Newman's Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine: Its Genesis and its Enduring Relevance

At the occasion of the first translation of the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine in Slovene, the author attempts to outline the biographical and historical background of the Essay, its central propositions and its many-sided importance. The idea of development was the most important single idea which Newman contributed to the thought of the Christian Church, being an expression of that shift from static to dynamic conceptions of Christianity which was characteristic of the period. It is worth noticing that the Development was published fourteen years before Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). Nearly every study of doctrinal development continues to ackowledge the seminal influence of the book and its creative view of the problem of change and continuity in Christian doctrine. The Essay, written immediately before Newman entered the Roman Catholic Church (1845), was intended to give his reasons for becoming a Roman Catholic and to help others in the same position as himself. The theory of development was "an hypothesis to account for a difficulty", the difference between the teaching of the primitive and the ninteenth-century Church. Newman drew out seven pragmatic tests for distinguishing legitimate developments from corruptions: fidelity to the original idea; continuity of principles; power to assimilate ideas from outside; early anticipations of later teaching; logical sequence discernible when developments were examined; preservation of earlier teaching; continuance in a state of chronic vigour. The book shows Newman's sense of history. His theory was the result of a critical study of Patristic writings themselves.