Sermon Blog
Oxford Univ. Sermon n. 15, The Developments of Religious Doctrine, part 3
March 15, 2025
This final of three posts covers the last part of Newman’s important sermon, The Developments of Religious Doctrine. Newman will end the sermon asserting that although dogmas about God are very imperfect they constitute true knowledge. He considers developments in doctrine regarding the Blessed Trinity and the Incarnation. He begins by pointing out that here the objects of study are not parts of a system, but of God Himself, who is one.
The believer has in his mind the impression of God as a one, whole, and integral being. God is not a series of propositions. We consider different aspects or attributes of an idea and its relations because of the nature of our knowing, which is piecemeal, though God is one.
However, “the Catholic dogmas are, after all, but symbols of a Divine fact, which, far from being compassed by those very propositions, would not be exhausted, nor fathomed, by a thousand.”
And yet we acquire “knowledge of God” which is such that along with St. Paul, we use the phrases: “Christ in us,” “Christ dwelling in us by faith,” “Christ formed in us,” and “Christ manifesting Himself unto us.”
Newman explains that we know reality in various ways beginning with the senses. Through baptism God gives the soul the capacity to receive impressions of the supernatural. We gain knowledge through the study and meditation of the Sacred Scriptures and the study of dogmatic theology. Next we put these religious ideas into language to fix, teach, and transmit. Dogmas are definitions of those impressions.
Theology reasons by deducing one proposition from another, but it is studying the sacred reality of a living being. He writes: “For though the development of an idea is a deduction of proposition from proposition, these propositions are ever formed in and round the idea itself (so to speak), and are in fact one and all only aspects of it.” The Church Fathers often argue from one particular passage or a word from Scripture as a safeguard from heretical deductions (of course this also runs the risk of the error of not understanding a passage in the entire context of revelation).
The Scriptures provide the outline of our religious knowledge and through the use of reason men develop these ideas, “one dogma creates another, by the same right by which it was itself created.” The Scriptures begin a series of developments which they do not finish. An example of this is what we profess about God in the Athanasian Creed.
“Those propositions imply each other, as being parts of one whole; so that to deny one is to deny all, and to invalidate one is to deface and destroy the view itself. One thing alone has to be impressed on us by Scripture, the Catholic idea, and in it they all are included.”
Doctrinal error or heresy consists in embracing one proposition of the Creed alone: “it being almost a definition of heresy, that it fastens on some one statement as if the whole truth, to the denial of all others, and as the basis of a new faith.”
Newman addresses an important objection: how can the mind really know realities which are supernatural, or convey to the mind with earthly images the idea of the Invisible? “The words ‘Person,’ ‘Substance,’ ‘Consubstantial,’ ‘Generation,’ ‘Procession,’ ‘Incarnation,’ ‘Taking of the manhood into God,’ and the like, have either a very abject and human meaning, or none at all.”
When we are speaking about God we use metaphors, but unlike with sensible realities – things – in this case we are using words from the Scriptures that tell us about God, for instance that He is Father or that He is a Son. These are not metaphors.
Newman admits that our knowledge of God is limited to our human capacities in a similar way that knowledge of material reality by our senses is also limited. “All that we know, strictly speaking, is the existence of the impressions our senses make on us; and yet we scruple not to speak as if they conveyed to us the knowledge of material substances. Let, then, the Catholic dogmas, as such, be freely admitted to convey no true idea of Almighty God, but only an earthly one, gained from earthly figures.”
Even so our earthly ideas can correspond to a heavenly archetype. Now on earth St. Paul tells us “we see in a mirror, dimly” (1 Cor 13:12). “Meanwhile we are allowed such an approximation to the truth as earthly images and figures may supply to us.” Human knowledge of religious matters is like the knowledge a child or a blind person has of the world. The diversity of languages presents another serious difficulty for communicating ideas.
Newman comments on different modes of knowing: fables, reasoning, the classification of living beings. Mathematics looks at extension, number, motion and “increase.” They are all instruments or “economical representations” of reality. Although they are symbols, they stand for real things.
“They are all developments of one and the same range of ideas; they are all instruments of discovery as to those ideas.” Useful as they are, at length we reach contradictions and come to a limit of what we can know. In religion this is called “a mystery.”
Yet, it is not a system of empty symbols. It is useful for our purposes. “Though we use it with caution, still we use it, as being the nearest approximation to the truth which our condition admits.”
Newman then turns to an analogy of the seven notes of the musical scale which are relatively few and yet represent the wide sphere of sound. A composer can create a beautiful composition which is “inexhaustible evolution and disposition of notes, so rich yet so simple, so intricate yet so regulated, so various yet so majestic.” Is it a mere sound that comes and then perishes? Likewise, is it possible, he asks, to reduce all that we know in theology to propositions which come and go without representing something real?
He replies: “No; they have escaped from some higher sphere; they are the outpourings of eternal harmony in the medium of created sound; they are echoes from our Home; they are the voice of Angels, or the Magnificat of Saints, or the living laws of Divine Governance, or the Divine Attributes; something are they besides themselves, which we cannot compass, which we cannot utter,—though mortal man, and he perhaps not otherwise distinguished above his fellows, has the gift of eliciting them.”
We must rely that God, who is merciful and True, gives us knowledge of Himself which leads us to heaven. “We have an instinct within us, impelling us, we have external necessity forcing us, to trust our senses, and we may leave the question of their substantial truth for another world, “till the day break, and the shadows flee away.””
There are so many divine truths of which we do not know. Newman mentions a few examples: “whether He knows all creatures in Himself?” “whether the blessed see all things possible and future in Him?” “whether relation is the form of the Divine Persons?” “in what sense the Holy Spirit is Divine Love?”
We know the truths of the Creeds as much as our minds can grasp them, despite the apparent contradictions. The fault we must avoid is to let our reason think that it is wiser than what is revealed. Reason can ascertain difficulties but is not able to remove them. We must approach the Faith like little children, and pray to God the Father of lights that we may use reason as He would that we use it with the Truth in mind and with a view to his glory.
