How practice tests and sometimes corrects doctrine

Program / Course 25: Theological Synthesis / Lesson 4.4

What you will learn

• Explain how the lived results of a belief can count as evidence about it.
• Describe cases in which practice led the church to re-examine or correct its teaching.
• Distinguish a correction of doctrine from a correction of how doctrine was applied.
• State the dangers of letting practice or experience judge doctrine.

The big idea

The previous lesson showed that doctrine shapes practice. The relation also runs the other way. When a teaching produces cruelty, neglect or despair, that is a reason to ask whether it has been understood correctly. Jesus taught that a tree is known by its fruit (Matthew 7:16 to 20). Christians have at times reformed teaching or its use after seeing its results, as in debates over slavery and the treatment of Jews. Yet practice cannot simply override Scripture and tradition, because practice can also be mistaken.

Key terms

Praxis

A Greek word for practice or action, used in theology for practice informed by theory and in turn shaping it.

Fruit

A biblical image for the results of a life or teaching, such as love, joy and peace (Galatians 5:22), or their opposites.

Reform

Change in teaching or practice aimed at restoring what is believed to be faithful.

Abuse

The misuse of a doctrine or office to harm. Where a harmful result follows from a teaching itself, the case is different.

Reception

The process by which the church as a whole accepts, tests and lives a teaching over time.

Sensus fidelium

A Latin phrase meaning the sense of the faithful. In Catholic teaching it is the shared instinct for the faith held by the whole body of believers.

Pastoral

Having to do with the care of people in a church, including counsel for particular situations.

Background

Jesus said that false prophets are known by their fruits (Matthew 7:20). Paul tells the Corinthians that a teaching must be tested (1 Thessalonians 5:21). The reasoning is that a teaching that claims to come from God and produces hatred is probably not what it says it is. The church has at times applied this principle to itself and to its teachers.

This is a delicate subject. It may seem to make experience a judge over Scripture and tradition. The Christian traditions answer in different ways. This lesson describes how practice has worked as a test, offers cases and states the limits, so that the student can see both the value and the risk.

Step-by-step explanation

Step 1: Fruit as evidence

A teaching that is believed to be true should be able to bear fruit that fits its claims. If the gospel is about love, then a community shaped by it should show love. If it does not, there are three possibilities: the teaching is true but poorly applied, the teaching has been misunderstood, or the teaching is false. Distinguishing them is the work of careful judgment.

The test is not popularity or comfort. The prophets often were unpopular. The test is fidelity to the character of Christ and to the shape of the Bible’s moral teaching.

Step 2: Cases where practice led to reexamination

Slavery was defended by many Christians, using texts such as Ephesians 6:5, for centuries. Others, such as William Wilberforce and many Quakers and abolitionists, argued from the creation of all people in God’s image, from Exodus and from the example of Christ. Over time, nearly all churches came to teach that slavery is wrong. Historians debate how much the change came from within the Bible’s own logic and how much from wider social movements, and Christians on both sides of the change appealed to Scripture.

A second case is the treatment of Jews. After the Holocaust many churches reexamined teachings that had fed contempt. The Catholic Church’s declaration Nostra Aetate in 1965 repudiated hatred of Jews, and many Protestant churches issued statements too. The reexamination led to a better reading of Romans 9 to 11, which many take to say that God’s gifts to Israel are irrevocable.

Step 3: Distinguish doctrine from its application

Sometimes the correction concerns how a doctrine was applied, not the doctrine. For instance, the claim that Christ is the only way to God has been used to justify violence, and Christians have answered that this is a misuse, since Christ taught love of enemies. Other times a correction affects the teaching itself, as in the shift on slavery. Telling the two apart requires reading the sources and being honest about what they say.

Traditions differ in how they describe such changes. Catholic teaching speaks of development and says that the substance of doctrine does not change. Some Protestants speak of reform according to the word. Critics outside the churches see them as changes in doctrine under pressure.

Step 4: The role of the whole church

Practice becomes a reliable test when it is the practice of the whole church over time and not a single group’s experience. Catholic teaching describes this as the sense of the faithful, and many traditions speak of reception, in which the church tests a teaching by living with it. Eastern writers appeal to the consensus of the fathers and the believing people.

A single person’s strong feelings, or a movement of a single generation, do not carry the same weight. They may point to something real, but they require testing.

Step 5: The limits and dangers

If practice judged everything, doctrine would become whatever works or whatever is accepted. The cross itself looks like failure by worldly measures. Faithful teaching has often produced suffering for believers. So practice cannot be the only test. A balanced view holds that fruit matters, that Scripture and the long tradition also matter, and that these should be weighed together, with humility about one’s own blind spots.

1. What fruit does a given belief of mine produce in my life and in my community?
2. When a teaching seems to cause harm, how do I decide whether the teaching or its use is at fault?
3. Are there cases where the church changed its mind in a way I now accept? How did that happen?
4. How do I avoid letting my culture’s moral sense decide what I believe?
5. What would a faithful correction look like, and who has the standing to make it?
6. What would be the cost of ignoring a bad fruit?

Examples

Different perspectives

Catholic

Catholic teaching holds that doctrine develops but does not contradict itself, and that the whole body of the faithful has a sense of the faith that the magisterium takes into account. Corrections of past practice, such as the statements on the Jewish people at Vatican II, are explained as clarifications of what the faith always implied, though critics say they involve real change.

Orthodox

Orthodox theology holds that the faith has been preserved unchanged, and that errors in practice are failures to live it. The believing people have a role as guardians of the faith, as in the rejection of the union with Rome at Florence in the fifteenth century, which the people and many clergy refused to accept.

Protestant

Protestants hold that the church must be always reforming according to the word of God. The Reformers criticized what they saw as practices without biblical basis, such as the sale of indulgences. Later Protestants have used the same principle in other reforms. The risk, noted by critics, is that appeals to Scripture can be used to justify nearly any change.

Secular and critical views

Historians note that moral changes in the churches often followed changes in society and that churches have sometimes led and sometimes followed. Some argue that the churches simply adapt to their culture. Christian writers reply that the fruit test is internal to the faith and that reform movements often challenged their own cultures.

Why it matters

Any serious worldview should allow for being wrong. The fruit test is a way for a believer to examine whether a teaching has been understood and lived rightly, and it protects against the pride of treating one’s current reading as beyond question. It must be used with care, since it can be misused to drop hard teachings. Knowing both sides prepares a student for the audit of their own commitments later in this course.

Common misunderstandings

Knowledge check

Think it through

1. Is there a teaching you were given that you later found harmful? What did you do with it?
2. How do you tell the difference between conscience and cultural pressure?
3. What would you want a community to do if it found that a long-held practice had caused harm?

Independent assignment

A fruit audit

In your own notebook, write 400 to 600 words. Choose a belief that you hold and describe its effects on your life and on others. Apply the five steps of this lesson: What fruit does it bear? Could any bad fruit come from misuse instead of the belief itself? What do Scripture and the tradition say? Conclude with what you will keep, revise or study further.

Further study

• Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (5 volumes) On how doctrine develops and is received.
• C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain On how suffering tests belief.
• John Chrysostom, On the Priesthood On pastoral responsibility.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fallacies On errors of reasoning to avoid when judging by results.
• Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church) Includes teaching on the sense of the faithful.
• Matthew 7:16 By their fruits ye shall know them.
• 1 Thessalonians 5:21 Prove all things.
• John 9:3 Jesus rejects the link between a man’s blindness and sin.