Newman and the Fathers
Newman and the Fathers
Throughout his long life, Newman’s imagination was fired by the study of the first Christian centuries. Paradoxically, his greatest originality as a thinker sprang from that imaginative engagement with the distant past. Already, in the first flush of his evangelical conversion at the age of fifteen, he was ‘nothing short of enamoured’ by the long extracts from St Augustine, St Ambrose and others he encountered in the pages of Joseph Milner’s Church History. From 1828 he began reading the Greek Fathers systematically, and he felt ‘set up in the patristical line’ when, three years later, a group of friends and former pupils presented him with a multi-volume set of the best modern editions of most of the major early church writers. From the outset, Newman’s scholarly exploration of Christian antiquity was never purely academic: he looked to ‘the primitive church’ as a mirror and pattern for the present, ‘the true exponent of the doctrines of Christianity and the basis of the Church of England.’19
As the Oxford Movement confronted in the early 1830s what seemed the withdrawal of the state’s support for the Church’s privileged status, he appealed (somewhat improbably, and perhaps mischievously) to the example of fourth century bishops like St Ambrose or St Athanasius defying heretical Emperors and Empresses, as the pattern for the contemporary English episcopate confronted by reforming Whig governments: as he wrote in the first of the Tracts for the Times, ‘Thoughts on the Ministerial Commission’,
black event as it would be for the country, yet, (as far as [the bishops] are concerned,) we could not wish them a more blessed termination of their course, than the spoiling of their goods, and martyrdom.20
In the summer of 1833 he began the first of a series of popular magazine articles on early church themes, which he later collected into a book entitled The Church of the Fathers, overtly designed to stiffen resistance to the erosion of the Church’s place in English society and, less overtly, to accustom nineteenth century Anglicans to ‘Apostolical’ ideas on church, doctrine, sacraments, and the religious and ascetical life. In his 1837 Lectures on The Prophetical Office of the Church, Newman’s most coherent articulation of the idea of Anglicanism as a Via Media between ‘Roman and Protestant errors’, he would argue that ‘whatever doctrine … may fairly and reasonably be considered to be the universal belief of those ages, is to be received as coming from the Apostles … Catholicity, Antiquity, and consent of Fathers, is the proper evidence of the fidelity or Apostolicity of a professed Tradition.’21 A growing realization of the problems inherent in measuring the vitality or legitimacy of any existing Christian body by this essentially static notion of Christian authenticity would lead him to the idea of doctrinal development, and ultimately to identify the modern Church of Rome, rather than the Church of England as the legitimate continuation of the Church of the Fathers.
Newman’s first book-length exploration of Christian antiquity, The Arians of the Fourth Century, appeared in November 1833. Originally commissioned as part of a series providing background to the Thirty-Nine Articles, Arians evolved into something radically different, a study of the great Christological battles of the fourth century, which Newman saw as paradigms for the perennial struggle to articulate the mystery of God faithfully to a hostile or uncomprehending world. Notoriously, Arians is marred by a ‘colossally over-schematic’ contrast between the ‘true’ Christian tradition of Alexandria – mystical, poetic, sensitive to the metaphorical dimensions of scripture and of all discourse about God –and the false theology in vogue in ancient Antioch, which Newman considered aridly rationalist, literal and reductively historicist, the type of a theology ‘dictated by human wisdom, human desire, and reluctance to be humble before revelation.’22 He argued, unconvincingly, that although Arius was an Alexandrian priest, the heresy that bore his name was the offspring of Antiochine (and behind that, Jewish) rationalism. Newman’s account of these fourth century debates is coloured by sometimes forced parallels to the religious parties of his own day: the favour shown to Arianism by successive emperors is likened to court patronage of nineteenth century whig churchmen, while his chapter on the Eclectic sect claimed to find in this ancient philosophy ‘the chief features of that recent school of liberalism and false illumination, political and moral, which is now Satan’s instrument in deluding the nations … the cold, scoffing spirit of modern rationalism.’23
Yet historically questionable as Newman’s contrast between Antiochine and Alexandrian theology was, his immersion in the writings of the Alexandrian Fathers from Clement and Origen to Athanasius was foundational for his own understanding of the nature and limits of Christian theology, and contained the seeds of his own later thinking about doctrinal development. As he was to recall in the Apologia,
