Januarius J. Asongu, PhD
Saint Monica University

Abstract
The question of doctrinal development remains among the most contested problems in theology and philosophy of religion. Classical traditions affirm the permanence of revealed truth while simultaneously acknowledging historical transformation in doctrinal expression. This tension has generated recurring disputes between doctrinal immutability and theological revisionism. This article advances a constructive account through Critical Synthetic Realism (CSR) , arguing that doctrine necessarily evolves because finite knowers participate in a historically situated process of approximation toward objective truth. Drawing from Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and Newman while engaging modern interlocutors including Karl Rahner, Yves Congar, Hans Küng, Alasdair MacIntyre, Hans Urs von Balthasar, George Lindbeck, Nicholas Wolterstorff, N. T. Wright, Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Thomas Kuhn, and Karl Popper, the article proposes that doctrinal evolution is neither betrayal nor relativism but an inevitable consequence of ontological realism combined with epistemic fallibilism. CSR introduces the concepts of Epistemic Fracture and Epistemic Sovereignty to explain both doctrinal stagnation and authentic development. The article concludes that faithful doctrine must remain historically dynamic while preserving ontological continuity with reality.

Keywords: doctrine, doctrinal development, Critical Synthetic Realism, Epistemic Fracture, Epistemic Sovereignty, theological method, tradition, truth, fallibilism, infallibility, Ressourcement

Introduction
One of the most enduring theological tensions concerns whether doctrine changes.
Religious traditions frequently affirm two propositions simultaneously: (1) Truth is eternal, and (2) Doctrine develops over time. To critics—whether Protestant polemicists targeting Roman Catholicism or secular philosophers dismissing religion as inherently irrational—these appear incompatible. If doctrine changes, either earlier generations were mistaken about the content of revelation, or truth itself changes across historical contexts. Yet neither conclusion is satisfactory for communities that understand themselves as preserving an original deposit of faith while extending it into new circumstances.

Classical Christianity has always maintained continuity while exhibiting undeniable development. The language of the Trinity—homoousios, the three hypostases, the filioque—emerged through centuries of conciliar debate. Christological formulations evolved from the Apostolic preaching through Nicaea (325), Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431), and Chalcedon (451). Sacramental theology expanded from baptism and eucharist to the medieval sevenfold schema, then to Vatican II's retrieval of the baptismal priesthood. Moral theology transformed from monastic penitentials to Thomistic virtue ethics to personalist approaches to bioethics. Ecclesiology developed from localized congregations through papal monarchy to Lumen Gentium's communion model.

The challenge, therefore, is not whether doctrine develops—the historical record forecloses any serious denial—but how such development is possible without collapsing into relativism. If doctrinal formulations are culturally conditioned products of specific historical moments, what warrants treating them as binding for later generations? If later formulations supersede earlier ones, what remains of the Church's claim to teach authoritatively?

This tension is nowhere more acute than in debates surrounding infallibility. The First Vatican Council's definition of papal infallibility (1870) represented a dramatic development in ecclesiological doctrine—one that Newman himself, despite his theory of development, found difficult to accept in its strongest formulation. Yet if the Church is not infallible in any strong sense, then doctrine is necessarily revisable. As Hans Küng argued with characteristic directness, the claim to infallibility cannot be sustained by historical evidence or theological argument; the Church has erred repeatedly, and acknowledging this fallibility is the precondition for honest theological reflection (Küng, 1971). Whether one accepts Küng's conclusion fully or seeks a more nuanced position, his challenge cannot be ignored: a Church that claims infallibility while demonstrating historical fallibility must either explain how these can be reconciled or abandon the claim.

This article proposes Critical Synthetic Realism (CSR) as a framework for resolving this tension without either claiming infallibility or surrendering to relativism. As developed in my recent systematic works (Asongu, 2026a, 2026b, 2026c), CSR argues that doctrine evolves not because truth changes—truth possesses ontological permanence—but because human access to truth remains historically incomplete. As I have stated elsewhere, "doctrines belong to the domain of Conditional Reality: real yet historically conditioned, objective yet subject to development" (Asongu, 2026a, p. 115). Understanding unfolds through time; communities learn; epistemic distortions accumulate and are (sometimes) corrected. Doctrine therefore represents neither immutable propositions detached from history nor infinitely revisable constructions detached from reality. Rather, doctrine constitutes humanity's evolving participation in truth—a participation that is real yet partial, authoritative yet corrigible, binding yet open to deeper penetration.

The argument proceeds in seven movements. 

First, I establish classical foundations for doctrinal development in Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and Newman. 

Second, I engage the major figures of the Ressourcement movement—Rahner, Congar, de Lubac, and Balthasar. 

Third, I examine the infallibility debate through the work of Hans Küng, showing how his critique of infallibility forces a reconsideration of doctrinal authority. 

Fourth, I engage modern philosophical pressures on doctrine: Popper's fallibilism, Kuhn's paradigms, Foucault's knowledge-power analytics, Habermas's communicative rationality, and MacIntyre's tradition-constituted rationality. 

Fifth, I articulate CSR's core commitments—ontological realism, epistemic fallibilism, stratified reality, and the distinction between Conditional Reality and unconditional truth—and introduce the concept of Epistemic Fracture. 

Sixth, I develop the concept of Epistemic Sovereignty as the goal of doctrinal development. Seventh, I conclude by specifying criteria for authentic doctrinal development and distinguishing CSR from alternative models.

The Classical Foundations of Doctrinal Development
Before advancing a constructive proposal, we must establish that the problem of doctrinal development is not a modern imposition on an otherwise static tradition. On the contrary, the major figures of patristic, medieval, and modern theology recognized that understanding unfolds historically—and they built this recognition into their theological methods.

