development of doctrine should work like an insight, which is a flash that unifies the disparate, makes radiant the previously unintelligible, and floods the body with a pleasure unique to the mind’s eros.[1] With insight achieved, the tension of inquiry finds a release, and the innate drive to know leaps forward to its terminus in a rational judgment that concludes either yes,
on the basis of sufficient evidence, this insight is indeed so, or no—back to the drawing board. What is true here on the level of the individual mind applies as well to the mind of the Church, to the body of Christ in its joyous and endless exegetical task. In that searching of the Scriptures which Christ enjoins (John 5:39),
the Spirit’s own searching of the deep things of God (1 Cor. 2:10) becomes, mirabile dictu, accessible to the Church. And when Christ’s ecclesial body communes in the Lord’s scriptural flesh, the latter becomes the matrix for the mind’s unending play of inquiry and insight, as the questions provoked by history’s uninterrupted march return to the Church to its perpetual sources in order to discern the mind of Christ (1 Cor 2:16).
And so the game of interpretation begins! The polyphony of biblical voices in the canon harmonizes under the baton of an Athanasius’s powerful hand; the nuances of the Law shine forth under an eye as keen as the Damascene’s; a Newman surveys the history of interpretation and, like a native citizen of the place, reassures us that this difficult terrain can be a land of delights.
In sum: the insight is delivered; the Church, in time, accepts it; and dogma moves on together with the Church, ready for the next question the Spirit’s desire and the mission of the Church will conspire to incite. Whatever new understanding is gained in this process of doctrine unfolding
will eventually penetrate so deeply into the texture of the Church’s mind that for its future members, it will appear remarkable that the Church could ever have thought differently or kept latent what is so blindingly obvious. For it is a mark of an insight that the distance separating before and after gapes like a canyon’s shocked grin.