Some portions of their teaching, magnificent in themselves, came like music to my inward ear … . These were based on the mystical or sacramental principle … I understood them to mean that the exterior world, physical and historical, was but the outward manifestation to our senses of realities greater than itself. Nature was a parable: Scripture was an allegory: pagan literature, philosophy, and mythology, properly understood, were but a preparation for the Gospel. The Greek poets and sages were in a certain sense prophets; for “thoughts beyond their thought to those high bards were given.” There had been a directly divine dispensation granted to the Jews … first one disclosure and then another, till the whole evangelical doctrine was brought into full manifestation. And thus room was made for the anticipation of further and deeper disclosures, of truths still under the veil of the letter, and in their season to be revealed. The visible world still remains without its divine interpretation; Holy Church in her sacraments and her hierarchical appointments, will remain even to the end of the world, only a symbol of those heavenly facts which fill eternity. Her mysteries are but the expressions in human language of truths to which the human mind is unequal.24
Given Newman’s hounding of doctrinal liberalizers like Professor Hamden, and his own lifelong insistence that creeds and dogmatic definitions were essential to preserve the apostolic witness, that emphasis on the centrality of symbol and metaphor in religious discourse, and the ultimate inadequacy of credal language to the realities it proclaims, were among the most remarkable features of Arians. He argued that even necessary dogmatic formulations represented a tragic diminishment, true as far as they went but always the reduction of ineffable mysteries to the ‘technicality and formalism’ of formulae too small to contain them. In credal definition, he wrote, ‘we count the words of the Fathers, and measure their sentences; and so convert doxologies into creeds. That we do so … is the fault of those who have obliged us, of those who, “while men slept”, have “sowed tares among the wheat”.’25 Heresy demands rebuttal: but freedom from such definitions ‘is abstractedly the highest state of Christian communion’, because
when confessions do not exist, the mysteries of divine truth, instead of being exposed to the gaze of the profane and uninstructed, are kept hidden in the bosom of the Church, far more faithfully than is otherwise possible.
Dogmatic declarations ‘most true as they are, still are daily wrested by infidels to their ruin’, and give rise to the ‘mischievous fanaticism’ of those who imagine
that they can explain the sublime doctrines and exuberant promises of the Gospel, before they have yet learned to know themselves and to discern the holiness of God, under the preparatory discipline of the Law and of Natural Religion.26
That last sentence was a sideswipe at contemporary evangelicals, whose preaching in Newman’s view crassly exposed the mysteries of atonement and predestination to irreverent and unprepared listeners. Yet his underlying belief that doctrinal definition was always a tragic necessity forced on a reluctant Church by the challenge of heresy would remain a core conviction. It accounts for his indignation in 1870 against the ‘aggressive, insolent faction’ campaigning for the definition of papal infallibility, when ‘no impending danger is to be averted, but a great difficulty is to be created’, thereby turning definition of doctrine de fide into ‘a luxury of devotion, and not a stern painful necessity.’27
Newman’s reflections on the problems of dogmatic definition rose out of his study of the Christological beliefs of pre-Nicene authors, whose language on the subordination of Christ to God the Father was difficult to square with later Conciliar definitions. Anglican writers like the seventeenth century theologian-bishop George Bull, on whose work Newman drew heavily, had approached this problem essentially a-historically, insisting or assuming that the pre-Nicene church, all appearances to the contrary, had in fact consciously held the full post-Nicene teaching, and Bull had read third century texts in the light of later formulations. Newman knew that judged by post-Nicene criteria, the earliest christian writers looked like heretics, and his extended discussion of the origins of Trinitarian doctrine in Arians show that he was alert to the historical problems in assuming identity between their teaching and later Catholic orthodoxy: he was aware that doctrine had a history. To that extent, Arians represented a new and more critical approach to patristic study. But at this stage he located the solution to the difficulty mainly in the almost equally a-historical notion of a disciplina arcana, a rule of secrecy by which the early church avoided committing the most sacred doctrines to writing or public disclosure, instead revealing them progressively in catechesis and liturgy as neophytes matured in their faith. Nevertheless, Arians, for all its flaws, unmistakeably laid the groundwork for Newman’s most original and abiding theological legacy, and opened a line of enquiry whose most momentous outcome would be the Essay on Development.
