In his survey of Anglican theological receptions of John Henry Newman, Geoffrey Rowell characterised the early 20th century as a time of ‘Newman Neglected’: references to his works by Anglicans are rare and focused as much on his character and secession to Rome as his substantive theological arguments.Footnote 1 This article will examine three Church of England writers who engage with John Henry Newman’s Essay on the Development of Doctrine in the first half of the 1920s, and situate their responses to Newman in the context of the loss of confidence in ‘theologies of progress’ after the First World War. From the brief engagement with Newman in Edward Gordon Selwyn’s The Approach to Christianity (1925), to the more extended considerations of Newman in William Inge’s Outspoken Essays and the third volume of Charles Gore’s Reconstruction of Belief series (1924), I shall argue that Newman, far from neglected, is a useful dialogue partner for these three Anglicans in addressing what they saw as the pressing questions of the 1920s. But each found Newman’s thesis was distorted or exaggerated in some way. Each considered that Newman had correctly recognised that Christian doctrine has developed and that this issue could not be sidestepped with a retreat to a static conception of Christian doctrine but had to be creatively incorporated to how the faith is understood. But for all three, Newman’s approach to the issue of development had either misconstrued or exaggerated some key characteristic of Christianity. Newman might hold, ‘whatever history teaches, whatever it omits, whatever it exaggerates or extenuates, whatever it says and unsays, at least the Christianity of history is not Protestantism’.Footnote 2 Inge, Selwyn, and Gore would contend that, wherever the Christianity of history was to be found, it was not solely in Roman Catholicism either.
1. The ‘hypothesis’ of development
Before proceeding to explore Inge, Selwyn, and Gore, I will re-examine Newman’s argument in Essay on the Development of Doctrine. Newman wrote that development was ‘an hypothesis to account for a difficulty’,Footnote 3 namely that arguments informed by the 1800-year-long history of Christianity face the problem of, ‘… the increase and expansion of the Christian Creed and Ritual, and the variations which have attended the process in the case of individual writers and Churches …’.Footnote 4 Newman was responding to a problem familiar to other historians of doctrine in the first half of the 19th century: Christian doctrine had not remained static since the New Testament, but had changed as it spread through various cultures, was exposed to philosophy, and reacted to various heresies. The apparent contradictions this involved needed to be accounted for: Newman highlights, for instance, that ante-Nicene theologians might refer to the Trinity, but not to the Persons as co-equal.Footnote 5 Newman explicitly places himself in the same tradition as De Maistre and Möhler’s Symbolik, but Development is also part of wider intellectual movements of the 19th century. Joshua Bennett places Development towards the start of the Victorian intellectual shift from seeing religious truth as abstracted from static patristic and Biblical texts, to the fruit of a developing conscience manifested in historical events, where the subject and the object of religious knowledge were no longer sharply distinguished, drawing a particular parallel with Newman’s near contemporary, the Anglo-Prussian Karl Bunsen.Footnote 6
For Newman, Christianity is a ‘real idea’, which represents the object as it is in the mind. A ‘real idea’ cannot be defined, but only expressed under different aspects in a way that gradually reveals its totality:
There is no one aspect deep enough to exhaust the contents of a real idea, no one term or proposition which will serve to define it; though of course one representation of it is more just and exact than another, and though when an idea is very complex, it is allowable, for the sake of convenience, to consider its distinct aspects as if separate ideas. Thus, with all our intimate knowledge of animal life and of the structure of particular animals, we have not arrived at a true definition of any one of them, but are forced to enumerate properties and accidents by way of description.Footnote 7
Two facets of Development are apparent here. First, the true nature of an idea will take time to be expressed fully. Second, Newman’s ‘idea’ is an organic concept that grows in the collective mind of a portion of humanity, with Newman making much use of analogies from the natural world to illustrate this.
The process, ‘by which the aspects of an idea are brought into consistency and form’ is what Newman calls development, ‘being the germination and maturation of some truth or apparent truth on a large mental field’.Footnote 8 Newman argues that this process is inherent to Christianity:
If Christianity is a fact, and impresses an idea of itself on our minds, and is a subject matter of exercises of the reason, that idea will in course of time, expand into a multitude of ideas, and aspects of ideas, connected and harmonious with one another, and in themselves determinate and immutable, as is the objective fact itself which is thus represented. It is a characteristic of our minds, that they cannot take an object in, which is submitted to them simply and integrally … whole objects do not create in the intellect whole ideas, but are … thrown into a series, into a number of statements, strengthening, interpreting, correcting each other, and with a more or less exactness approximating, as they accumulate, to a perfect image.Footnote 9
Likewise, development is a product not just of organic patterns of human thought, but of Christianity’s inculturation in time and place: ‘[I]f Christianity be an universal religion, suited not simply to one locality or period, but to all times and places, it cannot but vary in its relations and dealing towards the the world around it, that is, it will develop’.Footnote 10
Newman offers seven tests (or ‘notes’ in the 1878 edition) for distinguishing a true development from a corruption. The Notes – ‘Preservation of a Type’, ‘Continuity of Principles’, ‘Power of Assimilation’, ‘Logical Sequence’, ‘Anticipation of the Future’, ‘Conservative Action on its Past’, and ‘Chronic Vigour’ are often treated as the most important part of Newman’s theory, but within the context of the essay as a whole, they serve as illustrations of what true development in a real idea looks like. Two examples will suffice to show how this process works. First, Newman defends rapid change as sometimes better conserving a ‘real idea’. In elucidating ‘Preservation of a Type’, he argues, ‘… unity of type, characteristic as it is of faithful developments, must not be pressed to the extent of denying all variation, nay, considerable alteration of proportion and relation, as time goes on, in the parts or aspects of an idea’.Footnote 11 Thus, the bird is changed in all outward appearance from the egg; the butterfly from the grub; and the resurrection body will have attributes incompatible with the present life.
