ratzinger rejected anti-modernism, which was, as Karl Rahner pointed out, ‘Church, though strictly speaking not defined, doctrine’ until the oath of anti-modernism was suspended in 1967 (2004: 26). Besides generational reasons, this open rejection of ecclesial anti-modernism is what distinguishes Ratzinger from Karl Rahner, who, more than twenty years his senior, had put forward a very similar thesis to Ratzinger with regard to the understanding of revelation; namely, that theology should not be grouped ‘around a static word of revelation pronounced once and for all’, and that ‘each historically conditioned mode of appropriation of revelation’ is itself part of the process of revelation, since ‘the real understanding of the revealed and its existential appropriation by the human being’ must first be turned into decision and action in the ‘real, historically conditioned situation in which people find themselves’ (2004: 25–26). Rahner felt compelled to reconcile this thesis with Pius X’s anti-modernist position that revelation had ended with the death of the last apostle. In contrast, Ratzinger rejects such restraint and instead contradicts Pius X openly, arguing that ‘talk of the conclusion of revelation with

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the death of the last apostle’ (as Lamentabili sane exitu clearly does; see Denzinger, No. 3421) ‘not only blocks a meaningful understanding of the historical development of the Christian; it also contradicts the realities of the Biblical witness’ (1966: 18). For Ratzinger, the doctrine of Pius X constitutes an ‘unsatisfactory reflection on the relationship between revelation and history’ (1966: 10). This thesis testifies to two things. First, to Ratzinger’s theological originality. Second, to the change in the climate of discussion within the Church that took place during and after the Second Vatican Council, which made it possible to express unconventional opinions without the intervention of Church bodies, something that would (certainly) have been problematical before (and occasionally also after) the Council. The lecture that Ratzinger gave in 1965 in front of the Academy of North Rhine-Westphalia on ‘The Problem of Dogmatic History from the Perspective of Catholic Theology’ sums up his approach to the question of dogmatic development. Unfortunately, though, it is little read (see Walter 2015: 318). Ratzinger confronts in the lecture the problem that the present (in contrast to the Middle Ages, when every question ultimately became a theological question in the form of a ‘reductio in theologiam’) is witnessing an unprecedented ‘reductio in historiam’, and sees ‘being as having become’, which means that the ‘results of historical development are being stripped of their previous absoluteness and made part of the process of development’. For theology, which is conventionally concerned with the ‘self-showing of God’s immutable truth’, this has resulted in the reversal of its burden of proof, since it can no longer, like a neo-scholastic approach to history, ‘trace historical change to the lasting truth of God’, but must instead ‘trace what apparently lasts to the creative process of historical change’ (1966: 7–8). This also impacts on the notion of dogma for Ratzinger. The idea passed down of the immutability of dogma must therefore, according to Ratzinger (1968: 59), be reconciled with the newly awakened awareness of the historicity of dogma. For this to happen, it is necessary for theology to combine identity and change, constancy and transformation. ‘We can speak of actual history’, Ratzinger writes, only where there is this identity of what remains constant in change (otherwise, we would be dealing with a juxtaposition of unrelated facts, which does not constitute history); conversely, we can speak of history only where real progress and self-development takes place, and the mere identity of what remains constant does not result in history. (1966: 9)

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Ratzinger illustrates what this can mean with the example of Christology. The declared belief in Jesus as Christ is for Ratzinger a ‘belief in resurrection and parousia’, which is the reason that the belief can be ‘opposed completely to an orientation that is exclusively retrospective’. For, ‘the process of incarnation, the process by which the divine becomes human in the form of Christ, has begun, but not ended’, and the ‘encounter that humanity has with the beginnings established in Jesus of Nazareth will continue for as long as this humanity exists; it is only in this encounter that humanity can unfold into all its possibilities’ (1966: 17). Like Rahner, Ratzinger also believes that the historical Jesus and the Spirit sent by him enable humanity to encounter God not only retrospectively, but also in the present. This includes individual religious experience, but also the doctrinal and dogmatic articulation of this ever-recurring encounter between the self-revealing God and the human being who answers him, which for Ratzinger constitutes the entire event of revelation. Since, for Ratzinger, this ever-incomplete revelation is ‘the still occurring event of a new relation between God and the human being’, it demands a permanent dogmatic reflection, one that cannot be restricted to the formulas of the past, but must also be contemporary in content and formulation if it is to enable revelation to take place in the present. ‘The formulas that explicate this event in doctrine’, Ratzinger writes, are therefore no longer really revelation itself, but rather its explication in human speech. There is also undoubtedly here the factor of what is definitive and exemplary; by establishing an oral and written canon (regula fidei and holy scriptures), the Church has subjected itself to a permanent norm of explication. However, this norm cannot mean a defining and definitive quantity of immutable propositions of revelation, but instead creates a formative norm for the everlasting history of faith. (1966: 19)

For Ratzinger, scripture and tradition create the norms by which to explicate revelation, but they are themselves not revelation. The importance of this distinction cannot be overestimated; according to Ratzinger, the Bible is neither revelation nor the Word of God, and to see the two as identical would be a serious mistake. Ratzinger elaborated on this thesis in a lecture that he gave to the German-speaking bishops in Rome on 10 October 1962, the eve of the Council’s opening. Seeing the Bible as revelation is for Ratzinger to succumb to a ‘positivism’ and a ‘scripturism’; it should instead be clear ‘that revelation itself is always more than its fixed testimony in scripture; that it is the living thing that embraces and unfolds scripture’. Thus, Ratzinger

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also calls for the title of the schema on the theme of revelation that had already been prepared by the curia in the run-up to the Council to be changed from de fontibus revelationis to ‘On revelation’ or ‘On the Word of God’, since revelation has no affirmable sources itself, but denotes an event between God and the human being (2012: 159). As such, Ratzinger argues, ‘revelation itself is the source of the Bible and of the divine tradition; scripture and tradition are not the source of revelation’, since the relationship between scripture and tradition can only be understood when these two factors are subordinated to a third factor, which in truth is the first – namely, to revelation itself, which precedes and transcends its affirmative testimonies. Scripture and tradition are the epistemological and material principles of revelation, but not revelation itself. (2012: 160)

If scripture and tradition are now only spaces to explicate revelation, and not revelation itself, then the difference between dogma and revelation is even greater than thought. For, a dogma is not simply present in scripture or the tradition, but is the linguistic explication of an event of revelation, one that must in turn be measured against the norms of scripture and tradition. But this makes dogma dynamic in two ways: first, the way in which the event of revelation is articulated over time can change; and, second, there can also be change to knowledge of scripture and tradition, both of which underlie dogma as its norms. Must there therefore not be, Ratzinger asks rhetorically, ‘not only a history towards dogma, i.e. a prehistory of dogma’, a history that only lasts until a proposition becomes dogma and is thereby removed from the process of change, but also ‘a history of what has already become dogma, i.e. an actual history of dogma and an actual historicity of dogma’? (1966: 21) Ratzinger does not specify what this may actually mean in concrete terms, but it is possible that, in 1965, his principal target was the doctrine of the pope’s primacy and infallibility. The attempt made in Lumen gentium to integrate the legal and dogmatic primacy of the pope more tightly into the collegium of bishops (Lumen gentium, No. 22) was interpreted in the climate of great ecumenical hope that had emerged at the Council between the Eastern and Western Church as a friendly signal to Orthodoxy. In contrast, the nota explicativa praevia, in which Paul VI sought to give Lumen gentium an authentic interpretation that left the exercise of primacy untouched, relativizes the concept of the collegium, seeing it not in the strictly legal sense of equality among colleagues (non

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sensu stricte iuridico) (Lumen gentium, nota explicativa praevia, No. 1), and insists that the pope is entitled to exercise his primacy at all times and according to his own liking (omni tempore ad placitum) (Lumen gentium, nota explicativa praevia, No. 4). In response to Paul VI’s intervention in November 1964, Ratzinger wrote that no one can wish for a repeat of the events of that November week. For, they have undoubtedly shown that the exercise of primacy (and the formulation of the doctrine of primacy) has not yet been found in a form that could convince the Churches of the East, say, that uniting with Rome would not mean submitting to a papal monarchy . . . If the November days of 1964 brought a disillusioning realization, it was that historical events need time. (2012: 446–447)

Ratzinger wrote these lines in the same year as his lecture on the question of dogmatic development, and it is therefore possible to surmise that, when emphasizing the openness and incompleteness of dogma, and the fact that there could also still be ‘a history of what has already become dogma’, he is alluding to the question of primacy, which in his view the Second Vatican Council did not deal with sufficiently, and which was therefore still in need of further theological work. According to Ratzinger, the history of dogma in the real sense of the history of what has already become dogma comprises a twofold movement: the unfolding, in which what is defined as dogma has to be understood better and more deeply; and the reduction, which traces an event that was originally alive but has become solidified through excrescences back to its living core. From these reflections, Ratzinger ‘diminishes’ the ‘total finality’ of dogma: Thus, every dogmatic formula contains a double insufficiency: on the one hand, its distance from the reality, which it tries to express; on the other, its participation in the historically determined and historically relative world of the people who have expressed their knowledge of faith in this formula. This diminishes the total finality of the formula, without cancelling the finality of the thing meant in the formula, and thus also the lasting claim of the formula, if the claim is understood without false verbalism as a signpost to the thing itself, which linguistically is never formulated exhaustively. (1966: 25)

Ratzinger is presenting here a highly dynamic approach to doctrinal development. Although far from declaring dogmas to be a mass that can be modelled at will, he does relativize dogma from two perspectives. First, from the perspective of the ‘historically relative world of the people’ who express their historically concrete and contingent experience of faith

