Stichwort: Dogma

Autor, Quelle: Murray, The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Titel: Dogmenentwicklung - homoousion

Index: Irrtum: Futurismus, Archaismus; Eusebius,

Kurzinhalt: The homoousion formulates the traditional faith; it is a formula of faith. But the faith is so formulated as now to be more fully understood.

Text: 48a At the root of the fallacy is the rejection of the notion that Christian understanding of the affirmations of faith can and indeed must grow, at the same time that the sense of the affirmations remains unaltered. Archaist Eusebian thought wanted to cling to the earlier stage of understanding contained in the letter of Scripture, as later archaist thought would want to return to it—return from the complexities of conciliar dogma to the "simple faith of the fishermen of Galilee." [...]

49a What the Eusebians further failed to see was that the fallacy of archaism inevitably breeds its contrary, which is the fallacy of futurism. The futurist fallacy rests on the notion that the affirmations of Christian faith never have a final sense. They are constantly subject to reinterpretation in terms of any sort of contemporary philosophical thought. Development in the understanding of them is altogether open-ended. It may move in any direction, even to the dissolution of the original sense of the Christian affirmations. It was the merit of the Athanasian Center that it saw how dangerous the archaism of the Eusebians was. The Athanasians perceived that it opened the way to the futurism of Arius, who reinterpreted the scriptural affirmations—that the Father is Unoriginate and that the Son originates from the Father—in terms of a rationalist dialectic to the destruction of the sense of the scriptural faith. (Fs) (notabene)

49b The Nicene homoousion avoids both fallacies, archaism and futurism. It transposes the scriptural affirmations concerning the Son into a new mode of understanding —what we now call the Nicene or dogmatic mode for the reason that the Nicene dogma was its first historical illustration. But there is no discontinuity or incoherence between the dogmatic mode and the scriptural mode. The transition from one to the other was not made violently—from the descriptive, relational, interpersonal, historical-existential, scriptural mode, to the definitive, absolute, explanatory, ontological, dogmatic mode. The passage was made with ease and naturalness on the internal authority that it is in accord with the native dynamism of intelligence. Between the two modes there is harmony, even homogeneity. The sense of the affirmation, as made in both modes, is identical. The sense of Scripture, that Jesus, the Son, is present as our Lord, is identically the sense of Nicaea, that Jesus, our Lord, is consubstantially the Son. The tradition is maintained. But there has been progress within it, growth in the understanding of it. The homoousion formulates the traditional faith; it is a formula of faith. But the faith is so formulated as now to be more fully understood. The Christian who affirmed that Christ is with us as the Lord still makes this affirmation, only now he has come to understand more fully what Christ, the Lord with us, is. He has transcended archaism, and, in so doing, he has also avoided futurism. (Fs) (notabene)

Stichwort: Dogma

Autor, Quelle: Lonergan, A Second Collection

Titel: Dogma - Wahrheit, menschliches Erkennen

Index: veritas formaliter est in solo iudicio

Kurzinhalt: If one recalls that truth exists formally only in judgments and that judgments exist only in the mind, then the fallacy is easily pinned down.

Text: 70b Such is the objectivity of truth. But do not be fascinated by it. Intentionally it is independent of the subject, but ontologically it resides only in the subject: veritas formaliter est in solo iudicio. Intentionally it goes completely beyond the subject, yet it does so only because ontologically the subject is capable of an intentional self-transcendence, of going beyond what he feels, what he imagines, what he thinks, what seems to him, to something utterly different, to what is so. Moreover, before the subject can attain the self-transcendence of truth, there is the slow and laborious process of conception, gestation, parturition. But teaching and learning, investigating, coming to understand, marshalling and weighing the evidence, these are not independent of the subject, of times and places, of psychological, social, historical conditions. The fruit of truth must grow and mature on the tree of the subject, before it can be plucked and placed in its absolute realm. (Fs)

71a It remains that one can be fascinated by the objectivity of truth, that one can so emphasize objective truth as to disregard or undermine the very conditions of its emergence and existence. In fact, if at the present time among Catholics there is discerned a widespread alienation from the dogmas of faith, this is not unconnected with a previous one-sidedness that so insisted on the objectivity of truth as to leave subjects and their needs out of account. (Fs)


71b Symptomatic of such one-sidedness was the difficulty experienced by theologians from the days of Suarez, de Lugo, and Bañez, when confronted with the syllogism: What God has revealed is true. God has revealed the mysteries of faith. Therefore, the mysteries of faith are true.1 There is, perhaps, no need for me to explain - why this syllogism was embarrassing, for it implied that the mysteries of faith were demonstrable conclusions. But the point I wish to make is that the syllogism contains an unnoticed fallacy, and the fallacy turns on an exaggerated view of the objectivity of truth. If one recalls that truth exists formally only in judgments and that judgments exist only in the mind, then the fallacy is easily pinned down. What God reveals is a truth in the mind of God and in the minds of believers, but it is not a truth in the minds of nonbelievers; and to conclude that the mysteries of faith, are truths in the mind of God or in the minds of believers in no way suggests that the mysteries are demonstrable. But this simple way out seems to have been missed by the theologians. They seem to have thought of truth as so objective as to get along without minds. Nor does such thinking seem to have been confined to theoretical accounts of the act of faith. The same insistence on objective truth and the same neglect of its subjective conditions informed the old catechetics, which the new catechetics is replacing, and the old censorship, which insisted on true propositions and little understood the need to respect the dynamics of the advance toward truth. (Fs)