Newman’s engagement with Alexandrian theology pervaded his own original theological thinking. This is most obvious in the 1838 Lectures on Justification, which moved beyond the stale oppositional categories of ‘Romanist and Protestant’ that had dogged the subject since the sixteenth century, by locating Justification primarily neither in faith or works alone, but in divine self-communication through the Holy Spirit, and the consequent divinization of human nature. The remarkable emphasis in the lectures on the Holy Spirit as the agent in Christ’s resurrection and as the medium of his indwelling in us as a glorified and justifying presence, introduced a visionary Christological ardour into his exposition that was exceedingly rare in Victorian theologizing:
It would seem, moreover, as I have said, that He has done so by ascending to the Father; that His ascent bodily is His descent spiritually; that His taking our nature up to God, is the descent of God into us; that He has truly, though in an unknown sense, taken us to God, or brought down God to us, according as we view it Thus, when St. Paul says that our life is hid with Him in God, we may suppose him to intimate that our principle of existence is no longer a mortal, earthly principle, such as Adam’s after his fall, but that we are baptized and hidden anew in God’s glory, in that Shekinah of light and purity which we lost when Adam fell – that we are new-created, transformed, spiritualized, glorified in the Divine Nature – that through the participation of Christ, we receive, as through a channel, the true Presence of God within and without us, imbuing us with sanctity and immortality. This, I repeat, is our justification, our ascent through Christ to God, or God’s descent through Christ to us; we may call it either of the two; we ascend into Him, He descends into us; we are in Him, He in us; Christ being the One Mediator, the way, the truth, and the life, joining earth with heaven.28
Alexandrian influence was similarly responsible for some of the most radiant and uplifting passages in Newman’s preaching, but it could also startle and bemuse. Notoriously, his Christology was dauntingly exalted, and one can only wonder what congregations used to addressing ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’ would have made of this utterance, in April 1836:
though He was in nature perfect man, He was not man in exactly the same sense in which any one of us is a man. Though man, He was not, strictly speaking, in the English sense of the word, a man; He was not such as one of us, and one out of a number. … His incarnation was a “taking of the manhood into God.” As He had no earthly father, so has He no human personality. We may not speak of Him as we speak of any individual man, acting from and governed by a human intelligence within Him, but He was God, acting not only as God, but now through the flesh also, when He would. He was not a man made God, but God made man.29
Newman’s conviction that the Church of England was ‘substantially founded’ on the Fathers led to his cooperation with Pusey in the establishment of the Library of the Fathers, publishing translations of the major theologians of the early church. He was very conscious of potential resistance to the project, given the “starthng” unfamiliarity of much patristic teaching to Protestant sensibilities. In the preface to his edition of the Catechetical lectures of St Cyril of Jerusalem he conceded that the Fathers were ‘witnesses to Apostolic truth not individually but collectively … no one of the Fathers is necessarily right in all his doctrine, taken by himself, but may be erroneous in secondary points, [and] in danger, by his own peculiarities … of throwing discredit on all together … .’30
The question of which modern church had the best claim to teach the Catholic ‘fundamentals’ represented by the consensus of the Fathers was the issue at the heart of Newman’s 1837 Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, Newman’s most important exposition of the Via Media. The lectures were in large part an anti-Protestant polemic, ‘hitting the Peculiars [Evangelicals] a most uncommon blow in the face.’31 Yet they were just as obviously a sustained attack on the Roman Catholic Church for its alleged corruption of the fundamental teaching of the ancient church as distilled into the ancient Creeds. So Newman had to provide a rationale for the fact that every church, including the Church of England, expected from its adherents far more than subscription to the creeds, or what he calls the ‘Episcopal tradition’ of formally defined doctrine derived from the Apostles (which he believed to be infallible). With striking originality, he suggested that there was also a subordinate but still authoritative ‘Prophetic tradition’, which represented a legitimate outworking of those fundamental beliefs. If the Apostles and after them the bishops were the authoritative sources of the Church’s teaching, Prophets were the interpreters of revelation; ‘they unfold and define its mysteries, they illuminate its documents, they harmonize its contents, they apply its promises.’ But this unfolding was no mere expository exercise, to be gleaned from the works of long dead clergymen. Unlike the Episcopal tradition, which was lodged primarily in solemn formularies and authoritative teachers and rulers, namely the bishops, the Prophetic tradition was a far more diffuse and elusive reality. It was
a vast system … consisting of a certain body of Truth, permeating the Church like an atmosphere, irregular in its shape from its very profusion and exuberance: at times separable only in idea from Episcopal Tradition, yet at times melting away into legend and fable; partly written, partly unwritten, partly the interpretation, partly the supplement of Scripture, partly preserved in intellectual expressions, partly latent in the spirit and temper of Christians; poured to and fro in closets and upon the housetops, in liturgies, in controversial works, in obscure fragments, in sermons…existing primarily in the bosom of the Church itself, and recorded in such measure as providence has determined in the writings of eminent men.