Second, Newman characterises living ideas as taking from other sources. When speaking of the third ‘Note’, the ‘Power of Assimilation’, Newman argues that ‘… doctrines and views which relate to man are not placed in a void, but in the crowded world, and make way for themselves by interpenetration, and develop by absorption’.Footnote 12 Newman contrasts this to the stultification of Protestant theology, where forms, subscriptions and articles are necessary to prevent slides into Arianism or Unitarianism, arguing ‘The stronger and more living an idea, that is, the more powerful hold it exercises on the minds of men, the more it is able to dispense with safeguards, and to trust itself against the danger of corruption’.Footnote 13 Catholic Christianity, by contrast, has taken dedications, votive offerings, incense, lights, holy water, asylums, holy days, wedding rings, vestments, and the Kyrie Eleison from their pagan origins, and redirected them from the worship of idols to the worship of the living God.Footnote 14
Development is a weighted argument, not an objective analysis from an impartial viewpoint. Newman believes no such approach is possible: ‘To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant’.Footnote 15 The Essay on Development is the Anglican Newman’s swan song, written immediately before, and to justify, his conversion to Roman Catholicism. The ‘antecedent probability’ that he uses to illustrate his argument is that an ‘Infallible developing authority’ will emerge within Christianity. He argues: ‘If the Christian doctrine, as originally taught, admits of true and important developments, … this is a strong antecedent argument in favour of a provision in the Dispensation for putting a seal of authority upon those developments’.Footnote 16 Newman develops this argument in his historical illustrations, ranging from isolated statements about the authority of Rome in Polycarp, Irenaeus, and a catena of other Ante-Nicene Fathers, to the role of Leo the Great’s Tome at the Council of Chalcedon. Aidan Nicholls characterises this as a combination of a priori and a posteriori argument: Newman argues certain things are probable antecedently, but also that they have historically been the case.Footnote 17 At times, though, this is almost a circular argument: Newman states an assumption, and goes on to show it is true. ‘No-one doubts’, Newman writes, ‘that the Roman Catholic communion is the legitimate heir of the Medieval, or that the Medieval Church is the legitimate heir of the Nicene …’.Footnote 18
Nevertheless, it is an oversimplification to take the more expansive claims of Development and see them as special pleading on the part of a recent convert. There are also Anglican antecedents to Newman’s reasoning in the Essay on Development. Not only is doctrinal change something the Anglican Newman explored in his final University Sermon, Newman also makes considerable use of Joseph Butler’s Analogy, especially in his use of analogies from the natural world. There are also parallels between Newman’s view that ideas have a power to live in the minds of men and be developed socially, and Coleridge’s view that, ‘Transcendent truths may admit of but partial communication to us and that under the image of earthly things.’Footnote 19
2. Responding to Newman
David Nicholls and Benjamin King have both surveyed the initial responses to Newman’s Essay.Footnote 20 Much of these were negative: practically all rejected any substantial increase in the church’s understanding of the faith, with Tractarians such as F.W. Faber, high churchmen such as George Moberly, and Newman’s liberal beté noire, Renn Hampden, all sharing the criticism that Newman had repudiated the idea that the church has taught no more or less than she had in primitive times.Footnote 21 Others rejected the comparison between Christian revelation and other ‘ideas’ as it made theology analogous to the secular sciences. Many high church Anglicans in particular attempted to show that the seven ‘tests’ would lead to classical heresies. Some accepted the idea that logical deductions were legitimate developments of doctrine; others rejected them outright as distortions of the faith. Some, including William Gladstone, believed there was an a priori case to be made for a growth in the church’s understanding of the faith. Finally, some saw the theory as not radical enough, and argued the ability to cast away should be added as a sign of the church’s true development of its doctrine. Two particularly constructive responses came from the liberals Henry Hart Milman and F.D. Maurice. Milman assailed Newman for suiting historical evidence to his own inner light, but made a distinction between essentials and non-essentials in religion, seeing real progress in religion as not doctrinal expansion, but the development of Christianity’s morality and social influence.Footnote 22 Maurice recognised the full force of Newman’s argument in the lengthy preface to his 1846 lectures on the Epistle to the Hebrews, accepting the historical difficulty Newman proposes, but suggests a different solution. He argues Newman is right to view Christianity as a historical fact, subject to analysis, and right to state that Anglican and Protestant interpreters of history have done so through their own lens. However, Maurice argues that the unfolding of the idea of revelation is something that takes place in dialogue between the conscience of the believer and the text of scripture: ‘the idea from Scripture is not merely in his mind; … it is also in the text’.Footnote 23 For the reader of scripture there is, ‘One above me to whom I stand in a direct aweful relation; a relation of which He only could give me this glimpse; which He only can unfold to me, and probably will unfold, by very gradual methods’.Footnote 24
One Tractarian response is particularly notable for its influence on the authors we shall examine. J.B. Mozley, a Tractarian and disciple of Newman, distinguished development as a form of explanation, and development as something that added to the original substance of an idea. Using the metaphor of an acorn and an oak, he argues: ‘It is a pure metaphor by which we say the acorn is the oak; it is so, if by saying so be meant that the acorn is the thing in consequence of which (coupled with other causes) an oak will exist, but it is not identical with it actually.’Footnote 25 By contrast, Mozley says, historical treatments of the incarnation, such as Aquinas’, describe the incarnation through a sequence of explicatory questions: ‘such manifold evolutions do not process to add anything to the substantial idea of the incarnation’.Footnote 26 Newman’s argument is, thus, unsustainable in its use of organic metaphors and out of step with the mode in which theology in the catholic tradition has been done. As we shall see, Mozley is cited by Charles Gore in his criticism of Newman for allowing exaggerated development, as well as anticipating Inge’s accusation that Newman is ultimately an uncatholic modernist.
