Has the development of Church doctrine reached a dead end?

This column is part one of a two-part series. Read part two here.

A sense of disorientation

I would like to give voice to a state of mind that first arose in connection with the debates prompted by the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea (325–2025), and later in response to cultural developments in ecclesial life: an almost unconscious sense of disorientation that needs to be brought to awareness so that it can be worked through.

What I mean is that, in what the newly proclaimed Doctor of the Church John H. Newman — the English theologian and cardinal whom Pope Leo XIV declared a Doctor of the Church on Nov. 1, 2025 — called the “development of Christian doctrine” (or the development of dogma).

I perceive a serious deficit: we have lost our way, and perhaps we are stuck in a dead end. No path toward further development is in sight.

I would therefore like to offer, quietly, a few observations — not much more than brief notes — which I believe may, in embryonic form, point toward a renewed research perspective.

A long-term perspective

As is well known, from a Parmenidean perspective, the truth of reality, understood as non-concealment, as revelation, as manifest evidence, is called aletheia. It is contrasted with opinion, which may be fallacious and deceptive, is subjective, and is called doxa.

Neither of these is merely a concept; both are lived experiences. In Greek thought, doxa, as uncertain knowledge, was also understood as the opposite of episteme, that is, scientific knowledge.

Plato regarded faith (pistis) as a form of opinion. In the Socratic context, however, homologia was also valued as the convergence of different opinions on the basis of a multifaceted dialogical relationship.

The Greek Bible retained the polarity between truth and opinion. But — as Mancini^[1] observed in Fragment on God — a semantic reversal took place in the New Testament: doxa came to mean splendor, majesty, the glory of God, a powerful light that is perceived and illuminates, including the glory of Christ crucified and risen. Hence, the praise offered by Christians who glorify God is called doxology.

Thus, for Christians, sound doctrine is ortho-doxa, or orthodoxy, that is, right opinion. The term dogma is also connected to this right opinion, which nevertheless remains an opinion.

I will seek to reflect on the question of dogma within a doxological pleroma — a Greek term meaning “fullness,” used in theology for the fullness of divine being — that is, with a doxological intention.

But first, I would like to outline the problem from which the present state of mind arises and which gives rise to the need for a “second sailing” — a more arduous undertaking because we can no longer rely on the unfurled sails that characterized the Christian order of society.

I will therefore identify the problem through four quotations from four very different but equally well-known authors. All four have the merit of viewing history “from a distance and over the long term.”

Detailed and philologically accurate reconstructions are obviously necessary. But an excessively close-up perspective can cause us to lose sight of the overall historical meaning. Historiography is miniature painting, but it is also a fresco.

Only the fresco gives us a broad, comprehensive view and the general “meaning” of things. This allows us to glimpse the problem, which may otherwise remain “invisible” or at least very blurred under a microscope, even in an analysis that is valuable and essential, such as those that have reconstructed the various positions surrounding the Council of Nicaea.

Love here and now

The first voice belongs to a classic figure of contemporary philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead, an important mathematical philosopher who collaborated with Bertrand Russell and was also a theorist of relationalism.

In his work Process and Reality, written as early as 1927–28 and published in 1929, he wrote:

When the Western world accepted Christianity, Caesar was the master, and the accredited text of Western theology was edited by his Jurists. The Code of Justinian and his theology are two volumes which express a single movement of the human spirit. […]

[…] the deeper idolatry of fashioning God in the image of the Imperial rulers of Egypt, Persia, and Rome was retained. The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar.

In the great formative period of theistic philosophy […] after a continuous development contemporary with civilization, three lines of thought emerge which, amid many variations in detail, respectively fashion God in the image of (1) an Imperial ruler, (2) a personification of moral energy, (3) an ultimate philosophical principle. […]

There is, however, in the original Christianity of the Galilean, another suggestion which does not fit well into any of these three main lines of thought. It does not emphasize the ruling Caesar, or the ruthless moralist, or the unmoved mover.

It dwells upon the tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operate by love; and it finds its purpose in the present immediacy of a kingdom which is not of this world. Love neither rules, nor is it unmoved; also it is a little oblivious as to morals. It does not look to the future; for it finds its own reward in the immediate present.^[2]

The church lives by the gospel, not Roman law

The second voice belongs to a great theologian, Marie-Dominique Chenu — the French Dominican theologian (1895–1990) widely credited as an intellectual architect of the Second Vatican Council’s reforms — who, at the very beginning of the Second Vatican Council, developed his now-famous analysis of the end of the Constantinian era.

Many aspects of this analysis deserve to be recalled and developed, since Chenu only touched on them briefly. But I will limit myself to one, concerning the political and cultural — or rather, political-cultural — consequences of the agreement between Constantine and the Church:

The unity of faith, the Church’s triumph, becomes a principle of cohesion for the Empire, while schisms and heresies threaten to divide it. […] The other side of the coin is the political persecution of heretics by a State that has become the Church’s “secular arm.”^[3]The sacred is profaned, if one may put it that way.^[4]

First, the assimilation of Roman law, a normal consequence of imperial decisions. […] It is the incorporation, sometimes to the point of compromise, of evangelical perspectives into a non-Christian system; but it is also, at the same time, the penetration of classical law by Christian sentiment […]

[…] History attests to the advantages and the price of this conception.

