Harnack: History of Dogma, Vol. 1

1. The definition given above, p. 17: "Dogma in its conception and development is a work of the Greek spirit on the soil of the Gospel," has frequently been distorted by my critics, as they have suppressed the words "on the soil of the Gospel." But these words are decisive. The foolishness of identifying dogma and Greek philosophy never entered my mind; on the contrary, the peculiarity of ecclesiastical dogma seemed to me to lie in the very fact that, on the one hand, it gave expression to Christian Monotheism and the central significance of the person of Christ, and, on the other hand, comprehended this religious faith and the historical knowledge connected with it in a philosophic system. I have given quite as little ground for the accusation that I look upon the whole development of the history of dogma as a pathological process within the history of the Gospel. I do not even look upon the history of the origin of the Papacy as such a process, not to speak of the history of dogma. But the perception that "everything must happen as it has happened" does not absolve the historian from the task of ascertaining the powers which have formed the history, and distinguishing between original and later, permanent and transitory, nor from the duty of stating his own opinion.

2. Sabatier has published a thoughtful treatise on "Christian Dogma: its Nature and its Development," I agree with the author in this, that in dogma--rightly understood--two elements are to be distinguished, the religious proceeding from the experience of the individual or from the religious spirit of the Church, and the intellectual or theoretic. But I regard as false the statement which he makes, that the intellectual element in dogma is only the symbolical expression of religious experience. The intellectual element is itself again to be differentiated. On the one hand, it certainly is the attempt to give expression to religious feeling, and so far is symbolical; but, on the other hand, within the Christian religion it belongs to the essence of the thing itself, inasmuch as this not only awakens feeling, but has a quite definite content which determines and should determine the feeling. In this sense Christianity without dogma, that is, without a clear expression of its content, is inconceivable. But that does not justify the unchangeable permanent significance of that dogma which has once…