Answering doctrinal historical and social questions
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 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). 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. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content.ĭogma is a form of the abiding vitality of the deposit of faith in the church which itself remains always the same. The dogmas of a church are those doctrines which it declares to be the most essential contents of Christianity. Gieseler, a 19th-century German church historian, in Dogmengeschichte,ĭogma is not doctrinal opinion, not the pronouncement of any given teacher, but doctrinal statute ( decretum). Most modern historians, however, have stressed their difference. As late as the Roman Catholic reformatory Council of Trent (1545–63), doctrine and dogma were still roughly synonymous. 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. In Western Christianity, the great medieval theologian St. John of Damascus popularized the term orthodoxy (literally “correct views”) to connote the sum of Christian truth. In Eastern Christianity, the theologian St. Jerome) use the term dogma in the sense of doctrine. Later, however, many theologians of the early church (including, for example, Origen, St. 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). 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. Doctrines seek to provide religion with intellectual systems for guidance in the processes of instruction, discipline, propaganda, and controversy. 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. Distinctions between doctrine and dogmaĭoctrine in theology (Latin doctrina Greek didaskalia, didachē) is a generic term for the theoretical component of religious experience. Doctrines and dogmas also have influenced and been influenced by the ongoing development of secular history, science, and philosophy. The development of doctrines and dogmas has significantly affected the traditions, institutions, and practices of the religions of the world.
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