Augustine: Truth Exceeds the Knower
Aurelius Augustinus (354–430) established one of Christianity's earliest and most sophisticated accounts of doctrinal growth. For Augustine, divine truth transcends human cognition in principle, not merely in practice. The human mind, even when illuminated by grace, remains finite; God remains infinite. Understanding therefore advances through progressive illumination while remaining permanently incomplete.

This epistemological humility is nowhere more evident than in Augustine's Retractions, a remarkable text without parallel in the history of philosophy until perhaps Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Written near the end of his life, the Retractions catalogs Augustine's voluminous writings and corrects passages where he had spoken inadequately or erroneously. Consider his posture: "I have undertaken to review my works—my books, letters, and sermons—under the title of Retractions... In these same reviews I do not cease to pass judgment on myself" (Augustine, 1995, p. 3). Truth itself did not change across Augustine's career; rather, Augustine's understanding matured through prayer, study, debate, and pastoral experience.

His famous hermeneutical principle—crede ut intelligas (believe so that you may understand)—captures a dynamic movement rather than static possession (Augustine, 1991, I.ii). Belief initiates inquiry; inquiry deepens understanding; deeper understanding refines belief. This hermeneutical circle precludes final theological closure. The pilgrim church remains unfinished until eschatological fulfillment (Augustine, 1998, XIX.27). Development becomes intrinsic to theology itself.

Augustine's doctrine of the Trinity exemplifies this developmental logic. In De Trinitate, he famously acknowledges that his earlier attempts to articulate Trinitarian doctrine were inadequate: "I have said nothing that is worthy of that ineffable reality" (Augustine, 2002, XV.5). Yet he does not therefore cease speaking. Rather, he offers analogies—the lover, the beloved, and love; memory, understanding, and will—with the explicit acknowledgment that analogies fail. The failure, however, is not a defect in Augustine but a feature of theological language: all human speech about God participates in analogical limitation.

This insight anticipates CSR's distinction between ontology and epistemology. Truth—the reality of God as triune—does not change. But human concepts of that truth develop from simpler formulations (the Apostolic preaching that Jesus is Lord) to more precise ones (the Nicene homoousios) to more speculative ones (Augustine's psychological analogies). Augustine thus provides the deep structure for developmental accounts: ontological stability + epistemic progress.

Anselm: Faith Seeking Understanding
Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) transformed this Augustinian impulse into theological method. His famous principle—fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding)—does not imply passive reception of dogma. On the contrary, faith actively seeks its own expansion. The believer possesses real truth while remaining open to deeper penetration of that truth (Anselm, 2007, Proslogion I).

Anselm's methodological innovation was to treat theology as disciplined inquiry rather than mere repetition of authorities. The Proslogion opens with a prayer that already contains the logic of development: "I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand. Indeed, I believe that unless I believe I shall not understand" (Anselm, 2007, p. 87). Belief establishes the horizon; understanding operates within that horizon; but understanding can expand the horizon itself.

Crucially, Anselm distinguished between understanding and possession. No theological articulation exhausts divine reality. The ontological argument—id quo maius cogitari non potest (that than which nothing greater can be thought)—is not a comprehensive definition of God but a heuristic device for directing the mind toward what exceeds it.

As I have argued elsewhere, CSR extends Anselm's principle beyond theology into all knowledge systems: "If fides quaerens intellectum is the structure of theological knowledge, then analogous principles structure scientific, philosophical, and moral knowledge: trust in the intelligibility of reality seeks understanding of that reality; understanding remains perpetually unfinished" (Asongu, 2026b, p. 89). Anselm thus prefigures CSR's fallibilism: certainty about fundamentals is compatible with corrigibility about formulations.

Aquinas: Participation and Intellectual Humility
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) offers perhaps the strongest classical foundation for doctrinal evolution—though he is often caricatured as the theologian of frozen orthodoxy. This caricature mistakes the reception of Thomism for Aquinas's own method. The historical Aquinas constructed one of the most dynamic epistemologies in the premodern world.

Thomas's epistemology rests on three pillars: (1) knowledge emerges through participation in being; (2) human intellection moves from sensation through abstraction to judgment; (3) no finite intellect fully comprehends infinite being (Aquinas, 1947, I.12.7). The first pillar grounds realism: truth is conformity of intellect to reality. The second pillar grounds fallibilism: abstraction is always selective, always partial. The third pillar grounds development: since God is infinite, theological understanding can always deepen.

Aquinas's doctrine of analogy is especially relevant to CSR. In Summa Theologiae I.13, Aquinas argues that language about God is neither univocal (same meaning as applied to creatures) nor equivocal (completely different meaning) but analogical (related meaning). When we say "God is good" and "Francis is good," goodness is not identical in both cases—God's goodness exceeds creaturely goodness infinitely—nor is the term used arbitrarily. Rather, creaturely goodness participates in and reflects divine goodness, however imperfectly.

The analogical method implies perpetual refinement. Theological concepts are real—they truly refer to God—yet incomplete. Aquinas repeatedly emphasizes that we know God more truly by recognizing what God is not than by asserting what God is (Aquinas, 1947, I.3.0). This via negativa is not agnosticism but epistemic humility: the recognition that every positive theological statement requires supplementation by negation and supereminent affirmation.

Aquinas also distinguished among three levels: (a) reality itself (res ipsa); (b) conceptual mediation (conceptus); (c) linguistic articulation (vox). This layered realism anticipates CSR's stratified ontology, which I have developed as a "multi-level realism in which physical, psychological, social, and spiritual realities coexist irreducibly" (Asongu, 2026b, p. 112). Truth exceeds every doctrinal proposition because propositions exist at the third level while truth ultimately resides at the first. Doctrinal development, on this account, is the progressive refinement of conceptual and linguistic mediations to approximate more faithfully the reality they signify.