3. William Inge
William Inge was Dean of St Paul’s from 1911 to 1934, and was a noted Neoplatonist, controversialist, eugenicist, and advocate of Nudism. Inge is a transitional figure in 1920s Anglicanism. Adrian Hastings has characterised him as a hangover from a previous era and unaware of the extent to which Christianity was discredited among the intellectual elite in the interwar years. Despite his ‘punchy’ journalistic writing, he ‘exemplified of all the effects from which the Church of England was currently suffering’.Footnote 27 However, Bennett sees him as representing a transition in the history of ideas, moving away from 19th-century arguments around historical development, and towards the psychology of religion.Footnote 28 Inge had confidence that Christian mysticism, properly used, could offer the means of union with what is beyond and of finding meaning in the movement of history, but the publication of the two volumes of Outspoken Essays after the First World War marks his dramatic loss of confidence in the course of human history.Footnote 29 His arguments around Newman, modernism, and the Anglo-Catholic movement in that work in are thus conditioned by his scoffing rejection of the Victorian elevation of progress into a superstitious idea: ‘It was obvious to our grandparents that a nation which travels sixty miles an hour must be five times as civilised as one which only travels at twelve …’.Footnote 30
At the same time, Inge believed that Roman Catholic modernists, such as Tyrrell and Loisy, had elevated religious doctrines as symbols of deeper realities in such a way that they had completely cut themselves from the actuality of historical events. Inge believed theories such as Tyrell’s ‘elastic’ theory of development in Lex Orandi and Loisy’s biblical criticism had left religious facts as events whose significance was revealed by the progress of doctrine and the life of the church, which meant they really no facts at all. For the Modernists’, there was no correspondence between the will-world and the world of phenomena. He writes that ‘[T]he very serious question arises, whether it is really natural for faith to represent its ideas in the form of historical facts when it knows that these facts have no historical basis’.Footnote 31
Inge saw Newman as the genesis behind the Modernist substitution of the symbolic for the reality of historical fact. Newman’s work was ‘no doubt an epoch-making book, though the idea of tradition as the produce of the living spirit of a religious society, preserving its moral identity while expressing itself, from time to time, in new forms, was already familiar to the readers of Schleiermacher’.Footnote 32 For Inge, Newman’s view is that,
Through the operation of [the] spirit, old things become new, and fresh light is shed from the sacred pages of Scripture. Catholic tradition is, in fact, the glorified but ever-present Christ Himself, reincarnating Himself, generation after generation, in the historical Church. It is unnecessary to enquire whether there is apostolic authority for every new dogma, for the Church is the mouthpiece of the living Christ.Footnote 33
For Inge, this obviates any need for reference back to previous practice or historical fact, and essentially embraces a kind relativism towards doctrinal truth:
This is to destroy the old doctrine of tradition. The Church becomes the source of revelation instead of its custodian. On the other side, it is a perilous concession to modern ideas. There is an obvious danger that, as the result of this doctrine, the dogmas of the Church may seem to have only a relative and provisional truth; for, if each pronouncement were absolutely true, there would be no real development, and the appearance of it in history would become inexplicable.Footnote 34
To Inge, development rescues the Roman Church from a growing chasm between the church and modern civilisation. But Newman’s account of Christianity as an ‘idea, rather than an institution’ opens the way for ever-changing reformulations of doctrine to suit the present age:
[I]f the static theory of revelation is abandoned, and a dynamic theory substituted for it; if the divine part of Christianity resides, not in the theoretical formulations of revealed fact, but in the living and energising spirit of the Church; why should not dogmatic theology become elastic, changing periodically in correspondence with the development of human knowledge …?Footnote 35
A similar charge is found in the Anglo-Catholic Oliver Quick’s Bishop Paddock Lectures of 1922, where he sees Newman as exemplifying what he characterises as ‘evolutionary modernity’, whose, ‘… fundamental principle is to find the essence of Christianity in the development of doctrine, not in the particular facts which were its origin’.Footnote 36 Quick noted that Newman’s rhetorical statement that ‘to be perfect is to have changed often’ was liable to misinterpretation, but argued that Newman’s basis of Christianity in an idea, rather than in historical fact had passed, via evolutionary theories in the idealists T.H. Green, Edward Caird, Andrew Pringle-Pattison and Josiah Royce and finally the catholic Modernists into the doctrine that Christianity is just a human ideal. Newman’s location of the essence of Christianity in development rather than scriptural origins had led to a doctrine of mere evolution which justifies everything and his location of the organ of Christianity in the church rather than the individual led to a vague ‘religion of humanity’.