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in a dogma as an anthropogenic, human-made formula. And, second, from the perspective of the thing to which dogma is only a ‘signpost’. This ‘thing’ of dogma is ultimately the self-revealing God, in whose light the human being can know the world and themselves. Scripture serves here as the norm of this revelation, which is articulated in dogma; and it is for this reason that Ratzinger sees dogma as having a hermeneutic function in Biblical exegesis. Conversely, though, dogma is also bound to scripture, which acts as its norm; thus, for Ratzinger, ‘dogma as the interpretative factor must always be read backwards towards the interpreted and understood in accordance with it’ (1966: 27). The constant tying back of dogma to scripture must also take into account a changed understanding of scripture. Thus, it is wrong to see Ratzinger’s thinking in terms only of a theory of continuity and to foreground the element of preservation in his theology. What connection is there, though, between the young Joseph Ratzinger, who was open-minded to what was happening at the time and critical of authority, and the later prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and Pope Benedict XVI? His pupil Hansjürgen Verweyen reports that Ratzinger ‘already believed when he was in Münster in 1966 and in Tübingen from 1968 that he had been transported to another world’, but considers the idea that Ratzinger performed a ‘great turnabout’ to be a ‘myth’ (2007: 56, 39). We should also approach the question carefully when it comes to the issue of dogmatic development. It is perhaps not wrong to speculate that the widening of the concept of dogma that was sketched in the second chapter of this book took place formally under the authority of Pope John Paul II, but that the acting prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (i.e. Ratzinger) played a substantial role in this process. According to the Catechism promulgated in 1992, dogmas are ‘truths’ that are formulated by the magisterium and that oblige ‘the Christian people to an irrevocable adherence of faith’; these truths are ‘contained in divine Revelation’ or are ‘truths having a necessary connection with them’, that is, with such divine truths (Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 88; my emphasis). Thus, the Catechism exceeds the definition of dogma promulgated by the First and also by the Second Vatican Council. According to the First Vatican Council, what could be defined as dogma was only what was ‘contained in the word of God, written or handed down’ (Denzinger, No. 3011), that is, what was part of revelation. And the Second Vatican Council also teaches that the infallibility of the Church, whose highest form is a dogma proclaimed by the extraordinary, solemn magisterium, stretches as far as the ‘treasury of Revelation’ (Lumen gentium, No. 25), which means

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ex negativo that it does not extend beyond revelation, which is the reason that the Council does not consider propositions that are not revealed to be definable as dogma. The Catechism exceeds this boundary and extends what is definable as dogma to the secondary realm of the non-revealed, which is related to revelation only in an unspecific – logical or historical – way (Denzinger, No. 5041). This development was outlined in the second chapter of this book. We should merely note here that the Catechism’s widening of the category of what can be defined as dogma would not have posed a major problem to the thinking of the early Joseph Ratzinger. Ratzinger in any case rejects scripture and tradition as material sources, as the First Vatican Council stipulates (see Denzinger, No. 3011); and he understands by the depositum revelationis that the Second Vatican Council refers to as being more than what is expressly laid down in scripture or the tradition. In his comments on the schema De fontibus revelationis, Ratzinger remarks, ‘History can barely name one proposition that on the one hand is not contained in scripture, and that on the other could be traced back to the apostles with some historical probability’ (2012: 161–162). Ratzinger rejects the idea of an unwritten tradition that claims that the apostolic tradition has been passed on through two channels: in written form through the New Testament, and in oral form, which very little can be said about in terms of sources, since nothing was written. Such an understanding (which, incidentally, led many to reject the dogma of Assumption in the run-up to its proclamation, since they could find nothing about this doctrine in the first five centuries) also seems too narrow to Ratzinger with regard to the development of dogma. ‘If tradition is to be understood like that’, Ratzinger argues, ‘then the point of historical effort can only be to prove that everything has always existed in the same way, and to continue refining this proof’ (1966: 11): an undertaking that Ratzinger rejects completely. For this reason alone, to understand Ratzinger as a pure theorist of continuity would be to underestimate how original his approach was. He is not interested in showing that everything has always been the way it is today, and should therefore always remain so. For him, the Church should not stick to the past, even if it may be a past ennobled by scripture and tradition. Rather, Ratzinger argues, the Church should ask itself ‘in the self-contemplation of the Holy Spirit active in it’ how the encounter with God that takes place in and through the Church can be adequately verbalized; ‘this living struggle in the Holy Spirit is the process of “tradere”, and is the plus of tradition that exceeds scripture and its letters’; it is not simply past tradition, but is realized anew at every moment in the constant encounter

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between God and the human being in the space of the Church (2012: 162). Drawing on this concept of tradition, Ratzinger presents his idea of dogmatic development, which also includes corrections and thereby discontinuities, for ‘the mere identity of what remains constant does not result in history’ (1966: 9). The dynamics of Ratzinger’s approach can on the one hand open up a previously unimagined freedom of debate, but on the other can also inhibit such debate if it is used by an authority that is averse to discussion. For, if it is no longer possible to fall back on the positive sources of scripture and tradition to distinguish between what is revealed and what is not revealed, and if revelation only takes place through the (criteriologically unclear) ‘living struggle in the Holy Spirit’, then how can we specify what is actually revealed (and therefore binding), or what is related to revelation? This question was one already raised by Friedrich Becker following Ratzinger’s academy lecture of 1965. The proceedings of the Academy record that Becker was unsure how the believer can gain certainty as to what is truly divine revelation. He is not taught about this directly by God, but always only by other people, who tell him this or that is divine revelation and must be believed. Is, then, belief not in effect simply belief in human authority, and therefore disbelief is only disbelief in human authorities? (cited in Ratzinger 1966: 34)

For Becker, Ratzinger glimpses ‘the whole basic problem of theology and faith’ in this question, but does not provide a clear answer to it. Rather, he insists that there is beyond scripture and materialized tradition a ‘factor of more’, ‘which, according to the inner conviction of faith, can become visible to those who engage with it’ (cited in Ratzinger 1966: 34–35). Ratzinger leaves open the question of how this ‘more’ that is bestowed upon ‘those who engage with it’ can in turn lead to a common articulation on the part of the Church, that is, how the dogmatic formulas passed down, which, according to Ratzinger, have ‘only a mediating character regarding the process of the encounter’ (1966: 37), can be reformulated in such a way that they adequately describe this encounter in the present. And he does so deliberately, since there were several questions in the academy discussion that would have allowed him to address this issue. He thereby opens up a broad range of possible interpretations as to how exactly dogmatic development could be configured. However, Ratzinger’s approach also opens up the space for an official shutdown and fixing of the dynamic event of revelation, and indeed even for

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its use as a political tool, which was certainly not the intention of the young Joseph Ratzinger. In its presentation of what is revealed, the Church is for Ratzinger no longer strictly tied to what is contained in scripture or tradition in a clearly provable and affirmable way (a view that Ratzinger (2012: 161–165) explicitly rejects as being too narrow), and therefore the magisterium, which has the ultimate authority to interpret revelation, can also proclaim things as revealed whose status as revelation is not necessarily revealed to other members of the Church. This possibility was once again facilitated by the widening of the concept of dogma undertaken by the Catechism (Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 88), since now the secondary area – which is expressly not part of revelation, but which the magisterium sees as being connected to revelation – falls under the category of dogma. Thus, Ratzinger’s broad concept of revelation, which on the one hand opens up a space for flexibility and reform, is at the same time also susceptible to exploitation, with the power of authority threatening to replace the power of arguments, since arguments are divorced from the positive material on which they rely and on the basis of which they could claim that something is revealed or not revealed. Taken to its logical conclusion, this would mean the end of theology as theology – something that Joseph Ratzinger certainly did not intend. As suggested here, Joseph Ratzinger has remained true to himself with regard to his fundamental views. He puts forward a broad concept of revelation, one that opens up a wide scope for doctrinal development. However, the young Joseph Ratzinger does not say how this scope should be regulated and how it should be used. The later prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and Pope Benedict XVI seems to have given substance to this openness by minimizing its potential for criticizing authority and maximizing its potential for legitimizing authority. There is nothing wrong with the fact that the ambiguity of an early thesis becomes a later unambiguity. However, it is instructive to trace the later unambiguities back to their earlier ambivalences, since, from a distance, they show that Joseph Ratzinger, even if one might disagree with many decisions he made as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and as pope, is without doubt one of the great theologians of recent times.

