y they are
furthest removed from it. Here, however, it comes into consideration as
an object of immediate religious interest, which, strictly speaking, in
the Catholic Church is not the case.[4] The Council of Trent was simply
wrung from the Romish Church, and she has made the dogmas of that
council in a certain sense innocuous by the Vatican decrees.[5] In this
sense, it may be said that the period of development of dogma is
altogether closed, and that therefore our discipline requires a
statement such as belongs to a series of historical phenomena that has
been completed.

3. The church has recognised her faith, that is religion itself, in her
dogmas. Accordingly, one very important business of the History of Dogma
is to exhibit the unity that exists in the dogmas of a definite period,
and to shew how the several dogmas are connected with one another and
what leading ideas they express. But, as a matter of course, this
undertaking has its limits in the degree of unanimity which actually
existed in the dogmas of the particular period. It may be shewn without
much difficulty, that a strict though by no means absolute unanimity is
expressed only in the dogmas of the Greek Church. The peculiar character
of the western post-Augustinian ecclesiastical conception of
Christianity, no longer finds a clear expression in dogma, and still
less is this the case with the conception of the Reformers. The reason
of this is that Augustine, as well as Luther, disclosed a new conception
of Christianity, but at the same time appropriated the old dogmas.[6]
But neither Baur's nor Kliefoth's method of writing the history of dogma
has done justice to this fact. Not Baur's, because, notwithstanding the
division into six periods, it sees a uniform process in the development
of dogma, a process which begins with the origin of Christianity and has
run its course, as is alleged, in a strictly logical way. Not
Kliefoth's, because, in the dogmas of the Catholic Church which the East
has never got beyond, it only ascertains the establishment of one
portion of the Christian faith, to which the parts still wanting have
been successively added in later times.[7] In contrast with this, we may
refer to the fact that we can clearly distinguish three styles of
building in the history of dogma, but only three; the style of Origen,
that of Augustine, and that of the Reformers. But the dogma of the
post-Augustinian Church, as well as that of Luther, does not