DOGMA AND DOCTRINE:  
EAST VS. WEST

© 2002 by Orchid Land Publications

[updated 20020110]

      What can be said about the difference between dogma (a changeless truth of the essence of Christianity—a dýnamis in the Hellenistic and Biblical sense) and doctrine a (true or false) energization of a dogma, i.e. a clarification of it that gives it life and meaning for its being intelligible to worshipers?  The problem lies with the latter—doctrines or teachings..  The holistic nature of Orthodoxy theology has made it shy about a dogma : doctrine distinction because of the way the West treats it as a distinction between required and optional tenets—a distinction that is quite un-Orthodox.  Greek has dýna­mis-enéryeia pairs like dídaxis : dídagma “instruction” for the doing (energization) and the result, respectively—both referring to the mode of instruction.  (The former does not seem to occur in Patristic Greek, but anyone would have understood its sense.)   The ancients used didache5 or didaskalía, the latter covering secular teaching; modern Greek theologians have used mathe5mata “teachings.”  In Classical Greek, a didaskálion is a “lesson” or “science”.  Didachaí are teachings that can be true or false; the term certainly does not carry overtones of being “optional teachings” or “one among many acceptable teachings on the same aspect of the dogmat” in contrast with some required teaching they clarify—often only to the extent of declaring what the dogma does not involve..  All Orthodox doctrines approved by the Church (and, it follows, not declared to be heretical) are what the West would call de fide (non-optional).  Whereas both Orthodox and heretic could subscribe to a dogma like that of the co-essential and co-equal Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—the doctrines that give life and meaning to that dogma can be widely different; e.g. the Filioque doctrine comes from a different thought world from the Orthodox thought world..  Some of those who accept the Filioque view it as de fide; some view it as optional.  One has read that the Dormition is an optional Orthodox belief; this Western outlook is utterly untenable in holy Orthodoxy.  I think that without its Western connotations, the dýnamis-energy distinction is as essential as any other dyqnamis-energy distinction (see Ch. 5).  And the energy concept and termi­nology are certainly Biblical (26 times in St. Paul alone).  So long as idea is not construed as required-vs.-optional in the Western manner and only in terms of dyqnamis and eneqrjeia in the Greek manner, I think that  doqgma-and-didache5 signifies a very important contrast--one that is basic to Greek ontology.