The Development of Christian Institutions and Beliefs

Abstract

I. The development of religious institutions and beliefs may be logical or real.1. Logical development is the explication of the content of a notion. Nothing new is added; it is like the opening of a closed hand. Such a development is consistent with the static, or mediæval, conception of the world, and is not unknown to the older theologians. In this sense of the word many of them would admit a development—e.g. of the Papacy, of Transubstantiation, of Sacramental Confession, of the devotion to the Blessed Virgin—from the less formally complete teaching and practice of an earlier age. But there is no process, they would maintain, in the notion; the change is not in the notion but in us. This proviso is essential. The full powers of the modern Papacy, we are taught, were conferred by Christ on Peter; and the Syllabus of 1907, in condemning the proposition that the apostle was ignorant that this was so, appears to reject the principle even of logical development—of which it would be truer to say that it is tolerated than that it is approved of, by the official Church. Pius X carried this identity of dogma back into the legendary age of the Old Testament, attributing a knowledge of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin—defined in 1854—to the Hebrew patriarchs. Noah, he says, contemplates this mystery in the ark; Moses meditated upon it before the bush that burned in Horeb; David when he danced before the ark of the covenant. This is the language of a formal Encyclical (February, 1904), not the devout play of a pious imagination sporting over the sacred text.