"This book offers a new way of understanding the issue of doctrinal development in the Roman Catholic tradition. Since the early Christian centuries, Catholicism has affirmed a belief in divine revelation communicated in both scripture and tradition. Catholicism has never held a fundamentalist view of scripture, insisting instead that the Bible is susceptible to interpretation.

In spite of the efforts of modern theologians to speak of tradition as a historical development open to interpretation, powerful ecclesial currents from the Reformation to the present have regarded tradition only as a literal representation of divine truth, impervious to renewed understanding and even real change.".

"John Thiel attempts to counter this tendency toward "ecclesiastical fundamentalism" by proposing an interpretive schema for tradition analogous to the four senses of scripture."--BOOK JACKET.