While this is illustrative of the fact that Anglican critics of Newman have often formed unexpected alliances across party lines, Inge holds back from such a full equation of Newman with Modernism or evolutionary theories of religious development – there is in fact an ‘enormous difference’ between them.Footnote 37 Inge says that Newman intended Development as a polemic against the High Anglican reliance on the councils of the church, and never anticipated it would be used against the existing polity of his church. For Newman, ‘Development, however great the changes which it exhibits, can only follow certain laws’.Footnote 38 In Newman’s hands, the history of development ends with Pio Nono’s declaration, ‘La tradizione son io!’ The Modernists cannot depend on his theory, as Rome’s actual historical development has been a steady reformulation towards authoritarianism and away from the direction which the Modernist demands it takes.Footnote 39 Newman might claim purgatory and papal supremacy are logically involved in the earliest claims of the Roman Catholic Church, but there is no reason to expect the peculiar kind of liberalism 20th-century modernists looked for, especially when the sacerdotal system of Rome is based on supernatural mechanisms, which the modernist rules out as having any historical or scientific actuality.
Newman is thus charged with both absolutism and fostering a scepticism towards historical truth and its interpretation, which has reached an absurd terminus a quem in the modernist who says ‘Ora pro nobis’ to a Mary whose biography he believes is purely mythical.Footnote 40 In Inge’s article on ‘Cardinal Newman’, he elucidates further this sceptical element of Newman’s thought. While commenting largely on the Grammar of Assent, Inge also argues Newman’s account of the church is essentially modernist and anti-rational. Inge attributes to Newman an idealisation of a golden age of the past, stemming from a reserved and dreamy childhood.Footnote 41 After being shocked by the 1832 reforms, he sought a weapon against them, which he found in catholic ecclesiology.Footnote 42 But Newman’s answer to scepticism – that the Church is a concrete fact and has guaranteed the truth of the articles of the creed – does not rest on trustworthy grounds, for he rejects reason, distrusts feeling and does not make the will supreme. Instead, the undivided personality (Newman’s ‘conscience’) is the source of the verdict.Footnote 43 Inge concludes: ‘Newman, then, was only half a Catholic. He accepted with all the fervour of a neophyte the principle of submission to Holy Church. But in place of the official intellectualist apologetic … he substituted a philosophy of experience which is certainly not catholic’.Footnote 44
This is a striking conclusion: what Newman sought – certainty that the Roman Church was the embodiment of the real idea of Christianity – was undergirded by a liberal method he deplored. But Inge recalls some of Newman’s original critics’ charges that his ‘tests’ can also be passed by classical heresies, and his conclusion that Newman is ultimately a sceptical thinker is one that has appeared in recent critical literature around the Anglican Newman, especially Frank M. Turner’s 2002 biography.
Inge’s own account of what is unchanging in Christianity is found in the conclusions to ‘Roman Catholic Modernism’ and in the second series of Outspoken Essay’s article on ‘Progress’. He sees the antidote to the red peril’ of socialism and the ‘black peril’ of reactionary clericalism as a return to the character of Christ and his ethics. Three generations of secular education, he argues, will cause the cures at Lourdes to die out and with it, the sophistry of characters such as Newman, who sought to wield historical facts, selectively interpreted, to defend them. For Inge, a future without Newman will be a bright one where philosophers, psychologists, historians and scientists of all creeds and countries will supply the materials for a fixed and absolute standard of values to allow for true spiritual progress. Whether this bright future has come to pass is a matter for the reader to determine for themselves: Inge’s own advocacy must be read against his post-war scepticism about progress. But this elucidates how Inge sees Newman. The idea in Development is a flawed response to challenges to the historical narrative of the Christian faith. For Inge, Newman substitutes his ‘infallible developing authority’ for honest intellectual engagement, and Development’s selective interpretation of historical fact for disinterested ethical enquiry into how to ‘live in the knowledge and enjoyment of those absolute values, Truth, Goodness and Beauty’.Footnote 45
4. Edward Gordon Selwyn
Gordon Selwyn was successively Warden of Radley College, Rector of Havant and Dean of Winchester in the early 20th century. In contrast to the colourful William Inge’s Platonism, Selwyn wrote within the tradition of liberal Anglo-catholicism that had its origins in the Lux Mundi essays of 1889. He is best known for editing Essays Catholic and Critical (1926). Like Inge, Selwyn also wrote in reaction to the myth of progress, arguing the key failure of Edwardian theology was its synthesis between evolution and the doctrine of divine beneficence. In An Approach to Christianity (1925), he argues for a new approach: ‘Our first concern. is to vindicate the reality and autonomy of the supernatural’.Footnote 46 There he argues that ‘religious experience … is a genuine and distinguishable field of experience; and that the main assumptions and conclusions presented by the tradition of work and thought attaching to it have the same prima facie claim to acceptance as those of any of the sciences’.Footnote 47 Selwyn’s references to Newman are sporadic, but his importance as the editor of perhaps the most important liberal catholic work between the wars and his explicit reliance on Development of Doctrine in his most significant work justifies examining how he uses Newman.Footnote 48
