ABSTRACT
Cardinal Newman was accused of being a modernist by modernists and scholastics alike because of his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Since development involves history and theology, it is appropriate, before making a comparison between Loisy's and Newman's conception of development, to define the method which is proper to historical research and to theology as it is conceived by Loisy and Newman. This chapter analyzes the terms of the development, as they are understood by Loisy and Newman, and, on the basis of this parallel, and defines the meaning of the concept of development used by them. The cause of both the origin and the successive transformations of Christian thought was the Greek philosophy of transcendence. Loisy stripped revelation of its supernatural content when he claimed that the starting point of development was the historical Jesus and that the transformation of his human personality into a divine being was a product of the Greek philosophy of transcendence.