.  :           While Rahner developed his theories of doctrinal development almost completely in the slipstream of the definition of the Assumption as dogma,

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and Ratzinger did so partially, Walter Kasper had a different focus. ‘The word dogma’, Kasper writes, points to a problem that seems at present to weigh like a heavy and obstructive millstone on dialogue and on the new beginning that the Church has decided to make. Dogma hinders conversation between Protestant and Catholic Christians, just as it seems to hinder the encounter between Church and world. (2015: 43)

This is how Kasper evaluated the situation in 1965, at the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council. For him, the dogmatic structure of the Catholic Church will present great challenges both to the ecumenical movement and to the encounter between ‘Church and world’. What might sound to many like a truism today was then an observation that would anticipate the state of things to come. For, even if the Council did not satisfy all the hopes harboured by those groups demanding reform, there was nonetheless an overwhelming mood of optimism at the end of the Council. In the last plenary vote, which took place on 7 December 1965, the pastoral constitution Gaudium et spes was adopted, which encouraged, in an almost exuberant tone, precisely the encounter between ‘Church and world’; and, on the same day, a joint declaration was read out by Pope Paul VI and Athenagoras, the Patriarch of Constantinople, which lifted the reciprocal excommunications of the eleventh century. Thus, there seemed to be tangible progress in both fields identified by Kasper as being burdened by dogma: ecumenism and the relationship between ‘Church and world’. But Kasper was also aware of the dogmatic difficulties that would inevitably arise as a result of the high expectations, and he developed his theory of doctrinal development so as to prevent these difficulties from becoming a ‘millstone’ for the Church. What distinguishes Kasper is that, unlike Rahner and Ratzinger, he not only asserts the historicity of dogma, but also demonstrates it in detail. He works in a strongly semasiological manner and analyzes the various contexts in which concepts such as dogma, truth and gospel can be found in history. In doing so, he shows in a history of the concept of dogma how the Church first came to present the binding nature of its doctrine in the form that is today called dogma. The second chapter of this book has already discussed this issue, and what I will focus on now are the systematic conclusions that Kasper draws. Like Rahner and Ratzinger, Kasper also distinguishes dogma as a doctrinal formula from the event of revelation itself, one in which the human being encounters God in the space of the Church. For what are also probably ecumenical reasons, Kasper covers this distinction with the

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terms ‘dogma’ and ‘gospel’. Regarded not as a literary genre, but as ‘the power of the exalted Lord in and above the Church through his living Word’, the gospel is for Kasper ‘not an entity that can be detached from the process of dogmatic tradition’, but is also not identical with this process; rather, the gospel finds expression in the ‘faith and testimony of the Church’, ‘without ever being absorbed into this faith’ (2015: 57). Kasper thereby rejects the thesis that Harnack had put forward and that was extremely powerful in liberal Protestantism, namely, that the dogma of the Church is opposed to the gospel of Jesus; the latter is for Harnack (1901: 55) ‘so simple and on the other hand so rich’, since it encompasses only three things (‘Firstly, the kingdom of God and its coming. Secondly, God the Father and the infinite value of the human soul. Thirdly, higher righteousness and the commandment of love’). According to Harnack, Church dogma has deviated from this proclamation, and is therefore now opposed to the original gospel. For Kasper, though, if it wishes to remain not only a historical episode, but also a ‘power in the present’, the gospel proclaimed by the historical Jesus must also be articulated in the faith of the Church (2015: 60). It is only by being articulated in the Church that the gospel can be made comprehensible and thus acceptable, and credible in the literal sense. But, and here Kasper is in line with Protestant positions, the gospel is never completely absorbed into the Church’s faith. In other words, the word of dogma is not the Word of God; it is instead a word of the Church that the Church uses to make the Word of God binding in the time in which it is sent to proclaim the gospel. This distinction is fundamental; it is in dogma that ‘the Church finally becomes conscious of its faith’, without thereby being able to appropriate the Word of God, which never becomes the Church’s ‘property’, but instead stands ‘over the Church’ and constantly shapes it. A dogma is therefore for Kasper a dynamic concept of function: the result of the Church’s previous experience in dealing with the gospel, and the anticipation of future experience for which the Church must remain open. But, since Easter, this future is for the Christian faith no longer an empty openness, but a decided future. That is the reason why the anticipation of dogmatic experience will certainly not miss the mark. This does not mean, however, that the Church can already now calculate (so to speak) how it will actually confirm its solemn statements of faith. Its statements of faith are also pending the ever greater mystery of God’s future. (2015: 108–109)

On the one hand, then, what the Church claims to be true in a dogma remains unconfirmed in the strict sense, since the dogma can only prove

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the truth of what it claims to be true when Christ returns to guarantee this truth: this state of affairs preserves dogma from a rigid fixism. On the other, the future is open and yet not undecided, and the same Jesus will return that the Church has already recognized as the Christ who came before: this state of affairs saves dogma from an unstable arbitrariness. For Kasper, this tightrope walk between ‘the non-objectifiable theological difference between “already” and “not yet”’, a difference that leaves Christ the ‘last word’, while also containing the hopeful certainty of the Church that it ‘will not be disavowed’ on his return, lends dogma both ‘finality and temporariness’ at the same time (2015: 127–128). The truth of dogma is therefore, for Kasper, not first and foremost a correctness understood as a propositional truth, one that seeks to describe an objective state; rather, truth means, in Kasper’s reading of the Bible, ‘self-identification, self-verification and self-ratification’ (2015: 71). The dogma of the Church therefore proves itself to be true when the returning Lord proves himself identical to the person whom the Church avows, and ratifies what the Church believes of him, but no longer in the reflection and allegory of faith, but in the seeing of face to face (1 Corinthians 13:12). ‘The Church and its proclamation’, Kasper argues, ‘represent an eschatological phenomenon; they already shed the light of Christ’s truth in the midst of darkness’ (2015: 138). Dogma is part of this prolepsis, and is therefore – even in the contradiction that it evokes – part of the light that shines in the darkness. But since dogma is only the anticipation of the coming and not the coming itself, and since (again in Biblical terms) it is intended to bear witness to the light without itself being the light (John 1:8), it must always relativize its own significance, and perform the service that it is designed to perform. But what exactly is this service? Like Ratzinger (1968: 66–67), Kasper believes the main function of dogma to be the homologein, that is, the enabling of the Church community to achieve a common faith. However, Kasper gives this thesis more precision by drawing on studies in the history of concepts. Turning to the Protestant theologian Edmund Schlink (2017), who, as we have already seen, was a fierce critic of the dogma of Assumption, Kasper draws attention to terminological shifts in the self-understanding of the councils of the early Church. While the First Council of Nicaea and the Creed that it constructed and that was taken up again at the Council of Constantinople are based on a baptismal creed and thus serve the common, liturgical faith professed by the gathering community, the Council of Chalcedon already had a different focus. The latter no longer speaks the profession of faith from the congregation’s perspective of ‘we believe’

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(Denzinger, No. 125), but from the Council Fathers’ authoritative and doctrinal perspective of ‘we unanimously teach to confess’ (Denzinger, No. 301). Even though Kasper is aware that this observation should not be overestimated, since baptismal creeds also have a doctrinal character, be it only in catechesis, he believes that he can nevertheless see in Schlink’s distinction a ‘shift in the function of dogma’: The creed and therefore the profession of faith has the function of being the ‘distinguishing feature’ of faith within the Church, of facilitating the liturgical homologia, the common avowal, and of testifying to the world the fundamental truths of salvation in Christ. The formulation of doctrine, on the other hand, is intended to protect the purity of the doctrine of salvation and its theological interpretation, and always tended more towards erecting barriers within a common and all-connecting faith in Christ; in other words, dogma was given the function of forming religious denomination. Thus, the doctrinal decisions made by the Council of Trent, as well as its anathema, should be evaluated quite differently to the dogmas of the early Church. . . . The concept of heresy used by the Bible and the early Church should therefore not be applied to the Churches [!] of the Reformation. Hence, for all the diversity of faiths, the Church today no longer calls those belonging to the Churches [!] of the Reformation ‘heretics’, but instead ‘separated brethren’. (2015: 77–78)

Kasper also understands the basic homological function of dogma – that is to say, to serve the common faith that a dogma has to carry out as what Ratzinger (1968: 67) would call a binding order of a regula loquendi – as a service of love, since this service must be bound to the ‘ecclesial love’ that holds the Church together as a community in Christ. What prevents dogma from being a service of love, however, is the fact that, without being wrong, dogma could nevertheless be formulated (in the words of Karl Rahner (1983: 46, 48)) in a way that is ‘rash’, ‘presumptuous’, ‘equivocal’, ‘seductive’ and ‘forward’, that, in other words, dogma is able to ‘speak sinfully’, like everything that is human, even when it seeks to express the divine. His stipulation that dogma should serve ecclesial love, and his observation that some dogmas not only do not do this, but are actually opposed to this love, lead Kasper to draw some far-reaching conclusions for the future potential of dogmatic development: For the sake of the true function of dogma, the Church could and should, when it recognizes these shortcomings, reformulate its current creed. This means neither a revision in objective matters, and nor a negative judgment on the formula that may well have been necessary in its situation. Rather, it means affirming the historicity of the Church and its proclamation, as well as the patchwork character of its knowledge (1 Corinthians 13:9–12). Dogmas are in actu confitendi

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pneumatic events in the Church, but they can also later become a stultifying law if they are understood as a rigid boundary. (2015: 147)

For Kasper, then, it must be possible to reformulate a dogma, and he names three criteria that such a reformulation must meet. First, he insists on a hierarchy of truths (Unitatis redintegratio, No. 11) in which the Church’s ‘dogmas and commandments’ are not an end in themselves, but ‘bridge and crutch’ to the one belief, namely, that ‘for us God in Christ through the Holy Spirit is love’. ‘All other dogmas’, Kasper argues, ‘really only want to explicate this one belief’, and therefore have to be measured by this belief for the purpose of ‘returning unfolded truths of faith to the centre of belief, and reintegrating them into this centre’. Second, doing so has to serve ‘ecclesial love’, by which Kasper might have had in view, primarily, the ecumenical dimension of dogmatic development (2015: 642). For, if the primacy of the pope is to be understood in reference to a formulation in Ignatius of Antioch’s work as ‘a presidency in matters of love’ (see Koch 2017: 36), then the dogmatic form that it takes is also to be measured by the extent to which it does justice to what Kasper calls ‘ecclesial love’. According to the connotation of the concept of agape, this love has, of course, a connotation that is sacramental in the narrower sense and that is related to the Eucharist. But it is for this very reason that it is not exhausted in the mere performance of the sacramental event, but encompasses everything that this unity in the sacrament (which presupposes unity in belief ) makes possible. A dogmatic form of primacy, which prevents this unity and the love that presupposes it, is rejected by Kasper. Third, Kasper argues that the dogmatic structure of the Church should therefore be measured against the gospel and where necessary be altered in such a way that, ‘faced with today’s world, it awakens faith, hope and love’, so that the message of the gospel can be carried out and understood today. Faith is not at its purest in so-called unbroken faith, which in reality is a mere ghetto mentality, and where we do not even acknowledge the problems of today and simply ‘continue to believe’ behind closed doors. Rather, it is at its purest where our faith gives rise to a real interaction with the present. . . . If our historical situation is determined in all areas by a radical upheaval, then this calls for us to be brave and to take risks to embrace the new in our faith, too. (2015: 643)

