www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life The Christian East & West Development of Doctrine

Florovsky refers to development of dogmas, I believe that this topic is the development of doctrine.

Dogma:

Meaning #1: a religious doctrine that is proclaimed as true without proof
Synonym: tenet


Meaning #2: a doctrine or code of beliefs accepted as authoritative

Doctrine:

Doctrine, from Latin doctrina, (compare doctor), means "a body of teachings" or "instructions", taught principles or positions, as the body of teachings in a branch of knowledge or belief system. The Greek analogy is the etymology of catechism.

I believe that what the Western idea is that as time goes on that the method of teaching and understanding is better clarified. The homoousious argument stands. It is not a new dogma not a new belief. It is a new doctrine a new and better way to formulate the teaching of the Faith once delivered to the Apostles.

Can anyone point out a teaching about the 2 natures of Christ before the 4th century?

Let me try to clarify something: For the East the mystery revealed in Christ (whether a dogma or a doctrine) is unchanging. What can change is the mode expression used in talking about it, but that change in human language does not affect the mystery itself, because the mystery transcends language. In fact, as the Cappadocian Fathers point out, language is a creation of man, not of God, and so it is a diastemic reality (i.e., a dimensional and kinetic reality), but God is beyond human language, because He is adiastemic, and so a change in linguistic formulation has no affect whatsoever upon the immutable truth revealed once and for all to the Church in the mystery of the incarnation.

Christians of today must believe exactly what the Apostles believed, otherwise the faith has been added to or corrupted.

It is part of scripture, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . and the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us." [John 1:1 and 14]

Dr. Eric,

Are you arguing for a mutation in Christian belief? Are you saying that the dogma of the incarnation was "created" in the 4th century?

I think you are confusing the mode of expression used to convey a mystery, with the mystery itself.

As St. Ignatius of Antioch taught (circa A.D. 107): "There is only one Physician, both carnal and spiritual, born and unborn, God become man, true life in death; sprung both from Mary and from God, first subject to suffering and then incapable of it--Jesus Christ Our Lord." [St. Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Ephesians, no. 7]

Blessings to you,
Todd

Todd,
Thank you for pointing out those examples.

I tried, and failed miserably by using the 2 natures of Our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ , to prove my point that the dogma doesn't change but the mode of expression does.

I'm no expert, as proved above , but this is what I think most of us mean by development of doctrine.

Dr. Eric,

Perhaps the following quotation from Dr. Aristotle Papanikolaou's dissertation will help to highlight the different theological approaches of East and West, because as he explains, for the East "[t]he Incarnation is not a communication or an illumination to help reason discern the truths about God; it is rather the event of divine-human communion which reveals an immanent and transcendent God, a hidden and revealed God whose transcendence and hiddeness makes human reasoning about God inadequate. The presupposition of the Incarnation . . . is the ontological distinction between the created and the uncreated realms of being and the foundational axiom that nothing created can save the created." [Dr. Aristotle Papanikolaou, Apophaticism V. Ontology: A Study of Vladimir Lossky and John Zizioulas, page 328] Thus, the dogmas and doctrines of the faith are not rational propositions or intellectual exercises; instead, they are a communication of the divine given to man by God Himself, so that man can rightly praise God and experience the life of the uncreated Creator in divine worship. In other words, dogmas and doctrines are experiential, not propositional, and the locus of this experience is the divine liturgy, which communicates God's presence to man by infusing the uncreated divine life and glory into him as he participates in the act of divine worship. But the act of divine worship offered by the Church today, is the same act of worship that was offered by the Apostles, and so there is no development of dogma, there is instead one and the same incarnational experience communicated in the life of the Church throughout all the ages.

God bless,
Todd

It is a mystery to me why this discussion is happening at all.

This is precisely what the west means by 'development' of doctrine.

No more, no less.

To assert otherwise goes against the west's teaching and should not be considered as genuine.

Eli

It not a new dogma nor is it new doctrine. It is a clarification of an old truth, a core doctrine of the Church, that has been defined dogmatically in Council.

What is so difficult about the language of all of this?

Eli

Eli,

how do you explain then the addition of Filiouque into the Credo in West, in the light of the church having expressed, not discovered neither developed, the faith based on the formulation that "The Catholic faith is that which has been held always, everywhere, and by all."?

I don't. I allow the Church to do that. Something which she has done over many centuries. You might check those recorded discources. Much of it is available on the Internet now.

Eli

Eli,

I am pleased that you are coming closer to saying that there is no "development" of doctrine, yet there remains a subtle difference in outlook between East and West on this issue, but an important difference nonetheless. As I have said already in this thread, the East rejects the idea that there is a "development" of doctrine, because the doctrine received by the Church is immutable. In other words, the truth revealed in the incarnation of the eternal Logos is the same today as when it was given to the Apostles. Thus, there can be no "development" of doctrine, because the doctrine of the Church is not a series of abstract intellectual propositions, it ". . . is an intuitive truth, not a discursive axiom which is accessible to logical development." [Fr. Florovsky, "Revelation, Philosophy and Theology," section 2] As a consequence, in the Byzantine tradition the doctrine revealed in the Christ event is seen as an experience of the divine (i.e., it is a gift of divine-human communion established once and for all in the incarnation) mystically rendered present in the act of divine worship.

God bless,
Todd

Your quote above speaks about "development of dogma", Todd, yet you seem to use dogma and doctrine interchangeably. Would you agree that doctrine is WHAT IS TAUGHT by the Church - and that at times, the church TAUGHT more propositional statements than were taught earlier? Not more than was believed, but more than was explicitly taught?


Jeff

As far as the addition of the filioque to the creed is concerned, the Holy See in the mid 1990s said the following: "The Catholic Church acknowledges the conciliar, ecumenical, normative, and irrevocable value, as expression of the one common faith of the Church and of all Christians, of the Symbol professed in Greek at Constantinople in 381 by the Second Ecumenical Council. No profession of faith peculiar to a particular liturgical tradition can contradict this expression of the faith taught and professed by the undivided Church." [Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, Clarification on the Filioque]

Thus, the Nicene creed without the filioque is the normative creed of the Church, and that is one reason why the theological instruction Dominus Iesus [vatican.va] , issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in August of 2000, used the creed without the filioque.

Jeff,

Thank you for responding to my post.

There is no distinction between dogma and doctrine in the Eastern tradition. The Church's faith does not change or progress over time, it is one and the same experience of God. To understand the Eastern position, you must move away from a "propositional" view of doctrine, and see it as an experience, as an encounter with the divine in worship.

God bless,
Todd

One should not attribute the ideas of individuals with the universal teaching of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church does not encourage a propositional view, so to speak, of doctrine.

Not every professional theologian calling him or herself Catholic actually teach what is Catholic or what the Church teaches.

I find that far too often the Church is tarred with a brush that really only fits individuals or groups of individuals.

So as I said before there is no difference between east and west in the source and manner and mode of teaching of systematic theology or, if you prefer, doctrine.

The east did not have the schools of theology that developed in the west that were called schools because they were attached to a university or individual who taught at the new universities. The east had few universities at all. Period.

This kind of putatively comparative discussion here has no real grounding in fact. There are other kinds of questions and comparisons that are legitimate, such as the issue of 'schools' of theology, but I never hear them raised in these kinds of venues.

Eli

Perhaps you should talk to some of the professors at Franciscan University, because they emphasized in their lectures how Vatican II's Dei Verbum involves a return -- away from the Scholastic propositional view of revelation -- to a more Patristic understanding of divine revelation as a gift of self.

God bless,
Todd