The Emergent Village and Doctrinal Statements
While I personally am a fan of very basic doctrinal statements, I thought this article from emergentvillage.com was an interesting take on the Postmodern view of such ideas. I often wonder if my desire for concrete doctrinal statements as a sort of "bar" over which people and organizations must clear is part of my own human nature, or more part of my brain functioning from a Modern context. I do know that as I've come more in touch with our Postmodern reality I've become less needy of long, strict doctrinal statements. I only need like three, maybe four roman numeraled points to feel comfortable now, as opposed to the ten to fifteen I used to like.
In any event, this article is also an interesting insight into the unique situation of the Emergent Village. While I'm becoming less and less inclined to consider myself among the ranks of "emergents" every day, I do admire the fact that they won't cave in to critical pressure to nail down a set of specific beliefs.
This article was originally taken from http://www.emergentvillage.com/weblog/blast-from-the-past-i :
“Doctrinal Statement(?)”
Originally posted, May 4, 2006
From Tony Jones, National Coordinator, Emergent Village
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 of 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.
In any event, this article is also an interesting insight into the unique situation of the Emergent Village. While I'm becoming less and less inclined to consider myself among the ranks of "emergents" every day, I do admire the fact that they won't cave in to critical pressure to nail down a set of specific beliefs.
This article was originally taken from http://www.emergentvillage.com/weblog/blast-from-the-past-i :
“Doctrinal Statement(?)”
Originally posted, May 4, 2006
From Tony Jones, National Coordinator, Emergent Village
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 of 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.
posted by david t at 2:15 PM
18 Comments:
Well, in the dynamic and conversational spirit of Postmodernism, I'll have to say that although I've come to share many of these same ideas during the course of my "journey" of faith, my disposition cools when I come across terminology like "paleo-constructionism" and, yes, overuse of the term "Modernism". I question the consistency of all this very noble and sagacious talk of trying to be more than just another school of theology, a "dead conceptual specimen", that can be put in a glass case, as it were, for analysis . . . when it is laden, at the same time, with references to a contrastive "other".
Do you see what I am getting at? I'm not so much faulting people like Dr. Shults as the denser crowd that are the young, seminary-bred pastors in the field (q.v. some of the commentators) who seem to fail to see that, to be consistent with the spirit of the "movement", they are not meant to be some kind of Prometheus, bringing enlightenment and revolutionary thought to their congregations and church councils, but rather, they are meant to be humble, openminded members of a conversation WITH those silly Billy-Bobs and Mary-Janes in the congregation.
We're not on the ivory tower anymore Toto. This is where the rubber meets the road.
You think that you're a radical? Proove it by taking the risk of actually walking the walk.
If you want to talk logistics, we can talk logistics -- I've given a lot of thought to it over the years and particularly recently. The short story is that the conventional Euro-American church model (the business with a building) just isn't suited to a radical discipleship community directly applying the Word of G-d to their daily lives. That's what burns pastors out. They preach out of a Bible that says one thing but they are obliged to turn the sacred matter of the Word to be something a little different in order to justify their livlihood and their very role vis-à-vis the people in the pews. They try to bring reformation, but it ultimately hits the wall of logistics. The one commentator on Shults' blog article raises a classic point: I'd love to be a revolutionary and risk my job, but I've got a baby on the way.
Hmmm . . . not to sound cruel here, but on l'a déjà vu.
The rubber is meeting the road, preacher-man: are you going to have faith, are you going to forsake all for the Gospel and put all in G-d's hands, or are you going to take the "safe" route and in doing, quietly discredit your own "ministry".
Here are two examples of pastors that I have known (one of whom you should recognise) who seem to be responding to a similar problem (not enough tithe-money to support them) in a similar manner (getting a part-time job) but who are, in fact, worlds apart.
Exibit 1: This pastor in a small town in Montana can just barely remember when he first came to G.A.G. Church; he was fresh out of seminary and zealous for the ministry. He was going to turn this town around. Then he discovered this little free-market reality that if the consumers don't like a product, they are not going to pay as much for it and they might just opt for something else instead. He had a family to feed. Furthermore, he was an educated man with a degree (one of the few around): he shouldn't be expected to be living in a trailerhouse somewhere and shopping at the thrift store!
Time went by. At first he tried to live somewhat consistently with the radical Word that he preached, but, little by little, he compromised for expediency's sake, and, little by little, he went from being an inspired revolutionary to being a burnt-out and bitter swineherd. Other would-be revolutionaries rode into town. He saw them come and he saw them go. At first he supported them, indeed, anything to bring some enthusiasm back to his tithe-paying congregants was more than welcome. Eventually, however, one "evangelist" that he had been patronizing decided to turn "church-planter" in an already sparsely-populated county and the pastor couldn't take it anymore. At one point, he lost his temper and loudly demanded why the other guy was doing this to him, while the two families happened to be eating in the same restaurant. Nevertheless, even though the other guy eventually went out of business, our pastor friend continued to face financial woes. The church alone just couldn't meet the needs of his family and he began to moonlight at other jobs, using "counciling" as a cover-up for his absences during the week.
