II. The Task of the History of Dogma
rest upon divine authority. It has social significance, because it is the expression, not of a single individual, but of a community. And it has traditional value, since it passes the precious possessions of the Church on to future generations. In the History of Dogma we see the Church becoming ever increasingly conscious of the riches of divine truth under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, mindful of her high prerogative as pillar and ground of the truth, and engaged in the defense of the faith once delivered to the saints.
II. The Task of the History of Dogma The task of the History of Dogma is, briefly stated, to describe the historical origin of the dogma of the Church and to trace its subsequent changes and developments; or, in the words of Seeberg,
"to show how the Dogma as a whole and the separate dogmas have arisen and through what course of development they have been brought to the form and interpretation prevailing in the churches of any given period." The following general remarks may be made respecting its presuppositions, its general contents, and the point of view from which it is written.
1. ITS PRESUPPOSITIONS. The one great presupposition of the History of Dogma would seem to be that the dogma of the Church is changeable and has, as a matter of fact, undergone many changes in the course of its historical development. That which is unchangeable is not subject to development and has no history. Protestant theology has always maintained the position that the dogma of the Church, while characterized by a high degree of stability, is yet subject to change and has in the course of history been enriched with new elements, received more careful formulation, and even undergone certain transformations. It has no difficulty, therefore, with the idea of a history of dogma. The situation is somewhat different, however, in Roman Catholic theology. Roman Catholics glory in the fact that they have an unchangeable dogma and feel far superior to the
Protestant who, in the words of Cardinal Gibbons, "appeals to the unchanging Bible in support of his ever-changing doctrines." He says that the creed of the Church "is now identical with what it was in past ages." Faith of our Fathers, pp. 11, 87. Winners speaks in a similar vein when he says: "The Christian religion is unchangeable in all its revealed doctrines—in all those precepts and institutions which are intended for all men. No article of faith (for of doctrine there is mainly question) can be added or subtracted; nor can any dogma receive a different meaning from that given it by Christ." Handbook of the Christian Religion, p. 67. We are told repeatedly by Roman
Catholic authors that the Church cannot make new dogmas, but can only hand down the sacred deposit that was entrusted to her.
But if the repeated assertions that the Church cannot make new dogmas is true, then it follows that the dogmas were already given in the original deposit, in the faith once delivered to the saints and contained in Scripture and in the apostolic tradition. No dogma was ever added to the sacred deposit, and no dogma contained in it was ever changed. The Church only has power to declare a truth to be revealed by God and to give it an infallible interpretation, thus dispelling uncertainty and increasing the positive knowledge of the faithful. It did this in the past and will continue to do it whenever historical occasions call for it. The dogma itself then does not develop and therefore has no history; there is development only in the subjective apprehension of it, and this determines the Roman
Catholic conception of the History of Dogma. Says B. J. Otten, the Roman Catholic author of A Manual of the History of Dogmas (third edition), "It (the History of Dogmas) presupposes that revealed truths are objectively permanent and immutable, and also that their subjective apprehension and outward expression admits of progress." Vol. I, p. 2.
For a long time Roman Catholics looked askant at the History of Dogma. Neander says that a "modern theologian, Hermes of Bonn, has asserted that to treat the History of Dogmas as a special branch of Study, on account of the change in development which it
presupposes, militates against the Catholic Church, and for that reason he has scrupled to give Lectures upon it." The History of Christian Dogmas, I. p. 28. Petavius was the first of the Roman
Catholics to suggest something like a doctrine of development, but his work was not well received, and he had to qualify his statements.
Later on Moehler and especially Newman advocated a theory of development, which met with considerable, though no universal, favor. The latter's theory is to the effect that many of the doctrines of the Church were only germinally present in the original deposit.
They were like seeds implanted in the mind of the Church that were pregnant with unsuspected possibilities and in course of time unfolded into full-blown doctrines. While opposition often arose to the new doctrinal expressions, they gradually gained ground and increased in popularity. Finally the teaching Church, the hierarchy, stepped in to test the results of this new development and to set the stamp of its infallible approval on some of them by declaring them to be divinely revealed truths. This theory found favor with many of the Roman Catholics, but did not commend itself to all and never received official approval.
