Is Debate Over Development of Doctrine a Dead Duck?

Abstract

In this article I return to a theme on which I wrote almost a decade ago in an essay entitled ‘The Holy Spirit, Authority and Doctrinal Development’. Later on I shall refer to points in the essay to illustrate my two main points in this article, (i) that doctrinal development is less a controversial matter than it was, (ii) that we can, I believe, bypass it if we pay proper heed to the more basic issues of pneumatology and of authority.So to my title. Those who like duck to eat are constantly disappointed for there is little meat on a duck. So it will be with this article but I hope the meat there is will be nourishing. I am rather concerned that the bones should be prominent.The first reason I would suggest that the development of doctrine is becoming, if it has not already become, a dead duck is that the debate is not being carried forward much. After I had written the article to which I have referred I did a good bit of research on the situation and I found it was almost impossible to continue writing in any profitable way upon the topic. (I have seen little fresh or additional up to the present.) If I had written further over the last few years I would be repeating myself. Secondly, the most essential factor in development of doctrine, namely, the operation of the Holy Spirit, seems very difficult to discern. Criteria about development and how we could know that it was the Spirit who was acting and also for deciding on satisfactory tests of right and lawful development were varied. There was extreme difficulty in getting areas of agreement. This point has been brought out in my earlier essay and in some of Rahner’s essays to which I referred there.