II

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN INSTITUTIONS AND BELIEFS

BY ALFRED FAWKES, M.A.,

"The

Vicar of Ashby St. Ledgers, Honorary Chaplain to the Bishop
of Hereford, Author of "Studies in Modernism,"
Genius of the English Church," etc,

SYNOPSIS

I. Development Twofold: (1) Logical; and (2)
Real.

II. Newman's Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.

III. The World is a World in Movement.

IV. Development Ethical as well as Dogmatic and Institutional.

V. Lessons of Eschatology.

VI. Political Function of the Papacy.

VII. Early Transformation of Christianity.

VIII. The Reformation Inevitable.

IX. The Illumination: "Reason the Divine Governor of the Universe."

X. The Critical Movement.

XI. Archbishop Temple: "A Theology based on Psychology." What is essential in Christ is His Divine Mediatorship.

XII. The Sense of Community in Religion.

XIII. Example of the United Free Church of Scotland, XIV. Signs of Coming Change.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN
INSTITUTIONS AND BELIEFS

I. THE development of religious institutions and beliefs may be logical or real.

1. Logical development is the explication of the content of a notion. Nothing new is added; it is like the opening of a closed hand. Such a development is consistent with the static, or mediæval, conception of the world, and is not unknown to the older theologians. In this sense of the word many of them would admit a development-e.g. of the Papacy, of Transubstantiation, of Sacramental Confession, of the devotion to the Blessed Virgin-from the less formally complete teaching and practice of an earlier age. But there is no process, they would maintain, in the notion; the change is not in the notion but in us. This proviso is essential. The full powers of the modern Papacy, we are taught, were conferred by Christ on Peter; and the Syllabus of 1907, in condemning the proposition that the apostle was ignorant that this was so, appears to reject the principle even of logical development-of which it would be truer to say that it is tolerated than that it is approved of, by the official Church. Pius X carried

this identity of dogma back into the legendary age of the Old Testament, attributing a knowledge of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin-defined in 1854 -to the Hebrew patriarchs. Noah, he says, contemplates this mystery in the ark; Moses meditated upon it before the bush that burned in Horeb; David when he danced before the Ark of the Covenant. This is the language of a formal Encyclical (February, 1904), not the devout play of a pious imagination sporting over the sacred text.

2. Real development supposes a change not only in us but in the notion. The notion does not stand, a world of objective truth, motionless while the stream of life passes. No; bank and stream are alike in motion; all things flow. And the unity of the process is a unity of origin and direction, not of content; the waters are many, but they have one source and one goal.

What the Church takes to be logical are in fact, with few exceptions, real developments: the Mass or Eucharist, from the breaking of bread; Baptism, from the primitive immersion, which at once symbolised and coincided with spiritual regeneration; the decorous offices of our modern churches from the tumultuous assemblies described in the first Epistle to the Corinthians-" will they not say that you are mad? Some of these developments are legitimate, some illegitimate; some temporary, some permanent; some technical, some part and parcel of a larger life-movement, such as-to take ethical examples-the abolition of slavery, the growth of humanitarianism, or feminism. Their germs are to be found in the New Testament ;