Course XXXIV - Teaching 8: Evolution of Dogma

A Dogma is an indisputable Divine Truth that usually should be accepted by faith.
Dogma may be a formal, explicit truth, and also a virtual implicit truth.
The said offered truth, has and expresses certain meaning, and a mission of Theology is precisely to discriminate about this truth, and to make clear, fix and enlarge this meaning so that the light of the Revealed Truth shines more and more radiantly and illuminates more and more the field of the human rational knowledge.
But, as you know quite well, the Revealed Truth and, consequently, dogmas, sometimes are given somehow dimly, and sometimes theologians had to strive for discovering their true sense, if some Great Initiates and his disciples did not earlier.
As the result of this situation of relative confusion in front of the “sense” of dogmas, theological disagreements arose, which even led some people to state that a dogma does not preserve always the same sense, that is, it can vary and even change senses.
According to certain objectors, the dogmatic content, that is, the dogma, is not subject to the invariability of data objectively revealed by God; it particularly responds to alternatives of human psychological and religious factors.
In their opinion, dogmas are as contingent and mutable things as subjective conditions of man admit it. These subjective conditions evolve and change frequently in man, and there is no homogeneous continuity in changes.
According to this interpretation, dogmas can change substantial contents, to such an extent that dogmatic formulae, as the time passes by, can have entirely diverse, and even opposite senses.
A dogma cannot evolve from one sense to another; this would be transformism. But certainly a homogeneous evolution is possible in one and the same sense.
Evolution is an inherent quality of living and progressive things, and on pain of calling the Revelation something dead and lifeless, one must admit that a dogma evolves and has ever evolved, and the history of dogmas y theology demonstrates it.
First of all and once again, we must make clear that the Revealed Truth is eternal and never will stop being, in order to understand that a dogma can and must evolve. But it is also true that a truth, expressed in certain way, can stop having interest, application and transcendence as a whole at certain time. Life, environment, general circumstances come and go beyond a dogmatic truth expressed in certain way, but this does not mean that the original and unique sense of the Truth stops being valid, and that one must or can seek another different, and even opposite sense in the Truth.
Somehow fairly, philosophers and theologians are reproached because they “live in the past”. Of course, even some people may strive for using certain time-honored sentence, even though it means nothing today. So, in front of running the risk of remaining behind, a theologian must recall that fundamental verities, revelations and dogmas are perpetual and if sometimes they seem obsolete and out of place, this happens because the contact with the human evolution is lost.
So, a theologian must try and project always on present issues those fundamental verities that, being perpetual and eternal, are also of today.
So, by keeping a close contact with life and human evolution, the fundamental truth, the dogma, takes part in the said evolution in a homogeneous, clear and precise form, preserving unalterably the fundamental sense of the dogma.