7 Overview and Outlook

The tradition of theological thought, from which I have given some prominent examples, contains a treasure trove of theories of doctrinal development that is for the most part ignored today. Yet, at a time when the Catholic doctrine of faith is under unprecedented pressure to change, this trove could provide a number of things, both ‘new’ and ‘old’ (Matthew 13:52): old, because if it loses living contact with its tradition, then the Church would no longer be the Church; and new, because the Church is not simply a club of traditional costumes that can afford to gather dust in a museum, but has a mission that it serves, along with its dogma. The fundamental question faced by theories of doctrinal development concerns the relationship that the old (without which the Church would no longer have roots) has with the new (without which the Church can have no future). The answers provided by such theories do not replace discussions of individual problems and reforms. Not one of the theories outlined specifies exactly what would be absolutely necessary or completely impossible in a particular historical situation. To expect such a thing from a theological theory of development would be to understand history as a preprogrammed sequence of events that could be grasped simply by working out its mechanics. The theories of development discussed here did not succumb to such a view of history. What exactly should change in the Church and what should remain the same should be worked out in extremely difficult and, therefore, also highly controversial moraltheological, dogmatic and pastoral discussions. Theological theories of development do not offer a universal formula to explain dogma; rather,

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their task is to keep open the space of the possible in the face of its two opponents – the supposedly impossible and the supposedly necessary.

.    ,       We should first distinguish between five contexts in which the concept of dogma (which shapes the present form in which doctrine is presented in the Catholic Church) is used today, and be aware of how much these different meanings are themselves the result of developments that are still ongoing. 1. ‘Dogma’ means in the broadest sense the totality of Christian doctrine. ‘Christian’ dogma is therefore neither a special doctrine nor a collection of doctrines specific to a denomination, but rather simply the entirety of Christian faith manifested in doctrine. It is in this sense that, for example, Ferdinand Christian Baur uses the term when, in his reply to Möhler’s Symbolism, he speaks of ‘Christian dogma’ in relation to the doctrinal form of Christian faith in antiquity (1836: 550). But questions were also asked in the nineteenth century about (to quote the title of a book published in 1855 by Franz Egerer) Christian Dogma and Modern Philosophy that sought to determine the relationship between the doctrine of faith perceived as a unit and other intellectual phenomena. Thus, ‘dogma’ in the broadest sense is a term that serves as a collective singular to bring the many doctrines of Christianity together as one doctrine. The one dogma in this sense is, as Karl Barth (1975: 267–268) puts it, the ‘essence from which real dogmas and real dogmatic propositions may arise, i.e. when they are modelled on it’. 2. Somewhat more specifically, but still a unifying collective singular, is talk of what the Protestant theologian Ferdinand Christian Baur refers to as ‘Catholic dogma’ (1836: 37), which denotes all those doctrines that distinguish the Catholic Church from other Christian groupings, without thereby being restricted to ecclesiology alone. Thus, Baur, for example, would also regard the sacramental notions found in Catholicism (such as the doctrine of transubstantiation and the specifics of Mariological belief ) as part of Catholic dogma. 3. ‘Christological’ dogma is a thematic rather than a denominationally specific category, and summarizes what the Church believes in a certain part of its faith, in this case, about Jesus Christ. Dogma in

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this sense also comprises different doctrines, for example, the homoousios-doctrine or dyophysitism with regard to Christ’s will. 4. It is such a doctrine, in the singular, that the definition that would become influential in Catholic theology in the wake of the First Vatican Council had in mind: namely, a dogma denotes ‘all those things . . . that are contained in the word of God, written or handed down . . . by the Church, either in solemn judgment or through her ordinary and universal teaching office’ (Denzinger, No. 3011). According to these criteria, a dogma must express an aspect of the deposit of revelation entrusted to the Church and be presented by the Church authoritatively. It is therefore necessary to believe in the authority of the self-revealing God (fide divina), and in the authority of the Church proclaiming the dogma (fide catholica). If a doctrine lacks one of the two criteria (either the expression of revealed content or the Church’s definition), then it is not a dogma. This rule was altered substantially by the Catechism of the Catholic Church in 1992 (if a Catechism really can legitimately correct an ecumenical council), when it loosened the tight link between a dogma and revelation. According to the Catechism, what a dogma says must relate not only to ‘truths contained in divine Revelation’, but also to those with ‘a necessary connection’ to revealed truths (Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 88). But it remains disputed what exactly this connection is, and what this extended sense of ‘dogma’ actually includes. John Paul II distinguished a historical and logical variation of this nexus (see Denzinger, No. 5066). But, beyond the attempts to widen the concept of dogma, it remains true that, as Walter Kasper points out, ‘there is no official list of Church dogmas, and nor can there be one either historically or theologically’ (2015: 70). 5. It is only those cases in which the concept of dogma was used most narrowly that are clearly grammatically countable, namely, those doctrines presented by the extraordinary, solemn magisterium, which is incumbent either on the pope in the form of an ex cathedra decision or on an ecumenical council. Such doctrines comprise only three dogmas: the Immaculate Conception, the infallibility of the pope and Mary’s bodily Assumption to heaven. Theological discussion does not always clearly distinguish these five meanings from one another, and they make everything that is included in the issue of doctrinal or, as the magisterium has preferred to say since the

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nineteenth century, dogmatic development both more understandable, and less. First, and negatively, dogmatic development is not about leaving the concept of dogma to arbitrariness, and certainly not about disavowing the most narrow variant of the concept, which has so far only been used in the form of three cathedral decisions. Rather, a theory of doctrinal development begins with the historically undeniable observation that the Church did not always teach what it now teaches as being binding, and did not always teach bindingly. There are numerous things that belong to the innermost core of the Christian faith, but that have never been formally defined as dogma. For example, the resurrection of Jesus has not been accounted for in the dogmatic form of categories four and five. Someone who rejects the resurrection of Jesus is not guilty of any offence against dogma in the sense of categories four and five, but nevertheless destroys the ground on which the building of the Church stands: ‘if Christ has not been raised, then empty is our preaching; empty, too, your faith’ (1 Corinthians 15:14). Not everything that is central to the Christian faith can be found expressed in a dogma in the narrower sense, even if, like the resurrection of Jesus, it is part of the Christian dogma. Thus, when we speak of doctrinal or dogmatic development, then it is not a matter of placing an expiration date on a single dogma; rather, it is a matter of viewing the entirety of the Christian faith in its historical dynamics, and always linking continuities and discontinuities with one another so that fidelity to the origins can continue, while discontinuities are accepted for the sake of being able to proclaim the gospel in the present. It is perhaps beyond dispute that there was a development ‘towards dogma, i.e. a prehistory of dogma’, and the impression arises that, in the words of Joseph Ratzinger, there is also ‘a history of what has already become dogma, i.e. an actual history of dogma’ (1966: 21). The range of theories from different historical contexts outlined in this book shows that this second variant of the meaning of dogmatic development – namely, a history of what has already become dogma – is also not only an accident, but can be thought of as a theologically legitimate undertaking. Karl Rahner, Joseph Ratzinger and Walter Kasper make this very clear. But they leave open what implications their theories might actually have, that is, what the historical development of what has already become dogma might look like in the future; for Ratzinger, this historical development should comprise not only continuity, or the mere ‘identity of what remains constant’, but also discontinuity (1966: 9). In other words, theories of doctrinal development deal with the instable simultaneity of continuity and discontinuity.

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.        :   In order to give system to the multitude of theoretical approaches to development that have been discussed here, we can identify some ideal types that really are ideal types – they group complex relationships around an idea, but cannot be found in their pure form. All theories of development represent mixed types; a real type thus unites several ideal types. 1. All theological theories of development agree on the most fundamental of all questions: that doctrinal development is an undeniable fact. But, in order not only to describe this fact or to criticize it within a narrative of decay, all theological theories of development believe by definition that a certain kind of development is legitimate. Whoever does not share this belief can (to adopt the language used by Newman (1845: 44)) only believe that there is corruption or stagnation, but not development. But someone who sees stagnation does not need a theory of development. And someone who merely sees decay can be content with a theory of decay and does not need a positive explanation for development, which always sees discontinuity and continuity together and can therefore not be reduced to diagnoses of decay. All theories of doctrinal development therefore have inherent to them a legitimating element: they not only try to understand development, but also see it as being theologically legitimate. How they do so differs, however, with the locus classicus that most theories refer to being the paraclete sayings in the Gospel of John, where Jesus promises his disciples the help that ‘will teach’ them ‘everything’ (John 14:26), guide them ‘to all the truth’ (John 16:13), and reveal to them what they ‘cannot bear’ yet (John 16:12). 2. When it comes to the question of what exactly the concept of development refers to in the theological context, there has been a focus since the nineteenth century on the doctrinal element, which is the reason that we can perhaps speak in terms of a doctrinal type. According to this type, the doctrine of faith has developed, either with new doctrines being added, or existing propositions being understood in a different or at least more profound way. 3. My comments on Hugh of Saint Victor have perhaps made clear that the doctrinal type is not without alternatives. Hugh was of course not aware in the twelfth century of the doctrinal presumption of

