doctrine and dogma

doctrine and dogma, the explication and officially acceptable version of a religious teaching. The development of doctrines and dogmas has significantly affected the traditions, institutions, and practices of the religions of the world. Doctrines and dogmas also have influenced and been influenced by the ongoing development of secular history, science, and philosophy.

Distinctions between doctrine and dogma

Doctrine in theology (Latin doctrina; Greek didaskalia, didachē) is a generic term for the theoretical component of religious experience. It signifies the process of conceptualizing the primal—often experiential or intuitive—insights of the faith of a religious community in support of rationally understood belief. Doctrines seek to provide religion with intellectual systems for guidance in the processes of instruction, discipline, propaganda, and controversy. Dogma (Latin decretum, Greek dogma) has come to have a more specific reference to the distillate of doctrines: those first (basic or axiomatic) principles at the heart of doctrinal reflection, professed as essential by all the faithful.

This distinction appears in Christianity in the New Testament, in which didaskalia means “basic teachings” (as in 1 and 2 Timothy), whereas dogma is used only in the sense of an official judgment or decree (as in Acts 16:4). Later, however, many theologians of the early church (including, for example, Origen, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, and St. Jerome) use the term dogma in the sense of doctrine. In Eastern Christianity, the theologian St. John of Damascus popularized the term orthodoxy (literally “correct views”) to connote the sum of Christian truth. In Western Christianity, the great medieval theologian St. Thomas Aquinas chose the phrase “articles of faith” to denote those doctrines that are solemnly defined by the church and are considered to be obligatory for faith. As late as the Roman Catholic reformatory Council of Trent (1545–63), doctrine and dogma were still roughly synonymous.

Most modern historians, however, have stressed their difference. According to J.K.L. Gieseler, a 19th-century German church historian, in Dogmengeschichte,

Dogma is not doctrinal opinion, not the pronouncement of any given teacher, but doctrinal statute (decretum). The dogmas of a church are those doctrines which it declares to be the most essential contents of Christianity.

A modern church historian, Adolf von Harnack, sought to explain the rise of dogma in Christianity as the specific consequence of an alien blend of Greek metaphysics and Christian thought that had been rendered obsolete by Protestantism’s appeal to scripture and history. The German Roman Catholic dogmatician Karl Rahner’s contrasting definition, in Sacramentum Mundi, points to a perennial process:

Dogma is a form of the abiding vitality of the deposit of faith in the church which itself remains always the same.

Functions of doctrines and dogmas

The functions of doctrines and dogmas vary in the several religious traditions according to the stress each puts on the importance of the rational conceptualization of religious truth first glimpsed in images, symbols, and parables. In what are viewed by some scholars as the more mystical religions of the East, doctrines are usually designed to serve as catalytic clues to religious insight (e.g., the notions of nirvana, or the goal of the religious life, in Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism). In what are regarded as the more personalistic religions of the West, doctrines and dogmas tend to function as aids to theological reflection (e.g., the concept of God’s unity in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). In all the higher religions, doctrines and dogmas emerge and develop in the service of instruction for the faithful: interpreting their sacred scriptures, understanding their obligations and duties, and safeguarding the lines between allowable diversity and actual error—all of which help to chart the religious pathway to wisdom, rectitude, and fulfillment. Theology (which utilizes doctrines and dogmas) is, according to the medieval Christian theologian and churchman St. Anselm of Canterbury, “faith seeking rational self-understanding.”

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The normative function of doctrinal formulation is a typically vain effort to fix and conserve an interpretation of the original dogmas of a given tradition. The themes of samsara (the process of reincarnation) and karma (the law of cause and effect) are shared by Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism, though with quite different doctrinal explicitations and consequences. Analogous developments are evident in other traditions.

A third function of doctrine is polemical: the defense of the faith against misinterpretation and error, within or without a religious tradition. Given the invariably pluralistic character of theological reflection, there is a constant tension between the concern for identity and continuity of the tradition on the one hand and for deeper and richer comprehension of truth itself on the other. Over against this there is in most cultures a concurrent rivalry with other religions, with their contrary doctrinal claims, and beyond that, the challenges of secular wisdom and unbelief. This calls forth a special sort of doctrinal formulation: apologetics, the vindication of the true faith against its detractors or disbelievers.

At the heart of all efforts to support religious faith lies the problem of primal authority. It is required of a doctrinal statement that it be clear and cogent, but doctrines always point past their logical surface to some primitive revelation or deposit of faith. The appeal may be to any one of a number of primary authoritative positions: to the memory of a founder (as in Zoroastrianism), or a prophet (Moses in Judaism), or to ancient Scriptures (e.g., the Vedas and Upanishads in Hinduism), or an exemplary event (as in the Buddha’s “enlightenment”), or to God’s self-disclosure (as in the Torah, or Law, for Judaism, or in Jesus Christ in Christianity, or Muhammad’s revelations to Islam). Here again, the diversity between doctrines (“allowable interpretations”) and the stability of dogmas (“essential teaching”) points to the vexed problem of doctrinal development in history that is apparent in all the traditions.