Newman and the Recovery of Development
No modern figure shaped this discussion more profoundly than John Henry Newman (1801–1890). While earlier theologians had acknowledged that understanding develops, Newman was the first to argue systematically that development is the condition of continuity—that without development, tradition would be indistinguishable from stagnation and eventual death.

Newman's central insight is elegantly simple: a living idea grows. The Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845/1989) was written at a moment of personal and ecclesial crisis—Newman's conversion from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism—but its argument transcends its polemical origins. Newman needed to show that Roman Catholic doctrines that seemed to Anglicans like innovations were actually authentic developments of apostolic teaching.

His famous "notes" or "tests" of authentic development remain instructive. An authentic development preserves type (the same basic shape as the original), continuity of principles (the same animating commitments), logical sequence (later developments follow from earlier ones), anticipatory power (the earlier anticipates the later), assimilation (the development incorporates relevant external material), and chronic vigor (the development sustains life rather than extinguishing it) (Newman, 1989, pp. 171–206).

Significantly, Newman himself struggled with the First Vatican Council's definition of papal infallibility. While he accepted the definition—he had after all converted to Roman Catholicism in part because he believed the papacy provided a necessary principle of doctrinal authority—he did so with reservations. His famous statement, "I have always opposed the notion of infallibility, and I always shall," reflects a lifelong tension between his conviction that the Church must possess some authoritative teaching office and his recognition that no human institution can claim absolute immunity from error. As Küng would later note, Newman's theory of development, consistently applied, tends toward fallibilism rather than infallibilism: if doctrine develops, earlier formulations were incomplete; if earlier formulations were incomplete, they were not infallible (Küng, 1971, pp. 578–585).

CSR extends Newman in three directions. First, Newman emphasized internal theological development—how doctrines unfold from within the tradition through reflection on scripture and liturgy. CSR adds interdisciplinary learning: science, philosophy, social theory, and historical criticism all provide resources for doctrinal refinement. Second, Newman's tests are primarily organic and biological—development as growth. CSR adds institutional critique: doctrinal development can be distorted by power, fear, and ideology (the concept of Epistemic Fracture). Third, Newman wrote before the major developments in post-Kantian philosophy, hermeneutics, and critical theory. CSR brings these resources into dialogue with Newman's project.

Ressourcement and the Modern Recovery of Tradition
Where Newman argued for development from within the tradition, the twentieth-century Ressourcement movement (French, "return to the sources") transformed the very concept of tradition itself. Figures such as Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, and Hans Urs von Balthasar argued that tradition is not a static repository of past formulations but a living transmission requiring continual retrieval and reappropriation.

Henri de Lubac: Patristic Retrieval
Henri de Lubac (1896–1991) spent decades recovering patristic exegesis, especially the fourfold sense of scripture (literal, allegorical, tropological, anagogical). His Surnaturel (1946) argued that the medieval distinction between nature and grace had been hardened into a duality that distorted patristic teaching. The Church Fathers understood nature as always already oriented toward grace; the supernatural is not added to nature as an extrinsic supplement but fulfills nature's deepest longing (de Lubac, 1946, pp. 45–67).

This historical retrieval was not antiquarianism. De Lubac's return to the sources was simultaneously a constructive theological move. By showing that contemporary Catholic theology had lost contact with its patristic foundations, de Lubac argued for doctrinal development through retrieval: later formulations must be corrected by earlier ones when distortion has occurred.

CSR's concept of Epistemic Fracture draws directly from de Lubac's method, as I have acknowledged: "De Lubac diagnosed a specific fracture—the neo-scholastic separation of nature and grace—and showed how this fracture distorted subsequent doctrinal developments. Recovery required not innovation but return to the sources. However, return to the sources is itself a developmental move: one cannot simply repeat patristic texts; one must translate their insights into contemporary categories while preserving their animating principles" (Asongu, 2026c, p. 78).

Yves Congar: Tradition as Transmission
Yves Congar (1904–1995) made the most sustained contribution to a theology of tradition in the twentieth century. His magisterial Tradition and Traditions (1960) distinguished between Tradition (capital T) as the living transmission of faith through the Church and traditions (lowercase t) as particular practices and formulations that mediate that transmission.

Congar's central argument is that tradition is transmission, not repetition. The apostolic faith is handed down (traditio), but each generation must receive and hand on that faith in its own language, addressing its own questions, using its own conceptual resources. "Tradition," Congar writes, "is not the mummified remains of a dead past but the living faith of the dead" (Congar, 1960, p. 408).

This has profound implications for doctrinal development. If tradition is transmission, then formulations must change for transmission to occur. A formula that was intelligible in fourth-century Greek may be unintelligible—or, worse, misleading—in twenty-first-century Swahili or Korean. Faithfulness requires translation; translation requires change; change that preserves substance is development.

Congar's work directly informed the Second Vatican Council's Dei Verbum (Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation), which taught: "The tradition that comes from the apostles develops in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit. For there is a growth in the understanding of the realities and the words which have been handed down" (Vatican II, 1965, DV 8). This conciliar text is the closest Catholicism has come to a dogmatic endorsement of doctrinal development—though it carefully avoids specifying criteria for authentic development.

CSR takes Congar's transmission model as foundational. As I have written in Critical Synthetic Realism, "Doctrine develops because each generation must transmit the faith to the next, and transmission requires contextualization. However, CSR adds a critical dimension: not every development is authentic; some changes are distortions driven by power, fear, or ideology. Epistemic Fracture provides a diagnostic vocabulary for identifying distortions" (Asongu, 2026b, p. 267).

