Building a Statement of Faith

Choosing verses for a statement of faith can be challenging.  A statement of faith should reflect our understanding of what the whole Bible teaches.  But a statement of faith is expected to address several key questions (such as what is the Trinity, or what is the church, or what is faith).  For each question it’s hard to find time to read the whole Bible to answer that question.  Often we find short-cuts (such as key word searches, cross references, or examining other statements of faith).  And to make matters more challenging we want to find several references for each point.

But this leads us to a problem: we are starting with a theological statement or question and trying to find support in the Bible.  For example, we are starting with our question “Is Jesus divine or human or both and how?”  We have specific questions about issues like the Trinity or the nature of Inspiration.  For good reason we want to understand how this all makes sense and fits together with what we know.  It’s not that these questions and answers are wrong, but that the questions aren’t always the questions the Bible is specifically dealing with. The questions are questions our system of theology brings to the table.  Church history has done a good job of developing some of these questions and provides good answers.  But we are skipping some important steps if we start with those answers and try to find them in the Bible.  Instead of starting with the Bible’s answers to the questions it raises, we are starting with our questions and tradition and are trying to find answers for these within the Bible.  So really we are assuming our frame of thinking, our questions, and our answers on the Bible.

An issue such as “the two natures of Christ” might lead us to search the Bible for verses that support his full humanity and for verses that support his full divinity.  And I’m sure we would find several verses that speak about Jesus as a human and that speak about him in divine language.  (After all, the biblical themes interact at some level with these points).  But since we have started from our frame of thinking, we haven’t had the chance to really grasp the biblical frame of thinking.  We take those verses and put them into categories of “Jesus is divine” or “Jesus is human” as if that is all the passages were trying to communicate.  This grouping of verses really doesn’t adequately deal with the questions and answers the Bible raises about who Jesus was and is.

 This can be tested very easily: does our doctrinal statement about Jesus reflect the bigger themes in the Bible (as in emphasis)?  If our statement of faith spends more time talking about important points like Jesus’ divinity and the atonement, then we are missing those great (and very prevalent) themes about Jesus as messiah, Jesus as king, Jesus as son of God, Jesus as high priest, and Jesus as the perfect human.

Really this means we are dealing more with implications of these verses rather than what they teach.  And when these implications become the grid through which we read the Bible, we end up modeling a very bad example of how to read the Bible.  If the larger narratives and themes of the Bible don’t clearly inform our statement of faith, then this can convey the impression of needing to “hunt” for those key verses to defend our theology (or worse, those themes will be misunderstood as the theology.)  It’s not that questions such as the Trinity or Jesus’ divinity and humanity have no answers, but that our questions and answers demand more specific details than the Bible always provides.  And our focus causes us to miss so much of what the Bible does actually say about those topics.  We hunt through the Bible trying to find verses that support these answers, but we miss out on what the Bible spends the most time teaching.  And rather than our theology conforming to the shape and context of the Bible, we try to conform it to our theology.

This is the perspective that I try to approach the Bible from.  This approach is more generally under the banner of "biblical theology" as opposed to "systematic theology" or "historical theology".  The latter two are important to interact with, and I need to grow in interacting with them more.   After all, without historical theology, we're bound to repeat the mistakes of prior Christian thinkers.  And without systematic theology, we're bound to gloss over important questions and distinctions.  All three are important for theology, but I think by and large a lot of Christians could use a bigger dose of biblical theology in their preaching and bible study times.
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Who is an Arminian?

Roger Olson recently posted an interesting (although a bit out of character for him) discussion on the essentials of Arminianism: Who Is (or Might Be) an Arminian?

Three Litmus Tests:

1. Commitment to a basically Protestant theology: sola scriptura, sola Christi, sola gratia et fides, justification as a declaration of righteousness by God’s grace alone because of Christ alone, through faith alone.
2. Commitment to corporate election, conditional predestination, universal atonement, resistible prevenient grace, and the necessity of freely accepting God’s saving grace for salvation.
3. Belief in the universal love of God and God’s desire that all be saved.

Three Norms:

1. Belief in total depravity such that the natural person, apart from supernatural prevenient grace, cannot respond to the outer or inner call of the gospel.
2. Belief in non-compatibilist free will as power of contrary choice restored by means of prevenient grace in matters of salvation.
3. Belief that God is not the designer of evil or innocent suffering in the world, but that these exist only because of the fall which God permitted but did not desire or plan.

Five Reasons why one cannot be:

1. Denial of the supernatural and miracles (as in liberal theology, not cessationism).
2. Denial of the deity or humanity of Jesus Christ.
3. Denial of the unique inspiration of the Bible.
4. Denial of God’s omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence.
5. Denial of God’s eternal, unchangeable character as loving and just (nominalism).

