The Emergence of Christian Doctrine ..............................................

Lecture 7

This concern about teaching the right thing about Christian “doctrine,”

as it’s called, ends up becoming a central concern of Christian theology,

indeed, really the central concern of Christian theology in a way that

doesn’t really happen with other religions.

T

he very idea of “doctrine,” with its implication that there is a
difference between sound doctrine and heresy, is a characteristically
Christian notion. Paganism, with its roots in myth and its tolerance
for many alternative forms of ritual, had little need of doctrine at all. Judaism
focused its intellectual energies on questions of how to live more than what
to believe. In the pagan world, the competing schools of philosophy came
closest to having an of¿ cial doctrine, but they were not lifelong communities
de¿ ning their members’ identities.

Christians invented the idea of religious doctrine, because their religion was
fundamentally a “faith,” which is to say a belief which had to be taught. For
Christianity everything depended on believing the truth about Christ, which
therefore had to be rightly taught. “Doctrine” comes from the Latin word
doctrina, meaning “teaching.” The crucial criterion of sound doctrine was
“orthodoxy,” which meant both “right belief” and “right worship.” Orthodox
doctrine became the “of¿ cial” teaching of the church, meaning that it was
the responsibility or “of¿ ce” (in Latin, of¿ cium) of the church’s leaders to
teach it.

The concept of heresy follows as the negative side of the concept of
orthodox doctrine. “Heresy” originally meant “sect,” a subgroup within
the larger church (the “Great Church,” as it was called), which differed
from the church’s of¿ cial teaching. Orthodoxy was closely associated
with “catholicity” (meaning “universality”), as the Great Church sought
to formulate doctrines Christians everywhere held or should hold in
common. Vincent of Lerins, in the famous “Vincentian Canon,” articulated
a widespread view of the ancient church when he proposed that the criterion
for sound doctrine is that it is what is taught “everywhere, always, and by