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discontinuity that arose in the Enlightenment from the critical historiography of dogma, and that the theories of the nineteenth century had to react to; this presumption of discontinuity helped clarify, but also narrow, the issue. Hugh’s distinction between cognitio and affectus fidei on the one hand, and between substantia and materia fidei on the other, allowed him to open up a different level of discussion. For, the materia fidei can change in the form of individual doctrines when later generations see cognitively perceived propositions as being true that previous generations did not consider true. Thus, the material may have changed and therefore also the cognitio fidei. In contrast, the substance of faith remains the same, in line with the Epistle to the Hebrews (be certain in things hoped for, substantia sperandarum rerum (Heb 11:1)). Hugo demonstrates this by following Augustine on the question of how the faith of Israel prior to the advent of Jesus relates to the faith of the Church. But his distinction is also instructive when it comes to the question of changes to faith within the Church, and it represents an affective type of doctrinal development that differs from the purely doctrinal approach. 4. Since the doctrine of faith does not develop automatically, it requires an opportunity or an impetus to develop. This can be described either positively or negatively. A negative force is based on the idea that dogmatic development is a reaction to heresies. A dogma that continues to develop is thus given a primarily defensive character, which serves to protect the deposit of faith. We could therefore speak of a defensive type. 5. But development can also appear with a positive connotation as the result of profound human reflection or even as the manifestation of a divine plan of development, as suggested, for example, by Gregory of Nazianzus. Such an approach could be described as an explorative type. As Möhler shows, the negative drive to defend and the positive drive to develop are not mutually exclusive. They nevertheless derive from two different sources of doctrinal development. 6. Since faith understands itself as relating to God and his revelation, the question arises as to how a developing and changing faith can be thought of in relation to its permanent object. The clearest answer can be found in the neo-scholastic theories of development, which believe that the Church carries through time a stable depositum fidei, a deposit of revelation entrusted to it on a single

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10.

11.

Overview and Outlook occasion, but that it is never fully aware of everything that is contained in its depositorium, its divine storeroom replete with revelation. For such theories, doctrinal development makes explicit what the Church has always already embraced in faith implicitly, but not always in a reflexive manner. Such approaches to doctrinal development could be described as a deposital type. In contrast, there is the dynamic type, which does not presuppose a static deposit of revelation, but postulates instead that revelation always occurs anew in the space of the Church. It is for this reason that doctrinal development cannot be standardized by returning to a completed deposit that is present in certain sources (such as scripture or the testimonies of tradition, even though scripture and tradition remain normative manifestations of revelation). The most prominent representative of this type is Joseph Ratzinger. The dynamic type is accompanied by a scepticism towards objectively fixed criteria that would make it possible to identify clearly and precisely which innovation is a legitimate development, and which is a heretical corruption of the doctrine of faith. Most of the more recent theories do not specify exact criteria, but, like Walter Kasper, provide points of orientation that do not claim to have the character of a test in the demonstrative sense. Nevertheless, these approaches also do not assume that dogmatic development takes place arbitrarily, and we could therefore speak here of contextually regulated theories. In contrast, there are objectively regulated theories, which claim to provide ‘tests’ that function as unambiguous indicators of a legitimate development. This group includes the first edition of John Henry Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, but also Vincent of Lérins, who claims to present with his canon a universally valid regula to distinguish profectus from permutatio. The more a theory is based on rules, be they understood contextually or objectively, the greater its tendency to perceive doctrinal development as a process that is open to rational examination and discussion. We could therefore speak of a cognitive type here, since it leaves the question of doctrinal development to the general rules of cognition and discussion. The opposite of the cognitive type is the authoritative type, which can be observed in its extreme form in Adam Gengler and his

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criticism of Vincent of Lérins. The idea that the individual Christian who does not belong to the consecrated hierarchy can devote themselves cognitively to the issue of dogmatic development seemed to Gengler to lead to a dangerous subjectivism, which is why only the magisterium is in a position to decide on questions of doctrinal development. Gengler’s is certainly an extreme approach, but it is an approach that can nonetheless often be found in varying degrees: the magisterium is seen as having not only an external authority to make decisions, but also, because it enjoys supernatural assistance, a higher level of expert knowledge. Distinguishing various theories of doctrinal development and identifying eleven types – legitimating, doctrinal, affective, defensive, explorative, deposital, dynamic, contextually regulated, objectively regulated, cognitive, authoritative – allows us to grasp and organize the discussion more precisely. There have already been attempts at typologization in the field of doctrinal development.1 What is new here, however, is that I name different ideal types that occupy different levels and give rise to real types. Thus, the legitimating type can be found in all theories, and the doctrinal in most. Although the deposital type does not completely exclude the dynamic, it is still in tension with it, just as the determination of an objective regulation of development is in tension with a mere contextual determination of points of orientation. The cognitive layout of a theory and its reference to authority are not mutually exclusive (Catholic theories will probably not manage without both elements), but they relate to each other in an inversely proportional manner; the higher the cognitive content of a theory, the less authority is needed, and the stronger the reference to authority, the lower the cognitive aspect. For, if something is generally visible through the human being’s gift of reason, there is no need for authority to present as an object of belief what everyone can see anyway. Conversely, an authority is needed not only where the generally evident must be sanctioned, but also where the contested must be decided – without the authority being allowed to overstep its decision-making powers. The recourse to reason and the recourse to authority to justify faith are thus in a permanent relationship of tension, which is also reflected in the theories of doctrinal development. 1

Hammans, for example, distinguishes historical, intellectualistic and theological approaches to the problem of doctrinal development (1965: vii–viii), Dickinson (2000: 53–82) differentiates between logical, organic and situational theories, while Walgrave (1972: vii) speaks of logical, transformative and theological approaches.

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. :  ,      Trivial yet necessary is the point that the dogmas of the Church are not an end in themselves, but instead serve a function. Neo-scholasticism distinguishes between dogma and depositum fidei, between what is entrusted to the Church in a deposit that can never be entirely fathomed, and what it knows to say about this deposit. The concept of dogma was for the First Vatican Council an ‘instrument of definition’, something ‘applied to the depositum fidei’ (Wenzel 2011: 284); it was not itself the depositum fidei, but rather something that had only an instrumental and auxiliary character. Following Ratzinger and Kasper, one could distinguish between revelation and dogma, Word of God and dogma, and gospel and dogma. In all cases, dogma is not the ultimate, but the penultimate, element; it aims to proclaim revelation, Word of God and gospel authoritatively, without ever being able itself to become revelation, Word of God or gospel. To take dogma and gospel as one example, we can see that they are dependent on one another, but not identical. The latter, proclaimed by Christ and expressed irrevocably in Christ, is the devotion of the eternal God to the mortal creature subject to historical change, and as such gospel needs dogma if the human being is to express, proclaim, understand and confess it. As Walter Kasper argues, the gospel is ‘not an entity that can be detached from the dogmatic process’, but just as little ‘is it dogmatically identical with’ this process; it ‘always expresses itself anew in the creed and testimony of the Church’, without ‘ever being absorbed into this creed’ (2015: 57). The gospel is thus on the one hand dependent on dogma, but on the other is its sharpest critic. The gospel is inseparable from dogma because there is no conglomerate of fixed propositions that would describe the gospel or the depositum fidei outside dogma, and that could simply be placed next to dogma to gauge how correct it is. Where the gospel is proclaimed assertorically, it is dogma. But the gospel is more than just its assertoric expression. It is the devotion of God to the time-bound world in which the Church seeks to give conceptual articulation to this devotion. In other words, even if dogma claims to be the whole gospel, the gospel is never the whole dogma; rather, the gospel contains an unfathomable excess that leaves a space that cannot be measured in dogma for God’s Spirit and grace. Dogma must therefore always be guided by the ends to which it is the means. The question that dogma must ask itself is whether it does justice to its function of expressing the gospel in comprehensible

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propositions that make the gospel open in the first place either to acceptance or rejection, and therefore credible; and, should that not be the case, then it must develop. For, as Kasper argues, a ‘dogma is the provisional event of the eschatologically final truth of Christ’; it is not itself this truth, but part of ‘the patchwork character’ of human knowledge (2015: 139, 147). This patchwork only becomes a whole when faith is transformed into a seeing, from face to face (1 Corinthians 13:12). But then dogmas will no longer be needed, since the human being will no longer believe on the basis of authority, but will know on the basis of knowledge. But, since dogmas are not yet known through knowledge, but still believed through the authority fide divina et fide catholica, they belong to the penultimate, and not to the ultimate, things; to the pre-eschatic and thus relative, and not to the eschatic and thus absolute, objects of Christian life. Are such claims relativistic? Epistemological approaches are usually brought under the umbrella of alethic relativism, claiming as they do that a statement cannot be true in and of itself (because it would be claiming what is objectively the case), and that statements can only be true relative to a certain yardstick. One and the same statement could therefore be both true and false at the same time, depending on the yardstick that is used. Such an approach would no longer contain anything that is true in and of itself, but only propositions that could be deemed true in relation to one frame of reference, and at the same time false in relation to a different frame. Seeing knowledge in such a way would spell the end not only of theology, but of every science. Progress in knowledge would no longer be possible, but only endless transitions from one frame of reference to the next, which is the reason that contemporary philosophy rightly criticizes relativistic positions. However, the phobia towards a ‘dictatorship of relativism’ that is prevalent in some Church circles has unnecessarily polarized this discussion with its narratives of decay. Instead of contributing to existing criticisms of relativism, such as those levelled by so-called New Realism (see Boghossian 2006; Ferraris 2014), these circles make relativism into a theological spectre that, being vague, seems to be omnipresent; this is the case even where the issue at hand is one merely of distinctions that were part of the common property of theology, such as that between means and ends, or between uti and frui, as Augustine calls it, that is, the difference between the instrumental use of things and their enjoyment as an end in itself (see Fontanier 2000). Dogma belongs to the means, and not to the ends, if we adhere to what the Catechism of the Catholic Church itself teaches, namely, that God is ‘infinitely perfect and blessed in himself’, and wants the human being to

