Word: dogma
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...Roman Catholics, the religious revolution set loose by the Second Vatican Council has changed many traditional patterns of worship and thought, and seemingly unleashed a legion of priests, nuns and laymen who feel free to cast doubt on every article of defined dogma. Protestants too have been stunned by the spectacle of an Episcopal bishop openly denying the Trinity and the Virgin Birth, and ordained ministers teaching in seminaries proclaiming the news that God is dead. On the theological right, evangelical preachers summon believers back to a strict Biblical orthodoxy; on the left, angry young activists insist that...
There is nothing fundamentally new about the insight that Christian ethics are corporate rather than individualistic. The medieval monasteries, for example, were dedicated to serving their communities as well as to praising God in communal prayer; the Mennonites and Quakers have always emphasized brotherly love and peace rather than dogma. The difference is that theologians now take it for granted that Christian love is something that cannot be confined to the church but is directed toward all the world. The commitment of a man who follows Jesus is not to an institution, but to life itself...
...Decline of Dogma...
Professors should indeed profess with a passion, and scholarship should not remain aloof from social ends. But in their obsession with the failure of scholars to change the Government's Viet Nam policies, the dissenters run the danger of creating a restrictive dogma of their own. When the radicals contend, as did many of those at the conference, that "you can't change society through conventional political channels," they risk rendering their own efforts irrelevant. Instead of copping out, they might better examine the way thousands of their own students are now trying to topple a President...
...their criticism of "churchianity," leaders of the underground deny that they are out to destroy the church as a central community of faith. What they really want to do is reform it drastically, divest it of rigid structure, authoritarianism, senseless dogma and suffocating ritual, which the dissidents feel bear little relation to true Christianity. What the rebels are seeking, says Boyd, is a church that "will be seen less and less as a building on a corner, to be visited to indulge in a period of 'magic'. Smaller Christian communities will replace larger ones; clergy will be employed...