"The Western theology," Dean Stanley wrote, "is essentially logical in
form and based on law. The Eastern theology is rhetorical in form and
based on philosophy. The Latin divine succeeded to the Roman advocate.
The Oriental divine succeeded to the Grecian sophist."[28]
And all the laboured arguments in support of our hunger of immortality,
which pretend to be grounded on reason or logic, are merely advocacy and
sophistry.
The property and characteristic of advocacy is, in effect, to make use
of logic in the interests of a thesis that is to be defended, while, on
the other hand, the strictly scientific method proceeds from the facts,
the data, presented to us by reality, in order that it may arrive, or
not arrive, as the case may be, at a certain conclusion. What is
important is to define the problem clearly, whence it follows that
progress consists not seldom in undoing what has been done. Advocacy
always supposes a _petitio principii_, and its arguments are _ad
probandum_. And theology that pretends to be rational is nothing but
advocacy.
Theology proceeds from dogma, and dogma, _dogma_, in its
primitive and most direct sense, signifies a decree, something akin to
the Latin _placitum_, that which has seemed to the legislative authority
fitting to be law. This juridical concept is the starting-point of
theology. For the theologian, as for the advocate, dogma, law, is
something given--a starting-point which admits of discussion only in
respect of its application and its most exact interpretation.
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