Lash argues that Newman does not
really open his theory to falsification: “Are not some of the assumptions on
which the Essay rests such as to prevent, in the event, nay proffered
fact or set of facts from having this devastating effect? Newman is one of a
long line of catholic theologians whose commitment to the antecedent improbability
of the church’s ever having radically ‘changed its mind’ is to powerful that even
the most uncomfortable facts are fitted into the framework of a cumulative,
irreversible ‘view’ of doctrinal history” (Last, Newman on Development,
33-34). In my view, however, Newman’s theory could certainly be falsified—and indeed
many Catholic theologians today propose changes that they explicitly recognize
would falsify Newman’s theory. Here I may also note Cimorelli’s argument for
drawing together “the asymptotic, propositional-historical model of tradition-development”
and “a non-lineal model of tradition-development” marked by “participation and
narrativity” in order to arrive at a “relational-developmental model of
doctrine” (Cimorelli, John Henry Newman’s Theology of History, 309).
Cimorelli is particularly concerned to show that the Church’s doctrinal
teaching is not a static, strictly unchanging body of propositions, even though
these doctrines are indeed enduring truths. As he shows, doctrinal development
in one area may enrich (and thus in a certain way change) the Church’s understanding
of prior dogmatic teachings. Yet there is also the danger of making history
itself the fundamental of norm to which “development” is answerable, so that “it
is only through the act—indeed, the ‘practice’—of historical work that one can
perceive the progress of authentic developments in the church’s life”
(Cimorelli, 272). What here needs to be articulated more clearly is twofold: a deeper
place for ontology (judgments about the being of things) in dogmatic formulations,
and more reflection upon the possibility of doctrinal corruption. These
cautions need not entail falling into a merely propositional, ahistorical view
of dogma. (Matthew Levering, Newman on Doctrinal Corruption [Park Ridge,
Ill.: word on Fire Academic, 2022], 148 n. 126)