For Selwyn, all religious experience is at least partly mediated. Religious communities are preservers and transmitters of the ‘facts’ religious experience supply, as they pass on all that is communicable in religious experience. This means an expansive approach to religious formulae, which should encompass every aspect of religious experience, but this also calls for ‘an authority co-extensive with the whole field of the relevant experience’.Footnote 49 He argues, ‘The claim of Catholic Christianity is precisely that it is such an authoritative tradition. It presents us with an organic process of life and thought, in which religious experience has been, and is, described, intellectually ordered, mediated and verified’.Footnote 50 This is a fourfold operation: the church first describes the phenomena of religious experience, above all through its scripture, and then in turn intellectually ordering it, mediates it to others, and verifies it through subsequent actions. This means institutional religion will look different over time, as it tries to recapture what Selwyn calls the ‘seed’ of the first revelation: ‘The specific character of the seed then sown – what Newman called the “idea of the religion” – stands out there with arresting clearness; and its description constitutes a criterion by which men later distinguish the wheat from the tares’.Footnote 51 It should be noted that this is not completely compatible with Newman’s ‘idea’. For Newman, the idea of Christianity is not a seed that is successively recapitulated in different religious formulae over the centuries, but something that is progressively unfolded, so that it is most clear after the centuries have run their course. As Newman famously says, ‘It is sometimes said the stream is clearest closest to the spring – but in living ideas, such as Christianity, it only becomes clear when it is a broad, deep channel, full of the sediment of the ages’.Footnote 52
This highlights a key difference between Newman and some of his Anglican readers: Newman really does believe that the Roman Catholic Church as it was in 1845 was the clearest and fullest expression of Christianity that had ever existed up to that point. By contrast, Selwyn sees successive generations’ expression of the idea of Christianity as a kind of ‘seeing through the glass darkly’. Theology, he says, requires a flexibility of expression because of the varied circumstances and conditions of the prompting of the supernatural. But these expressions, however varied, all express the same reality: ‘It is they which constitute on its intellectual side what Newman called the idea of Christianity – that in it, namely, which through many forms many forms of expression and development remains essentially the same’.Footnote 53 In Development, Newman is also willing to relativise religious formulae, and goes so far as to argue that the ossified formulae of confessional subscriptions in the Protestant churches is a sign they lack the vitality of a ‘real idea’. Selwyn goes further and says that the crystallisation of language in religious formulae can arrest development completely. He argues papal infallibility is a tool that gives no allowance to the limitation of the human mind and does not allow the Spirit’s infallibility to be refracted through human media. This contrasts with scripture itself, which is always mediated through its human authors.Footnote 54 For Selwyn, papal infallibility fails to acknowledge how religious experience really works in human minds. This approach lacks the certitude that Newman valued most of all, as it makes it impossible to formulate how the church decides what developments are genuine. But in place of certitude, it offers an acknowledgment that all formulations of religious experience are shaped by the traditions through which they are mediated.
5. Charles Gore
Charles Gore offers perhaps the most sustained engagement with Newman’s account of development of any Anglican writer in the 1920s. Gore was successively Bishop of Worcester, Birmingham, and Oxford, a founder of the Community of the Resurrection, and perhaps the leading voice in the catholic movement in Church of England after the First World War. Gore is a paradoxical figure within the Church of England of the 1920s. He was a revered figure within the catholic movement with a long career behind him, including previous criticisms of Newman’s theory in Roman Catholic Claims (1890), and a consideration of the problems of the changing language of doctrinal definitions in his Bampton Lectures (1890). By contrast with Inge’s embrace of modernity, Gore cast doubt on many of the social changes of the 1920s, and considered the 1932 Lambeth Conference’s limited acceptance of contraception as a catastrophe. At the same time, Gore was a Christian socialist and radical dissident from the existing relationship between the church, establishment, and wider society, something exemplified by his resignation as Bishop of Oxford in 1919 over the issue of the franchise for the Church Assembly.Footnote 55 His Reconstruction of Belief series represents a major contribution to theology, following his intention after resignation to do serious study and write something better than ‘little books’.Footnote 56 Reconstruction is intended to give his 1920s contemporaries reasons to believe the Christian faith against the background of growing scepticism in wider society. The first two volumes attempt to reconstruct belief in God and Christ using the critical method, but the third, The Holy Spirit and the Church (1924) was written in reaction both to the call for irrational submission to authority that Gore identified with the Roman Catholic Church and to what he saw as modernism’s rejection of Christ as the historical record revealed him.Footnote 57 Gore rejects both the respectable contemporary idea that the church exists primarily to guarantee good morals, and is thus broadly coterminous with society as a whole, and the historical reality that the church has sometimes acted as a compeller of assent to articles of belief. Instead, the church’s authority is based on God’s self-revelation, which also brought the church into existence:
[A]like in the Old Testament and the New the doctrine concerning God’s will and nature is not presented as a conclusion from reasoning, but as a positive revelation and self-disclosure of God a word of God which commends itself to the conscience of men, but is to be received in faith. […] Thus the religion of Christ is in its very essence an authoritative religion based upon the word of God, and the Church is authoritative because it is the commissioned carrier of the message.Footnote 58
The church, its authority, and the self-disclosure of God in Christ are thus, in Gore’s mind, intertwined parts of the same whole. But this means the opposite of expecting the church to deliver infallible proclamations for its people to read with The Times over breakfast. If the church is a product of God’s revelation in Christ, then it ought to act with the candid open-mindedness Christ expected of his disciples, not the ‘bigoted traditionalism’ of the scribes and the Pharisees. Doctrines such as the Trinity had not emerged from lectures, but from the church’s collective experience, ‘as something which in the course of their experience had merged into light. It became evidence as a doctrine because it was the interpretation of experience’.Footnote 59 The collective experience of the church as the means by which doctrine is mediated parallels the work of the idea expanding the mind of the church in Newman, and the similarity to Gore’s younger contemporary, Gordon Selwyn, is also evident. This parallel is further seen in Gore’s view that the early church did not have a love of dogmatic definitions, but had a high view of the ‘spiritual man’s’ ability to reach conclusions from scripture, something he traces back as far as St Paul. He sees it later in Athanasius’ reticence in referring to the decision at Nicaea in his controversy with Arius, and in the ‘liberal temper of tolerance’ of different schools of scriptural interpretations in Antioch and Alexandria.Footnote 60 He says,
[A]t least in the beginning, the Church cannot be charged with any love of dogmatizing. They believed that their duty of maintaining the ground of faith forced them to frame these conciliar definitions. Knowing all that we know about the blessing which the dogmatic formulas have proved, we may be loath to call them ‘necessary evils’; but that phrase does not misrepresent the mind of the fourth-century Church towards them.Footnote 61
Gore summarises his position in three points, and says it has two enemies. First, the church inherited from the Lord the idea that true religion is a life to be lived through human eyes. Second, that this life is based on a revelation of God, and ‘the message declares not only the life which is to be lived, but also the reasons for living it. It is a message about God and His redemptive acts, and about the nature and destiny of man, and about the divine provision made for realizing the good life’. Finally, the church’s authority is to elucidate this message, based on the acts of Jesus and the example of the early church. The two enemies to this view of the church are first, those who see the acceptance of any authority as degrading, and second, those who demand passive obedience of absolutist authority.
Gore characterises this as a ‘conservative’ and ‘moderate’ approach; ‘conservative’ because it postulates that Christ is the final word of God’s self-revelation and that the apostolic preaching, recorded in the New Testament, gave the true and final interpretation of the person of Christ and the mission of the spirit; and ‘moderate’ because while the Church has the duty to defend and interpret the New Testament, it has no authority to add to it or to claim as part of the faith anything over and above what has been written.Footnote 62 This latter point leads to his consideration of Newman’s theory of development, which Gore says repudiates the idea of ‘moderation’ as it sees tradition as an equal source for revelation. Gore says that for Newman, development is a device for ‘bridging over for his own mind and conscience the interval between the present doctrine of the Roman Church and that of the early Church’.Footnote 63 Gore acknowledges this is a legitimate endeavour, one that has been attempted by other theologians.Footnote 64 However, Gore considers that Newman draws conclusions within his historical illustrations of development that cannot be justified by the historical record. Gore draws attention to Newman’s statement that Christianity came into the world as an idea, not an institution, and had to fit itself with clothing and armour.Footnote 65 Gore stresses that this implies not just change, but transmogrification. He sees this exemplified in Newman’s claim that Arianism discovered a sphere of thought, whose inhabitant the church later discovered to be Mary. Gore says this flies in the face of the fact the Fathers saw the Arian Christ as both an impossible concept and, moreover, an idolatrous one, as it made a creature an object of worship.