Karl Rahner: Historical Consciousness
Karl Rahner (1904–1984) brought a distinctive philosophical framework to doctrinal development, drawing from German Idealism, phenomenology, and existentialism. Rahner's central insight—developed in Foundations of Christian Faith (1978)—is that modern historical consciousness has transformed the conditions of belief.

For premodern Christians, Rahner argues, the world was relatively static; the same questions recurred across generations; the same answers sufficed. For modern Christians, by contrast, history is dynamic; every formulation is recognized as historically conditioned; every answer must address new questions. "The dogmas themselves," Rahner writes, "are not simply identical with the statements of scripture and of the primitive kerygma. They are an interpretation of that primitive kerygma... an interpretation which is adapted to the contemporary situation" (Rahner, 1978, p. 445).

Rahner is careful to avoid relativism. The kerygma—the apostolic proclamation of Christ's death and resurrection—remains norma normans non normata (the norm that norms without itself being normed). But dogmatic formulas are norma normata (norms that are themselves normed). They bind consciences because they express the kerygma, but they do so in historically conditioned language. Later formulations that better express the kerygma for new circumstances supersede earlier formulations—not because the earlier formulations were false but because they are no longer optimally expressive.

This is a subtle but crucial distinction. Earlier formulations are true but incomplete; later formulations are true but different. The Nicene Creed is true; the Chalcedonian Definition is true; the Athanasian Creed is true. But none is the final or exhaustive expression of Trinitarian or Christological faith.

Hans Urs von Balthasar: Theological Beauty
Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) approached doctrinal development through aesthetics rather than epistemology. His magisterial Herrlichkeit (The Glory of the Lord) argues that theological truth is inseparable from theological beauty. The truth of revelation is not merely propositionally correct but gloriously radiant (Balthasar, 1982).

For doctrinal development, this aesthetic orientation has significant implications. A doctrine can be propositionally correct yet aesthetically impoverished—and that impoverishment may indicate a failure of development. The Church Fathers understood this intuitively, which is why their theological writings are saturated with doxology and contemplation. Medieval scholasticism, for all its analytical power, sometimes lost this aesthetic dimension.

CSR incorporates Balthasar's aesthetic dimension without abandoning propositional truth. As I have argued in The Splendor of Truth, "Epistemic Fracture occurs not only through conceptual distortion but also through aesthetic flattening. Doctrines that have become dry, abstract, or merely defensive have likely lost contact with the reality they signify. Recovery requires not only conceptual correction but also liturgical, spiritual, and aesthetic renewal" (Asongu, 2026a, p. 178).

The Infallibility Debate: Hans Küng and the Crisis of Authority
No account of doctrinal development can ignore the explosive debate over infallibility that followed the First Vatican Council and was reignited by Hans Küng in the twentieth century. The question cuts to the heart of the tension between doctrinal authority and historical development: if the Church teaches infallibly, how can doctrine change without contradiction? If doctrine changes, in what sense can it have been infallible?

The First Vatican Council and Its Aftermath
Vatican I's definition of papal infallibility (1870) was itself a development of doctrine—one that many bishops had opposed during the council. The definition carefully circumscribed infallibility: the pope speaks infallibly only when he speaks ex cathedra (from the chair), defining a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church. Such definitions, the council taught, are "irreformable of themselves, not from the consent of the Church" (Vatican I, 1870, Pastor Aeternus IV).

The definition left considerable room for interpretation—room that has been both exploited and contested ever since. How many papal statements have been ex cathedra? The overwhelming majority of scholars agree that only two: the definition of the Immaculate Conception (1854, proclaimed before the council but retrospectively understood as exercising the same authority) and the definition of the Assumption of Mary (1950). Some would add the canonizations of saints, though the status of canonizations as infallible teaching remains debated.

Despite these narrow parameters, the claim of infallibility has generated persistent theological controversy. If the pope can define doctrine infallibly, then later popes cannot reverse such definitions. Yet the Church has changed its teaching on numerous matters—slavery, religious liberty, usury, the treatment of Jews—in ways that at least appear to contradict earlier authoritative statements. How can these be reconciled?

Küng's Challenge: Infallible? An Inquiry
Hans Küng's Infallible? An Inquiry (1971) represents the most sustained and provocative critique of infallibility from within Roman Catholicism. Küng argued that the claim to infallibility cannot be sustained by scripture, tradition, or reason. The New Testament contains no doctrine of infallibility; the early Church knew nothing of it; the historical record demonstrates that the Church has erred repeatedly; and the philosophical problems with infallibility—how could a finite human institution claim immunity from error?—are insuperable.

Küng's argument proceeds in several stages. 

First, he examines the scriptural basis for infallibility, finding none. The promise that the Holy Spirit will guide the Church into all truth (John 16:13) does not guarantee that every formal definition will be free from error. The apostles themselves erred, as Paul's confrontation with Peter at Antioch demonstrates (Gal. 2:11–14). If Peter could err in his conduct, why could not his successors err in their teaching?

Second, Küng examines the historical record. He documents numerous instances in which popes and councils taught what later Church teaching has rejected or significantly revised. The condemnation of Galileo; the approval of slavery; the persecution of heretics; the denial of religious liberty—in each case, Küng argues, the Church taught authoritatively and later changed its position. If the Church can change its teaching, its teaching cannot have been infallible (Küng, 1971, pp. 101–178).

Third, Küng examines the philosophical and theological problems with infallibility. The claim that a human being or institution can be preserved from error in certain specified conditions requires a theory of divine intervention that Küng finds incompatible with a proper understanding of human freedom and responsibility. God does not ordinarily override human fallibility; why would God do so for papal definitions when the same protection is not extended to councils, bishops, or the sensus fidelium?

