Doctrinal Development Through Dialogue
By Frances Forde Plude
How does Catholic teaching develop? What role do “the faithful” play? This process is called the development of doctrine and this topic was the theme of a recent meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) when almost 500 theologians explored questions like:
What is the role of dissent as church teachings develop?
How do we explain it when what is taught as truth later changes?
What happens when many do not agree with the church’s teaching?
A classic essay on the subject was written by John Henry Newman in 1859 entitled On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine. This statement is still respected by theologians as they try to discern how to integrate new insights about scripture, history, tradition, and human nature into current church teaching.
The Dialogue Factor
As a communication specialist I am especially intrigued by, and committed to, the dialogic process. As I have mentioned before in these columns, we used to think of communication as primarily one-way: the sender sends a message to a receiver. Now we know that communication is a process: communication-as-exchange rather than simple proclamation. The challenge comes when the church is asked to integrate a lot of feedback into its authoritative teachings. To be perfectly honest, we do not know how to do this very well. Thus, many of the theologians spoke of the dangers of using poll data to decide authentic teaching. One theologian suggested we might need a new category in addition to the historical development of doctrine. This second category could be called “prudent guidance” as the church sifts through many new ideas prudently in the process of developing doctrine.
Boston College Professor M. Cathleen Kaveny noted that in the modern world credibility is often strengthened when you admit frankly that you are in search of a sound solution – that frank discussion is often good in the process of the development of doctrine.
Hermann Pottmeyer, a respected German theologian, notes that “dialogue as a description of communication within the Church is new. It is not found [earlier when] key words were jurisdiction and obedience.” Pottmeyer adds: “The transition from a style of authority that was part patriarchal and part authoritarian to a style of authority that is exercised in the form of dialogue creates difficulties for the Church. The new awareness that ‘we are all the Church’ creates fear in some people.” These ideas are developed in his essay in the Sheed and Ward book The Church and Communication edited by Patrick Granfeld.
The Role of Experience in Church Teaching
At the CTSA convention Judge John T. Noonan gave a profound address entitled “Experience and the Development of Doctrine.” Noonan began by stating quite clearly: there are billions of individual experiences and all this is chaotic. Thus, someone needs to decide what experience is valid. Yet, he added, moral doctrine cannot develop without reference to experience. He explored this through historical case studies such as church teaching on the indissolubility of marriage, on slavery, on taking interest on loans, and on capital punishment.
One of the major contributions of thoughtful feminist theology is its insistence on the value of women’s experience as doctrine is developed. There is another aspect of today’s church where human experience is creating “new theologies.”
The Globalization Impact
Robert Schreiter gave his CTSA Presidential Address on the topic “The Development of Doctrine in a World Church.” In an article entitled “Popular Catholicism,” (America, May 29, 1999), Thomas Bamat notes that “some 70 percent of the world’s Catholics now live outside Europe and North America.”
Schreiter reminded theologians that the model for doctrinal development has been primarily a Western European model of the abstract, of egocentric propositions, structured in recent centuries on the scientific method. In contrast, many non-Western cultures value social-group cohesion. Relational – thus dialogic – theories are more important than propositional structures.
Schreiter proposes that new existential theories will see church as encounter, that this theology of church must focus on catholicity (universality) which is intercultural. The new globalization is the result of economic, communication, cultural, and political links, Schreiter writes in his Orbis book: The new catholicity. His earlier work, Constructing Local Theologies, explores the whole concept of many local theologies as local cultures and local churches insist on being part of the catholicity dialogue.
The development of church teaching is complicated (or, perhaps, enriched) by the existential and the multicultural as the Holy Spirit guides all of God’s people in the 21st century.