An Essay on the Development of Dogma in a Heideggerian Context: A Non-Theological Explanation of Theological Heresy

Abstract

0 NE ROLE that falls to systematic theology is that of re-conceptualizing traditional doctrines in terms of shifting cultural and theoretical frameworks. What this essay attempts within modest limits is to show what dogmatic development would look like if it were considered within a Heideggerian context. The theoretical framework in which doctrinal development is usually considered is, we believe, implicitly Aristotelian. Development itself is as much a feature of experience as permanence, and a discussion of the nature of development leads into ontology, into the question about being, about identity and permanence, change and becoming. Even so diverse thinkers as Rahner and Whitehead acknowledge this point: dogmatic development is one characteristic feature of the world that must be comprehended in a general metaphysics of being and becoming.1 But there is something about Aristotle's ontology which is uncomfortable with change, which favors the substantial and the permanent, and which supports an understanding of truth as the permanently valid and immutable. In dogmatic theology this approach to being translates into doctrines whose meanings can be fixed for all times and which thereafter determine the limits of orthodoxy. Now, we do not mean to deny any dogma, nor to shift the ontological weights from being to becoming, from permanence to process, although it does seem to us that a theory of dogmatic develop-