Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I. THE TRADITIONAL CONCEPTION OF DOGMA. I. Philological analysis.— Etymology and meaning of the word "dogma."—Classical Greek: the political and philosophical meaning of the term.— Biblical Greek: the version of the Septuagint, of the New Testament. — Ecclesiastical Greek: changes in the use of the term; return to the philosophical usage ; restriction to the theoretical sphere; dogma differentiated from popular preaching and moral and practical decisions.— Result of the philological inquiry. II. Psychological analysis.— The primitive phenomenon of piety and the secondary character of dogma.—Evolutionary force and manifold manifestations of religious sentiment: place of dogma in the series of various expressions of piety.— Role of a community in the transformation of a doctrine into dogma: the idea of collectivity, the idea of authority. III. Historical analysis.— The illusion common to the Roman church, to Protestant orthodoxy, and to the Hegelian school: dogma, the organic flowering and adequate expression of religious faith.— Foreign factors which enter into that analysis; necessity of a constant study of the history of dogma.— Characteristic stages of doctrinal evolution: the Christian religion's progressive assimilation of philosophical knowledge, the formation of the Catholic church, the official sanction of the State.— Result of the historical inquiry: dogma is obligatory belief decreed by an infallible church and sanctioned by an absolute State.— Agreement of the threefold philological, psychological, and historical analyses.— The problem which this imposes on the theologian : does the traditional conception of dogma correspond to the religious principle of Protestantism ? Before determining the actual task of Protestant dogmatics it is necessary to e...