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But according to long-standing usage, a dogma is now understood to be a truth appertaining to faith or morals, revealed by [[God]], transmitted from the Apostles in the Scriptures or by tradition, and proposed by the Church for the acceptance of the faithful. It might be described briefly as a revealed truth defined by the Church—but private revelations do not constitute dogmas, and some theologians confine the word defined to doctrines solemnly defined by general councils, while a revealed truth becomes a dogma when proposed by the Church through her teaching office. A dogma therefore implies a twofold relation: to Divine revelation and to the authoritative teaching of the Church.
For Orthodox Christians, the dogmata are contained in the [[Nicene Creed]] and the [[canon (law)|canons]] of the seven [[ecumenical councils]]. These tenets are summarized by St. [[John of Damascus]] in his ''Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith'', which is the third book of his main work, titled ''The Fount of Knowledge''. In this book he takes a dual approach in explaining each article of the Orthodox faith: one for Christians, where he uses quotations from Scripture and, occasionally, from works of other Fathers of the Church, and the second, directed both at non-Christians (but who, nevertheless, hold some sort of religious belief) and at [[Atheism|atheist]]s, where he quite skillfully employs Aristotelian logic and dialectics, especially ''reductio ad absurdum''.
==See also==
[[el:Δόγμα]]
[[ro:Dogmă]]
