I am well aware that many Christians imagine that God has revealed to us dogmas in the Bible, and that they will accuse me of denying revelation. God forbid! We believe with all our soul in Divine Revelation and in its particular action in the souls of prophets and apostles, and especially in Jesus Christ. Only, the question is whether the revelation of God has consisted of doctrines and dogmatic formulas. No. God does nothing needless, and since these doctrines and formulas can be and have been conceived by human intelligence, He has left to it the care of elaborating them. God, entering into commerce and contact with a human soul, has produced in him a certain religious experience whence, afterwards, by reflection, the dogma has sprung. That therefore which constitutes revelation, that which ought to be the norm of our life, is the creative and fruitful religious experience which first arose in the souls of the prophets, of Christ, and of His apostles. We may be tranquil. So long as this experience shall be renewed in Christian souls, Christian dogmas may be modified, but they will never die. But why should we retain dogmas which, in the nature of things, must always be imperfect? Why not have religion pure and simple without dogmas? What would happen if we listened to this cry for pure unmixed religion? By suppressing Christian dogma you would suppress Christianity; by discarding all religious doctrine you would destroy religion. How many great and eternal things there are which never exist, for us, in a pure and isolated state! All the forces of Nature are in this case. Thought, in order to exist, must incarnate itself in language. Words cannot be identified with thought, but they are necessary to it. The hero in the romance, who was said to be unable to think without speaking was not so ridiculous as was once supposed, for that hero is everybody. The soul only reveals itself to us by the body to which it is united. Who has ever seen life apart from living matter? It is the same with the religious life and the doctrines and rites in which it manifests itself. A religious life which did not express itself would neither know itself nor communicate itself. It is therefore perfectly irrational to talk of a religion without dogma and without worship. Orthodoxy is a thousand times right as against rationalism or mysticism, when it proclaims the necessity for a Church of formulating its faith into a doctrine, without which religious consciousnesses remain confused and undiscernible.
The mistake that orthodoxy sometimes makes is in denying or desiring to arrest the constant metamorphosis to which dogma, like all living things, is subject. So long as they are alive, dogmas have the faculty of changing and evolving. How is their evolution effected? The analogy between dogma and language will help us to the answer. A language is modified in three ways: (1) By disuse, i.e. by the disappearance of words whose contents have vanished; (2) by intussusception, i.e. by the faculty which words have, without changing their form, of acquiring new significations; (3) by the renaissance of old or the creation of new words, i.e. by neologisms.
Nothing is easier than to establish these three kinds of variations in the history of dogmas. Some religious formulas perish from disuse; others acquire a new content; while still others are themselves renewed. Many doctrines that were once alive and prevalent are seldom heard of now; they gradually passed out of use. There is hardly a dogma dating from the seventeenth or the sixteenth century that has now the same signification that it had at the beginning. The new wine that has been put into them has modified the old skins. There are limits, however, to the elasticity of words and formulas. There comes a moment when the new wine bursts the old skins, and when the Church has to construct other vessels to receive it. In this way neologisms spring up in languages, and new dogmas in theology. In the sixteenth century the dogmas of Justification by Faith and of the universal priesthood were resuscitated with a new energy. The verses of Horace, on which I might appear to have been commenting, are eternally true:
Ut silvæ foliis pronos mutantur in annos,
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Multa renascentur quæ jam cecidere cadentque
Quæ nunc sunt in honore, vocabula...
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The evolution of dogma is possible; why is it necessary? Simply because the material of which it is composed is in a state of constant flux and evolution.... We do not mean to say that everything in the old formulas should be condemned. There are to be found in them many great and excellent ideas which still retain their truth and power. We simply say that there is nothing absolute in them, nothing that may be imposed by authority on Christian thought. It is always with notions borrowed from current science and philosophy that the Church constructs her dogmas. But science and philosophy are continually evolving and carrying dogma in their train. Everything changes, even our manner of thinking. Why do certain things appear absurd or grotesque in the imaginations of the past? Because we have lost the faculty for comprehending them. It is as impossible for us to think in Greek as to speak in Greek. Since the end of the Middle Ages two or three intellectual revolutions have occurred which have profoundly separated us from antiquity and changed the inner and the outer world in which we live. It will suffice to recall them in a few words in order to deepen our sense of the decadence of Græco-Roman dogmatic Christianity, and of the necessity incumbent upon us to reform and renovate it, if only we are strong enough to answer to the call of God.