I'm certainly no expert on this subject, but I definitely resonate with all of these!  I especially appreciate how he included total depravity, and how he also made a point to define Arminian by conservative / orthodox theology.  (Some seem to automatically equate Arminian with either liberal or pelagian, both of which his definition denies)
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Incarnation and the Bible

I started reading Peter Enns recent book: Evolution of Adam, The: What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say about Human Origins. In chapter 1 he references that he operates from an incarnational view of the Bible. (I think this is the theme of his book Inspiration and Incarnation, and a brief introduction can be found here. I really find this language attractive!


Theologically we say that the incarnation of Christ (his coming to earth as a human) means he was fully and perfectly human, and fully and perfectly divine, yet remained one person. (Two natures, one person). How this actually works out can be very complicated, and to some extent is beyond my comprehension, but it makes for a very powerful metaphor for Scripture. What I mean is the Bible is both a human and divine. Sometimes we evangelicals like to make it mostly if not entirely divine, (as in “these are the very words of God”), and I’m sure many have a knee jerk reaction to the “humanity” of Scripture as mere liberalism.

But the truth is it is both, and that is a good and necessary thing.

I think a good starting point to define these could be:

The humanity of Scripture

1. Language - Language is inherently symbolic, so the humanity of Scripture means it includes our metaphors, symbols, language, and so on in order to communicate its message. I think this is really important because sometimes we look at “divine texts” as very abstract, proverbial statements that require a lot of interpretation, and even more so because of human finitude often result in a wide variety of interpretation. But I think the humanity of the Bible means that there is a message, and it’s intended to be understood because it uses our language. There still might be some differences of opinion, but it’s not because there is no message but because we are moving closer to that message


2. Context - Our humanity in a large part is defined by context. We inherently see the world from our perspective, our emotions, thoughts, ideas, and dreams are all shaped to some degree by our various contexts in life (whether career, relationships, geographic, demographic, etc.). I think the Bible has the same context because each author speaks from a unique perspective with a unique voice. We’d be at a huge loss if we didn’t have four different Gospels with very different personalities. I don’t mean they contradict one another, but they do offer unique perspectives on Jesus that I think complement one another very well to give us a fuller picture of Jesus. So we have to acknowledge that the Bible is written from a particular context, just as we have to acknowledge that we read and study it from a particular context. One important question that has to be wrestled with is how we distinguish between historical context and timeless message, but this is in many ways the heart of why we study the Bible!


3. Narrative - This is a popular buzzword, but I think narrative is another essential attribute of humanity. Our lives are an unfolding story, and story is a primary way we communicate. (I am often amazed at how much of our conversation is telling stories!) I think story is how we express deep emotions, abstract ideas, and how we work through various conflicts and difficult scenarios (like ethical dilemmas)
   

The Divinity of Scripture

1. Authority - If this is really an inspired message from God, then it must carry the full authority of God. We might differ on what inspired means, but at the end of the day, I think it’s important to acknowledge that if the Bible is at all true, then it must stand with the full authority of God behind it.


2. Unity - While the humanity pushes us towards diversity, I think the divinity of the Bible pushes us towards unity. While there are some beautiful differences in the Bible, at the end of the day it does tell a unified story, with a unified picture of God, his love for humanity, and his story of redemption. I do think however that those who overemphasize the divinity will often overemphasize this point (e.g. proof texting).


3. Truth - I could have used the word inerrant, but that word is just too loaded to accomplish anything productive. What I mean here though is that the Bible, as a message from God who is the creator of the universe, communicates a true message. Some might disagree on whether this should include the details of the narrative, but in my mind the very least we can say is it must include the message. I believe this demands that if we want to accept this message, we cannot just compartmentalize truth in our minds: we cannot have the “truth of science”, the “truth of psychology”, the “truth of my experience”, and the “truth of the Bible”. Truth simply means what really exists. Since God is the God of truth, it is therefore important for us to have a unified view of truth and work through some of the tough questions when our different worlds of truth disagree.
   

I think this is a good starting point for our view of the Bible. We might think ourselves more pious if we emphasize the divinity, or more sophisticated if we emphasize the humanity, but we need both. Honestly, overemphasizing the divinity strikes me as a form of idolatry, and overemphasizing the humanity really empties the Bible of any useful substance. Just as Jesus’ incarnation means the uniting of two very different natures in a profound and mysterious way, I think the Bible is a uniting of the divine and human to result in a profound and true message.

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