An Emerging Statement of Faith?
“No”, says Tony Jones, National Coordinator for U.S.-Emergent, and LeRon Shults backs up this decision; read the piece for yourself, 
and then I’ll comment (tip of the Wahoos hat to my buddy Paul Oyler over at SteelerDirtFreak for this one):
From Tony Jones, National Coordinator, Emergent-U.S.
Yes, we have been inundated with requests for our statement of faith in Emergent, but some of us had an inclination that to formulate something would take us down a road that we don’t want to trod. So, imagine our joy when a leading theologian joined our ranks and said that such a statement would be disastrous. That’s what happened when we started talking to LeRon Shults, late of Bethel Seminary and now heading off to a university post in Norway. LeRon is the author of many books, all of which you should read, and now the author a piece to guide us regarding statements of faith and doctrine. Read on…
From LeRon Shults:
The coordinators of Emergent have often been asked (usually by their critics) to proffer a doctrinal statement that lays out clearly what they believe. I am merely a participant in the conversation who delights in the ongoing reformation that occurs as we bring the Gospel into engagement with culture in ever new ways. But I have been asked to respond to this ongoing demand for clarity and closure. I believe there are several reasons why Emergent should not have a “statement of faith” to which its members are asked (or required) to subscribe. Such a move would be unnecessary, inappropriate and disastrous.
Why is such a move unnecessary? Jesus did not have a “statement of faith.” He called others into faithful relation to God through life in the Spirit. As with the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, he was not concerned primarily with whether individuals gave cognitive assent to abstract propositions but with calling persons into trustworthy community through embodied and concrete acts of faithfulness. The writers of the New Testament were not obsessed with finding a final set of propositions the assent to which marks off true believers. Paul, Luke and John all talked much more about the mission to which we should commit ourselves than they did about the propositions to which we should assent. The very idea of a “statement of faith” is mired in modernist assumptions and driven by modernist anxieties – and this brings us to the next point.
Such a move would be inappropriate. Various communities throughout church history have often developed new creeds and confessions in order to express the Gospel in their cultural context, but the early modern use of linguistic formulations as “statements” that allegedly capture the truth about God with certainty for all cultures and contexts is deeply problematic for at least two reasons. First, such an approach presupposes a (Platonic or Cartesian) representationalist view of language, which has been undermined in late modernity by a variety of disciplines across the social and physical sciences (e.g., sociolinguistics and paleo-biology). Why would Emergent want to force the new wine of the Spirit’s powerful transformation of communities into old modernist wineskins? Second, and more importantly from a theological perspective, this fixation with propositions can easily lead to the attempt to use the finite tool of language on an absolute Presence that transcends and embraces all finite reality. Languages are culturally constructed symbol systems that enable humans to communicate by designating one finite reality in distinction from another. The truly infinite God of Christian faith is beyond all our linguistic grasping, as all the great theologians from Irenaeus to Calvin have insisted, and so the struggle to capture God in our finite propositional structures is nothing short of linguistic idolatry.
Why would it be disastrous? Emergent aims to facilitate a conversation among persons committed to living out faithfully the call to participate in the reconciling mission of the biblical God. Whether it appears in the by-laws of a congregation or in the catalog of an educational institution, a “statement of faith” tends to stop conversation. Such statements can also easily become tools for manipulating or excluding people from the community. Too often they create an environment in which real conversation is avoided out of fear that critical reflection on one or more of the sacred propositions will lead to excommunication from the community. Emergent seeks to provide a milieu in which others are welcomed to join in the pursuit of life “in” the One who is true (1 John 5:20). Giving into the pressure to petrify the conversation in a “statement” would make Emergent easier to control; its critics could dissect it and then place it in a theological museum alongside other dead conceptual specimens the curators find opprobrious. But living, moving things do not belong in museums. Whatever else Emergent may be, it is a movement committed to encouraging the lively pursuit of God and to inviting others into a delightfully terrifying conversation along the way.
This does not mean, as some critics will assume, that Emergent does not care about belief or that there is no role at all for propositions. Any good conversation includes propositions, but they should serve the process of inquiry rather than shut it down. Emergent is dynamic rather than static, which means that its ongoing intentionality is (and may it ever be) shaped less by an anxiety about finalizing state-ments than it is by an eager attention to the dynamism of the Spirit’s disturbing and comforting presence, which is always reforming us by calling us into an ever-intensifying participation in the Son’s welcoming of others into the faithful embrace of God.
