This whole period of theology, Protestant and Roman Catholic, is statical. Men are defining and protecting the positions they have inherited; they do not think of progress. And yet the Roman Catholic Church had upon its hands one great unsettled question--the thesis of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin. This became the standing type of an assertion which, while favoured by the church and on the very verge of dogma, was yet not a dogma[15]--till the definition came through Pius IX. in 1854. Here then the frontier of dogma had unquestionably moved forward. Its conception must become dynamic; there was need of some theory of development like J. H. Newman's (1845). It does not happen, however, that the papal definition of 1854 employs the _word_ "dogma"; that honour was withheld from the word until the Vatican decrees of 1870 affirmed the personal infallibility of the pope as _divinitus revelatum dogma_. With this, one line of tendency in Roman Catholic doctrine reached its climax; the pope and the council use "dogma" in a distinctive sense for what is definitely formulated by authority. But there is another line of tendency. The same council defines not indeed dogma but faith--inseparable from dogma--as[16] (1) revealed, (a) in Scripture or (b) in unwritten tradition, and (2) taught by the church, (a) in formulated decrees, or (b) in her ordinary _magisterium_. This is a correction of Chrismann. Not only does the correction involve the substitution of papal authority for a universal consent of "pastors" and "the faithful"; it also deliberately ranks the unformulated teachings of the church on points of doctrine as no less _de fide_ than those formulated. This amounts to a serious warning against trying to draw a definite line round dogma. The modern Roman Catholic temper must be eager to believe and eager to submit. New dogmas have been precipitated more than once during the 19th century; there may still be others held in solution in the church's teaching. If so, these are likely one day to crystallize into full dogmas; and, even while not yet "declared," they have the same claim upon faith.
Thus there seems to be a measure of uncertainty as to what the Church of Rome now calls "dogma"--only in part relieved by the distinction between "dogmas strictly" and mere "dogmatic truths." Again, the assertion that the church is infallible upon some questions, not belonging to the area of revelation (properly so-called in Roman Catholic theology), destroys the identification of "dogmas" with "infallible certainties" which we noted both in the Protestant schoolmen and in Chrismann. The identification of dogma with revelation remains, with another distinction in support of it, between "material dogmas" (all scriptural or traditional truth) and "formal" or ecclesiastically formulated dogmas.[17] On the other hand, there is absolute certainty on a point long disputed. Questions about church authority are henceforth questions about the pope's authority. What he calls heresy, under the sanction of excommunication or that more formal excommunication known as anathema, is heresy. What he finds it necessary to condemn even in milder terms as bad doctrine is infallibily condemned; that is certain, Roman Catholic theologians tell us, though not yet _de fide_.