Bogoslovska smotra, Vol. 90 No. 4, 2020.
Original scientific paper
John Henry Newman on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Contemporary Difficulties in the Understanding of the Development of Christian Doctrine Amidst the Commodification of Matter
Šimo Šokčević
orcid.org/0000-0002-8171-3437
; Catholic Faculty of Theology in Đakovo, University of Josip Juraj Strossmayer, Đakovo, Croatia
Abstract
Starting from John Henry Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, the intention of this article is to show that one of the main reasons for the failure to understand the development of Christian doctrine is the loss of meaning and purpose of material reality. The first part of the article discusses how Newman uses the analogy between life and ideas in order to bring forth criteria of the development of ideas that he then applies to the development of Christian doctrine. These criteria show the importance of concrete material reality that leads us, through symbiosis with conceptual and spiritual, to the Truth. The second part of the article draws attention to reductionisms that degraded the importance of matter in Newman’s times. The author reaches the conclusion that those reductionisms were only the beginning of the commodification of that same matter; the problem that we are dealing with today and that has direct bearing on the understanding of the development of Christian doctrine.
Keywords
John Henry Newman; Christian doctrine; analogy; matter; commodification.
Hrčak ID:
254566
URI
Publication date:
23.12.2020.
Visits: 736 *