A charming and thought-provoking post , to which I will just add a few minor nitpicks. I cannot stand the framing of everything through Newman’s dubious concept of development of dogma, which IMO is a slow-motion bomb blowing up Catholic orthodoxy. In fact I don’t see that this adds anything to the piece, which stands perfectly well without it! All your excellent points about the antiquity of Christian acceptance of a long timeframe between the life of the Lord and his Second Coming work fine without this bizarre insistence that unchanging dogma develops according to completely arbitrary and post hoc criteria of authenticity. For modern Catholicism, of course, with its fixation on the theological authority of the Pope, this sort of thing is quite nice because ultimately both Newman and his modern interpreters simply made the authoritarian turn down the road of church history and turned authentic doctrinal development a simple matter of “whatever Rome wills”, but this is IMO historically unsupportable and an evangelistic disaster.
Another nitpick: ‘and even a committed Augustinian notion of perseverance as entirely God’s gift maintains that “a man who does not persevere fails by his own fault.”’ - I think a secular audience will misunderstand this. Augustine’s “fault” is the fallen nature of man: it is not a personal capacity of any individual. Man sins through his own inherited weakness and natural propensity towards sin- the “fault”—but can only do good through the grace of God. But I think nowadays this is widely misinterpreted as saying that human nature is morally neutral and individual persons simply make good or bad choices in some kind of vacuum, whereas the Augustinian position is that all of us are born defective, entirely irredeemably so absent the grace of God and so we will inevitably choose the bad. I’m sure you know this perfectly well, of course, but I think this audience will not.
But again, these are minor nitpicks. To add some more scriptural evidence to the contention that Christian longtermism is theologically viable: Genesis 15:5, where we can, I think, read the text as God showing Abraham all the stars of the universe, by a special grace of extraordinary vision. This would, I think, imply 300 billion trillion descendants of Abraham, which the Earth could never support, so logically I think this must imply an eventual inter-Galactic Empire. In Haggai 2:9, of course, God promises that “the glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former”, which we can read as narrowly referring to the rebuilt Temple, more broadly as referring to the New Testament, but which we might read even more broadly as a perpetual promise of the slow ascent of man, up the skyscrapers, towards the stars, and towards the great eventual reunion with the divine. These are, I admit, more speculative readings, but somewhere from heaven I like to think Origen smiles down on them.
Thank you for sharing your response. You make some great points for me to think about.
The only thing I’d add is that, writing to a Catholic theological audience, you have to really work quite hard to justify saying anything new, especially if you want to gain traction in more conservative circles. I guess ultimately it’s a rhetorical thing: Newman’s idea of the development of dogma is a generally accepted framework for legitimising novel ideas, and I believe is applicable in this case in a softer use, as an example of how, in light of new knowledge outside of theology, maintaining dogmatic principles can lead to some surprising implications.
Yes, that makes sense. I am actually a traditionalist Anglo-Catholic with a strong Augustinian bent, so in my corner of the Church of England things are a little different and I think there’s more acceptance of novelty. Nevertheless, I wonder if even in more conservative Catholic circles it would be easier to gain acceptance of more novel takes if the primary framing was exegetical rather than top-down doctrinal, if that make sense? After all, the Fathers always do theology through exegesis rather than vice versa, and I still feel the possibility space of things we can say about Scripture remains vastly under-explored.
A charming and thought-provoking post , to which I will just add a few minor nitpicks. I cannot stand the framing of everything through Newman’s dubious concept of development of dogma, which IMO is a slow-motion bomb blowing up Catholic orthodoxy. In fact I don’t see that this adds anything to the piece, which stands perfectly well without it! All your excellent points about the antiquity of Christian acceptance of a long timeframe between the life of the Lord and his Second Coming work fine without this bizarre insistence that unchanging dogma develops according to completely arbitrary and post hoc criteria of authenticity. For modern Catholicism, of course, with its fixation on the theological authority of the Pope, this sort of thing is quite nice because ultimately both Newman and his modern interpreters simply made the authoritarian turn down the road of church history and turned authentic doctrinal development a simple matter of “whatever Rome wills”, but this is IMO historically unsupportable and an evangelistic disaster.
Another nitpick: ‘and even a committed Augustinian notion of perseverance as entirely God’s gift maintains that “a man who does not persevere fails by his own fault.”’ - I think a secular audience will misunderstand this. Augustine’s “fault” is the fallen nature of man: it is not a personal capacity of any individual. Man sins through his own inherited weakness and natural propensity towards sin- the “fault”—but can only do good through the grace of God. But I think nowadays this is widely misinterpreted as saying that human nature is morally neutral and individual persons simply make good or bad choices in some kind of vacuum, whereas the Augustinian position is that all of us are born defective, entirely irredeemably so absent the grace of God and so we will inevitably choose the bad. I’m sure you know this perfectly well, of course, but I think this audience will not.
But again, these are minor nitpicks. To add some more scriptural evidence to the contention that Christian longtermism is theologically viable: Genesis 15:5, where we can, I think, read the text as God showing Abraham all the stars of the universe, by a special grace of extraordinary vision. This would, I think, imply 300 billion trillion descendants of Abraham, which the Earth could never support, so logically I think this must imply an eventual inter-Galactic Empire. In Haggai 2:9, of course, God promises that “the glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former”, which we can read as narrowly referring to the rebuilt Temple, more broadly as referring to the New Testament, but which we might read even more broadly as a perpetual promise of the slow ascent of man, up the skyscrapers, towards the stars, and towards the great eventual reunion with the divine. These are, I admit, more speculative readings, but somewhere from heaven I like to think Origen smiles down on them.
Thank you for sharing your response. You make some great points for me to think about.
The only thing I’d add is that, writing to a Catholic theological audience, you have to really work quite hard to justify saying anything new, especially if you want to gain traction in more conservative circles. I guess ultimately it’s a rhetorical thing: Newman’s idea of the development of dogma is a generally accepted framework for legitimising novel ideas, and I believe is applicable in this case in a softer use, as an example of how, in light of new knowledge outside of theology, maintaining dogmatic principles can lead to some surprising implications.
Dear Fr,
Yes, that makes sense. I am actually a traditionalist Anglo-Catholic with a strong Augustinian bent, so in my corner of the Church of England things are a little different and I think there’s more acceptance of novelty. Nevertheless, I wonder if even in more conservative Catholic circles it would be easier to gain acceptance of more novel takes if the primary framing was exegetical rather than top-down doctrinal, if that make sense? After all, the Fathers always do theology through exegesis rather than vice versa, and I still feel the possibility space of things we can say about Scripture remains vastly under-explored.