I think focus on “the bugaboo of skepticism” goes right to the heart of the matter. Chadwick says of Newman that “Lurking at the back of his mind is the ghostly shadow of Hume.” Paul Helm picks up on this in his critique of Newman, pp 116-123 of his primer on Divine Revelation, which can be accessed at Google Books:

tinyurl.com/ybnebbj

I don’t mean to give a blanket endorsement of everything Helm says about revelation, but his analysis of the development idea seems quite good. He quotes Newman writing that “Of no doctrine whatever, which does not actually contradict what has been delivered, can it be peremptorily asserted that it is not in scripture.”

In this manner, Roman Catholics who profess the material sufficiency of scripture will claim that the later Marian dogmas (much like the Trinity) are in fact in scripture. But if they’re contained in scripture only in the sense that all the New Testament is contained in Genesis 3:15, then we would seem to need progressive revelation to discover them, just as revelation progressed in the ages leading up to Christ’s coming.

From this thought we are carried back to Newman’s identification of the living voice of the author of scripture with the living voice of the Roman Magisterium. The danger is that such a posture amounts to recognizing a perpetual oracle in Rome. Newman comes very close to admitting this kind of ongoing revelation when he says:

“I conceive then that the Depositum is in such sense committed to the Church or to the Pope, that when the Pope sits in St. Peter’s chair, or when a Council of Fathers & doctors is collected round him, it is capable of being presented to their minds with that fullness and exactness, under the operation of supernatural grace, (so far forth and in such portion of it as the occasion requires,) with which it habitually, not occasionally, resided in the minds of the Apostles”

This thesis looks less than catholic to me. Indeed, a grace that enables a special group of teachers to locate doctrines in scripture that are undetectable to normal readers sounds rather like what St Irenaeus was opposing in the gnostics.

A very apt line: “at any given moment one cannot know whether the current teaching of the church is the definitive teaching, or rather whether a new position will arise as there are new doctrinal developments.”

Frank has found a quotation from CS Lewis about that exact difficulty. Once Newman’s theory is accepted, it looks as though the conservative disposition of the current Magisterium alone is preventing the floods of radicalism from being unleashed. If theologians of more progressive tastes gain sway over the Magisterium, it seems they could make a plausible case for treating as authentic “developments” everything from contraception to women’s ordination to same sex marriage. Rather like liberal protestants, they’d say they are not repudiating the tradition, but clarifying it in the light of insights the Spirit has providentially opened to the Church today. They would argue that the continuity with the preceding tradition can only be seen retrospectively, something Frank can expand on from his reading of John Thiel.

Another apt remark: “if a living authority is the only way of interpreting Scripture, why settle for the particular living authority of the Roman Catholic magisterium?”

AA Hodge said something to that effect in his response to disparaging talk about private judgment. He points to the kind of incoherence the charge ushers in:

“Is there a God? Has he revealed himself? Has he established a church? Is that church an infallible teacher? Is private judgment a blind leader? Which of all pretended churches is the true one? Every one of these questions evidently must be settled in the private judgment of the inquirer, before he can, rationally or irrationally, give up his private judgment to the direction of the self-asserting church.” (Outlines of Theology, ch 5)

I was pleased to read this: “The Rule of Faith was not something external to Scripture, but is a summary of its subject matter as the Scriptures were already being used in the worship of the church before they were formally canonized.”

That looks true to the practice of the early church. Oral tradition as crystalized in the rule of faith was not understood as an alternative to interpretation according to the analogy of faith. Rather, it served as an aid, deference to which helps us read the scriptures in such a way that will leave a given passage consistent with the whole.

Regarding Lonergan, I agree his Way to Nicea is an impressive answer to the apologetical use made of the council by supporters of Newman’s theory. It’s interesting by way of contrast that Lonergan admitted something like the development thesis in his argument that the Assumption could be defined:

tinyurl.com/yb5c4r5

In any event, perhaps Newman’s supporters would do better to make the full deity and personhood of the Spirit the acid test for their notion of development? Since those doctrines are often thought harder to establish than a high Christology, couching the debate in terms of them might make things more interesting. Moreover, once it is seen that even the Cappadocians’ teachings were essentially a restatement (albeit more elaborate than anyone up to them had made) of what was already taught in scripture, Development B would seem to be without a leg to stand on.

The example of St Athanasius reminds me of another example someone once gave as an obstacle to Newman’s theory. Sayings are attributed to Maximus the Confessor that seem to resonate more with Luther (at his best) than with Newman. Here’s one excerpt, where the saint responds to the taunts of messengers from the Patriarch:

“To which Church do you belong: to that of Byzantium, Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, or Jerusalem? All these churches and the provinces under them are in concord. If you belong to the Catholic Church, you must enter into communion with us at once, lest you forge a new and strange pathway and fall into unexpected disaster.”

The man of God wisely replied, “Christ the Lord acknowledges as Catholic that Church which maintains the true and saving confession of faith. He called Peter blessed for his correct confession of Him, upon which He built His Church. But tell me: on what basis have all the churches, as you say, entered into communion? If it is on a foundation of truth, I do not wish to be separated from them.”

The document records other such statements, among them, “There is nothing more burdensome than to suffer the reproach of conscience, and nothing more desirable than conscience’s approval.”

Considering that Maximus was an unordained monk, it would seem hard to condemn Luther as uncatholic just because he thought the tradition was knowable independently of the pronouncements of the Magisterium. The danger lies thinking extraordinary cases like his are normal, and so treating everything like a church dividing issue. But since most any principles break down when applied immoderately, the later abuses of the Reformers’ principles do not invalidate the right use made by the more traditional side of the Reformation churches.