“Unnecessary, inappropriate, and disastrous”…get the feeling that Shults thinks that it’s a bad idea? Actually, I think I agree with the idea that Emergent doesn’t need a statement of faith—but Shults’ reasoning leaves a whole lot to be desired, from where I sit. First, note his second paragraph relative to the fact that Jesus did not have a “statement of faith”. Cute, Mr. Shults, but borderline silly, frankly, and used to introduce an all-too-typical problem with Emergent, the use of red herrings (Brian McLaren particularly seems to excel in red herrings). Statements of faith are not antithetical to “trustworthy community through embodied and concrete acts of faithfulness“; rather, they form a part of the very basis of such.
Moving to Shults’ third paragraph, about the inappropriateness of such a move, interact with this gem: “the struggle to capture God in our finite propositional structures is nothing short of linguistic idolatry“. Wow…I’m at a loss as to what to say about this one…if he’s saying that God is to big to be “captured” by human language, well, I suppose that’s true; God is beyond our ability to fully comprehend, of course, and that entails an inability to sum Him up tidily in formulaic propositions; fair enough. But assuming that Shults’ words mean anything (from his own words, we are left to wonder), then isn’t his own work as a “theologian” called into question? Isn’t he condemning himself as an idolator to try to speak of God in any meaningful way? It’s one thing to say (and I can agree, as I said, on some levels) that Emergent shouldn’t have an SOF at this point; it’s quite another to condemn the whole project of having a statement of faith (by any entity, assumedly, at any time) as idolatrous. Did Mr. Shults have to sign some kind of statement, or profess fidelity to some articulation of fundamental Christian truth, when he assumed the position at Bethel Seminary, and was that profession an act of idol worship? Or is this why he’s heading off to Norway now…
As to his “disastrous” paragraph, his concerns that drawing boundaries would calcify the movement into a rigid “he’s in, she’s out, she’s on the border, he’s out” kind of thing is overblown, at the least. Yes, I appreciate (as one who finds himself intrigued by, encouraged by, scared to death of, worried about, mortified by, and energized by, at various times, this thing called “Emergent”) the fact that what is going on is characterized as a “conversation”; that, to me, is why perhaps an SOF isn’t necessarily needed at this point. But that said, are all viewpoints valid? Is there no place for, if not exclusion from the conversation, at least the concept that, hey, you know, the deity of Christ isn’t up for debate here? I can have an amiable conversation with a Muslim, but his viewpoint on the Trinity and mine aren’t compatible, aren’t going to be compatible, and a “conversation” cannot mean the legitimation of his viewpoint on the subject as being equal to mine (and I’m not talking legality here, of course). I say of Emergent what I’ve always said of PromiseKeepers: if the “playing field” is evangelical, then let’s take all comers, but we can’t compromise the base. Shults seems to want to cede the playing field to some kind of free-for-all deal, and frankly, that’s going to spell the death-knell of this movement—and certainly keep a guy like me at a safe distance. Hey, I’m all for semper reformanda, and the disturbing and comforting presence of the Spirit, but let’s remember: Jesus calls Him the “Spirit of Truth“. Emergent may not (yet) need an SOF, but if Shults’ reasoning is offered as the rationale, perhaps an SOF is needed sooner rather than later after all…
This phrase comes from the 1978 "Jonestown massacre" in which most members of the Peoples Temple cult, blindly following their leader Jim Jones, committed suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.
Osborne: A Contrarian's Guide to Knowing God
Schlossberg: Idols For Destruction
One Response to “An Emerging Statement of Faith?”
I share Mark Driscoll’s opinion, in the latest Criswell Theological Review (and elsewhere) that Emergent and its leaders are simply re-looping the road of neo-orthodoxy trod a hundred years ago, but with new lingo.
The Bible teaches a method and process of “exclusion”. It’s called church discipline. This part of the emergent movement is heretical (in that, when it says that God can’t be known or defined propositionally, it in effect denies the inspiration and authority of Scripture), and antinomian to its core.
It’s a great insight that America is a post-modern mission field and we need to think of ourselves as cross-culturalists, esp. in the EFCA. But we can’t rescue lost pomos by becoming infected with pomo ourselves. You don’t heal homosexuals by infecting yourself with AIDS. Only the (reasonably) healthy can help the sick.
Jack Brooks ~ Aug 1, 2006 at 11:28 am