Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 178:712 (Oct 2021)
Article: Aggiornamento
Author: Douglas A. Sweeney

BSac 178:712 (October-December 2021) p. 387

Aggiornamento

Douglas A. Sweeney

Douglas A. Sweeney is Dean and Professor of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School, Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama.

* This is the fourth article in the four-part series “Sources of Authority for Teaching Christian Doctrine: A Brief Historical Sketch,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 4–7, 2020.

“The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knitted together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love” (Ephesians 4:11–16, NRSV).

In the first lecture of this series, we talked about the sending of the Spirit and the spread of Christian doctrine during early church history. In the second installment, we treated creeds, canons, church councils, and the best-known contests over biblical exegesis in the post-canonical era. The third lecture covered the best-known part of our story—the part in which Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants alike debated the relative authority of Scripture, Tradition (now spelled with a capital T), and leaders of the church in the teaching of Christian doctrine. But we ended with some questions that remain to be addressed in this final lecture. By the early twentieth century, the three main branches of the global Christian church still disagreed sharply on the issues discussed in the last lecture—undermining the unity and witness of God’s people, not to mention their ability to transmit the faith in a uniform way. Major differences persisted regarding the nature of and best ways to teach Christianity, and we wondered whether the

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churches could surmount them. Let’s look at what has happened during the last hundred years.

Before the mid-twentieth century, Roman Catholics had a rough time gaining much ground with Cardinal Newman’s understanding of the development of doctrine, circumventing the strictures set at Trent and Vatican I, and incorporating t...