Peter Leithart is one of the most insightful Protestant thinkers of our day, but his recent post on “Tradition and the Individual Theologian” gave this Protestant pause. He begins with the assertion that “Catholics, Orthodox, and not a few Protestants have been known to reject theological novelties with a wave of the hand and an appeal to tradition.” They have, in other words, set up a dichotomy between tradition and new theological ideas. And, based on his last (rather startling) paragraph, Leithart readily places Newman in this camp. Newman was mistaken in asserting that to know history was to reject Protestantism, Leithart argues, for the history of theology is the history of individual thinkers who protested against the prevailing tradition and suggested new ways to think the tradition. So to object to all theological innovation—to think of tradition as a permanent feature of the theological landscape—is to misunderstand the history of theology.
Leithart is correct in pointing out that setting up a dichotomy between “Tradition” and “the individual” is highly problematic. But Leithart agrees with Newman more than he knows. We need only look to Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) to see that Newman thinks of the history of orthodox theology as a history of change and development, developed precisely by rethinking the tradition in light of new questions and suggesting new implications of the basic principles of the tradition.
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