Wednesday, July 9, 2025

Excerpt from “Theories on the Development of Faith" from The Dublin Review (January 1869)

While browsing through old books, I came across the following from The Dublin Review. The article focused on the development of doctrine and its limitations in Roman Catholicism. He does a better job discussing Roman Catholic claims about the deposit of faith and related issues than most contemporary pop-level apologists:

 

We, however, believe Christianity not only to have been a revelation, but we believe it to be exclusive in the strictest possible sense. It ceased absolutely with the Apostles. They deposited the faith, their successors only transmitted it. All subsequent definitions of faith* are simply the unravelling of matter given by them. Their state of mind was quite different from that of their successors. Theirs was what we may call inspiration; after them the teachers of the Church had only that special guidance of the Holy Spirit, which was promised them by Christ. The Apostolic teaching, then, was not only the first link in a chain; it was that out of which all future developments came, and in which all were implicitly contained. We cannot exaggerate the importance of this fact, on the subject which we are treating. It seems to us to follow that the Apostles must have had explicitly in their minds all the future definitions of faith, though not, of course, necessarily in the same terms. They must have so framed their teaching that it was capable of all subsequent developments. If they did so by a conscious intellectual act, must they not have had them before their minds? We can only answer the question in the affirmative. Thus, if the Immaculate Conception of our Blessed Lady was a part of the original deposit given by Christ to His Apostles, it must have been clearly before the intellect of S. Peter. Furthermore, since there has been no subsequent revelation to the Church, that truth must have been transmitted to their successors at least in such a shape that without any extraordinary supernatural interposition, it can be extracted from the propositions left with them. Besides this, these propositions must have in some way reached the understanding of the teaching body of the Church. In other words, the truth must have been really contained in all the explicit teaching of the Apostles, and have been really known by their successors at least implicitly. (“Theories on the Development of Faith,” The Dublin Review 12, no. 1 [January 1869]: 47)

 

Footnote to the above:

 

* “All subsequent definitions of faith”; we are not denying, of course, that the Church often puts forth other infallible determinations, for the purpose of protecting the deposit. (Ibid., 47, emphasis in original)

 

 

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