Küng's conclusion is direct: "The Church must be honest and admit that it has made errors in the past, that it can make errors in the present, and that it will make errors in the future" (Küng, 1971, p. 184). Infallibility, he argues, is not a dogma but an illusion—one that has caused enormous harm by making the Church resistant to correction and reform.

The reaction to Küng's book was immediate and severe. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared that Küng could no longer teach as a Catholic theologian, and he was stripped of his missio canonica (permission to teach Catholic theology). Yet his work has remained influential, particularly among theologians who find the claim to infallibility historically indefensible and theologically problematic.

Responses to Küng
Küng's critics have responded in several ways. Some, like Karl Rahner, defended a more nuanced understanding of infallibility. Rahner distinguished between the irreformability of a definition and its exhaustive conceptual adequacy. A definition may be irreformable—it cannot be reversed—while still being historically conditioned in its conceptual framework. The teaching that Christ is truly present in the Eucharist is irreformable; the conceptual framework of transubstantiation is not. This distinction preserves something of infallibility while allowing for doctrinal development (Rahner, 1978, pp. 448–456).

Others, like Avery Dulles, argued that Küng misunderstood the nature of infallibility. Infallibility, Dulles contends, is not a guarantee that every teaching will be perfectly expressed or that the Church will never make prudential errors. Rather, it is a negative guarantee: the Church will not definitively teach error as a matter of faith and morals. The condemnation of Galileo was not an ex cathedra definition; the approval of slavery was never taught as a dogma. Infallibility applies only to the highest level of magisterial teaching, and even then only to the core truth being affirmed, not to the historical or scientific assumptions that may accompany it (Dulles, 1987, pp. 101–123).

CSR offers a way beyond this impasse by distinguishing between unconditional truth and conditional formulation. The Church may teach infallibly in the sense that the truth it affirms—Christ's real presence, Mary's assumption—is true and will never be reversed. But the formulations through which this truth is expressed remain conditional, historically situated, and subject to development. Infallibility attaches to the truth itself (the res), not to the conceptual or linguistic expression (the conceptus or vox). This preserves the substance of infallibility while allowing for the kind of development that Küng rightly insists the historical record demonstrates.

As I have argued, "If we distinguish between unconditional truth (which does not change) and conditional formulation (which can and must develop), we can affirm that the Church teaches truth without claiming that every formulation is exhaustive or final. The truth is infallible; our grasp of it is not" (Asongu, 2026c, p. 134).

This resolution has implications for the broader argument of this article. If even the Church's most authoritative teachings are expressed in conditional formulations, then doctrine must develop. The refusal of development—the insistence that sixteenth-century formulations are adequate for twenty-first-century questions—is not fidelity but stagnation. Küng's great contribution was to force the Church to confront this reality, even if his conclusions were more radical than many found acceptable.

Philosophical Pressures on Doctrine
No account of doctrinal development can ignore the major philosophical movements of the twentieth century. Even theologians who reject these movements must engage them, for they shape the intellectual environment in which contemporary doctrine is received or rejected.

Karl Popper: Fallibilism and the Growth of Knowledge
Karl Popper (1902–1994) contributed one of the most important epistemological frameworks for understanding knowledge growth: critical rationalism. Popper argued that knowledge advances not through verification—no number of confirming instances can prove a universal statement true—but through falsification. Scientific theories are conjectures that survive rigorous attempts to refute them. Knowledge is therefore provisional, corrigible, and asymptotic: we approach truth by eliminating error (Popper, 1959, pp. 40–42).

Popper's influence on CSR is explicit and foundational. As I have written, "Popper's insight—that knowledge grows through error correction—transformed epistemology from a search for certainty into a discipline of humility. The scientist, like the theologian, must be willing to be wrong. The refusal to consider that one might be wrong is not faith but dogmatism" (Asongu, 2026a, p. 91).

The relevance for doctrinal development is direct. If all human knowledge grows through falsification and error correction, then theological knowledge—including doctrinal formulations—must be subject to the same dynamic. Doctrines are conjectures about divine reality; they can be tested against scripture, tradition, reason, and experience; they can be refined, revised, or in some cases replaced. The Church that refuses to consider that any of its formulations might be incomplete or inadequate has abandoned the method of knowledge growth.

Popper also distinguished between the context of discovery and the context of justification. Doctrinal development often begins in the context of discovery—a new question, a pastoral challenge, a theological insight. But the justification of a doctrine requires critical testing: Does it cohere with scripture? Does it correspond to the experience of the faithful? Does it survive rational scrutiny? Doctrinal development that bypasses this critical testing is not authentic development but arbitrary change (Popper, 1963, pp. 223–228).

CSR integrates Popper's fallibilism into its core architecture. The third pillar of CSR—Critical Rationalism—explicitly draws on Popper's logic of falsification. As I have stated, "Knowledge advances by subjecting hypotheses to potential refutation. Surviving hypotheses are not proven true; they are least false so far. Doctrinal development similarly proceeds through conjecture and criticism" (Asongu, 2026b, p. 118).

Thomas Kuhn: Paradigms and Incommensurability
Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) transformed the philosophy of science by introducing the concept of paradigms: the shared assumptions, methods, and exemplars that guide research within a scientific community during periods of "normal science." Paradigms are incommensurable, Kuhn argued—meaning that scientists working in different paradigms cannot fully understand each other because their fundamental categories differ.

