Doctrines & Dogmas

[WorldlingWatcher]

For the purposes of this post, I'll use the following definition of "doctrine":

Doctrine: a codification of beliefs or a body of teachings or instructions, taught principles or positions, as the body of teachings in a branch of knowledge or belief system.

Alister E. McGrath, in The Genesis of Doctrine, proposes the following four roles of doctrine in Christian theology and thought:

1) social demacator
2) interpreter of the Christian narrative
3) interpreter of experience
4) maker of truth claims

Dogmas traditionally take doctrine a step further and expand the role of doctrine as follows:

Dogma: an established belief or doctrine held by a religion, ideology or any kind of organization which is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted, or diverged from.

Some questions that come to mind for the group are:

1) Are McGrath's roles appropriate or not?
2) Is there a role missing from McGrath's list?
3) Do dogmas have a role? Why or why not?

[Pseudonym]

Dogmas traditionally take doctrine a step further and expand the role of doctrine as follows:

Dogma: an established belief or doctrine held by a religion, ideology or any kind of organization which is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted, or diverged from.

That's how the term is usually understood these days. I don't know when it changed from its former sense of referring to a professional opinion, such as a legal or medical opinion, but Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics, published only 60 years ago, is not a book of "dogma" in the sense that McGrath uses it.

So while I like McGrath's definitions, not every valid occurrence of the words "doctrine" and "dogma" from the last 2000 years mean that.

[WorldlingWatcher]

I agree with your point about the change in the way "dogma" is used today. I suspect the popular usage changed with counterculture's rebellion against the combination of the Catholic Church's use of the term and their doctrine of papal infallibility. In that light, "dogma" looked like a bad thing to the left and through decades of disparaging the term the negative connotations stuck.

And in defense of McGrath, the definition I used was pulled from Wikipedia, not him.