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share in ‘his blessed life’ (Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 1). Communion with God is thus the purpose of all creation and the point of the opus reparationis, of the divine act of salvation that can be the object of the Church’s dogmatic definitions. Communion with God, to which, according to Christian belief, all life runs, is of course not a communion of arbitrariness, but a communion in the truth. This truth, however, is what has become human in Jesus Christ, and what has become a proposition in dogma, only if the proposition expresses what has happened in Christ in such a way that the individual can understand it as an event of salvation, and believe or reject it, and if the Church as a community can confess it. If dogma does not manage (or no longer manages) this, and thereby obstructs the gospel and closes the gospel instead of opening it up, then, for the sake of the purpose that it should serve, it is obliged to develop further. ‘For the sake of the true function of dogma’, Walter Kasper argues, ‘the Church could and should, when it recognizes these shortcomings, reformulate its current creed’ (2015: 147). This thesis is the very opposite of relativism. It does not use a random yardstick, but takes seriously the gospel as the ultimate yardstick of Church doctrine. The goal of doctrinal development must therefore be to achieve an even better understanding of the gospel throughout the course of history. This involves a ‘reinterpretation’, one that has ‘the aim of achieving a better understanding of the testimonies passed down, and of reformulating what is currently misunderstood in terms of continuity and discontinuity’ (Werbick 2010: 188). It is in this effort to understand the gospel better where lies the anti-relativist thrust of doctrinal development, which on the one hand cannot do without the selfexpectation of a better understanding, but on the other cannot be arrogant towards the past. For, only from the past has the Church faithfully transmitted to the present what it seeks to understand ever more deeply and precisely, that is, better. And every newly emerging present will do the same: (hopefully) thank the past for what has been passed down, and honour and criticize it by seeking to understand it better. The development of dogmas thus initiated does not exclude correcting what exists. According to Joseph Ratzinger, this correction is not, however, a crude antithesis that makes the old wrong, but rather a ‘movement of reduction’, which, besides the ‘movement of unfolding’, also occupies a legitimate place in the development of dogma, insofar as it does not see the old as false, but leads back to the living that it sought to express and that could become fossilized in the course of time (1966: 23).

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According to the definition underlying this book, the issue of doctrinal development denotes the unstable simultaneity of continuity and discontinuity. Pure discontinuity would be the beginning of something completely new, which has no relation to the old and therefore cannot be seen as a development from it. Pure continuity, on the other hand, would be standstill, since every change always carries within it the element of discontinuity. The Church, which sees itself as a community of Jesus’ disciples in succession to the apostles, is on the one hand dependent on preserving continuity with its historical origins. On the other, it has to link this continuity to its increasing distance from these origins, a distance that can potentially threaten continuity. In order not to lose itself, the Church must therefore always ensure its continuity with its origins and its identity as the Church of Jesus Christ. It is here that doctrine plays an important, though not the most important, role. Pope Benedict XVI suggested how to overcome the doctrinal narrowing of the discussion on continuity. In his Christmas address to the Roman Curia in 2005, he did not contrast a hermeneutics of discontinuity with a hermeneutics of continuity (as is occasionally claimed); rather, Benedict XVI (2006: 11) distinguished in his interpretation of the Second Vatican Council between a ‘hermeneutics of discontinuity and rupture’ and a ‘hermeneutics of reform’. Thus, he juxtaposed not discontinuity and continuity, but ‘rupture and discontinuity’ on the one hand, and ‘reform’ on the other, which lends his distinction a completely different meaning; however, the Pope does refer in the context of liturgical reform (but not in the context of dogmatics) to ‘the need for a hermeneutics of continuity’ (Lang 2017: 157–158, fn. 9). For the Pope, a ‘hermeneutics of discontinuity and rupture’ risks ‘ending in a split between the pre-conciliar Church and the post-conciliar Church’. Although he pins such a hermeneutics primarily on those theologians for whom the innovations of the Council did not go far enough, the hermeneutics of rupture seems to exist in its pure form on the other side of the spectrum of Church politics, in the work of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who, in the aftermath of the Council, rejected its teachings on the Church’s relations with other Christian denominations and religions, and its attitude to freedom of religion and conscience, as being modernist, thereby perceiving a fracture between the Church before the Council and the Church after the Council. In his text J’accuse le concile (a text that alludes to Emile Zola’s intervention in the Dreyfus affair), Lefebvre sought ‘to prove that in the Council the Church had ceased to be the Church of Jesus Christ’ (Neuner 2014: 86). The reasons given for this claim are not

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liturgical, but purely doctrinal: the Council is shaped ‘by liberalism and modernism’, which is the reason that he only adheres to what ‘the Church has believed at all times and before the modernist influence of the Council’ (Lefebvre 1975: 5–8). For Lefebvre, continuity and discontinuity are thus decided only according to the doctrine of faith that the Council allegedly corrupted. Benedict XVI (2006: 11) opposes this ‘hermeneutics of discontinuity and rupture’ not with a thesis of unhistorical continuity, but with a ‘hermeneutics of reform’, by which he understands ‘renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us’. For Benedict XVI, the Church ‘is a subject which increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God as the one subject’. What ensures continuity through changing times is for Benedict XVI not, as it is with Lefebvre, the doctrine of faith, but rather the community of the Church. Dogma is of course an important element in the Church. A Church without dogma would be an intellectually undeveloped or dishonest assemblage that does not know, and therefore cannot tell others, what it believes. As a propositional expression of what is believed, and thus also an account of faith that can be accepted or rejected, dogma is indispensable, which is the reason that (to quote the title of an 1888 collection of essays by Otto Dreyer) an ‘undogmatic Christianity’ would be neither desirable nor help to foster dialogue with those who believe and think differently. Despite the importance of dogma, though, the Church is much more than its doctrine of faith, and the question of whether the Church of the present is still identical with the Church prior to the Second Vatican Council cannot be decided on the basis of dogma alone. A purely doctrinal discourse of continuity nevertheless pervades today’s Church, and makes even the most cautious change seem like a great rupture both with the Church itself and with its Lord. This can be seen, for example, in the discussion sparked by the post-synodal letter Amoris laetitia, where Pope Francis (Amoris laetitia, No. 305) makes the extremely general statement: Because of forms of conditioning and mitigating factors, it is possible that in an objective situation of sin – which may not be subjectively culpable, or fully such – a person can be living in God’s grace, can love and can also grow in the life of grace and charity, while receiving the Church’s help to this end.

The Pope is making a distinction here between a situation in life that does not correspond objectively to the Church’s ethics on relationships and that is therefore regarded as ‘irregular’, and how those affected evaluate

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this situation according to their conscience. The external view and the internal view of one and the same situation can diverge, which from the perspective both of the Church and of those affected, who see themselves as members of the Church and want to be accepted as such, is undesirable, but does not separate those affected from God’s grace. The Pope provides the statement that even people who live in situations that the magisterium deems irregular should be supported by the Church with cautious clarification, by pointing out in a footnote that such support ‘can include the help of the sacraments’ (Amoris laetitia, No. 305, fn. 351), since sacraments are not a reward for heroic or simply good behaviour, but medicine for the sick and food for the weak. Anyone who believes, as Robert Spaemann does, that this statement constitutes an unacceptable ‘rupture’ (cited in Goertz and Witting 2016: 51) is guilty of narrowing the issue of continuity and discontinuity to a single sub-issue, namely, that of doctrine. The Church, which as a community is more than the sum of its individual members, is, according to Möhler, held together by the identity and continuity of an ecclesial awareness that allows the Church to experience itself as being constructed by God’s Spirit and maintained in an ‘inner unity of life’, a unity that is not merely doctrinal. For Möhler, the identity of the consciousness of the Church in the various moments of its existence thus in no way needs a mechanistic protection: The inner unity of life must be preserved or it will not always be the same Christian Church; but the same consciousness develops, the same life unfolds itself ever more, is always more specific, makes itself always clearer. The Church attains to the humanity of Christ. These forms are characteristic developments of the life of the Church, and tradition contains these successive unfoldings of the higher seed of life by protecting the inner unity of life itself. (1996: 111–112)

If we take Möhler’s ‘identity of consciousness’ as a basis for marking continuity, then we would clearly have to shift the pain threshold of what is reasonable in terms of discontinuities. Completely different horizons could come into view beyond half-hearted reforms, which some already perceive as ruptures when viewed from a purely doctrinal perspective. The range offered by locating the problem of continuity in the Church rather than only in doctrine opens up a broad space of possibility, one in which the Church could develop without thereby ceasing to be identical with itself and with the Church of Jesus Christ. Despite their many important features, objectively regulated approaches have failed in their attempt to apply rules and formulas to determine once

