Well, like I said, it doesn't have to have anything to do with philosophy. It can and sometimes does, but I was more interested in only how religion and philosophy intertwine.
But theology is also used to refute or invalidate religious practices and ideas; there can be an assumption of the divine, but not necessarily agreement on whether that implies God. Though honestly "God" is very abstract and can mean almost anything, so maybe that's what you meant, I don't know.
Here is some music for our listening pleasure, as we read and contemplate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VswsTffasc
Actually, by it's very definition it is a
form of philosophy. Philosophy overlaps most academic disciplines, because they all were originally and continue to be under it's purview, owing their basis to philosophers after all. Scientists, for example, subscribe to a specific form of empiricism in order to have epistemological grounding for their work, which is in the category of philosophy called metaphysics.
It may help in understanding this to take a look at etymology and some of the more recent history of philosophy, so that you can see what I'm getting at.
Philo is the Attic Greek word for "wisdom", and
sophia the word in Attic for an infatuation, a kind of love lesser than
agape (unconditional love) but greater than
feleo (brotherly love).
Thus, philosophers were originally and for quite some time until the stratification of philosophy (hence physicists, biologists, anthropologists, sociologists, theologians, "philosophers", etc.), generalists who for the love of wisdom most often made contributions in a variety of fields. Aristotle, for example, discovered that fish have air bladders in the research chronicled in his
Zoology, continued the work of political theory set out in Plato's
Republic with his
Nichomachean Ethics, and came up with groundbreaking ideas as to the form and function of logic such as the syllogism, and types of causes (material, final, formal, and efficient), in his masterpiece entitled
Posterior Analytics.
Later on in Isaac Newton's day, it was much the same as he not only published the
Principia Mathematica but a number of theological treatises, marvelous studies into biological taxonomy, and a few forays into epistemology in support of Empiricism especially against Descartes, a Rationalist. Of course he is most well known for the
Principia which lays out Newton's Laws of Motion, and during his time scientists like himself were actually called natural philosophers.
Now, we sally onward to discussion of theology.
Theo is the Attic word for Deity/deities, and
logos is a very loaded Attic word that pertains to the practice of formal dialogue and thinking, hence the modern term "logic". As such, from the beginning of it's practice theology has been the study of deity. It exists in many forms, some clearly less possessive of critical thinking than others, but the same can be said in other areas of philosophy when we compare Socrates to either the Sophists or Eleatics of his day. There is a rich philosophical history behind theology and many debates that could be considered anything but dogmatic, rather they were probing and should rightfully invoke excitement today just the same as any other of philosophy.
The best example in theology, has to be the giant that is Augustine of Hippo. There is no other person of the classical period who had published so much material as Augustine, and to be frank no one else even comes close to the 200+ books that we know of today. His two most famous works are
The Confessions and
The City of God.
In
The Confessions we find a riveting account of his
metanoia ("change of mind", translated as "repentance" in the New Testament) from the late and internally divergent adherents of the Second Platonic Academy to Christianity. Partly a biography and partly an extensive rationalization of his conversion, he details the changes in his ethics, his understanding of deity, etc. and composes a number of critical Christian responses to the Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics of the Academy, at the same time establishing the
logos of his faith with Platonic reasoning as well as uniquely Christian philosophical reasoning.
In
The City of God, we find the Platonic Christian counterpart to Plato's
Republic, in which Augustine borrows some from Platonic reasoning (in particular the idea of Platonic Forms) in order to form a picture of the
pneuma/soul. This is juxtaposed against Plato's understanding of
pneuma, which to him models the perfect
polis/city, as Augustine contrasts from him with his conclusion that humanity on earth is hopelessly depraved, and the only perfect societal state of affairs wherein the qualities of the
pneuma can truly be seen, is within the Kingdom of Heaven. Thus, the function of society is instead bent towards an ultimate, theological purpose.
Are there dogmas within philosophy? There certainly are. Just look at Platonic Forms, for one example of many. But my main point is that the mere observation that there are different noticeable tendencies between theology and the stereotypical idea of "philosophy", hampers more than it helps in explaining the real nature of the two. Historically, and functionally, theology is fundamentally predicated on philosophy, and the different attitudes/modes-of-thought that people observe in theology (sometimes contrasting them from "philosophy proper" as if it were separate), are in fact types of reasoning that have their origins in the work of philosophers.
While it might be said that "philosophy proper" doesn't operate under the axiom that "deity must exist in the first place" (which isn't true either as the designation "atheist" is technically a theological position, just look at the word itself!), every area of philosophy aside from certain inquiries in epistemology, has to use a number of axioms. Determining the presence or lack of such axioms is called "establishing the
universe of discourse", and it is necessary to have a universe of discourse in order to ask all kinds of different questions without having to regress all the way back to "how can we know anything, or this or that, in the first place".
