In the year 325, the Church staked its faith on a single Greek word.

Homoousios. Consubstantial. Of one being with the Father.

The word was not found in Scripture. It had previously been used by heretics. Its meaning was not fully clarified at Nicaea itself, but unfolded across centuries of controversy and several further councils.

This presents theology with an apparent contradiction.

The Church teaches that the meaning of its dogmas remains permanently true. Yet Christian doctrine has visibly developed through changing languages, concepts, cultures, and worlds of thought.

Can the permanence of dogma be reconciled with the historicity of human understanding?

In Episode 12 of this series on Bernard Lonergan’s Method in Theology, we examine Doctrines, the sixth functional specialty. Foundations established the horizon from which the theologian speaks. Doctrines now selects among the positions disclosed by Dialectic and affirms what is true.

Lonergan begins by distinguishing doctrine from dogma. Doctrine is the broader category, referring generally to what is taught. Dogma is narrower: the Church’s solemn declaration of a revealed mystery that could not be known unless God had revealed it.

This episode explores:

• the difference between doctrine and dogma
• the original Christian message, ecclesial doctrines, and theological doctrines
• the authoritative, communal, and normative functions of doctrine
• classicist and empirical understandings of culture
• why doctrine must be expressed differently across cultures
• the ongoing discovery and differentiation of the human mind
• why doctrines must sometimes be recast to preserve their meaning
• the development of Nicaea through Constantinople, Ephesus, Chalcedon, and later councils
• systematic meaning in medieval theology
• the distinction between permanence and immutability
• Vatican I and the permanence of dogmatic meaning
• how historical development can deepen understanding without changing revealed truth
• pluralism and the unity of faith
• the legitimate autonomy of the theologian
• the difference between dogmatic and doctrinal theology

Lonergan’s answer depends on a fundamental distinction.

When data are understood more fully, an earlier theory may be replaced by a better one. But when a truth is understood more fully, it remains the same truth. The understanding develops without turning the truth into something else.

Dogmas belong to this second category.

Their meaning is permanent because what God has revealed and the Church has solemnly affirmed is true. Yet dogmas are also historical because every statement has meaning within a context, and contexts change as cultures and consciousness develop.

The permanence belongs to the meaning, not necessarily to the formula.

Repeating the same words while assigning them a new meaning would violate permanence. Recasting the words so that the same meaning can be communicated within a new cultural and intellectual context may be necessary precisely to preserve it.

The apparent conflict, therefore, is not between permanence and history.

It is between history and classicism: the assumption that there is only one permanent culture, one conceptual framework, and one universally sufficient form of expression.

Lonergan’s doctrinal theology is historically conscious. It recognizes that the one faith may require many forms of expression while remaining grounded in the same revealed truth and the same religious love.

Chapters
00:00 The Scandal of Homoousios
02:32 Doctrine and Dogma
05:18 Culture and Development
08:21 The Ongoing Discovery
12:15 Nicaea and Its Context
15:24 Permanence and Historicity
20:39 Pluralism and Autonomy

In the next episode, we turn to Systematics. Doctrines determines what theology affirms as true. Systematics asks the next question: how can the mysteries affirmed by faith be understood in an ordered, coherent, and genuinely illuminating way?

How do we recover meaning in a fragmented world?
Short reflections on consciousness, conversion, and responsibility.

Read the full essays at Mediated by Meaning: https://mediatedbymeaning.substack.com

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