There are a few things about the idea of "development of doctrine" that confuse me. On the face of it, the idea is simple enough to be a truism. Of course, if you take God's truth, ie revelation, and move with it through 2 millenia, putting it in encounter with many historical events and social trends, not to mention people of genius not just in philosophy and theology but in linguistics, art, music and poetry -- you are going to have something that has built up many -- let's say branches? -- or maybe facets? that may not have been necessary or explicitly evident to our ancestors in the faith.
On the other hand, except in a kind of analogical sense it doesn't seem to be true that we "know" more now than we did then. We moderns tend to say and think that we "know" more than our forefathers, meaning that the human race has a more scientific understanding of physical laws and can do various technological things that would have astounded earlier ages. But in fact, though even our toddlers can flip a switch to turn on a lamp, many of us wouldn't even be able to describe how a lightbulb works without at least a quick moment or two on Youtube. And if you could do that, you might not be able to work pleasingly with oil paints or codify a previously oral language into print. We still rely in many, many ways on those ancestors who actually did figure out electricity and how to harness it, and so on.
When you consider that the one needful thing is salvation, not an accumulation of language about divine things, it doesn't seem like the average person of today has a more developed doctrine than the Church Fathers, say; perhaps not even more than one of those catechumens instructed by Augustine or John Chrysostom.
I am not saying that it is unimportant that we as a Church have done much problem-solving and thinking through those two thousand years. It has been more than an accumulation of language, it has been a building up of a durable tradition that has and can face many intellectual and other challenges. When I was an Evangelical, it was me, my Bible and the Holy Spirit. Not that we didn't read other books or listen to our pastors and parents. But they were in roughly the same boat, because the personal relationship is the only one really conceptualized in that denomination.
But the Catholic Church is on a whole different level. When I first converted I felt like an orphan who had suddenly found herself heir to a kingdom. I didn't lose any of the real treasures I had gotten from my earlier years, but I gained much, much more -- more than I can explore in a lifetime.
Progress in doctrine, however, seems to me a bit like progress in spiritual life. It's not a self-improvement project where you can look back in pity at the less-enlightened. It's a progress or development towards -- towards closeness to the things of God. You usually owe a lot to the teachers and counsellors who got you there.
The apostles, the martyrs, the confessors, the Fathers, knew the One Needful Thing. If we add new facets or branches or whatever, it seems like it can only be a matter of a clarification of true or negation of false doctrine. Revelation was already given to us, it's not a DIY construct. It's more like a matter of exploring all the rooms, maybe?
Also, when the Church HAS made a conceptual leap forward suitable to its moment in history, it is very often through the devotion and acuity of one person, sometimes a few. St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross, along with St Therese of Lisieux, were such people. There are a lot more, but they're the ones I'm reading about right now. Every once in a while someone comes along and by their life and thought casts something in such a clear light that it illuminates all around it, a reflected light of course, but a beacon for many others. A lot of times the single person is not high in the hierarchy at all; in fact, God seems to love to choose people that society never would have picked out. And then it's usually the simple folk like shepherds, or wise men searching for truth, that seize on the light while the institutional Church is still rather suspicious of the whole thing. Only later on does it become part of the tradition.
At the same time I do think there may be more to it than what I have just said. Basically, the main point I'm making is that I think it's because our modern age tends to pride itself on its advancement that the word "development" can take on a connotation similar to Darwinian evolution, of a fitness contest where we would obviously win because we are superior. Then the temptation is to mess around with doctrine, think of it as building a machine or evolving a rather poor primeval thing rather than passing on a light.
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