The
inventor of the idea that Christian doctrine develops is John Henry Newman.
Ignoring the boast of Bossuet that doctrine is unchanging, escaping the thin theorizing
that would restrict development to a movement from the implicit to the
explicit. Newman pointed to transformation od doctrine as tangible and as
organic, as many-sided and complex and real, as the passage from childhood to
adulthood. An Anglican arguing his way into the Catholic Church, Newman saw
that the anomalies and novelties of his new spiritual home were the marks of
vigor, of maturity, of being alive. What Newman noticed and defended were
changes in the ways that piety was expressed, in the rules guiding the
governance of the Church, in the understanding of the nature of Christ. What he
spent no time in either enumerating or explaining were changes in the rules of
moral conduct.
On
October 26, 1863, Thomas William Allies, a lecturer on history at Oxford
University and a convert to the Catholic Church, sent Newman the draft of a
lecture in which he pronounced slavery to be intrinsically evil. He wanted his
friend’s opinion. Newman replied cautiously: “I do not materially differ from
you, though I do still startle at some of the sentences of your Lecture.” The
source of his startle was St. Paul. Newman wrote:
That
which is intrinsically and per se evil, we cannot give way to for an hour. That
which is only accidentally evil, we can meet according to what is expedient,
giving different rules, according to the particular case. St. Paul would have
got rid of despotism if he could. He could not, he left the desirable object to
the slow working of Christian principles. So he would have got rid of slavery,
if he could. He did not, because he could not, but had it been intrinsically
evil, had it been in se a sin, it must have been said to Philemon,
liberate all your slaves at once. (Newman to Allies, Nov. 8, 1863, John Henry
Newman, Letters and Diaries, ed. Charles Stephen Dessain [London: Thomas
Nelson and Sons, 1976], vol. 20, 554-556)
Succinctly
raising his central difficulty, Newman elaborate with examples of other
institutions that he saw to be bad but not to be intrinsically evil. Any army
and any government offered occasions of sin and provided temptations to sin and
were instruments to sin. Neither an army nor a government was to be condemned
as intrinsically evil. “Which did most harm to the soul the Jewish slavedom or
the Jewish army?” Slavery, he surprisingly added, was not even as bad as
polygamy. (John T. Noonan, Jr., A Church That Can and Cannot Change: The
Development of Catholic Moral Teaching [Notre Dame, Ind.: University of
Notre Dame Press, 2005], 3-4)
