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Why Should We Believe it?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Brian Davies OP
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Extract

A contribution to the debate initiated by Michael Dummett in October 1987.

It is often said that Catholics believe in the development of doctrine. But it is not a doctrine of the Catholic Church that doctrine develops. The teaching of the Church is that its faith is immutable. The Church’s primary attitude to doctrine is the principle given by St Paul. ‘Even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preach to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received, let him be accursed’ (Galatians 1:8). There is, of course, an obvious sense in which doctrine does develop. For the number of defined doctrines has grown over time. But the Catholic view of this is that doctrines defined over time are contained in or implied by what was taught from the beginning. The primary role of the Church as teacher is to preserve what has already been given and to state what that amounts to as need arises. It retains the Gospel and articulates it.

If that is what the Church does, it seems fair to ask why we should believe what the Church teaches. Some would dispute this on the ground that the Church in a sense does not teach. ‘Why should we believe it?’ presupposes that someone has propounded what he takes to be a truth.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 69 , Issue 819 , September 1988 , pp. 360 - 368
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 The point is properly emphasized and documented by Anthony Kenny in ‘The Development of Ecclesiastical Doctrine’ (Reason and Religion, Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar.

2 See the texts collected in Rahner, Karl S.J. (ed.), The Teaching of the Catholic Church (New York, 1967)Google Scholar, pp. 56–84.

3 Cf. Geach, P.T., The Virtues (Cambridge, 1977), p. 37.Google Scholar

4 In saying all this I am, of course, presuming that ‘Christ is God’ is either true or false and that it means that ‘Christ is all that God is’, not that it means what it does in what are often called ‘reductionist’ Christologies.

5 In Boeth. de Trin., 3,4.

6 Cf. Summa Theologiae, la,32,1 and Summa Contra Gentiles, 1,9.

7 I recognise that the analogy I am drawing here is imperfect. Aquinas does not think of the persons of the Trinity as three individuals sharing a nature—as a given number of aliens might share a nature. The one God, for him, is what the three persons are.

8 One may, in any case, take leave to doubt that, even if he did call God ‘Abba’, Jesus should be taken to be expressing any special connection between himself and God. See Barr, James,’“Abba” isn't “Daddy���’, Journal of Theological Studies, 39 (1988)Google Scholar and ‘“Abba, Father” and the Familiarity of Jesus’ Speech’, Theology XCI (1988)Google Scholar. If Professor Barr is right, Fr Radcliffe's comments on how Christ ‘laid hold of his identity’ (p. 124) need qualifying.

9 To suppose that Jesus, speaking from knowledge, said enough to warrant us proclaiming that God is Trinity does not, of course, commit one to holding that Jesus uttered the language of Nicea and Chalcedon or an Aramaic translation of that. In ‘A Leaky Sort of Thing’, Professor Lash suggests otherwise (p. 556), as does Joseph Fitzpatrick in ‘Lonergan's Method and the Dummett‐Lash Dispute’ (New Blackfriars, March, 1988, p. 136). All it commits one to, however, is the belief that the language of Nicea and Chalcedon is a legitimate way of expressing what Jesus taught. It might be replied that knowledge of the Triune God depends on knowing the formulae of Nicea and Chalcedon. But that is false. God from eternity knows himself to be Trinity. But he does not need to know the formulae of Nicea and Chalcedon. If he had not created, there would be no such formulae for him to know.

10 ‘Faith, Objectivity and Historical Falsifiability’ in Davies, Brian O.P., ed., Language, Meaning and God (London, 1987), p. 149Google Scholar.