THE Faith and Order Commission of the Church of England seems to have undergone a quiet transformation. Its new report, The Nature of Doctrine and the Living God, talks confidently about scripture as revelation. It is unapologetic about doctrine: it thinks that the Church has something to teach.
That said, it would be a mistake to describe this document as straightforwardly conservative. Alongside renewed emphasis on scripture runs unease that some matters of interpretation may no longer be up for grabs. Protestantism can be libertarian, and that chafes here.
An ecclesial crisis has exposed unease about how the understanding of the Church develops. I won’t dwell on the occasion for this report: it is too depressing. Suffice to say that a charitable project of thinking together about a contested issue — Living in Love and Faith — has unravelled. The theological weakness of the House of Bishops is part of that story. Unwilling — or unable — to make a theological case for same-sex blessings (or, indeed, against them), the Bishops reached, instead, for a procedural lever. They claimed (conveniently) that these blessings required no theological justification, because that lay latent within what the Church already believed and allowed. As it happens, I agree that it did, but the case should have been made.
The procedural method has not worked. The Bishops tell us that we need to think more about doctrine (although that was always part of the process, and you might hope that the Bishops could have provided more themselves when more was needed). The new report asks what “doctrine” might be and whether it can change.
I welcome the conviction of The Nature of Doctrine and the Living God that the Church guards a deposit of faith, and the report’s serious engagement with theologians, especially St Thomas Aquinas. He is singled out for his attention to the Bible, mediation of the Fathers, and broad appeal (hailed, even, as the “Common Doctor” of the Church).
The report contains some factual slips: there are 512 questions in the Summa Theologiae, not 90; and only one of our creeds is the “product of an ecumenical council”. And in what sense was the Book of Common Prayer “codified” in the 17th century?
Slips aside, the theological confidence of this report marks a welcome shift. One of its main conclusions, though, is far from landed: namely, that we should resist talk of the development of doctrine (extended summary, para. 30). I will address that here.
THE underlying problem with the report on this score is that “development” is never properly defined; nor are its meanings teased apart. Witness how “development” is consistently yoked with “change”, as if development meant that we once believed one thing but now we believe something else. The report is incurious about whether an account of a development in doctrine is available which does not involve change but works within what we already believe.
Suppose that doctrine develops, but not by novelty, and still less by “moving beyond Scripture as if the Bible was insufficient”. Suppose, rather, that doctrine develops by drawing out the implications of what we already believe and by stating that more clearly.
The Church came to express its commitment to monotheism in a Trinitarian way not as abandoning belief in one God, but as entering into it more deeply. So, too, describing the union of humanity and divinity in Christ as “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation” brought new depth and clarity to the faith of Nicaea. Was it not a development to recognise the One God as Trinity? Or that Christ’s humanity and divinity are neither held apart, nor homogenised — that Christ is as divine as the Father, and as human as we are human?
Doctrine develops by a deeper indwelling of the faith given in the scriptures (of its “plenitude”, as the report puts it). Unwittingly, the report frequently endorses this, with many of its theological quotations supporting the development of doctrine: from patristic authors (para. 48) Kevin Vanhoozer (para. 90), Alister McGrath (paras. 114-15), Sarah Coakley (para. 123), Rowan Williams (para. 137), and Ellen Charry (para. 145), among others. The Spirit, at certain points, has led the Church a little further into all truth. Do the authors — do our bishops — think that a Christian can now legitimately elevate themelves above these formulations, as if they knew better than the established mind of the Church?
What about Aquinas? You might say that, by giving him such attention, the authors have stacked the deck against an account of development. Aquinas had a better historical sense than many of his contemporaries, but he did not appreciate quite how much labour and struggle lay behind the doctrinal insights of the Early Church. None the less, he has more to offer in thinking about development (see Christopher Kaczor’s excellent paper from 2001) than the single passage discussed here, which might have helped to articulate a more sophisticated account.
A final difficulty is how superficially the report treats arguments in support of doctrinal development. In the week when the Church of England joined the Pope in celebrating the life and thought of John Henry Newman (News, 7 November), he is dismissed here with embarrassing brevity. I hold no particular candle for Newman, but the report’s confidence that it has refuted the argument of An Essay on the Development of Doctrine in three-and-a-half pages is not credible.
Later, a second challenge is ducked. The report acknowledges the idea of a hierarchy of assurance. A few theological decisions of the Church, for instance around the incarnation and God as Trinity, are definitive (although not, of course, exhaustive).
In comparison, much of doctrine remains work in progress, with some variation across traditions. (Sacramental theology, for instance, has something of a widely shared core — for instance, “We acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins” — but also significant differences between Churches.) The notion of a hierarchy of surety bears directly on how to understand the development of doctrine, but it is abandoned as swiftly as it is mentioned.
IN SUMMARY, then, the report dispenses too quickly with serious challenges to its conclusion, and it ignores how the texts that it quotes endorse an account of development. It dismisses a straw man, rejecting only poor accounts of what development might mean (e.g. para. 49).
Development is not change, nor a “uniform, linear progress”. Who ever thought that? The development of doctrine is about recognising certain moments when the Church has come to a decisive insight about what the faith that has been entrusted to us means (or, just as often, what it does not mean).
Such insights clarify the Christian faith. They are an expansion of belief and a contraction from error. We have decided for good that Tritheism is off the table; we reject the idea that God created less than everything.
The idea of a salutary contraction offends the authors of this document because, alongside the many admirable Protestant sensibilities of this report, it is haunted by a Protestant libertarianism. The outlook that leads some in the Church of England to neglect infant baptism or the celebration of holy communion is at work here: I will do and think as I see fit.
Published in this year of celebration of the Council of Nicaea and its creed — not least, and strikingly, by many Evangelicals — this report implies that opinion may still trump the Church’s teaching that Jesus is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father”.
The Revd Dr Andrew Davison is Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford and a Residentiary Canon of Christ Church, Oxford.