The general problem of "dogma" or "doctrine" has come up here. This is a big issue to which "gay marriage" is only a small very recent contingent issue. Rus in particular has mentioned it several times, and has said from time to time that one should treat with some suspicion a new idea that runs counter to the dogma which has been being developed by scholars for 2000 years. Getting into this in any detail would take a lot of work, which maybe I am cursing myself with by rolling the stones I am about to push. Right now, I just want to make a few points. I use "dogma" and "doctrine" interchangably, since they are translations of each other.
1 - It is exactly because of the fact that so many people have lost faith in the dogma of the Church that there are so many new ideas tight now, and so many people who are or who seem to be "picking and choosing" what teachings they think are valid.
2 - Dogma or Doctrine originally meant "teaching" and not simply the things to be taught, but the methods and qualifications of teachers. St. Augustine's treatise De Doctrina Christiana (On Christian Teaching, Peri Dogmati Khristianoi) describes how one determines what correct teaching is and how one is to then affect that teaching. It is clear that at that time the Church did not consider that the truths were all known and should merely be dictated as laws.
3 - The majority of lay Christians today, and non-Christians who observe the churches, think of "dogma" as a kind of intellectual law, a set of thoughts that must be thought to be a good Christian, and they point at examples where people have been persecuted for defying this law.
4 - At the time of Augustine, the notion of "Sola Scriptura", that all useful teaching should come directly from Scripture, was not considered valid. It was well known that issues of what we call science today would inform both exegesis and teaching. Augustine warned about tricking oneself into teaching contrary to evidence of the senses.
5 - Many, if not the majority, of Christians disaffected with the doctrine of their church do so for one of three reasons: they see other churches with different doctrines (much of the last few hundred years in Europe and America), they believe their church teaches in defiance of Paul and Jesus (the Reformation), or they see modern philosophy and/or science defying church doctrine (modern America). There is of course a constant pressure to "get out of" doing what one id morally obligated to do, but this is not new, and should not be given as a cause for all of the doctrinal conflicts of the past 450 years (or earlier, if we go back to the Roman/Orthodox mess.)
6 - In the last 100 years, the average person has access to more information about the early church than any person since before the Nicene Council. It is probably true that every person reading this has more original texts at their fingertips, and more knowledge of the period during which Jesus lived, than anyone at any Ecumenical Council in history. We are not unqualified to challenge their decisions.
7 - Augustine and the others who lived at or between the times of the Ecumenical Councils knew that what was to be taught was not a settled matter, and they also knew that interpretation of Scripture depended on general knowledge about the world. Our knowledge of the world and it's cultures is vastly greater and different in the last 200 years than in any time previous to it. That dogma would change under such pressure would have been taken as certainty by the early church.
8 - The lay person sees the church as out of touch with reality because this is often the truth. The church, and by this I mean both the Orthodox and Catholic Church and her "protestant" children, has not reacted to all of this change of state and knowledge. It may be that in the end Doctrine will not teach much, but the church has not done well, in a lay person's eyes, explaining why it should not change.
9 - In the early church, part of teaching was explanation. Explanation or teaching proper, "Christian Doctrine" involved explaining in common terms why a person should give up their old religion and adopt the new one. The church today is dismal at this art. Too many clergy and defenders of "dogma" have fallen into defending it as something that should not be questioned, while true traching would assume questions and attempt to answer them.
Because of the above points, we should expect church doctrine to be in crisis. We should never conclude automatically that a decision uninformed by the situation in the past 200 years is valid. Church leaders have an obligation to deconstruct their beliefs, reform them in the light of modern knowledge just as St. Augustine would have done, and then explain their conclusions as teachers, not lawgivers.
