Doctrine of Development and the Development of Doctrine by Tobias Philip
The world exists in a state of
perpetual permutation, its innate engine of change burning as a Heraclitean fire. As for the permanence of thought, Gerard Manley Hopkins phrases it, “Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone!...death blots black out; nor mark / Is any of him at all so stark / But vastness blurs and time | beats level.”1 Nonetheless, the great literary and philosophical treasures of antiquity appeal to us for the appearance, at the very least, of timeless applicability. We delight to find glimpses of what we may deem the essentially human be they in the overwhelming pathos of Antigone, the existential dilemma of Hamlet, or the archetypal aestheticism of Don Juan. These dramas doubtless exhibit characters in whose being we find something continuous with our own existence. Such ought to be the case also with the cosmic drama of Christianity. The Christian religion of old must also carry timeless principles, so as to have anything of value to the present. I will argue that the Christian religion is a living system growing from the initial principle of the incarnation, more definitely revealing and elaborating on itself throughout history. I will further argue that not every change constitutes a true development, but that it is necessary to distinguish between development and corruption. As an exercise of this logic of development, I will consider
whether Christianity may embrace contemporary secular sexual ethics while maintaining internal consistency. With a system held for so long and with such popular prevalence as the Christian Faith, it is necessary that its adherents may at times modify their religious practice according to the conditions of the world in
If the Christian faith is entirely subjective, then one can call something Christian only according to an entirely individual interpretation. In this sense the most disparate groups can contemporaneously exist with antithetical opinions as to what it means to be Christian. which they live. Christianity is generally believed to have been in existence after the first century C.E., but unless these Christians were able to preserve the precise historical circumstances which furnished the world in which Christ and his apostles preached, then there seems to be some essence of the faith, or at least some kernel of belief, which allows us to predicate the term
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“Christian” of both Mary Magdalene and Mother Teresa, or of Saint Paul and Pope Francis. For Christians and non-Christians alike, I believe it may be a helpful exercise to determine what this idea of Christianity is and when we can call a change in Christian practice a real development. This investigation, however, must presume the existence of some objective Christianity. If the Christian faith is entirely subjective, then one can call something Christian only according to an entirely individual interpretation. In this sense the most disparate groups can contemporaneously exist with antithetical opinions as to what it means to be Christian. The polemics-flinging Westboro Baptists would have to share the faith of the progressive female Archbishop of the Lutheran Church of Sweden. Rather than speaking of any universally Christian beliefs, we must concede that all Christians are simply “a law to themselves.”2 Hence, it would be entirely unproductive to argue anything regarding the teaching of Christianity, unless there exists a Christianity which has a definite message to communicate. Furthermore, it is to be wondered what import Christianity really bears in the world, if any two individuals can extrapolate utterly bipolar meanings from it. Let us, then, draw the distinction between Christianity as a self-identifying
