In John Senior’s The Death of Christian Culture, he compares Matthew Arnold’s evolutionary view of Christianity and culture to the developmental view of the same espoused by Cardinal J. H. Newman. Whereas Arnold saw Christianity and Culture working alongside one another to achieve perfection, a word Arnold redefines not as having become (per facere) but as always becoming (i.e.,evolutionary), Newman saw it as just the opposite.
Senior writes,
Evolution, Newman insists, is not development. In development, what is given once and for all in the beginning is merely made explicit. What was given once and for all in Scripture and Tradition have been clarified in succeeding generations, but only by addition, never contradiction; whereas evolution proceeds by negation…Put positively, development is radically conservative, permitting only that change which helps doctrine remain true by defining errors that arise in every age against it.
As a teacher approaches the great responsibility of educating the next generation—what the world is like, how it works, and to what end it was created—said teacher will have to decide up front whether he or she views the truth of Christianity and Culture—the very essence of all education—as evolutionary (always becoming) or developmental (having become but being made more explicit).
For, as the African Proverb contends, a man who tries to walk two roads will eventually split his pants.