Kuhn's work has obvious parallels to doctrinal development. If science—the paradigm of objective knowledge—develops through paradigm shifts, then perhaps theology develops similarly. The shift from pre-Nicene to Nicene Trinitarianism is analogous to the shift from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy: in both cases, fundamental categories changed, earlier formulations were reinterpreted, and the community emerged with a new framework.

However, CSR rejects Kuhn's stronger claims about incommensurability. Later paradigms are better than earlier paradigms in realist terms—they represent reality more accurately. Similarly, Nicene Trinitarianism is better than pre-Nicene formulations—it represents the reality of God as triune more accurately. Incommensurability does not entail incomparability; one can compare paradigms by their explanatory power, coherence, and fruitfulness.

Michel Foucault: Power and Knowledge
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) posed a more radical challenge. For Foucault, knowledge is inseparable from power; what counts as truth in any era is shaped by institutional structures, disciplinary practices, and discursive formations (Foucault, 1972). Truth is not that which corresponds to reality but that which is produced by power-knowledge regimes.

This seems to undermine any realist account of doctrine. If doctrinal formulations are products of power, then appeals to truth are merely ideological mystifications. The Church's teaching on sexuality, for example, might be interpreted not as participation in divine truth but as a mechanism for controlling bodies and regulating populations.

CSR takes Foucault seriously without capitulating to his anti-realism. Yes, power distorts knowledge. Yes, institutional structures shape what counts as orthodoxy. Yes, doctrinal formulations are embedded in discursive formations that reflect social interests. All of this is true—and all of it is captured by CSR's concept of Epistemic Fracture.

But Foucault's error—and it is a major error—is to reduce truth to power. Reality itself, CSR insists, exercises a corrective force on interpretation. As I have written in Critical Synthetic Realism, "Communities that systematically distort reality eventually encounter resistance from reality. False doctrines have consequences. The Church that denied Galileo eventually had to admit error—not because power relations shifted but because the earth really does move around the sun. The Church that defended slavery eventually had to repudiate slavery—not because power relations shifted but because slavery really is evil" (Asongu, 2026b, p. 301).

Jürgen Habermas: Communicative Rationality
Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) offers a more constructive interlocutor. Habermas's theory of communicative rationality argues that truth claims are subject to discursive validation: they can be defended or criticized through argumentation in which participants are free from coercion, deception, and self-deception (Habermas, 1984).

For doctrinal development, Habermas's framework provides criteria for authenticity. A doctrinal formulation that cannot be defended discursively—that requires coercion to maintain—is suspect. A tradition that refuses to subject its claims to rational scrutiny has already conceded its irrationality. Authentic development, on this account, is development that survives rational reconstruction.
CSR incorporates Habermas's emphasis on discursive accountability without accepting his universalist rationalism. Rationality is tradition-constituted, not tradition-transcendent. Criteria for good reasoning emerge from within traditions, not from a universal standpoint. But traditions can still be accountable—to their own criteria, to external criticism, to the reality they purport to describe.

Alasdair MacIntyre: Tradition-Constituted Rationality
Alasdair MacIntyre (b. 1929) has done more than any contemporary philosopher to rehabilitate tradition as a framework for rationality. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), MacIntyre argues that rationality is always tradition-constituted: what counts as a good reason depends on the traditions of inquiry within which one stands.

Traditions develop through epistemological crises: moments when a tradition's internal resources prove inadequate to resolve emerging problems. In such crises, traditions must innovate—either by retrieving neglected resources from their own past or by borrowing from other traditions. The crisis is resolved when the tradition can explain both what went wrong and how the new resources solve the problem.

MacIntyre's account maps directly onto doctrinal development. The Arian controversy was an epistemological crisis for the fourth-century Church: how to affirm Christ's divinity while preserving monotheism? The Nicene solution—homoousios—was an innovation (not found in scripture), but it was an innovation that preserved continuity with apostolic faith while solving the crisis.

CSR radicalizes MacIntyre's insight. As I have argued, "Tradition exists not merely to preserve identity but to increase truthful participation in reality. Static tradition becomes ideology—a set of formulations defended regardless of their truth. Dynamic tradition becomes wisdom—a living inquiry that preserves continuity while welcoming correction" (Asongu, 2026c, p. 145).

Critical Synthetic Realism: Architecture and Core Commitments
Having established classical foundations, traced Ressourcement developments, engaged the infallibility debate through Küng, and examined modern philosophical pressures, I now articulate CSR's constructive proposal. CSR is defined by its tripartite architecture: a Critical dimension of radical fallibilism, a Synthetic dimension of integrative reasoning across disciplines and traditions, and a Realist dimension affirming a mind-independent, stratified reality (Asongu, 2026a, pp. 47–53).

Ontological Realism
CSR's first commitment is ontological realism: reality exists independently of interpretation. The truth about God, creation, salvation, and human flourishing is not constructed by human communities but discovered—however imperfectly. This commitment distinguishes CSR from anti-realism, relativism, and strong social constructivism.

Ontological realism does not entail naive realism—the view that reality is immediately accessible to perception or that our concepts perfectly mirror reality. CSR embraces a stratified ontology in which reality comprises multiple levels: physical, biological, psychological, social, and spiritual (Asongu, 2026b, pp. 89–124). Each level has its own structures, causal powers, and modes of explanation.

For doctrinal development, stratified ontology means that doctrinal claims may be true at some levels while requiring refinement at others. A doctrine of the atonement may be true at the level of relational restoration while requiring refinement at the level of metaphysical mechanism.

Epistemic Fallibilism
CSR's second commitment is epistemic fallibilism: human understanding remains corrigible in principle. No doctrine is beyond revision; no formulation is final; no community possesses complete knowledge. This is not skepticism but fallibilism: knowledge is possible yet always subject to correction by new evidence, better arguments, or deeper penetration.

