It is delighting that hevangel is prepared to share with us his thoughts on Tillich's book. Regarding the notion and significance of dogma, it will be helpful, as hevangel already intimated, to set aside for the moment our modern aversion to the word, and our stereotypical imaginings about times past. Chesterton once observed, in his lovely book entitled "Heresy," that it is most curious of the modern world, that certain words have assumed connotations almost contrary to what they mean to denote. Orthodoxy, which means "true belief" originally, is now avoided, like leprosy, or even condemned, like crime, by all those who nonetheless believe that their beliefs are true; in this modern world, it seems more reputable to be a heretic: but in times past, we ought to remember, those whom we would call heretics believed strongly that what they believed were in fact true: they believed that they were orthodoxy.

Orthodoxy, heresy, dogma, teaching: these concepts in Western thought have undergone such vicissitudes that we are most advised to approach their historical connotations with great caution. But this caution should not be confined to several terms of import. Characterizations of a whole age might no less be influenced by later historiographical predilections, that the way we come ordinarily to think about, say, the Middle Ages does in fact little justice to those who lived therein. So when heganvel said, that "中世紀黑暗年代政教合一﹐教會用政治手段以教條迫害異己﹐才造成啟蒙年代以後的人對教條的反感," we are obliged to take his statement with a grain of salt.

First of all, the description "中世紀黑暗年代政教合一" is I think historically inaccurate. No doubt that the Carolingians, for instance, relied heavily on the clergy for royal administration (remember that in the 8th and 9th century it was very hard to find literate people except among churchmen), the Investiture Controversy a few centuries later clearly underscored the struggle between temporal and spiritual power (regnum and sacerdotum) as a constant theme in the period under consideration. That princes and bishops guarded most jealously their respective jurisdictions (royal court versus ecclesiastical) against each other's encroachment, showed that it can be very misleading to think of the Middle Ages in terms of the post-Reformation world where the English Crown had become Supreme Head of the Anglican Church, and German princes had now the right to determine the religion in their realms, each according to his will. Notice, in this vein, that John Locke, famous for his doctrine of toleration, never called for the Separation of Church and State. Toleration, for all the 17th-century writers, need not imply Separation.

Back to the Middle Ages. "教會用政治手段以教條迫害異己," said hevangel. But such a statement would be meaningful only to a modern reader who is used to conceiving the Church as an allegedly non-political organization, which, moving within the civil society circumscribed by the modern state, has already surrendered to the latter almost all jurisdiction and decidedly all use of violence. This clearly is NOT what the Church meant to the men and women, literate or no, in the Middle Ages. For them, the Church, the power spiritual, the representation of God on Earth, could legitimately be so powerful as to humble the Holy Roman Emperor, to crown royal heads, to excommunicate princes, to decide doctrines, to prescribe rites, to tax, to adjudge, to punish, and even to wage wars. For Medieval men and women, all these were the rule rather than the exception. Of course, the power of the Church rose and fell, Innocent III being much more powerful, for instance, than Bonafice VIII; but the LEGITIMACY of the Church to do many things, which we would straightway condemn the present-day Roman Church for doing, was as often accepted as challenged, if not more indeed.

The changing connotation of the word dogma since the early modern times--riding through the high times of doctrinal controversies, wars of religion, ages of revolution, the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, all the way to yet another age of revolutions--is a story I shall not venture to tell. But recognizing that our world differs from that of the Middle Ages, not only in terms of productive capacity and political organization, but also, and more deeply, in terms of background understandings which inform the men and women of respective ages as to what is right and what is wrong, what is acceptable and what is not; we ought, in tracing the vicissitudes of the word dogma, and indeed in tracing the vicissitudes of Christian thought itself, to be very sensitive to the grand yet subtle changes in these background understandings. For only then can we do full justice to the history of Christian thought.

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