Though by its nature fallible and more susceptible than the Episcopal Tradition to corruption and abuse, this Prophetic Tradition also deserved the ‘dutiful and simple-hearted acceptance’ of the Church’s children.32
With many loose ends and unresolved questions, in this distinction between what gave the Church form – the episcopal tradition – and what gave it life – the prophetic tradition – Newman was manifestly reaching here towards an extraordinarily rich understanding of Christian tradition that in some ways anticipates the teaching of the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on Revelation, Dei Verbum. Significantly, the phrase ‘in the bosom of the Church’, which he had deployed in Arians to characterize the Church’s cherishing of divine truth before the challenge of heresy forced it into formal definition, is applied here to the whole ‘Prophetic tradition’. This highlights the difficulty Newman had in maintaining a sharp distinction between the so called ‘fundamentals’, and the more diffuse and fallible outworking or embodiment of those fundamentals in the life of the Church: that ambiguity would edge him towards the idea of the development of doctrine: it also anticipates elements of the analysis of the threefold energies within the Church in his remarkable Preface to the 1877 edition of The Via Media.33
Up to this point, the study of the early church had served to bolster Newman’s confidence in the Anglican Church. Thereafter, it began to tug him towards Rome. The summer of 1839 represented a decisive stage in this shift. After four years when other preoccupations had halted his patristic studies, he found himself almost alone in Oriel and able to resume what he called ‘my own line of reading’. And ‘it was during this course of reading that for the first time a doubt came upon me of the tenableness of Anglicanism.’34 He had turned his attention to the Monophysite controversies of the fifth century on the nature of the union of divine and human in Christ, and the doctrinal settlement of the Council of Chalcedon. Always on the alert for parallels between the history of the early church and that of the present day, Newman began to question whether Christian truth after all would be found in a ‘Via Media’ between supposed extremes. For the records seemed to suggest that the Monophysite Oriental churches had presented themselves as moderates seeking compromise, and it was the Pope then who repudiated compromise: yet it was the Pope’s teaching that had been vindicated by the Council. As Newman recalled in the Apologia, ‘My stronghold was Antiquity: now … I saw my face in that mirror, and I was a Monophysite.’35
Worse was to follow, in September a friend drew his attention to an article on ‘The Anglican Claim to Apostolical Succession’ by Nicholas Wiseman, in the August issue of the Roman Catholic Dublin Review, in the course of which Wiseman compared modern Anglicanism to the Donatist schism in fourth century North Africa. Newman at first dismissed the article, but his friend pointed to a sentence of St Augustine’s cited by Wiseman, Securus judicat orbis terrarum: ‘the judgement of the whole world is to be trusted’. Newman of course did not believe in truth by referendum: he knew that in the Arian controversy a majority of bishops had fallen into heresy. But here was a criterion of truth ‘simpler than that of Antiquity’, indeed ‘Antiquity declaring against itself’. What was being claimed, with what seemed to him devastating plausibility, was that ‘the deliberate judgement in which the whole church at length rests and acquiesces, is an infallible prescription and a final sentence against such portions of it as protest and secede.’ By Augustine’s words, it now seemed to him, ‘the theory of the Via Media was absolutely pulverized.’36
It was a turning point. To calm his own doubts and those of his followers, he published a long article in the British Critic in January 1840 on the Catholicity of the Anglican Church, ‘my last arrow against Rome’, conceding that the Church of England claimed to be part of the Catholic Church while being out of communion with the rest of that Church, both east and west, but arguing that ‘Augustine’s maxim about submission to the orbis terrarum ... is a presumption rather than a law.’ Anglicans were like the semi-Arians in the time of St Basil, who, though visibly separated ‘from the general body’ of the Church, were nevertheless, sufficiently ‘sound in faith’ and holiness of life to be considered in communion ‘with the invisible church’.37 Newman would continue to deploy special pleading of this sort for another four years,38 but as he confided to a horrified Henry Wilberforce, ‘a vista has been opened before me, to the end of which I do not see.’39
The end of that vista was, of course, his reception into the Church of Rome in October 1845, but an immense obstacle had first to be removed. Newman identified true Christianity with the church of the early centuries, but the passage of eighteen centuries meant that no modern institution seemed straightforwardly identical with the Church of the Fathers, Protestantism least of all, with its deliberate renunciation of most of the Christian past as a history of corruption, and its attempt to refound Christianity on the Bible alone. ‘Whatever be historical Christianity’, he considered, ‘it is not Protestantism … To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.’40 Yet the Roman Catholic Church of the mid nineteenth century, with its centralized papacy, its baroque churches and liturgy, its lavish devotion to the Virgin, seemed at first sight very remote indeed from Primitive Christianity. Here seemed an insuperable difficulty. Now, as he was increasingly convinced that Rome in the end ‘would be found to be right’, he needed a hypothesis that would account for this difficulty. That hypothesis was the idea of the development of doctrine.