A second cultural consequence was the primacy of reason over the other forms of spiritual life. The truth of the logos, the solid objectivity of the concept, the certainties of science as it discovers the origins and reasons behind things, the rationalization of life and of virtue itself — all remain the beneficial legacy of the Greco-Roman West.

The Church has greatly benefited from all this, especially with regard to the dogmatic expression of its faith. […] But its intellectuals have not always known how to remain sensitive to the atmosphere of mystery; and, in an inferior form of scholasticism from which we are still suffering, they have yielded to the poorest abstractions of the rational method, even in elementary catechisms.^[5]

Here are the main elements […]

First, the tendency to define the human being on the basis of human nature, abstracting not only from individuals but also from their different circumstances […]

Then, at the opposite pole, there is the equally idealistic notion of the person. The word itself has a significant history, dating back to the Constantinian language of jurists and philosophers, and soon afterward of theologians. […]

Finally, guiding these speculations and choices through an underlying influence, there is the dualism of matter and spirit, […] which is not entirely consistent with biblical anthropology […]^[6]

[But] the Church “lives” by the Gospel, not by Roman law, nor by Aristotelian philosophy or liberal culture.^[7]

Wanting to define once and for all

Moving into the 21st century, the third voice is that of a great intellectual, a professor of Judaism who described himself as a Christian Pharisee: Paolo De Benedetti — the Italian scholar of Judaism (1927–2016) known for his work on biblical hermeneutics and interfaith dialogue. In a book published in 2014, he observed:

Just as there is not only one Jesus in the New Testament, there is not only one Christ, nor is there only one Christology. […] There are different Christologies. The trouble is that the great Church, which was nourished by Greek philosophy, felt the need, at the Councils of Nicaea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon, to define things about Jesus Christ once and for all (because the Church’s obsession is always to define things once and for all).

These definitions continue to be repeated without anyone realizing that the words we use no longer have anything like the meaning they had back then, and that these definitions now hinder reflection.^[8]

[…] Should these Christologies, which were constructed between the second and sixth centuries and subsequently developed further, not only be updated but also replaced? […] The Churches continue to recite a Creed of which Neusner says that, as far as Jesus was concerned, the first four lines and the last two were acceptable, but not the ones in between.

And when a Christian recites it, that Christian does not know what he or she is saying. Just consider the word substance: how many meanings does the word have today? It ranges from chemistry and physics to cooking, pathology, and many other fields.^[9]

Changing the way we speak of God

Finally, the fourth voice belongs to a lively and provocative writer and commentator, Michela Murgia, who died in August 2023 at age 51 after a battle with cancer, as reported by ANSA. In a work published in 2022, she reflected on long-term historical processes:

For three hundred years, the Christian religion had as its primary objective survival, both for itself and for those who embraced it. At the time, it was self-evident and even consoling to imagine that God himself was oppressed, just like the community of believers who identified with him. It is no surprise that the period when Christianity presented itself as the religion of the humblest […] effectively coincided with the era of persecution and the catacombs. […]

It took decades for things to change and for the new religion to lose the status of strangeness and subversion that, in its early centuries, had made it the object of social suspicion. When that happened, its representational needs also changed. But those who believed in Jesus had to wait for the imperial openings under Constantine and Theodosius before they could portray God, to themselves and to others, in a less marginal way.^[10]

The historical evidence is that, from Constantine onward — that is, as Christianity moved from being the faith of the dispossessed to becoming the religion of everyone — it could no longer deny the powerful the claim to represent themselves in God.

The question today is how that representation, which has meanwhile become the established norm, can still claim to endure, even though the problem of survival that might initially have justified the ethical compromise no longer exists. If times have changed, why have the tools we use to speak of God not changed as well?^[11]

A call for a new council

These are four distinctly Christian voices that converge in identifying the problem with considerable clarity, precisely because they adopt a long-term historical perspective and a broad horizon.

We have a problem. A formidable problem. And perhaps we have lost our way.

Addressing our problem adequately would require a great Council of all Christians: let us call it a second Council of Jerusalem — a reference to the first Council of Jerusalem described in Acts 15, where the apostles debated how far Gentile converts needed to adopt Jewish law.

Footnotes:

[1] See I. Mancini, Frammentosu Dio, Morcelliana, Brescia, 2000.
[2] A.N. Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, Macmillan, 1929; Italian translation of the first edition, Il processo e la realtà. Saggio di cosmologia, Il Saggiatore, Milan, 1965, pp. 648–649.
[3] M.-D. Chenu – M. Pesce, La fine dell’eracostantiniana, Morcelliana, Brescia, 2013, p. 15.
[4] Ibid., p. 17.
[5] Ibid., pp. 19–21.
[6] Ibid., pp. 22–23.
[7] Ibid., pp. 27–28.
[8] P. De Benedetti, Quale Gesù? Una prospettivamarrana, Morcelliana, Brescia, 2014, p. 38.
[9] Ibid., p. 40.
[10] M. Murgia, God save the Queer. Catechismofemminista, Einaudi, Turin, 2022, pp. 56–57.
[11] Ibid., pp. 61–62.

This is a translated and edited version of the Italian-language column that first appeared on Viandanti and has been republished with permission.