Doctrinal Drift,Dance or Development: How Truth Takes Time in the Life of Communion

In recent ecclesiology, which highlights the value of diversity and dialogue and the difficulty of resolving complex issues, the concept of doctrinal development is sometimes reduced merely to the notion that we cannot be sure of things we once thought we knew. While affirming the need for ecclesial humility and uncertainty, the article insists that a truly questioning church is one that also has hope of arriving, eventually, at answers to history's new questions. Passages from Scripture, Augustine and J.H. Newman are used to show that in recent ecclesiological statements of the Anglican Primates, the World Council of Churches and the Catholic theologian Stan Chu Ilo commenting on the 2014–15 Synods on the Family, an imbalanced vision of a church of only questions – prone to doctrinal drift or ‘dance’ – has supplanted a proper vision of a church of both questions and answers, in which authentic development of doctrine is possible.