I do have a specific person in mind here, but it happens that I have also known another pastor who also fits this description almost perfectly. Certainly both men have the same basic story: the started out fresh out of seminary and ready to change the world and ended with a part-time job to supplement a dwindling income.
Exibit 2: This pastor lives in one of the largest urban slums in the world. All of his congregation is impoverished yet even then they scrap something together to put in the offering-plate on Sundays. Nevertheless, this pastor does not feel right in taking his salary from this money, rather he puts it in a church fund for charity. This money feeds the poor and supplies the needy. Because he does not take a salary as a pastor, he works instead during the day as a high-school janitor. If I remember correctly, his house has something on the order of two or three rooms, not counting the attic. The floor was only poured concrete last time I was there. He was right, though, he did have a nice view of the sea from his kitchen window.
Both of these men and their families have discovered the hard financial realities of being a career pastor. One let it burn him out, and in turn, left his children disillusioned. Eventually he had to take on a secret part-time job to keep up appearances, and even then, money was tight. The other essentially works two full-time jobs, and doesn't earn a cent from the one, that is, his pastoral ministry yet G-d is faithful to meet his needs and the needs of the rest of the community. No, I'm sure that few of them have cars, much less mercedes, but somehow they get by without them.
So you want to reform the Church eh? How much are you willing to put on the line?
ah, david t. i found you through mr. gust and i am glad to discover that you too are a blogger. good to see you in fargo this past week. i look forward to seeing you and your wife again in the near future.
-j.
Methinks thou blogest too much, Corineus! At least too longue... But the arrow strikest true.
The nature of humankind is to want a bit of spirituality to resonate within it's otherwise hollow core, then a bit of religion so that it's spirituality can be held in check, then a bit of an institution so that the religion gains some worldly merit ...thus the secular dogs can be held at bay ...and tax write-offs made legit.
Yet the Gospel of Jesus Christ is no institution and eschews the religion of any age. It operates among us in spirit and in truth. Our response to it is by faith. Any other religion preached among us is just religion.
weatherman...
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Chris,..."openminded members of a conversation..."? Yes to some extent but as G.K. Chesterton said, " The object of opening the mind as of opening the mouth is to close it again on something solid."
"...they are not meant to be some kind of Prometheus, bringing enlightenment and revolutionary thought to their congregations and church councils, but rather, they are meant to be humble, openminded members of a conversation" Well, I say, why not both???
And as far as conversations go, I heard Hilary is having one....
L-O-L.
The problem with Prometheus-wanabes is that they are always a one-man show. That is my point.
Obviously I expect that these MDiv-s learned something while they were in the pastor-factory and that they can offer fresh and sagacious insight, not to mention a model of servant leadership, to the congregational discourse, but one cannot be simultaneously an arrogant, Promethean cowboy and a humble Christ-like harvest-worker. Show me such a man or woman and i will show you a fraud or, at best, an inexperienced infant.
Chris you seem to have a very low opinion of those who attend seminary.
Conversely, I have a deep admiration for most people who attend seminary. I have a low opinion of seminaries -- in large part due to what I've seen come out of them.
You seem to have an unusually high opinion of Prometheus. I take issue with that, with all due respect.
"I have a low opinion of seminaries -- in large part due to what I've seen come out of them."
Thats a hasty generalization. Some of our greatest preachers were "produced" by seminaries. Who wants ot have a bunch of dumb pastors that have no idea what they are talking about? Of course you don't have to attend smeinary to be a Pastor, but many who do attend benefit greatly, thus benefitting their congregations greatly. I have deep respect for many men in my life, many of whom are smeinary professors and/or graduates. The church has been dumbed down too much, seminary can help counteract that.
"You seem to have an unusually high opinion of Prometheus. I take issue with that, with all due respect."
I have no high regard for a pagan false deity...even if he did bring us fire ;)
I will certainly cede to you the point that many great Christian thinkers have come out of seminaries. Some, like C. S. Lewis, were English professors and many others were "unlearned" fishermen from Galilee.