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and for all whether a change is an authentic development or an illegitimate corruption. Vincent of Lérins already had to face the accusation that he represented a ‘naïve belief far removed from practice’ when he claimed that ‘the difficult problem of distinguishing between heresy and orthodoxy could be solved for all time simply by observing a “rule”’ (Sieben 1979: 169). John Henry Newman also downgraded the criteria that he described in the first edition of his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine as ‘tests’ (which he himself never applied consistently), with these ‘tests’ becoming ‘notes’ in a later edition (see McCarren 2009: 124–125): Newman’s ‘notes’ distinguish developments, but are themselves not given the character of a strict criteriological test. The failure of attempts to identify rules and tests as unambiguous indicators of authentic development shows that doctrinal development is not a mechanical process, and that we cannot draw on methods from the natural sciences to discover and present as formulas the laws according to which this mechanism works. For, a theory of dogmatic development in the narrower sense only became necessary through the presumption of discontinuity that was formulated by the history of dogma of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the theory had to do justice to what had been given to it historically. But if there is contingency in history, and if freedom is one way of dealing with that freedom, then a theory of doctrinal development cannot itself in turn betray this freedom by employing a mechanistic and determinative formula that could explain all developments in the past and anticipate all developments in the future. If the formula could do so, then the gospel would no longer be able to develop historically, and the Church could no longer make the once and always incarnate Son of God contemporary at all times. For, this historical development lives precisely from the fact that the Church tells its truth in the face of changing cultures, languages and worldviews. To know how this might happen in advance and according to certain set rules would only be possible if all future contexts in which the gospel is manifested were already known and the human being could thereby believe according to what Léonce de Grandmaison calls ‘more geometrico’ (1928: 267). But that would require an all-encompassing perspective that could observe both the past and future, and that would have a complete view of world history. God may be able to take such a perspective; the scholar of God, certainly not. ‘It is fundamentally impossible to grasp history only in laws that can be read from previous history’ (Finkenzeller 1972: 28). God in his omniscient vision, before whom all times spread out like a fan as a praesentia nulla extensa, can already know, or even have already planned, every future manifestation of the gospel – if we allow him to. We, on the

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other hand, do not know and cannot plan or regulate each manifestation in advance. To us, each manifestation seems contingent. As a ‘science of faith’ that should certainly avoid the danger of ‘mixing faith and knowledge into an impure amalgam of half-knowledge and halffaith’ (Seckler 2013: 18), theology must, if it wishes to survive, keep sight of this distinction between divine and human knowledge. As a science of faith, theology must assume that what it says about the Church and its dogma is not all there is to say, since God is at work in the Church, and we can never have full access to his plans. As a science of faith, though, theology must limit itself to what it actually knows, that is, to what can be communicated clearly and what can hold true in discussions with other disciplines. This insight should force theology to concede that all theologies – and indeed the magisterium offers nothing but theology (endowed with authority) – are nothing other than interpretations of different concepts, such as dogma, in contingent social and historical contexts. For theology as a science of faith, this observation is unavoidable; for theology as a science of faith, though, it is at the same time not the last word. In the spirit of hopeful faith, but not of knowledge, the Church assumes that, as a divine foundation entrusted with the gospel, it does not err in all the ways of history to the extent that it loses the gospel completely. But this hope taken from faith cannot be built as a parameter into a theological formula of doctrinal development. For otherwise hope would no longer be hope, and theology would no longer be a science.

Epilogue: An ‘Obituary’ to the Church?

This book opened with the words of Evelyn Waugh, to whom it had ‘never occurred’ that ‘the Church was susceptible to change’, too. When he did notice this change, he thought that he should write (or that he had written) an ‘obituary’ to the Church, as one does to a dearly beloved who has passed away. Does change therefore visit death on the Church and do theories of doctrinal development that deal with this change sound the death knell for this sacred institution? If that were so, this knell would not be sounding only today, or not have sounded only at the Second Vatican Council, or wherever the purported ‘rupture’ can be found; rather, it is a sound that has accompanied the entire history of the Church. For, doctrinal development has never reached a point of rest in history. The Church has been from its very beginnings a highly dynamic community that has sought to proclaim the gospel in the changing times in such a way that it becomes understandable as Good News. This process of transmission, which seeks to lead the gospel to an ever-new present, finds itself today in an unprecedented crisis that will change the social form of the Church (not only in Europe, but all over the world), and in some areas will even make it disappear altogether. That is cause for concern, but not reason for alarmism. It is an invitation to think. Where the line lies between a challenge that the Church has to take on board for the sake of the gospel, and a challenge that prevents it from proclaiming the gospel: this cannot be prescribed by authority. Rather, it can only be discovered through discussion without fear, without prohibitions on thought, and without blinkers. What the Protestant theologian Gerhard Ebeling (1967: 54) formulates as a criticism – namely, that the Catholic Church is split ‘by a dual tendency’, by 186

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both ‘a radical conservatism and a no less radical evolutionism’ – is indeed from a Catholic perspective the best compliment possible. A healthy conservatism allows the Church to remain itself through the millennia. A healthy evolutionism allows it to remain forever young. Many people have written obituaries to the Church. It has outlived them all.

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Index

Abelard, Peter, 91–2, 96 Ad tuendam fidem, 22 Adelmann of Liège, 85 Aeterni Patris, 101 Ambrose of Milan, 78 Anicetus (pope), 48 Anselm of Canterbury, 88–92, 104 Anselm of Havelberg, 92–3, 106 anti-modernism, 136, 141, 143–4, 146, 156 anti-modernist oath, 141–2 apologetics, 140, 143, 146 Aquinas, Thomas, 11, 86, 99, 101, 105, 127, 155 view of authority, 104 view of faith, 102–3 Arian controversy, 62, 70, 79 Arianism, 63, 65, 75–7, 80, 87 Arius of Alexandria, 63, 75, 77, 80 articulus fidei, 11, 102, 104 Assumption of Mary, 146–7, 149, 162, 167 Athanasius of Alexandria, 75 Athenagoras (Patriarch of Constantinople), 165 Auctorem fidei, 14 Augustine of Hippo, 9, 25, 70, 87–8, 90, 93–7, 175, 179 authority apostolic, 45, 52, 134, 146 Augustine as, 95 of belief, 139, 179 Church, 13, 20, 22, 83, 105, 131, 134, 146, See also fides catholica of Church Fathers, 86

clerical, 73 of Divine Law, 73 of doctrine, 11 eschatological, 52 external, 83 of God, 13, 35, 133, 136, 153, See also fides divina of the Holy Spirit, 106 human, 163 of the magisterium, 164, 177, 185 in medieval theology, 85, 101 papal, 103–5 Pauline, 55–6 Ratzinger’s view of, 161, 163–4 in scholastic theology, 85 of Scripture, 86, 89, 100 of the Septuagint, 43 Thomas Aquinas and, 101, 104 Barth, Karl, 171 Basil of Caesarea, 64–5 Benedict VIII (Pope), 88 Benedict XV (Pope), 141–2 Benedict XVI (Pope), 164, 181–2, See also Ratzinger, Joseph Bible as canon, 40, 45 as devotional book, 39 as Divine Law, 73 and dogma, 8, 13, 38–9 and dogmatic development, 39 and evolution, 34 and heresy, 168

209

210 Bible (cont.) interpretation by the magisterium, 38 Kasper’s view of, 167 Marcion’s view of, 49–50 Protestant view of, 106 Ratzinger’s view of, 158 as reservoir of dicta probantia, 38 Boethius, 91 Bonaventure, 155–6 Bultmann, Rudolf, 100 Caecilian of Carthage, 74 canon, 40, 50 according to Marcion, 49 Alexandrian, 51 biblical, 40–2, 46–9 of the Church, 40 exclusions from, 51–2 of faith, 40 meaning of in early Church, 40 New Testament, 42, 50–2, 63, 116 Roman, 51 Syrian, 51 of truth, 40, 52 Vincentian, 76, 82, 176 canon law, 19, 106, Canon Muratori, 51 Catechism of the Catholic Church, 20–1, 23–4, 161, 164, 172, 180 Celsus, 9 Charlemagne (Emperor), 87–8 Chrismann, Philipp Neri, 13–15, 17 Christology, 52, 158 controversies, 69, 86–8, See also Arian controversy; filioque controversy docetic, 46 and doctrinal development, 65 dogma, 139 explicit, 100 implicit, 100 pre-existent, 53, 63, 77 Church Fathers dicta authentica of, 85 and dogma, 9 and dogmatic development, 59, 67 Latin, 10 and Nicaea, 25, 77–8, 80 pre-Nicene, 80 in scholastic theology, 85 as secondary authority, 86 Vincentian view of, 78

Index Clement of Alexandria, 50, 77, 80 Clement XIV (Pope), 29 Codex Iuris Canonici. See canon law College of Bishops, 18–19, 22–3 Congar, Yves, 144 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 18, 21–4, 161, 164 Consalvi, Ercole, 110 Constantine (Emperor), 74–5 corruption of doctrine, 123–4, 126, 150, 174, 176, 184 Council of Basel, 12 Council of Chalcedon, 167 Council of Constantinople, 65, 77, 86, 167 Cyprian of Carthage, 73 Cyril of Alexandria, 79 Daniélou, Jean, 144 Darwinism, 26, 32–3, 136 De fontibus revelationis, 162 Dei verbum, 20, 39, 136 deposit of faith, 16–17, 22, 24, 55, 71, 125, 128–31, 134, 145, 150, 175, 178 as distinct from dogma, 10 deposit of revelation, 21, 134, 162, 172, 175 depositorium Church as, 99 depositum custodi, 56 depositum fidei. See deposit of faith depositum revelationis. See deposit of revelation development analogies of, 64, 72 and anti-modernism, 141 defined, 24–5 dogmatic, 25, 31–2, 144, 149, 173 as logical challenge, 89 Scripture as starting point, 44, 54 theories of, 4, 29, 36, 58, 60, 67, 97, 100, 122, 130–1, 146, 170, 173, 181 typologies of, 174–8 Didache, 9 Diekamp, Franz, 8, 38–9 doceticism, 52 dogma and God’s authority, 13 Catholic, 171 Christological, 171 criteria of, 172 defined, 2, 6, 171–2

