Christian dogma has fallen on hard times. For one thing, many no longer know what dogma means (or used to mean). For another, many find the idea of knowing classic Christian teachings unnecessary or intolerant. This is sad because once we explore the history of Christian dogma, we find that it is very important and interesting.
In modern language, dogma often means teachings accepted without hesitation. This could mean ideas that you’re not allowed to explore or question, which wouldn’t be healthy for Christians. The Bible encourages us to love God with all our hearts (Matthew 22:37), which in ancient Greek (kardia) included our “seat of intelligence” as well as our sense of passion. We must seek to understand things, even if sometimes the answer is “this idea is too complex for me to fully fathom.”
In older times, dogma meant the beliefs which were absolutely central to a system of thought. The dogma is the “make it or break it” ideas, the foundation. A political party’s core beliefs, the ones so central you can’t belong to the party without having them, would be that party’s political dogma. In that context, Christian dogma is the beliefs we must hold to call ourselves Christians. We may struggle to understand these beliefs, and some may have an inherent mystery to them. However, we would not be Christians if we let go of those beliefs.
Christian dogma is the core of faith. We may disagree on particular religious ideas in different denominations. Once we move past those debates and get to the foundation, we find a set of ideas which (to deliberately misquote C.S. Lewis) have been believed by all Christians, everywhere, throughout time. Richard Baxter used the term “mere Christianity” to describe these beliefs, a term Lewis used for his famous book which aimed to defend and explain the basics of Christianity. We also have books like Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, which he described as him trying “to take all that has been said before and to think it through once more and freshly to articulate it anew as a theology of the grace of God in Jesus Christ.”
If you know a little about religious language, you may now be thinking, “Isn’t that just doctrine?”
Well, yes and no.
The line between dogma and doctrine depends on which faith tradition you belong to.
For example, Paragraph 88 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church describes a “church dogma” as “truths contained in divine Revelation or… truths having a necessary connection with these.” That is, according to Roman Catholicism, dogma is not just a doctrine (a form of religious teaching accepted as canon). Dogma is a doctrine that has been divinely revealed. So, Jesus being divine would be dogma, the theories about how that worked would be doctrine.
For many Protestants or nondenominational Christians, doctrine may be described as the full set of orthodox Christian teachings. In contrast, dogma may be described as the orthodox Christian teachings which are in the center. This means that we cannot talk about dogma without talking about doctrine.
Throughout the Bible, people are not encouraged to follow and pursue good teaching. They are commanded to follow and pursue good teaching.
Genesis 2-3 describes God giving humans a very clear teaching, “you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17). The serpent presents them with another teaching, which they follow instead, and suffer the penalty for it (Genesis 3:8-24). Later, we see God giving moral teachings to the Israelites, laying down clear penalties for not following those teachings.
Various books of the Old Testament explicitly tell people to follow good teaching, such as the famous line from Proverbs 22, “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6).
Once we get into the New Testament, we see Jesus rebuking the Pharisees for having poor doctrine, ignoring the major “matters of the law” in favor of minor rituals (Matthew 23:23-24). After Jesus is resurrected and ascends into heaven, the first generation of Christians as having “devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42).
The letters in the New Testament repeatedly talk about following sound doctrine and the problems with following or teaching anyone else.
Hebrews warns Christians, “do not be led away by diverse and strange teachings, for it is good for the heart to be strengthened by grace, not by foods, which have not benefited those devoted to them” (Hebrews 13:9).
Peter warns readers that in the last days, “there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction… And in their greed they will exploit you with false words. Their condemnation from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep” (2 Peter 2:1-3).
Paul talks about sound doctrine many times, particularly in his letters to Timothy and Titus. Both men had a particularly special pupil-mentor relationship with Paul (he refers to both of them as “sons”) and he gave them lots of advice on how to teach people and run churches.
When he talks to Titus, he says, “the reason I left you in Crete was that you might put in order what was left unfinished and appoint elders in every town, as I directed you” (Titus 1:5) and that “there are many rebellious people, full of meaningless talk and deception… They must be silenced, because they are disrupting whole households by teaching things they ought not to teach” (Titus 1:10-11). After describing the problems with these rebellious teachers, Paul tells his pupil, “But as for you, teach what accords with sound doctrine” (Titus 2:1).
Similarly, Paul’s first letter to Timothy starts with him telling Timothy to stay in Ephesus “so that you may command certain people not to teach false doctrines any longer” (1 Timothy 1:3). He then describes the problem with foolish people who don’t teach sound doctrine:
“They want to be teachers of the law, but they do not know what they are talking about or what they so confidently affirm. We know that the law is good if one uses it properly. We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful… and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine that conforms to the gospel concerning the glory of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me” 1 Timothy 1:7-10.
While the word dogma has a positive meaning in certain religious contexts and studies of Christian history, the term has a bad reputation in modern Western culture. Usually, when people mention dogma, they’re not just talking about beliefs we hold, they mean the beliefs we are irrational or arrogant about. Often dogma is associated with fundamentalism.
This is partly because language shifts over time, often in ways we don’t expect or understand. The word geek used to mean a carnival performer who ate live animals, and the word nerd first meant an uptight person from Detroit. Today, those terms are often interchangeable and mean a socially awkward person with specialized knowledge or hobbies. Since language shifting is always a little bit hard to analyze, we may never know exactly how dogma came to mean the dark side of belief.
There are, however, some clear reasons why dogma has become negative. Here are two of them:
People don’t like moral absolutes these days. Moral relativism in various forms and labels has become the norm in most of American society. We talk about having “our truths” or something being “true for you maybe, but not for me.” To believe in a dogma (Christian or otherwise) is to believe that there is one way of doing things that is objectively right, no matter people’s position or experience, or background. Since moral absolutes are not a fashionable way of viewing life, it’s easy to be labeled “intolerant” when you hold a dogmatic position. The fact that saying “there are more moral absolutes” or “there are no dogmas” is in itself a dogma, is something many people miss (or conveniently forget).
Many churches don’t teach clear doctrine anymore. It’s becoming rare to find American churches which encourage or expect members to study the Bible and church history. Our knowledge of what the Bible actually says, and what Christians have always believed about certain subjects, has shrunk a lot. Plenty of people like to use the term “unbiblical” when critiquing things they don’t like. However, there aren’t many people who truly know, in context, what makes something unbiblical or biblical, orthodox or unorthodox.
When we don’t have clear education on a subject, we’re left with how we happen to feel about it. Feelings are emotional, and not always bad. We all have healthy emotional responses built on self-preservation instincts (such as to dodge a moving car before it hits us). However, unless we take time to understand why we feel what we feel, and put solid teaching behind our good feelings, we don’t have foundations for our beliefs. We are left lashing out at things, with no clear idea what we believe, whether our beliefs are false, or how to find true beliefs. As Christian cultural commentator Peter Hitchens put it, “arguing with people who don’t know how to argue is like playing chess with a squirrel.”
Because many Christians don’t study sound doctrine, they don’t defend or communicate their ideas well. Thus, their attempts to defend or explain Christian dogma don’t work.
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