Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/138

 the tradition itself, in its historical development, is essentially a positing or making explicit of some implicit truth. Thus doctrine is essentially worked out and matured in the Church. It exists, to begin with, as intuition, feeling, as the felt, flash-like witness of the Spirit. But the determination implied in the act of producing or bringing into existence is itself merely a one-sided determination, for truth is at the same time implicitly present or presupposed. The subject is already taken up into the content.

The confession of faith or dogma accordingly is something which has been essentially formed in the Church first of all, and it is consequently Thought, developed consciousness which asserts its rights in connection with it, and it applies all that it has gained from trained thinking and philosophy, to these thoughts and on behalf of this truth thus consciously perceived; doctrine is constructed out of foreign concrete elements which have still an impure element mixed with them.

This actually existing doctrine must accordingly be preserved in the Church, and all that is considered as doctrine must be taught. In order to remove it out of the region of caprice and of accidental opinions and views, and to preserve it as absolute truth and as something fixed, it is deposited or stated in creeds. It is, it exists, it has value, it is recognised immediately yet not in a material fashion that the apprehension of this doctrine takes place through the senses, just as the world, too, is something presupposed as existing, and to which we are related as to something material.

Spiritual truth exists only as something consciously known; the mode in which it outwardly appears consists in the fact that it is taught. The Church is essentially the institution which implies the existence of a teaching body to which is committed the duty of expounding this doctrine.

The subject is born within the circle of this doctrine;