A second presupposition of the History of Dogma is that the development of the dogma of the Church moved along organic lines and was therefore in the main a continuous growth, in spite of the fact that the leaders of the Church in their endeavors to apprehend the truth often wandered into blind alleys, chasing will-o'-the-wisps and toying with foreign elements; and that even the Church itself, as a whole or in part, sometimes erred in its formulation of the truth.
God's special revelation is the progressive unfolding of the ectypal knowledge of God and of the redemptive idea in Christ Jesus. It is an organic whole in which all the parts are interrelated, the comprehensive expression of divine thought. The Church in its endeavors to apprehend the truth is simply seeking to think the thoughts of God after Him. It does this under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, which is the Spirit of truth and as such guarantees that it will ever-increasingly see the truth as an internally connected organism. The History of Dogma may not be a mere chronicle,
recording the external history of the various dogmas of the Church. It is the history of an organic growth and of the inner workings of the mind of the Church, and therefore presupposes a rather continuous development of the ecclesiastical dogma.
If the Church in the past had proceeded on the assumption, now advocated by many, that the changing conditions of the religious life ever and anon call for a new dogma, and that every age must formulate its own dogma, discarding the old and substituting for it another more in harmony with the spiritual condition of the times, it would have been quite impossible to write a history of dogma in the organic sense of the word. We shall have to proceed on the assumption that the Church, despite the melancholy aberrations that characterized her search for the truth and often led her into ways of error, yet gradually advanced in her apprehension and formulation of the truth. We shall have to assume that even such a tremendous religious upheaval as the Reformation did not constitute a complete break with the doctrinal development of the past. While many errors were exposed and corrected, the Reformers sought support for their views in the early Church Fathers, and did not even hesitate to adopt some of the views that were developed during the Middle Ages. There was continuity of thought even here.
2. ITS SUBJECT MATTER. The fact that the History of Dogma deals primarily with the dogmas of the Church does not mean that it need not concern itself with those doctrinal developments that were not yet, and perhaps were never to be, incorporated in the official
Creeds. It would be a mistake to assume that it can begin with the Council of Nicea and end with the adoption of the last of the historical Confessions. In order to describe the genesis of the earliest dogmas of the Church, it must take its starting point at the close of the period of special revelation in the study of the Apostolic Fathers.
It will have to take account of those preformations of the dogmas of the Church that resulted from the theological discussions of the day and met with rather general approval, though they did not receive the official stamp of the Church; of those peripheral truths that
necessarily followed from the central and controlling dogma, and yet did not receive special ecclesiastical sanction; and of those further developments of doctrinal truth that point forward to and prepare the way for additional formulations of theological dogmas. Since the dogma of the Church is not the fruit of a mechanical construction but rather of an organic growth, the study of its history cannot afford to limit its attention to the clearly defined results obtained at various times, but must also consider the intervening stages with their promise of even better and richer fruits.
From this it follows that, as far as the external history is concerned, the History of Dogma cannot neglect the study of the great doctrinal controversies of the Church, which were the birth pangs of new dogmas and often had a determining influence on their formulation.
Though this study may not always be edifying, it is absolutely essential to a proper understanding of the genesis of ecclesiastical dogmas. In these controversies differences of opinion became apparent and in some cases gave rise to different lines of development, and doctrinal formulations arose which were at variance with the united consciousness of the Church in general or of some particular denomination. Even these departures from the main line of thought are important for the History of Dogma, since they often led to a clearer and sharper formulation of the truth.
But while the History of Dogma cannot afford to ignore any of the external facts that bear on the development of dogma, it should never lose sight of the fact that it is primarily concerned with the development of theological thought in the consciousness of the Church and should therefore trace the development of the idea which is inherent in the revealed revelation of God itself. Hegel and Baur rendered good service to the History of Dogma, when they directed attention to the fact that the development of dogma is controlled by an inner law, though their principle of interpretation does not commend itself to Christian thought. We can discern a certain logical necessity in the successive stages of the development of each dogma, and in the order in which the various dogmatical problems presented