Newman had sketched the outhnes of a theory of development as early as November 1840 in a letter to his brother Frank, who rejected as corruption all development beyond what was explicit in the New Testament. By contrast, Newman maintained ‘All systems which have life, have a development, yet do not cease to have an identity though they develop.’ By development at this point he meant ‘the more accurate statement and the varied application of ideas from the action of the reason upon them according to new circumstances.’ The criteria he sketched for assessing authentic developments were essentially reducible to internal consistency and discernible continuity with the original revelation. The characterization of such historical consistency he suggested to Frank was calculated to challenge, even to startle, as much as to convince: ‘the temper and principles of the Church have been precisely the same from first to last, from the Apostolic age to this; viz what her enemies call dogmatic, mystical, credulous, superstitious, bigotted, legal.’41 Newman made a more developed, but also more limited, attempt at articulating a theory in a university sermon preached in February 1843, on the text ‘Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart’. Taking a lead from the text, his account of development in the sermon was essentially psychological: he compared the authentic development of doctrine to the slow teasing out of an inchoate, but real apprehension, as intuitions and ideas ‘latent in the Christian mind’ were made explicit as they were reflected upon, and their implications slowly explored.42
In the Essay on Development, which Newman began writing in March 1845, he would elaborate that insight, but recast the argument in much broader historical terms: ‘from the nature of the human mind, time is necessary for the full comprehension and perfection of great ideas.’43 But this process is not the mere logical exposition of a deep thought:
The development … of an idea is not like an investigation worked out on paper, in which each successive advance is a pure evolution from a foregoing, but it is carried on through and by means of communities of men and their leaders and guides; and it employs their minds as its instruments, and depends upon them, while it uses them”44
A living ‘idea’ generates and responds to complex social and historical energies, whose outworkings have a capacity to surprise – its beginnings ‘are no measure of its capabilities, nor of its scope’, for
the more claim an idea has to be considered living, the more various will be its aspects; and the more social and political is its nature, the more complicated and subtle will be its issues, and the longer and more eventful will be its course …45
But these transformations are not signs of instability: on the contrary, they are designed to conserve the integrity of the idea in changing circumstances: the idea changes, ‘in order to remain the same’.
