Poking around on the Emergent Village Blog today I found a fairly intriguing post. It seems certain critics of the vagueness of statements from emergent leaders have asked those leaders to produce a statement of faith. This would seem a reasonable request so that we can all know at least what sort of historic Christian doctrines emergent leaders consider essential.
Tony Jones, the National Coordinator of Emergent-U.S. provided a bit of a response by deferring to the statement of LeRon Shults, a former professor of Theology Bethel Seminary and author of The Postfoundationalist Task of Theology and Reforming the Doctrine of God. Jones writes:
"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..."
Even given the opinion from Scott McKnight at Jesus Creed that since Emergent is not a denomination, no creed is necessary, one wonders why a simple statement of what doctrines emergent finds essential would be disastrous.
From there, Jones allows Shults to explain why Emergent should not have a statement of faith:
"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 very idea of a "statement of faith" is mired in modernist assumptions and driven by modernist anxieties. "
Giving Shults the benefit of the doubt, he seems to be saying not that doctrine is bad, but that statements of faith tend to define things tightly in language that reflects the particular worldview of the era in which they are written. But such a notion belies a postmodern bias every bit as troublesome as modernist assumptions. Postmodern assumptions about the inadequacies of language tend to call into question the very possibility of communication or truth.
Shults continues regarding and emergent statement of faith:
"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...
: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. "
As others have pointed out (notably C.S. Lewis in his essay 'Horrid Red Things') the common sense knowlege that words don't convey everything about the object they represent does not mean that words convey nothing. Does the statement "One God" or "Creator of Heaven and Earth" convey nothing that is understood with "with certainty for all cultures"? What is more frightening is the sentence "The truly infinite God of Christian faith is beyond all our linguistic grasping", for reasons I shall discuss below.
But one more quote from Shults:
"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..."
It would seem to me, as one who assumes Shults' words have some correspondence to reality, that the concept of heresy is dead. He says that one cannot be excluded from the community for unwillingness to profess to believe specific doctrinal statements. But is this not what the historic church has always demanded? Is it not the apostle John who insists that to deny that Christ has come in the flesh is the spirit of anti-Christ? Was it not Paul who said that those who returned to Jewish ceremonial law were severed from Christ?
Intriguingly, the revisionist forces in mainline denominations use "inclusion" as a primary definition of their version of god, a god who is loving and not judgmental, a god who is ineffible. As I posted a earlier, quoting Robert Sanders' article on the The Ecstatic Heresy, it was the teaching of Kant, echoed by Schleirmacher, that led mainline theologians to conclude that God cannot be described in human language, which led to the eventual denial of all meaning in theological and moral thought. A few quotes from Sanders may sound hauntingly like some of this emergent talk
"Theological statements use language and literal language refers only to objective realities. Therefore, in the ecstatic view, language applied to God is always symbolic since God is ineffable.
"… the ecstatic view believes that God is always beyond concepts and language. In this view, one encounters God, but only mystically, beyond the self and God as speaking to each other. From this perspective, God never says anything specific, objective, and concrete. Since God is beyond language, every attempt to verbalize God is partial and inadequate, with the result that differing partial truths, even when they contradict, can be harmonized at a higher level in God.
"In the ecstatic view, God never speaks a "Thou shalt" or "Thou shalt not" since this implies objectivity in God's Word. Therefore, ethics usually concerns a principle, love for example, which receives its concrete realization according to the forms of a given culture. Since cultures evolve, so do ethics."
As a result of divorcing knowledge of God from language, it inevitably followed in the mainline that orthodox concepts of God eventually were dismissed and now, moral principles observed by Christians for twenty centuries are also considered passe. Episcopal, Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian and other mainline liberals now insist that orthodox believers who reject a radical "inclusion" of not only sexual deviance but neo-pagan religious leanings are simply closed minded.
I understand Scot McKnight's suggestion that since Emergent is a movement and not a denomination, no statement of faith is needed. But is it not at least reasonable to clearly state a belief in historic Christian Orthodoxy? In the Trinity? The incarnation? Is dialog with the culture really impossible when one simply states what one believes? Does dialog with culture mean that we cannot discuss moral categories of right and wrong?
All the critics of emergent are asking is "can you admit to orthodox theology and biblical morality as defining limits?" And the emergent folks continue to waffle, refusing to give clear answers.
I continue to believe that the downward spiral of the mainline churches is being mirrored in the evangelical community. The many of the leaders of the new generation of evangelicals are just as infatuated with postmodern skepticism about language and contentless mysticism as leaders of the last generation were with naturalism and the irrational leap of faith. And I fear the results in doctrine and morals will one day be the same.
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