Gore asks two questions of the theory of development. First, does it account for the action of the church over the first centuries and the decisions of the Councils, without resorting to adding to what the New Testament has already revealed? Second, does it cover later actions of the church? To the first, he answers ‘yes’, with qualifications. Gore says that ‘[T]he definition of the Trinity did only give distinctness and explicitness to the conception already implicit in the apostolic teaching’.Footnote 66 For Gore, the threefold name, ‘each personal, distinct, and co-inherent’, has always been explicit in early Christian writings, even if it is ambiguous in writers such as Irenaeus and Shepherd of Hermas. However, he holds that later developments in the western church have treated traditions over and above the New Testament as having the same authority as the first revelation: there is nothing implicit in the early tradition as to the primary of Peter, purgatory, the ending of the substance of bread and wine in Holy Communion, nor anything remotely like the immaculate conception.Footnote 67 There is an element of what Paul Avis has called the ‘Protestant’ tendency in Gore’s works here – the Bible cannot be isolated from creeds or councils, but whatever must be believed by Christians must still be proved in scripture.Footnote 68
Gore allows that Newman’s idea of development can help towards an adequate conception of development in doctrine and institutions, but that the tests to determine legitimate and illegitimate developments must be modified. Gore resurrects Mozley’s criticism of Newman for allowing ‘exaggerated development’ as well as explanatory development. Gore argues that the most permanent transformations occur slowly, much as revolutions are accompanied by reactions, and illustrates this with the development of the papacy. No one would question the development of the papacy had continuity of principle, power of assimilation, logical sequence, anticipations going back to the second century, as well as being preservative, and having chronic continuance. But the result might still prove to be a one-sided accentuation of some feature or idea with the final result amounting to a complete deterioration of the original concept.Footnote 69
Gore further argues that Rome’s claims are likely to be exaggerated developments because of the fact they are inaccessible to the good sense of those who look for verification of doctrines in the scriptures and will not just accept them on the grounds of authority:
[T]here are some in every age, and in our generation and country they are the majority of good religious people, who are quite incapable of this sort of blind submission, without what would seem to them an act of treason against the light. They are people who, in the spirit of the Reformation, will accept nothing but what can be shown them to be really the teaching of the New Testament …Footnote 70
Furthermore, this tendency towards one-sided development, whose logic is inaccessible to some believers, will not be inclusive where Christ was inclusive:
For it is surely self-evident, that if the love and claim of God are perfectly disclosed in our Lord, the Church which is His body must be – exclusive indeed where He would have been exclusive, but inclusive where He would have been inclusive. It cannot be intended that is should be narrowed as it comes down through the ages, or present obstacles where there were originally none.Footnote 71
This gives Gore his main criterion for identifying a false development, which is ‘that any development in the doctrine or practice of the Church which narrows it, so that it is no longer a home for men of goodwill who in its earlier days would readily have found a home in it, is thereby marked as a spurious development’.Footnote 72 While Gore, at times, appeals to traditional Anglican grounds of controversy with Rome – the papacy, the nature of the real presence, purgatory, and so on – this shows that his project is a more expansive one, connected to the overall purpose of The Reconstruction of Belief. Gore wants to reconstruct the grounds for belief in God and Christ as they are revealed in the Scriptures. For the faith to be the same as that disclosed in the original revelation, the criteria for right belief cannot be wider or narrower than that found in the New Testament.
This means that genuine doctrinal development is not the same as mere progress: ‘Every institution develops; but the development… may be for better or for worse.. Likewise, development is not about multiplying doctrines to be believed in, but about the church making the original revelation explicable, intelligible, and welcome across all classes and cultures:
by the development of the Church we ought to mean something much wider and deeper than the intensification and amplification of doctrines by a sort of logical process. The Church was set in the world to develop, not mainly by amplification of doctrines, nor by the increasing provision of plain answers to plain questions … but by demonstrating its power to become the truly catholic home of all races and kinds of men. All sorts of human faculties and dispositions and personal needs are capable of being enriched and sanctified and met and harmonized by the Holy Spirit.Footnote 73
There is a resemblance to Selwyn’s and Inge’s scepticism about Victorian myths of progress here, but Gore is focussed more on the needs of a changing world and perhaps more aware than many of his contemporaries of the fact that Christianity has been shaped by the intellectual assumptions and social institutions of the West. He argues for a development in the sense of a ‘free power of adjustment and mobility as is consistent with real continuity’.Footnote 74 He writes,
A religion claiming to be permanent and universal, and appealing to the permanent and universal elements and needs in man, but at the same time set in a changing world, presents a special problem. For in each more or less settled age and civilization the permanent religion becomes incrusted with impermanent intellectual assumption and social institutions from which, when the turn of the wheel comes, and the ideas and institutions are seen to be changing, it can only be disentangled with immense friction and difficulty.Footnote 75
He goes on, in case there were any doubt about the implications of this, to say that the western church had too easily dragged its ideas of ritual, controversy, and organisation from West to East, without sufficient ‘mobility’. Gore here recalls one of Newman’s original objectives for the theory of development, that it shows how Christianity can be received by all different conditions of humanity.