Fallibilism is the logical consequence of ontological realism combined with finite knowers. If reality exceeds our concepts—if God is infinite, creation is complex, and human minds are limited—then our concepts will always be partial. The only alternative to fallibilism is dogmatism: the claim that some community or some formulation has achieved exhaustive knowledge.

This is where CSR directly engages Küng's critique. Küng argued that the Church is not infallible; CSR would modify this to say that the Church's formulations are not infallible. The truth the Church confesses is infallible because it corresponds to divine reality. But the human articulation of that truth—the conceptual and linguistic framework through which it is expressed—remains fallible and corrigible. As I have written, "The Church teaches truth, but it teaches truth in human language shaped by historical conditions. The truth remains; the formulation develops" (Asongu, 2026c, p. 136).

Conditional Reality and Unconditional Truth
A distinctive CSR contribution is the concept of Conditional Reality: the domain of entities, structures, and truths that are real yet historically conditioned, objective yet subject to development (Asongu, 2026a, pp. 112–118). Doctrines belong to Conditional Reality. They are not merely human constructions (they refer to real divine action) nor are they identical with uncreated reality (they are created mediations).

This concept resolves the apparent paradox of doctrinal development. If doctrines are unconditionally true—identical with the mind of God—then they cannot change. If doctrines are merely human constructions—arbitrary conventions—then they need not be taken seriously. Doctrines are conditional: true in the conditions under which they were formulated, extendable to new conditions, corrigible when conditions change.

The Eucharist provides an illustration. The real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is unconditional truth—it does not depend on historical circumstances. But the conceptual framework for articulating real presence—transubstantiation, the medieval term—is conditional. Transubstantiation was a brilliant articulation for its context: it preserved real presence while rejecting crude physicalism. But transubstantiation depends on Aristotelian metaphysics that may not be universally intelligible. Other frameworks (transignification, transfinalization) may better articulate real presence for other contexts—provided they preserve real presence.

The Distinction Between Truth and Formulation
CSR builds on a traditional distinction, articulated by Vatican I and Vatican II, between truth and formulation. The First Vatican Council taught that the Church's dogmas "retain that same meaning, that same understanding, forever" (Vatican I, 1870, Dei Filius IV). But Vatican II's Gaudium et Spes added that "there is a growth in the understanding of the realities and words which have been handed down" (Vatican II, 1965, GS 62).

These conciliar texts can be reconciled by CSR's distinction between ontological truth (unconditional, unchanging) and conceptual formulation (conditional, developing). The meaning of a dogma—the reality it signifies—does not change. The understanding of that reality—the conceptual and linguistic articulation—can and does develop.

This distinction also addresses Küng's challenge. The Church can teach infallibly in the sense that the truth it affirms is true and will never be reversed. But the formulations through which it teaches this truth—including the very concepts used to articulate it—remain historically conditioned and subject to development. The refusal to acknowledge this distinction leads either to the frozen orthodoxy that Küng rightly criticizes or to the relativism that Küng's critics fear.

Epistemic Fracture: A Diagnostic for Doctrinal Distortion
CSR's most significant contribution to the theology of doctrinal development is the concept of Epistemic Fracture (EF). EF describes structural distortions that interfere with truthful knowing—distortions that operate at the level of communities and institutions rather than merely individual knowers (Asongu, 2026a, pp. 156–189).

The Typology of Fracture
EF occurs through multiple mechanisms, which I have catalogued in The Splendor of Truth (Asongu, 2026a, pp. 156–178):
1. Institutional Incentives. Theological communities, like all institutions, develop reward structures that incentivize certain claims and penalize others. A community that rewards conformity and punishes dissent will systematically produce doctrines that conform to existing power structures—regardless of their truth.
2. Ideological Capture. Doctrines can become ideological when they serve class interests, national identities, or political agendas. The "just war" doctrine has sometimes been deployed to sanctify imperial ambitions rather than to restrain violence.
3. Epistemic Fear. Communities may resist doctrinal development because they fear uncertainty, change, or loss of identity. Fear of modernity, fear of science, fear of other religions—these fears can freeze doctrine into defensive postures that prioritize security over truth.
4. Historical Trauma. Communities that have experienced persecution, schism, or scandal often develop defensive doctrinal positions that encode trauma responses. Protestant-Catholic polemics produced doctrinal formulations on both sides shaped more by mutual opposition than by dispassionate inquiry.
5. Cognitive Limitations. Even without distortion, finite knowers cannot grasp infinite reality. Some fractures are inevitable—not moral failures but structural features of finite cognition.

Historical Examples of Fracture
Resistance to Scientific Evidence. The Church's opposition to Galileo (1633) and later to Darwin (1859) exemplifies fracture produced by institutional incentives and epistemic fear. The biblical texts that seemed to teach geocentrism and special creation had been interpreted in particular ways. When scientific evidence challenged those interpretations, the Church doubled down rather than reinterpreting.
Delayed Moral Recognition. The Church's teaching on slavery is a telling case. For centuries, Catholic moral theology defended forms of slavery as legitimate. Only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did the Church unequivocally condemn slavery as intrinsically evil (Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes 27; John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor 80). As I have argued, "the slavery case demonstrates that fracture can persist for centuries before correction becomes possible. The truth about human dignity was always available in scripture and tradition, but institutional interests suppressed it" (Asongu, 2026c, p. 176).
Infallibility as Fracture. Here Küng's analysis becomes directly relevant. The claim to infallibility, Küng argued, functions as a protective mechanism that insulates the magisterium from correction. Even if one does not accept Küng's full conclusion, his diagnosis of how infallibility discourse can become an instrument of epistemic closure is persuasive. When the Church claims that certain teachings are irreformable, it may become resistant to reconsidering those teachings even when evidence or argument suggests that they are inadequate. This is epistemic fracture: the substitution of institutional self-protection for truthful inquiry.