I have been in academia too long and I have been in the Church too long not too be a little critical of the idea found in many Christian circles that seminaries produce an enlightened clerical élite who are the only ones suitible to hold the official (paid) position of pastor in a church. It very much is a mentality that views the "pastor" as some enlightened being, a Prometheus-figure, instead of a servant among servants. I am challenging the entire model, Brian. If you read the Acts of the Apostles, it nowhere implies that there were these paid pastors (epscopoi) who gave sermons on Sunday mornings and signed marriage certificates. Late Roman/medieval history tells a different story to be sure, but forgive a poor, twice-baptised Protestant for flying "sola" here.
Perhaps I am skeptical, Brian, but, with all due respect, your words imply a certain naïvité. I realise that you are considering going to seminary, as, to be honest, am I, but it is neither men nor men's minds that we are to worship. In fact, even the Berean Jews searched the Scriptures to see if there was truth to what Gamaliel's student the rabbi Paul was preaching to them.
If I get to heaven and C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, Charles Spurgeon and Jerome the Neo-Platonist are not there, that would be too bad, but I do know that if no one else is there, my Savior, the incarnate Word, will be. At least there will be less cigar smoke.
"If you read the Acts of the Apostles, it nowhere implies that there were these paid pastors (epscopoi) who gave sermons on Sunday mornings and signed marriage certificates."
-Yes, but after you finish Acts, keep reading...
"...but it is neither men nor men's minds that we are to worship."
-I don't get your point. Of course we aren't to worship men.
Spurgeon will be there....
~BL
And . . . getting back to my orignal comment (which was written, for the record, after reading Dr. Shults' article on the weightiness of reformation), I find it interesting to think of those church boards who looked at so-and-so's transcript from such-and-such seminary (here Bethel Seminary) and saw that he took these courses with learned professors like LeRon Shults when, in reality (by their own admission), they were clueless as to what their professors were actually saying for most of those "dry" classes and, like even the best of us, distracted by extra-curricular things like their coming date with the pretty sacred music major or the Friday-night party at the grape juice den. They did take away something about doing away with doctrinal statements and opposing fuddy-duddy board members but then they landed the job and discovered things like salaries and overhead costs.
You know, Brian, I've known a few pastors and seminal students in my day too. I'm not meaning to include everyone here, but I think that I have experienced enough variety over the years to make a few generalisations. More importantly, however, I read the Bible and wonder why there are so many fundamental disparities between, say, the Church of Acts and the conventional churches of the U.S.
When you find the passage, Brian, let me know.
I hope so too, Brian, because I have a lot of respect for Spurgeon. However, whether he is there or not is ultimately between him and G-d.
Apparently, one can even cast out demons in Jesus' name, not to mention "speaking with the tongues of men and of angels", but not be one of His own.
Oh, and please excuse my rather Romantic transliteration error. It should be spelled "episkopoi" rather than "episcopoi".
I love you, Brian :j
Jesus loves you too
Our experiences have been very different Chris...
You cannot generalize the way you do about seminary graduates. It's highly fallacious and insulting.
http://www.wscal.edu/clark/whyseminary.php
Experience is hard to argue with, and it's been my experience that a lot of young christians who don't have a clear conception of "what they want to do in life" try to either be a missionary or go to seminary. It just seems like the "christian" thing to do. This is the wrong reason to go to seminary, and hence it yields faulty M-Divs.
Of course there are going to be good apples and bad apples that come out of seminary, that shouldn't surprise anyone. My experience says that the majority are bad apples, hence a "generalization" isn't so much "fallacy" as much as "statistic".
I think what Chris was getting at is that, like the classical "liberal snob" with a PhD in Biology that tries to tell us "how the world works", seminary too produces "wannabe Prometheuses" who come out thinking they know scripture and they're gonna tell people how to interpret it right.
While they certainly do have an advantage (believe me, I'm all for post-baccelorate scholarship), the difference lies in the attitude.
My dad recently made an interesting comment to me. I think he was getting wary of my attitude; perhaps he thought I was acting like a "know-it-all". He said:
"Listen, you don't go into ministry because you think you've got something good to tell everyone. Your ministry will fail. You go into ministry because you want to be a servant."
I don't think this could be more true. I think Chris was hitting on the same thing--that too many people go to seminary thinking that they're going to leave and become the next big mega church I've-got-all-the-answers guy. If one pursues seminary because they think they've got a "special gift" and they want to use their credentials to spread THEIR message to the world, they're going for selfish reasons.
Seminary should serve to equip a person for a life of servitude. And being an edumacated christian, I think, holds one to a higher standard of servitude--not just the "bless this servant, O Lord" type--I mean the "Ok God, I'll shovel Sh** for the rest of my life if you want me to" servant.
So yes, one can be an M-Div and a humble servant of God. It just seems like it doesn't happen very often.
Whatev, your statistics are baseless. They are made up. What do you base them on? Where are you pulling your data from?
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