So how are we to be certain the idea has indeed remained the same: what distinguished an authentic development from a corruption or betrayal? Newman proposed seven ‘tests’ of a genuine development. These were (1) ‘Preservation of type’ – the maintenance of the integrity of the original idea despite significant change. (2) ‘Continuity of principles’ – fidelity to the core ideas of Christianity, such as the Incarnational or sacramental principle. (3) ‘Power of assimilation’ – an example (not Newman’s) might be the way in which medieval Christianity was able to assimilate an ‘alien’ philosophical system – Aristotelianism – to its own purposes. (4) ‘Logical sequence’: although developments do not proceed from strict deduction, retrospectively the logical coherence of the development that has actually occurred will be recognizable. (5) ‘Anticipation of its future’: true developments emerge from hints already present, even if only minimally and vaguely, as the cult of relics is derived from the belief in the resurrection of the body: (6) ‘Conservative action on its past’; true developments clarify and corroborate earlier elements, whereas a corruption corrects or changes them. (7) ‘Chronic vigour’ – true developments have lasting power and the ability to flourish, corruptions and heresies wither away.46
These so-called ‘tests’ were of course every bit as impressionistic and subjective as those outhned in Newman’s 1840 letter to his brother Frank, and when he came to revise the Essay he rearranged them and called them ‘Notes’ rather than ‘tests’, indicating that they were general characteristics rather than objective criteria of a truthful development.47 Newman was not unduly concerned by their inconclusiveness: he believed that in an infallible Church, God had provided an ultimate judge of authentic developments, and he included a chapter arguing for the reasonableness or ‘antecedent probability’ of such an ‘infallible arbitration’. That emphasis was integral to Newman’s insistence that an authentic development must be known to be true to the original revelation. Yet it also reflected his very distinctive concern to emphasize the role of the whole of the Church in the process of discernment: as he told John Acton, ‘I should like to say that the Church apprehends it more clearly … When I suggested it to Fr Perrone, he disliked the idea – but what is the Church as separate from Pope, Councils, Bishops, and faithful?’48
These tests or notes have always been among the most controversial and least satisfactory aspects of the Essay: but they are not its centre. The heart of the book is the three chapters offered as applications of the first test and ‘Illustrations of the argument in behalf of the existing developments of Christianity’. These surveyed in turn the christianity of the ‘first centuries’, the fourth century, and the fifth and sixth centuries, each chapter a tour de force offering a vivid broad-brush characterization of the Church in that age, and each culminating in a final paragraph that finds the same characteristics in modern Roman Catholicism. As always, the examples are designed to challenge a Protestant readership as much as to persuade. So, his survey of the fourth century emphasizes the struggle to assert and maintain orthodoxy and the unity and authority of the Catholic Church in the face of Arianism and other heresies, and then concludes:
On the whole, then, we have reason to say, that if there be a form of Christianity at this day distinguished for its careful organization, and its consequent power; if it is spread over the world; if it is conspicuous for zealous maintenance of its own creed; if it is intolerant towards what it considers error; if it is engaged in ceaseless war with all other bodies called Christian; if it, and it alone, is called ‘Catholic’ by the world, nay, by those very bodies, and if it makes much of the title; if it names them heretics, and warns them of coming woe, and calls on them one by one, to come over to itself, overlooking every other tie; and if they, on the other hand, call it seducer, harlot, apostate, Antichrist, devil; if, however much they differ one with another, they consider it their common enemy; if they strive to unite together against it, and cannot; if they are but local; if they continually subdivide, and it remains one; if they fall one after another, and make way for new sects, and it remains the same; such a religious communion is not unlike historical Christianity, as it comes before us at the Nicene Era.49
This is not a form of argument calculated to convince a hostile sceptic, but that was not its purpose. Newman wrote the Essay to remove the remaining obstacles he himself had felt to identification of the Church of Gregory XVI with the Church of Athanasius and Leo the Great: before he had finished the book his doubts had disappeared. On 9 October 1845, in his ‘monastery’ at Littlemore, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church by the Italian Passionist missionary, Fr (now Blessed) Dominic Barberi, and the Essay was published it as it stood, incomplete.
Newman was well aware that he had opened a line of enquiry, not said the last word on it. As he told H. J. Coleridge, his theory was ‘characterized by incompleteness and crudeness – but it is something to have started a problem, and mapped in part a country, if I have done nothing more.’50 No one, then or since, has found all aspects of his argument satisfactory, and he himself was prone at times to minimize its range and novelty – as he wrote to the future Lord Acton in 1862, ‘to me the words “development in dogma” are substantially nothing but the process by which, under the magisterium of the Church, implicit faith becomes explicit.’51 But every subsequent discussion of development of doctrine has had to engage with Newman’s Essay. For the first time a major Christian thinker had confronted head-on the radical contingency of Christianity as an historical phenomenon, had acknowledged that doctrine, ritual and church organization all change over time and in changed cultural contexts, while still maintaining the integrity and objectivity of the revelation which those doctrines, rituals and institutions exist to articulate. The Essay on Development has remained the essential touchstone for all subsequent explorations of the issues it first identified: idiosyncratic, incomplete and tentative as it is, it is a landmark in Christian thought worthy of mention alongside more systematic classics like Augustine’s City of God, Aquinas’ Summa or Calvin’s Institutes.