The Corrective Function of Reality
Fracture is not the final word. CSR insists that reality resists distortion. Communities that systematically distort truth eventually encounter resistance from reality itself—through empirical counter-evidence, moral failure, pastoral harm, or loss of credibility.

Development frequently emerges not from innovation but from repentance—the acknowledgment that earlier formulations were fractured and need correction. The Church's apologies for antisemitism, slavery, colonialism, and sexual abuse are not merely diplomatic gestures but doctrinal acts: they acknowledge that the Church taught and practiced error. Such acknowledgments are themselves doctrinal developments, because they require revising earlier claims that had been defended as authentic tradition. "Repentance," I have argued, "is the most underappreciated motor of doctrinal development. When a community admits it was wrong, it does not abandon truth—it deepens its participation in truth by shedding falsehood" (Asongu, 2026c, p. 199).

Epistemic Sovereignty: The Telos of Development
If Epistemic Fracture diagnoses what goes wrong in doctrinal development, Epistemic Sovereignty (ES) names the goal. ES is "the disciplined capacity of epistemic communities to pursue truth without domination by inherited distortions—whether those distortions are institutional incentives, ideological commitments, fear responses, or historical traumas" (Asongu, 2026a, p. 247).

The Components of Sovereignty
1. Critical Self-Awareness. Sovereign communities understand their own historical conditioning. They know which aspects of their doctrine are central and which are contingent. They can distinguish between apostolic faith (unchanging) and cultural expression (changing).
2. Institutional Correctability. Sovereign communities have mechanisms for acknowledging and correcting error. These mechanisms include scholarly freedom, open debate, responsiveness to external criticism, and procedural pathways for doctrinal revision. Communities that lack correctability—that cannot admit error—are not sovereign but captive to their own fracture.
3. Interdisciplinary Openness. Sovereign communities learn from outside their traditions. They engage philosophy, science, social theory, and other religious traditions not as threats but as resources for deeper understanding.
4. Practical Fruitfulness. Sovereign communities test doctrine against human flourishing. Doctrines that produce holiness, justice, peace, and joy are confirmed; doctrines that produce abuse, oppression, violence, and despair are suspect.

Sovereignty and Development
CSR proposes seven criteria for authentic development, building on Newman's tests while adding critical dimensions (Asongu, 2026c, pp. 245–267):

1. Preservation of Type: The development must preserve the basic shape of the original teaching.
2. Continuity of Principles: The development must be animated by the same principles as the original.
3. Logical Sequence: Later developments must follow from earlier ones, not contradict them.
4. Anticipatory Power: The earlier tradition must anticipate the development, however implicitly.
5. Assimilation: The development must incorporate relevant external knowledge.
6. Critical Self-Awareness: The development must acknowledge its own conditionality.
7. Practical Fruitfulness for the Oppressed: The development must produce human flourishing, especially for those most vulnerable to epistemic fracture.

These criteria distinguish authentic development from both stagnation (refusal to develop) and deformation (development that breaks continuity). Stagnation is fidelity to formulations without fidelity to truth. Deformation is change without continuity. Development is change that preserves continuity while expanding truth.

Conclusion: Toward a Dynamic Orthodoxy
Doctrine always evolves. Not because truth changes. Truth—the reality of God, creation, redemption—is eternal, unchanging, inexhaustible. Not because revelation fails. Revelation—God's self-communication in Christ through scripture and tradition—is sufficient for salvation, clear in its essentials, trustworthy in its substance. Not because institutions are weak. The Church, despite all fractures, remains the Body of Christ, the pillar and bulwark of truth.

Doctrine evolves because finite knowers encounter inexhaustible reality through the mediation of history. The truth is given once for all; the understanding of that truth is given progressively, generation by generation, crisis by crisis, development by development.

Augustine recognized it when he wrote his Retractions. Anselm pursued it when he insisted that faith seeks understanding. Aquinas systematized it when he distinguished reality, concept, and word. Newman defended it when he argued that development is the condition of continuity. Ressourcement theologians deepened it when they showed that tradition is transmission, not repetition. Küng forced the issue when he demanded that the Church confront the reality of its own errors. Popper provided the epistemology: knowledge grows through error correction. Kuhn showed how paradigms shift. Foucault exposed the entanglement of knowledge and power. Habermas insisted on discursive accountability. MacIntyre demonstrated that traditions develop through epistemological crises.

Critical Synthetic Realism synthesizes these traditions into a broader theory of doctrinal development grounded in ontological realism and epistemic humility. CSR introduces Epistemic Fracture as a diagnostic for distortion and Epistemic Sovereignty as a goal for authentic development.

The practical implications are significant. Doctrinal development is not a concession to modernity but a demand of faithful theology. Communities that refuse development—that insist on repeating the formulations of the past without adaptation—are not being faithful to tradition. They are being faithful to their own fear.

Authentic doctrine remains simultaneously faithful and unfinished. Faithful because it confesses the reality that saves. Unfinished because it awaits deeper penetration of that reality. The refusal of development may ultimately represent not fidelity to truth but fear of truth's depth.
The Church that trusts the Holy Spirit—led into all truth, not all at once but progressively—has nothing to fear from development. The Spirit who inspired scripture, who guided councils, who raised up saints, who corrected errors, who unfolded understanding across centuries—that same Spirit guides the Church today. Development is not betrayal but obedience. Not innovation but maturation. Not relativism but realism.

Doctrine develops because truth is inexhaustible and knowers are finite. That is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be embraced.

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