Dogma
May 25, 2006
James Schall, S.J., a frequent contributor to TNP, has written about dogma for Ignatius’s Pastoral and Homiletic Review. It is a good followup to the problems noted earlier in a recent review by Susan Wise Bauer:
Not infrequently, moreover, we find that the very effort to articulate dogmas, itself often a classically “Catholic” endeavor, is under attack because, it is held, human beings substitute or confuse the statement of the dogma or doctrine with the reality itself to which the dogma points. Thus, it is held, we believe in “dogmas” but not that towards which dogmas direct us or to what they articulate. Catholics, for instance, consciously and deliberately say the Creed together at Sunday Mass. This is, at bottom, the Church’s recognition that Catholicism is an intellectual faith whose members know and want to know precisely what it is that they hold about the Trinity and its Persons in relation to us. The Creed is the minimal but most accurate statement of this “holding” insofar as it can be properly formulated by the human mind considering revelation and what it means.
When we say this Nicene Creed, the objection goes, we are said to “believe” in the Creed as a statement but not in that to which the Creed points. As a matter of fact, I doubt if very few, if any, believing Catholics actually make this subtle confusion, however much they are accused of it for being “dogmatists.” But if, in spite of it all, they should do so, it would prove that they do not believe in a reality but only in a statement of reality. While this confusion is possible, the very accusation is, I think, often an effort to prevent us from making the effort to state what the doctrine actually indicates.
None the less, it is a perfection of the human mind to seek to state, however imperfectly, what reality means through the formulation of a stated dogma. Nowhere in Catholic tradition is it claimed that the dogma or doctrine as a statement is, even by reason of its accuracy, something that exhausts the actual reality of what is defined. Nor is it claimed that no better statement can be concocted. This better statement depends on facts. The dogma is always designed to encourage us to pursue a further knowledge, understanding, and indeed love of the what is that we seek to know.
In this passage Fr. Schall defends against a critique that is, in part, one that Eric Voegelin made not of Christian dogma but dogma in general, as “doxic thinking.” The problem is, as the WIkipedia entry on Voegelin summarizes, “a sense of order is conveyed by the experience of transcendence. This transcendence can never be defined nor described fully, however it may be conveyed in symbols which can evoke the sense of order in others.” Fritz Wagner’s fine essay on “Voegelin and Christianity” discusses this point and changes in Voegelin’s view later in his life.
This is Dogma in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Come Closer So I Can Kick You | Next: Luther’s Silence on The Da Vinci Code | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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