Reviewed by: John Henry Newman and the Development of Doctrine: Encountering Change, Looking for Continuity by Stephen Morgan Guy Nicholls C.O. Stephen Morgan John Henry Newman and the Development of Doctrine: Encountering Change, Looking for Continuity Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2021 xvi + 315. Hardback. $75.00. John Henry Newman is undoubtedly one of the greatest Christian thinkers of any age, who made significant and highly original contributions to many areas of philosophy and theology. This beautifully written and closely argued book justifies the author's claim that Newman made no single contribution to theology more important than his long exploration of these questions: how can doctrine actually change and develop, whilst simultaneously remaining faithful to the original revelation? How can we know this to be so? In researching and pursuing this matter in ever greater depth and detail, Newman, according to Morgan, "addressed a question that had posed for him a serious existential difficulty for a very considerable period of time" (263), viz. how, in encountering change, can we find continuity? In pursuing this quest Newman has also bequeathed to the Church of our own time a vitally urgent hermeneutic tool to tackle questions concerning [End Page 206] the nature and extent of ecclesiastical authority to make definitive pronouncements on matters of doctrinal development. Morgan draws a striking picture of the intricacy of Newman's mind in framing the question and in devising various theories to provide its solution. In many ways it is most helpful to begin from the latest stage of Newman's research, which was the publication of the book that effectively divided his life into two halves: the first Anglican, the second Catholic. The 1845 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine was described by Newman as "an hypothesis to account for a difficulty." First of all, the genesis of this "difficult" question of development of doctrine is to be located in the historical and revealed nature of the Christian religion. Christianity is an historical religion based not only on the facts of the life and teaching of Christ, but on the transmission, or "tradition," of these facts down the generations which form his Church. In short, the central fact of the Christian religion is the person of Christ, who, as the incarnate Son of God, is the subject of divine revelation. This fact can also be described as an "idea" which exists in human minds and is therefore subject to the multiform processes of human thought and reflection. Morgan has skillfully traced the unfolding of Newman's thought processes and of the interaction between him and his contemporaries, both Anglican and Catholic, in arriving at a fully articulated theory of development of doctrine. In so doing, he has also constructed a robust defense of Newman against those who have called into question Newman's own claim to honesty or who have impugned the accuracy of his memory when, more than twenty years after the climax of this period had passed, he was obliged to defend himself in the Apologia Pro Vita Sua against Charles Kingsley's charge of untruthfulness in his dealings with his fellow Anglicans before his conversion. Morgan conducts a painstaking forensic examination of New-man's letters and other writings in which he tested his own intricate theories to account for the "difficulty" of the phenomenon of doctrinal development. But as Morgan shows, Newman's successive attempts to locate development within Anglican fidelity [End Page 207] to patristic antiquity and within the via media of the Anglican church between the "extremes" of Roman excess and Protestant error, were utterly "pulverised" by the Catholic Nicholas Wiseman's 1839 article on the fourth century Donatist schism. Wiseman quoted the judgement of St. Augustine, "securus iudicat orbis terrarum," which Newman immediately sensed was precisely applicable to his own contemporary view of the Anglican and Catholic churches. Newman took this to show that the Anglican church was not as he had claimed, a true branch of the Catholic Church, but rather a schismatical body. The Anglicans were in a parallel position to the Donatists of North Africa, and out of communion not only with St. Augustine but also with the papacy...