The division is found applied also to the “Nicene-Constantinopolitan” creed, both in East and West. Sometimes fourteen articles are detected (in either creed), 7 + 7; the sacred number twice over.[1]
The Reformation set up a new idea of faith, or recurred to one of the oldest of all. Faith was not belief in authoritative teachings; it was trust in the promises of God and in Jesus Christ as their fulfilment. But the Protestant view was apt to seem intangible, and the influence of the The Reformation.learned tradition was strong—for a time, indeed, doctrine was more cultivated among Protestants than in the Church of Rome. The result was a structure which is well named the Protestant scholasticism. The new view of faith is bracketed with the old, and practically neutralized by it; as was already the case in Melanchthon’s theological definitions in the 1552–1553 edition of Loci Communes, also printed in other works by him. This brings back again the Catholic view of “dogmatic faith.”
The word “article” for a time holds the field. Pope Leo X. in 1520 condemns among other propositions of Martin Luther’s the twenty-seventh—“Certum est in manu Papae, aut ecclesiae, prorsus non esse statuere articulos fidei (imo nec leges morum seu bonorum operum).” The Augsburg Confession Article. (1530) is divided into numerous “articles,” while Luther’s Lesser Catechism gathers Christianity under three “articles”—Creation, Redemption, Sanctification. Where moderns would speak of the “doctrine” of this or that, Lutherans especially, but also churchmen of other communions, wrote upon this or that “article.” Nikolaus Hunnius (διάσκεψις, &c., 1626), A. Quenstedt (c. 1685) and others—in a controversial interest, to blacken the Calvinists still more—distinguished which articles were “fundamental.” Modern Lutheranism (G. Thomasius, Dogmengeschichte, 1874–1876, influenced by T. F. D. Kliefoth 1839) speaks rather of “central dogmas”;[2] and the Roman Catholic J. B. Heinrich[3] is willing to speak of “fundamental dogmas,” those which must be known for salvation; those for which “implicit” faith does not suffice. When Addis and Arnold’s Catholic Dictionary denounces the conception of central dogmas, what they desire to exclude as uncatholic is the belief that dogmas lying upon the circumference may be questioned or perhaps denied.[4] This suggests the great ambiguity both in Roman Catholic and Protestant writers of the 17th century as to the relation between “articles” and “dogmas.” Many writers in each communion felt that an “article” is a higher thing. Others, in each communion, made the identification absolute. Perhaps the Roman theologians of that age were more concerned than the Protestants to draw a line round necessary truths. This attempt was made by Dr Henry Holden (Div. Fidei Analysis, 1652) in connexion with the word “articles.[5]”
Another term to be considered is decretum, the old Latin equivalent for δόγμα. Another of Luther’s assertions branded by the pope in 1520—the twenty-ninth—claimed liberty judicandi conciliorum decreta. On the other hand, the Augsburg Confession protests its loyalty to the decretum Decreta.of Nice. What Protestantism saw in the distant past, Trent naturally recognized in the present. Every one of its own findings is a decretum—except five, among the sacramental chapters, each of which is headed doctrina. Holden again quotes the (indefinite) decretum of the Council of Basel regarding the Immaculate Conception.