3. The Crisis of Dogma
The first of these revolutions was a religious one. Our specific consciousness as Protestant Christians dates from the Reformation. Now, the Evangelical Reformation of the sixteenth century was the rupture of the tradition of the Church, of which the Dogmatics of the great Councils was the framework and the centre. In breaking the authority of the Church, the Reformers broke up the basis on which those ancient dogmas had been built. In appealing to the Word of God against traditional doctrines, they at least called in question the Dogmatics of the Councils. After protesting against all the infiltrations of pagan manners and superstitions into the morals of the Church, into its organisation and its hierarchy into its worship and its rites, why should they regard as sacrosanct the ancient philosophy which had entered into the construction of its dogmas?
On the other hand, the Reformation renewed the Christian consciousness by its fundamental doctrine of Justification by Faith. Until then salvation had come through adhesion to the Symbols of the Church and obedience to its commands. Justification by Faith (and faith here means the trust of the heart) freed the Christian from the tutelage of the priesthood and the bondage of Symbols. To maintain that you can only be saved by believing certain theological doctrines, is the same as to say that you can only be saved by doing certain works; it is to add to or to substitute for faith some other condition of salvation. The second principle of the Reformation therefore also shook the ancient edifice; in Dogmatics it substituted the internal principle of Christian experience for the external principle of authority; it made of Christianity a moral life and no longer a metaphysic. Is it not right and necessary to give the new principles of the Reformation a new theological expression? This process has been going on ever since the sixteenth century and can never cease.
The Reformation displaced the centre of the Christian consciousness. At the same time there began a scientific revolution which displaced the centre of the universe. I speak of that which is connected with the names of Copernicus and Kepler, and which was continued by such men as Galileo, Newton, and Laplace. Modern astronomy, geology, biology, etc., have completely changed the outlines and the horizon of our philosophy, and rendered for ever impossible the popular cosmogonies which, until then, had reigned supreme. And who does not see the bearing of this revolution on our views of Scripture, on its cosmography in particular, and on many of its minor teachings? The traditional doctrines of creation have been greatly modified, as also the doctrines as to the origin of evil, suffering, and death. These discoveries, it is said, have ruined religion, and are destroying Christian faith. Not so. What is being destroyed is the débris of an ancient philosophy. But they do compel us, absolutely, if we would remain in touch with the thought of our age, to modify the formulas by which the Church has hitherto believed that she might render an account of the origin and evolution of the universe.
A third intellectual evolution has been effected in our own time by the advent of the Historical Method. This has completely upset the traditional view of the history of mankind. Floods of new light have been poured upon the prehistoric and historic races of man. Modern criticism and exegesis have given us an entirely new view of the origin and contents of many parts of the Old and New Testaments. In every department of knowledge the historic method has made the point of view of evolution possible and victorious. It is in vain to oppose it, for it is the law of life. Those who cling to the doctrine of dogmatic immutability, whether in the Catholic or the Protestant Churches, are exactly in the position of the Romish cardinals who covered Galileo with anathemas and protested energetically against the rotation of the earth. Neither their protests nor their anathemas prevented the earth from turning round, and the cardinals along with it. In Protestantism, a resistance so blind would be the grossest of inconsistencies. Dogmatic revision is always alive, both in principle and in fact, in the Churches of the Reformation: in principle, because all Confessions of Faith are relative, and subordinate to the Word of God; in fact, because the spirit of research, of criticism, and free discussion has never ceased to breathe in Protestant Theology, and breathes to-day more ardently than ever. The work will therefore be completed; I am sure of it. We may lack the faith and courage to carry it on, but, failing us, God will not fail to raise up other fellow-workers with Himself in this great enterprise. Christianity cannot perish; it has never failed to adapt itself to the state of mind of ages past; in the future, it will find and make new forms in which to express and propagate itself, forms adapted to the coming times....