The Prophetic Church: History and Doctrinal Development in John Henry Newman and Yves Congar by Andrew Meszaros (review)

Andrew Meszaros observes in the introduction to his, The Prophetic Church, that "one quintessential marker of modernity is undoubtedly historical consciousness" (10). This rise in historical consciousness prompts the question amongst Christian theologians as how to "theologically account for, and therefore make credible, doctrines whose content is allegedly revealed (coming from God) and therefore absolute and immutable, but whose existence and form rely on historical and human contingencies?" (12)

No other Christian thinker rivals Newman's influence in how we conceptualize this tension between tradition as developing in time and the eternality of the revelation itself. The influence of Newman's theory of doctrinal development began during his lifetime,¹ was amplified during the first half of the twentieth century,² and continues to influence our contemporary discussion concerning revelation and its transmission in history, which is in many respects still considering the tension between corporeality and immutability as it relates to Christian doctrine.³

Utilizing both historical and thematic methodologies, Meszaros sees a way to account for doctrinal propositions as both "products of history and effective instruments of God's revelation" (240). Pulling from theological giants, John Henry Newman (1801-1890) and Yves Congar (1904-1995), Meszaros proposes an Incarnational lens through which to understand the nature of doctrine and its reception. Namely, the idea that God reveals divine reality in a way that human language can mediate, albeit imperfectly Quoting Congar, Meszaros observes that "[h]istory, for Congar, is not synonymous with a theological problem to be 'solved,' as it were. It is, rather, an intrinsic dimension of what it means to be human" (127). Ultimately Meszaros argues that the economy of doctrine "give(s) doctrine a real role in the plan of salvation" (240), in which the Incarnation is the "key to giving a theological account of the historical conditions of doctrine" (240).

The progression of Meszaros's argument is centered upon two challenges that modernity poses to Catholic theology, described in Chapter One as, 1) "the discovery of the subj ect or the analysis of what the subj ect brings to knowledge and to the world," and 2) "the discovery of history, change, or development" (18).

Chapters Two through Five examine the nature of and connection between the "subject" and "history." Chapter Two looks specifically at how Newman's attention to the subject and history informs Congar's theory of doctrinal development. Here, Meszaros observes that "Congar definitely sees Newman's epistemic reflections on the subject as the basis for how the ecclesial subject penetrates the deposit [of faith]" (95). Chapter Three builds upon the notion of the Church's "mind" or "conscience" as the subject, which describes the active nature of the ecclesial subject and examines the intrinsic causes of development. Chapter Four investigates the relationship between the subject and history as it sets the stage for examining extrinsic,⁴ or historical, causes of tradition. Chapter five examines how history, or extrinsic causes, bear upon the Church's doctrine.

In Chapter Six, Meszaros proposes a theory of doctrinal development, based firmly on ideas found in Newman and Congar, in which certain key principles are maintained: "the unity and finality of revelation based on, and culminating in, the coming of Jesus Christ; the homogeneity of revelation based on the Truth that is God who neither deceives nor is deceived; and the communicability and knowability of revelation implied in the very notion of revelation" (198).

Meszaros's work functions at the intersection of several interrelated subfields within Newman studies, particularly 1) the historical and theological reception of Newman's thought concerning the doctrine of revelation and 2) an application of Newman's thought into a contemporary understanding of revelation, which is built upon the notion of an active ecclesial subject.

This book, which originated as Meszaros's doctoral thesis for the Catholic University of Louvain...