The word “dogma” was however to revive, and, with more or less success, to differentiate itself from “doctrine.” Early writers of the modern period, Protestant or Roman Catholic, use it frequently of heretics; thus the Augsburg Confession protests that the Protestants have carefully avoided nova dogmata. Dogmata in revived use.A Roman Catholic writer, Jan Driedo of Louvain, revives the reference to Ecclesiastica dogmata—De ecclesiasticis scripturis et dogmatibus (1533)—using the word, though not exclusively yet emphatically, of teachings extra canonem scripturae sacrae. Philip Melanchthon’s preface to his Loci communes (ed. 1535) protests that he has not expressed himself de ullo dogmate—on any point of doctrine—without careful consideration of what has been said before him. Richard Hooker (d. 1600) in bk. viii. of Eccl. Polity (pub. 1648 or perhaps 1651) quotes Thomas Stapleton, the Roman Catholic (De principiis doctrinalibus fidei, 1579), on the royal right or duty to enforce “dogmas,” and adds a gloss of his own—“very articles of the faith,”—a surprising and probably isolated usage. Many identified Dogmas and Articles by levelling down or broadening out; but Hooker levels up. The statement of the Council of Trent (1545–1562) may be quoted here. The Council will rely chiefly upon Scriptures[6] in reformandis dogmatibus et instaurandis in ecclesia moribus; the Roman reply to the two sets of articuli of Augsburg, and the Roman counterpart to the (later) Protestant assertion that the Bible[7] is the “only rule of faith and practice.” At Trent, therefore, once more, dogma means doctrine. It still means “doctrine” when the collected decreta of Trent bear on their title-page (1564) reference to an Index dogmatum et reformationis; but here “dogma” is already verging towards the narrower and more precise sense—truth defined by church authority. In other words, it is already edging away from its identification with (all or any) doctrines. On the Protestant side the identity is still clear in the Lutheran Formula of Concord (1577). This creed formulates its relation to Scripture over and over, as the one regula by which all dogmata are to be tried. That characteristic Protestant assertion had been still earlier pushed to the front in “Reformed” creeds, e.g. the First Helvetic Confession (1536), and more notably in the Second (1566).
Protestant creeds had clearly affirmed that nothing possessed authority which was not in Scripture: in a short time, Protestant theologians—following an impulse common to all Christian communions—define more sharply the identity of what is authoritative with the letter of Definition in Protestant scholasticism. Scripture, and call these entire contents dogmas. Here then, under Protestant scholasticism (Lutheran and Reformed), we have the first perfectly definite conception of dogma, and the most definite ever reached. Dogma is the whole text of the Bible, doctrinal, historical, scientific, or what not. Thus dogma is revealed and is infallibly true. Dogma is doctrine, viz. that body of doctrines and related facts which God Himself has propounded for dogmatic faith. Every true dogma, says Johann Gerhard[8]—the most representative figure of Lutheran scholasticism—occurs in plain terms somewhere in Scripture.
Over against these sweeping assumptions and deductions, the Roman Catholic Church had to build up its own statement of the basis of belief. Its early controversialists—like Driedo or Cardinal Bellarmine—meet assertions such as Gerhard’s with a flat denial. The great dogmas are not, Roman Catholic replies. literally and verbally, in the Bible. Along with the Bible we must accept unwritten traditions; the Council of Trent makes this perfectly clear. But not any and every tradition; only such as the church stamps with her approval. And that raises the question whether the church has not a further part to play? A. M. Fairbairn holds that D. Petavius’s great work De theologicis dogmatibus (especially the 1st vol., 1644) made the word “dogma” current for doctrines which were authoritative as formulated by the church. We must keep in mind, however, that the question is not simply one as to the meaning of a word. The equation holds, more firmly than ever; dogma=the contents of
- ↑ See G. Hoffmann, Fides implicita, vol. i. (1903), pp. 82, &c.; and cf. the 17th-century creed of Bishop Mogilas adopted by the whole Greek Church.
- ↑ A. Schweizer’s Protestant Central Dogmas (1854–1856) was an historical study of Reformed, i.e. Calvinist-Zwinglian theology.
- ↑ “Dogma,” &c., in Wetzer and Welte’s Kirchenlexikon.
- ↑ The distinction of pure and mixed articles—those of revelation and those taught in common by revelation and natural theology—reappears in modern Roman Catholic theology as a distinction between pure and mixed dogmas.
- ↑ Luther’s Schmalkalden Articles and the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England should also be mentioned.
- ↑ That seems to be what is meant.
- ↑ Early Protestantism lived too much in the thought of justification to mark out the boundaries of creed with this scholastic precision.
- ↑ Loci communes (1610–1622), on Interpretation of Sacred Scripture, ix. 149.