Gore’s disagreement with Newman can be seen as a mere disagreement over how to interpret the church history and its relationship to contemporary practice, as well as a defensive reaction to a founding figure of Anglo-Catholicism’s departure to Rome. Benjamin King characterises Gore’s view of Newman as standing in a long line of Anglican reactions to Newman’s secession, and suggests it is a late defence of a ‘successionist’ view of church history, as opposed to emerging views informed by development, such as William Sanday’s.Footnote 76 However, there is a more fundamental philosophical difference between Anglicanism’s two great catholic figures. Gore’s biographer, G.L. Prestige, considered that Gore had a lifelong dislike of everything subjective, which informed his criticism of von Hügel’s approach to religious mysticism, but he traced to his attitude towards Newman’s secession something Gore called ‘pure idiosyncrasy’.Footnote 77 Newman united the subject with the object of religious knowledge: the Idea of Christianity existed in the mind of the historian sifting doctrinal history, much as it expands in all the minds of the faithful, so there can be no such thing as an ‘objective’ analysis of history. Gore sees a danger that this can descend into pure subjectivism, and senses, like Oliver Quick, that a line can be drawn from Newman to Modernism, saying explicitly that Newman’s essay reads as modern or even ‘modernist’.Footnote 78 Gore acknowledges that German writes of Dogmengeschichte and the French modernists have made use of Newman’s earlier, freer sense of development ‘often in a sense quite antagonistic to his own’. He also, both here and in the Bampton Lectures, takes from Lord Acton a distinction between Newman’s views in Development and his later statement that Christian dogmas ‘were in the Church from the time of the apostles; that they were ever in their substance what they are now’.Footnote 79 But Gore goes further and insists there must be a real correspondence between the beliefs that were required of the first Christians, and what beliefs are required of us today. The language in which those beliefs are expressed may be inadequate or even allowed a power of mobility, but their content is permanent.Footnote 80
Ultimately for Gore, development cannot go further than fidelity to God as he has revealed himself in Christ and as that revelation has been documented in the New Testament. Development may be accepted as a historical fact; indeed, it is a positive asset in communicating a universal religion to all ages, peoples, and cultures. But it cannot be allowed to exaggerate certain features of Christianity in a way that distorts the original revelation and causes the criteria for what must be believed to be transformed out of all recognition to what was believed by the first disciples. For Gore, the right understanding and use of development is a matter of fidelity to the church’s character. He says that some, perhaps, would welcome the authoritative voice of Rome and
… get rid of all personal responsibility for the truth. But I fancy this kind of spirit would have found our Lord a great trial when He on earth, showing such reserve in providing plain answers to plain questions and leaving His would-be disciples so much to do for themselves. I fancy it would have found more satisfaction with the dogmatic Pharisee.Footnote 81
6. Conclusions
Inge, Selwyn, and Gore represent different tendencies within the interwar Church of England: Inge and Gore, the peripheries of idiosyncratic modernism and the catholic movement; Selwyn the more mainstream Cambridge liberal catholic theology. But each sees Newman’s argument in Development as having something to say in response to the collapse of the Victorian myth of progress. Inge sees Newman as a representative of that myth, but also anticipating one of its successors: the ‘Black Peril’ of clerical authoritarianism. Selwyn and Gore, by contrast, see Newman as useful dialogue partner in the rejection of the idea of progress: Selwyn sees Newman’s ‘idea’ as vindicating the religious experience as a genuine source of human knowledge, while Gore makes use of Newman to respond to the growing rejection of religious authority and to offer a ‘power of adjustment and mobility’ to enable Christianity’s message to be communicated effectively both in the new intellectual landscape in the West and in the different cultural context of the East.
Likewise, all three authors see Newman as related, in some way, to Roman Catholic Modernism. For Inge, Newman is an antecedent of Modernism, as he substitutes a dynamic unfolding of tradition with the church as the source of revelation for the traditional concept of the church as custodian of revealed facts. Selwyn, by contrast, shares similar concerns to the Modernists in his treatment of religious formulae as mediating symbols of a deeper reality – but he sees the use of the papacy as an infallible developing authority as something which stultifies mediation, rather than fostering it. Finally, Gore sees Newman’s theory as allowing Christianity to change out of all recognition in successive ages, due to its subjective focus: what is part of the Arian philosophical arsenal in one age can supply the materials for Mariology in another. For Gore, this means the church can, at different times, be more exclusive or more inclusive than its founder, something intolerable to the believer seeking consistent fidelity to scripture. In Gore and Inge, however, Newman’s ‘modernism’ is carefully caveated to distinguish him from Catholic Modernism – a useful reflection, given the continued debates over the extent to which Newman can be considered a forerunner of modernism.
Finally, however, Inge, Selwyn and Gore all acknowledge that Development addresses two real problems: the need to account for how and why Christian doctrine has changed and the need to show how Christianity can adapt to be received in all times and all places by all peoples, without its reality being distorted. Each of our authors think that Newman’s answer as to how development does this is not completely satisfactory. Selwyn believes papal infallibility prevents the work of producing new religious formulae for each generation. Gore believes Newman allows for exaggerated developments in Christianity, which makes it more exclusive as it goes on. Inge thinks Newman obfuscates uncomfortable historical facts in the service of authoritarianism.
What is the continued relevance of these Anglican receptions of Newman? Both the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England have changed substantially since the 1920s. It is hard to imagine an Anglican author today representing Newman as the source of the view Inge imputed to the catholic Modernists, that historical facts only had value as symbols of doctrinal truths after the renewed importance of scriptural exegesis and reading in the church after the Second Vatican Council. The spotlight has moved on to other ethical debates beyond Inge’s advocacy of eugenics or Gore’s opposition to contraception. However, the challenges of doctrinal development remain: when and why can changes to doctrinal formulations or Christian practice be justified? What does the unity between present-day Christians and the Christians of previous centuries consist in? How can Christianity adapt to be received by all people in all ages? These questions are still relevant in a Church of England divided over theological issues that have sprung from social change and a Roman Catholic Church still ill at ease over changes to its forms of worship, much as answers to them help determine whether Christianity is credible in an intellectual culture that is as sceptical as that of the 1920s. Newman – and Inge, Selwyn and Gore in their responses to him – sought to elucidate what was the unchanging core of the Christian faith in a changing world. As long as that faith is in the world, their reflections will continue to inform where we locate the essence of that faith in changing times.
