ABSTRACT
Cardinal John Henry Newman was accused of being a modernist by modernists and scholastics alike because of his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrinen. Concerning empirical science Newman uses a sentence which is literally identical to that which we find in Alfred Loisy: “The inquiry into physical, passes over for the moment the existence of God. With theology, too, Newman insists that the method should follow the subject matter, and thereby he rejects any form of apriorism. Concerning the relationship between Revelation and dogma we find in Loisy and in Newman divergent conceptions which are due to different conceptions of the value and relativity of dogma. Loisy had defined revelation as a natural religious intuition and as a religious experience which in its “intellectual definition consists in ideas which are born in humanity.” Consequently Loisy envisages a further change or transformation of Christian dogma according to modern philosophy and modern science.
