John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845)

John Henry Newman wrote An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine in 1845, in the months before his own reception into the Catholic Church from Anglicanism, and revised it in 1878 as a Catholic. It argues that a true doctrine can unfold and articulate itself more fully over time, under the church's own fidelity to what it already held, without that unfolding making it a novelty, using the image of a seed that is not less itself for growing into a tree. The essay became the founding text of the theory of doctrinal development and the standard reference for the argument that later, fuller statements of Catholic teaching, including papal primacy and jurisdiction, are a legitimate growth from an original deposit of faith rather than an invention.