Index as distinct from deposit of faith, 10, 178 as doctrine of faith, 15 early modern view of, 12 etymology of, 7 of faith, 13, 16 historicity of, 157, 159, 165 history of modern concept of, 10–18, 25 and logic, 22 New Testament use of, 7–9 patristic view of, 9 and the primary realm, 21, 24 relationship to the gospel, 2–3 and the secondary realm, 21–4, 162 as source of catholicity, 117 as system, 30–1, 113 dogmatic development. See development Döllinger, Ignaz von, 16 Donatism, 73–6 Donatus of Carthage, 74 Dörhold, Bernhard, 98 doxography, 26 Drey, Johann Sebastian, 30–2, 35, 108–14, 119 Ebeling, Gerhard, 23, 186 Epistle of Barnabas, 9 Eugene IV (Pope), 12 Eusebius of Caesarea, 9, 41, 47, 51–2 Eustathius of Sebaste, 64 evolution, 32–7 faith, explicit, 95 faith, implicit, 95, 98–100, 105 Felix (Bishop of Aptunga), 74 fides implicita. See faith, implicit fides nicaena, 65 filioque controversy, 86–93 First Epistle of Clement, 45, 51 First Epistle to Timothy, 55–6 First Synod of Tyre, 75 First Vatican Council, 13, 17–19, 21, 81, 129, 133 definition of dogma, 161 Francis (Pope), 182 Franzelin, Johann Baptist, 128–31 Gengler, Adam, 82–3, 177 gospel as distinct from deposit of faith, 55 and dogma, 2–3, 32, 50, 140, 166, 178 Gratian (Emperor), 76, 78

211

Gregory of Nazianzus, 66, 175 Gregory the Great (Pope), 102 Harnack, Adolf von, 9, 49, 100, 137, 139, 166 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 155 Heidegger, Martin, 155 Heiler, Friedrich, 146 Hellenization, 62, 139 heresy, 118 and apology, 26–8 Aquinas’ view of, 104 biblical view of, 168 and canon of truth, 40 Drey’s view of, 111 Franzelin’s view of, 129 Loisy’s view of, 140 modernism as, 137, 141 Möhler’s view of, 117–18 and orthodoxy, 33, 70, 80, 114, 184 patristic view, 63 Vincentian view of, 73, 80 Hermes, Georg, 31 Hermesianism, 31 Hieronymus, 64 Hilary of Poitiers, 63–4, 79, 87 Hirscher, Johann Baptist, 16 historia dogmatum. See history of dogma history of dogma, 26, 28–9, 31 Holy Spirit. See also filioque controversy; Nicene Creed as inner teacher, 67, 69 homogeneity, 138 homoousios, 25, 63, 65, 69–70, 75, 77, 87 Honorius (Emperor), 74 Hugh of Saint Victor, 95–8, 174 Humani generis, 24 Ignatius of Antioch, 9, 47, 169 Immaculate Conception of Mary, 12, 15, 81 Ineffabilis Deus, 15, 81 infallibility. See also Lumen gentium of the Church, 20, 134, 161 and College of Bishops, 19, 23 papal, 81, 129, 135, 146, 159, 172 and Second Vatican Council, 18–19 and secondary realm of dogma, 21, 24 innovation, 100 Arianism as, 76 Benedict XVI’s view of, 181

212

Index

innovation (cont.) and Catechism of the Catholic Church, 21 and discontinuity, 25 and heresy, 103, 176 medieval view of, 85–6 patristic view of, 63 and Pius IX, 14, 16 Protestant view of, 100 terminological, 69, 89 theological challenge of, 60 Irenaeus of Lyon, 40, 43–4, 50, 56, 99, 114 Jerusalem, Johann Friedrich Wilhelm, 26–9 John Paul II (Pope), 20–3, 135, 161, 172 Josephus Flavius, 42 Judaism, 42, 46, 48 Julian the Apostate (Emperor), 76 Justin Martyr, 29, 50, 77, 79 Kant, Immanuel, 30, 155 Kasper, Walter, 2–3, 108, 164–9, 178 Kleutgen, Joseph, 13, 16–17, 127 Lamentabili sane exitu, 136, 141 Lefebvre, Marcel, 181 Leibniz, Gottried Wilhelm, 32–3 Leo III (Pope), 87 Leo X (Pope), 105 Leo XIII (Pope), 101, 127 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 28 Letter to the Philadelphians, 46–7 logic, 23–4, 74, 91, 140, 153 and dogma, 22, 111–31 and theories of development, 148 Loisy, Alfred, 108, 137–42, 146 Lubac, Henri de, 144, 147 Lumen gentium, 18–19, 159 Luther, Martin, 99, 105 magisterium, 2 as protector of the deposit of faith, 16–17 role in defining dogma, 8 and the secondary realm, 24 Marcellus of Ancyra, 9 Marcion, 48–50, 63 Marín-Sola, Francisco, 132–6, 138, 153 Mariology, 147–8 medieval theology, 11–12, 85, 89–90, 95, 101 Melito of Sardis, 41 Mensurius, 74

Miltiades (Pope), 74 modernism, 108, 136–7, 141–2, 146–7, 152, 182 Möhler, Johann Adam, 108–9, 114–20, 171, 175, 183 Montanism, 49 Munificentissimus Deus, 145 Mysterium ecclesiase, 18 neo-modernism, 162 neo-Platonism, 62 neo-scholasticism, 131, 178 approach to history, 157 concept of dogma in, 8, 13 controversies, 108 criticism of, 137, 139, 144 and dogmatic development, 127, 136, 140 and Franzelin, 128 and logic, 148 and Loisy, 141 magisterial preference for, 101 Ratzinger’s view of, 16, 82, 155 and the Second Vatican Council, 127 theories of development, 143, 146–7, 175 view of the Bible, 38 Nestorius of Constantinople, 79 New Realism, 179 Newman, John Henry, 36, 108, 120–7, 130, 176, 184 criteriology of, 123–4 forms of development, 123 and patristic theology, 120 theory of doctrinal development, 122–3 Nicaea, Council of, 25, 63, 65–6, 70, 75, 77–80, 86, 167 Nicene Creed, 75–7, 79, 86 Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, 86–90 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4 nous theology, 63 nouvelle théologie, 145 Novalis, 118 Oberthür, Franz, 29, 32 Ordinatio sacerdotalis, 22–3 Origen, 9, 42, 44, 51, 61, 77 Örsy, Ladislas, 21 orthodoxy, 33, 37, 70, 73, 79–80, 114, 117, 143, 184 Oxford Movement, 121

Index Papias of Hierapolis, 47–8 Paraclete sayings, 56–8 Passaglia, Carlo, 128 patristic theology, 56, 59, 120, 145 Paul VI (Pope), 159 Paula González Vigil, Francisco de, 15 Pauline epistles, 40, 42, 45–6, 48, 68 Pauline theology, 82 pedagogy, divine, 60, 67 Pelagianism, 10, 27 Perrone, Giovanni, 125–6, 128, 131 Peter Comestor, 104 Peter Lombard, 98, 101 Pius VI (Pope), 14 Pius VII (Pope), 110 Pius IX (Pope), 14–17, 23, 81, 127, 138 Pius X (Pope), 136, 141–3, 146, 152, 156 Pius XII (Pope), 4, 24, 145–7 Platonism, 29, 61–4, 68 Middle, 61 professio fidei, 21, 23 Protestant Enlightenment, 26–7, 29, 106 psychology of faith, 96 Rademacher, Arnold, 36–7 Rahner, Karl, 147–54 Ratzinger, Joseph, 21, 155, 158, 162, See also Benedict XVI (Pope) rejection of anti-modernism, 156–7 view of authority, 161, 163 view of doctrinal development, 157, 160, 162–3 view of dogma, 159–60 view of revelation, 158, 164 view of Vincent of Lérins, 82 Reformation, 12, 86, 95, 105–6, 121, 168 regula fidei, 13, 52, 158 regula proxima fidei, 38 regula remota fidei, 38 relativism, 3, 150, 179–80 Riem, Andreas, 29 Ritschl, Albrecht, 100 Roman School, 128 Scheeben, Matthias Joseph, 130–1 Schlink, Edmund, 145, 167 Schmaus, Michael, 156 scholasticism, 89, 93, 95, 101, 109 Schrader, Clemens, 128 Schultes, Karl Joseph, 132–5 Scriptural principle, 105–6

213

Second Vatican Council, 4, 18–20, 135–6, 143 view of Bible and dogma, 38–9 view of dogma, 20 semipelagianism, 25, 82 Semler, Johann Salomo, 27–8, 111 Septuagint, 41–5, 48, 54 Serapion of Antioch, 52 Sieben, Hermann Josef, 80 Simon, Richard, 27 Sodalitium Pianum, 141 Spirit and dogma, 115–17, 119–20 subordinationism, 63, 77, 79 Syllabus Errorum, 15 Synod of Antioch, 75 Synod of Constantinople, 76 Synod of Pistoia, 14 Synod of Serdica, 75 Tarasios of Constantinople, 87 testimonium externum, 69 Theodosius (Emperor), 76 theologia systematica. See dogma:system of theology as science, 31 as science of faith, 185 Tractarianism, 121 tradition in scholastic theology, 128 Trent, Council of, 92, 110, 168 Trinity, doctrine of, 65, 87–8, 92 Trypho, 43 Tübingen School, 16, 26, 108–9, 128 Tuyaerts, Marcolinus Maria, 147 Valens (Emperor), 76 Valentinian (Emperor), 76 Véron, François, 11, 13–15, 17 Verweyen, Hansjürgen, 155 Vincent of Lérins, 15, 60, 64, 70, 72, 76, 115, 146, 176–7, 184 criteriology of development, 71–80 critique of Gengler, 83 and Immaculate Conception, 81–2 and modern view of dogma, 9–10 rule of, 82–3 view of Church Fathers, 78 Waugh, Evelyn, 1, 186 Zola, Emile, 181