Emergent and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea of a doctrinal statement

Tony Jones, the national coordinator of Emergent-U.S., has recently posted an article written by LeRon Shults, formerly of Bethel Seminary, on why the Emergent Church will not produce a doctrinal statement. The whole article can be read here.

First, I would like to say that I have no problem with the Emergent Church not releasing a doctrinal statement. My understanding of the movement is that it is just that—a movement. It is not a church or a denomination. However, I believe that the reasons set forth in the article are wrong, and, if followed to their logical conclusions, can and will destroy true Christianity among those who hold to them

The first argument Shults puts forth is that a doctrinal statement is 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.

It comes as a surprise to me, as well as to others, I am sure, that Jesus and the New Testament writers were not highly concerned with doctrine. Is it not a doctrinal statement when Christ says, “this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins?” What about “heaven and earth will pass away, but my word will not pass away?” The first chapter of John certainly appears to be doctrinal. However, I will admit that these are not doctrinal books. They most definitely contain doctrine, but they are narratives, not statements of faith.

The epistles, however, are another story. When Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15 of the gospel he preached, that Christ died for our sins and was raised from the dead in accordance with the Scriptures, what is this if not a doctrinal statement? If Christ is not raised from the dead, then our faith is futile and we are still in our sins. Not only that, but we are misrepresenting God also. “If anyone is preaching a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.” How are these not a “set of propositions the assent to which marks off true believers?” The New Testament is full of doctrine, and to claim otherwise is either to be blind to what the text actually says or to ignore it.

The next argument is that it is inappropriate to formulate a doctrinal statement. Shults’s argument here stems from his post-modern view of language. He asserts that you cannot create a statement of doctrine that would hold true for all cultures and contexts. It would seem to me that this argument doesn’t really hold much water. If a single statement of faith cannot be true for all cultures and contexts, then why wouldn’t he want to create a statement for the present culture and context? Also, and more importantly, he claims that

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.

So what exactly is the Bible? Is it idolatry to view the Bible as the revelation of God? And what about all that the great theologians wrote about God? If they truly believed it was “linguistic idolatry” to use “finite propositional structures” in discussing God, would we have Calvin’s Institutes? I know of no one who claims that God has been captured in words. That is a ridiculous statement. God is not in the words of any doctrinal statement, or even in the words of the Bible. God is greater than any words, but he has chosen to reveal himself to us in words, and therefore it is not wrong to write about God. In fact, one could say that to argue that writing about God is idolatry is to accuse God himself of idolatry. After all, he put his revelation of himself into words before any of the rest of us ever dreamed of our statements of faith.

This argument is truly dangerous to Christianity. If God transcends the written word to the point that no true knowledge of him can be acquired in that way, then on what basis do we claim any knowledge of God? If we cannot claim any knowledge of God, then we cannot know that we have been saved. We can’t even know that we need to be saved. We can’t know that God created the world, or that there is only one God, or anything at all about him. We are left to our own devices, and the Bible becomes just another book about what people think about God. We’ve already been down that road, and we need only look at the liberal denominations to see that it leads to a religion that isn’t Christianity at all.

The third and final argument set forth by Shults is that it would be disastrous to have a doctrinal statement. On this, I think that I agree. It would indeed be disastrous to a movement that is “dynamic rather than static” to set its beliefs down on paper. It could very well lead to “excluding people from the community” or “excommunication from the community.” When the primary focus of your organization is to “facilitate a conversation among persons committed to living out faithfully the call to participate in the reconciling mission of the biblical God” and to “provide a milieu in which others are welcomed to join in the pursuit of life ‘in’ the One who is true,” then anything that might exclude someone should be avoided.

Christianity is an exclusive religion. Jesus himself taught that no man comes to the Father but through him, and that he came not to bring peace but a sword. Any religion that seeks to bring in others at the expense of the truth and exclusivity set out in Scripture is not Christianity, but something else. That being said, this isn't the first time the true Church has been forced to deal with this sort of doctrinal relativism, and it possibly won't be the last. We should deal with those who would propogate this belief with love and with prayer, that God might call them to himself and establish them in the "faith that was once for all delivered to the saints."