Saint Thomas and the Development of Doctrine

Abstract

Saint Thomas and the Development of Doctrine Guy Mansini O.S.B. Introduction The "development of doctrine" commonly refers to the unfolding of Christian faith into hitherto unformulated and undefined doctrinal propositions. It is the successive unfolding of the one, once and for all given revelation completed by and in Christ and possessed by apostolic faith, into newly articulated doctrines. I take it that the original possession of revelation, the original formulation of faith, was itself propositional, located in the propositions of the Bible, in such dicta as the confession that "Jesus is Lord," and "he has risen from the dead," and "he will come again." Sometimes revelatory propositions summarize a narrative of events, of course, and this is not unimportant, since certain truths about God cannot be manifested except on the basis of a history captured in narrative. For instance, in the Isaian reflection on the Old Testament story of Israel's exodus from Egypt, her establishment in the Promised Land, the kingdom and then the kingdoms, Jewish exile, and return from exile, there are statements about God's providence and eternity. The narrative itself is the prior and necessary demonstration of this providence and eternity, without which Isaiah cannot formulate his teaching about them. Evidently, the narrative of the mission of Jesus and its conclusion are the necessary presupposition of what Saint Paul teaches, quite "didactically," in Galatians and Romans. And there are smaller narrative communications of truth, too: the narrative of Jesus's calming of the storm on Lake Galilee and the subsequent worship of the disciples is a declaration of his divinity. What is to be noticed, however, is this, that the original possession of revelation and so every initial access to the Realities disclosed by revelation through deed and event—namely, the triune God, the Incarnation, the Eucharist, and so on—this possession is in language. And [End Page 393] although saving assent to revelation requires the interior assistance of the Holy Spirit, it remains a saving assent to the exterior word of biblical truth (see Rom 10:14–17), the exterior word spoken by apostle and evangelist. The point of departure for the development of doctrine, therefore, is not in the first place some wordless experience, either historical or transcendental, of God and his Christ, but assent in faith to the creed and the reading of Scripture the creed enables and controls. We recognize the phenomenon of development when we see four things. The first thing to see is that there is a "one," an integral cognitive whole, "revelation" as such "closed with the death of the last apostle." The second thing to see is a "many" into which this one is unfolded or developed or articulated, which unfolding occurs—third thing to notice—within a temporal expanse in which the "many" are formulated and articulated. Fourth, there is required also our ability—a Christian ability of reason illumined by faith—to discern and verify that it really is the one, integral cognitive whole that is exfoliated into the many subsequent doctrinal propositions. Without the first thing, the one perduring whole of revelation, we have not development but transformation, a self-contradictory plurification of Christian discourse where one age says something different from another. Without the second thing, the many articulations of the one, there is no development but only repetition. Without the third thing, temporal expanse, the question does not arise as to the maintenance of the apostolicity of the Church for us, the maintenance of the truth across time. And without the fourth thing, the ability of reason to recognize that the one really is truly and rightly unfolded in the many, our faith in the apostolicity of the Church turns into fideism. It is a condition of the possibility of genuine development of doctrine that it be able to be recognized as such. This recognition, of course, is magisterial, but it also engages the sensus fidei of all the faithful. Moreover, this ability, while it requires faith, requires also certain auxilia, two auxilia in fact, namely, metaphysical skill and historical learning. There is also a fifth thing ordinarily contained in the idea of the development of doctrine, a function especially...