I never go to the business meetings of the ETS. I don't go because I don't care. Okay, I do care a little. I think they should meet in decent places close to my house, but I doubt such a motion would gain a majority.

At the business meeting for this year's ETS meeting the amendment to the ETS doctrinal basis offered by Ray Van Neste and Denny Burk was received and docketed for discussion at next year's meeting. I commnented on this issue earlier. I agree that the ETS doctrinal statement is thin gruel. Ray and Denny are correct that all sorts of folk can join ETS who couldn't be regarded as Evangelicals in any meaningful sense of the word. At the same time I always get the sense at ETS that a number of folk regard it as a sort of Synod for "Evangelicalism." I agree with Mike Horton's argument that Evangelicalism is better regarded as a village green rather than a tent where someone has to guard it and decide who gets in or out. It's true, however, that there are things that cannot be done on the village green. Who decides who is "in" and who is "out" is tricky business. There are a lot of folk who would say that I'm "out" because I'm not pre-mil. If I get to define "evangelical," then a lot of the folk who attend ETS would be "out" because I would define in terms of the sixteenth-century Protestant theology. They are the original "evangelicals." They would regard most ETS members today as fanatics.

Then there is the problem that Darryl Hart has raised: whether evangelicalism even exists. What if, on analysis, there is no such thing at all? "But there has to be, ISAE says that there are 60 million of them!" Yes, and someone has to be in charge of them, right? What if the -ism is really about marketing to, influencing, and using as a base of power, those scattered 60 million "evangelicals."

What Mike and Darryl argue in common is that the -ism is a lot less important than actual, visible congregations and churches. I am a member of the Oceanside Reformed Church, a member congregation of the United Reformed Churches in North America. I am a minister of word and sacrament in OURC and delegated to broader assemblies in the URCs. I hold the historic evangelical faith, which may or may not overlap with views held by contemporary evangelicalism. I associate with the ETS for the purposes of talking to folks who might interested in the historic evangelical faith as defined by the Protestant confessions. What I don't want is for folk to think of the ETS as a sort of Evangelical Super Synod, as some sort of quasi-ecclesiatical body. It isn't. It's just an academic society.

It is the business of the visible, institutional church to define the adjective "evangelical" and the historic Protestants did that in the 16th- and 17th-century confessions: the Augsburg Confession, the Book of Concord, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Belgic Confession, the Canons of Dort, the French Confession, the First and Second Helvetic Confessions, the Westminster Standards, the Savoy, and so forth. Yes, this omits the 18th century. What to do with the London Baptist Confession? That's a problem. Now we're back to the church. Now there are two radically different views of what a church is. The Protestants agreed, formally anyway, on infant baptism and now, if the Baptist Confession is added, the definition of the church is radically altered.

Then there is the problem that, if we define evangelicalism sociologically, in the light of the 18th-century, it becomes a largely revivalist movement dominated by the Quest for Illegitimate Religious Experience and the Quest for Illegitimate Religious Certainty. So, perhaps we can say that the 16th- and 17th-century Lutheran and Reformed Confessions define "evangelical" but revivalism and fundamentalism define "evangelicalism"? Perhaps it's appropriate for the ETS to include both sets of people?

That said, I don't object to the points Van Neste and Burk want to add to the statement. The proposed points come fromPer the UK UCCF/IVF statement.

Here's a journal article (PDF) by Burk and Van Neste defending their proposal. The points themselves are fine and the ETS probably should have adopted them in the very beginning. I would like to see a coherent explanation of why they didn't do so at the beginning. Did they really make the assumption that evangelicals all agreed on all the other points that made one an evangelical?

Van Neste and Burk distinguish between a "doctrinal statement" and a "doctrinal basis." Is there really a distinction? The ETS has amended it's basis before, in 1989, when it added the statement on the Trinity, so it's not as if the ETS can't amend the basis. Surely, the rise of this question witnesses to the fragmentation of and the virtual disintegration of evangelicalism.

Maybe it's all for nothing? Ted Olsen doesn't seem to think it will go far.

Just for fun, comments are on.

Conferences are just crazy. The hotel is a labyrinth but the labyrinth does not aid contemplation! The labyrinth is frustrating.

The book display is a prime reason for going to conferences. Here's what I learned:

The Evangelical Theological Society began on Tuesday. It's in San Diego this year so I don't have to fly anywhere or stay in any hotels. Speaking of hotels, why does ETS always pick the most bizarre hotels? Okay, they aren't all bizarre but the hotel in Valley Forge was disturbing and I need a GPS unit to navigate this one.

The book display area was closed when I got there last night so Mike and I talked until we had a meeting with a group of folks associated with Bethlehem Baptist Church as a follow-on the John Piper's plenary lecture on justification. I missed the plenary (work) but we had a very interesting and stimulating discussion. It didn't begin until 9:00 PM but there were lots of thoughtful folk in the room. Very stimulating.

Today is the big day SD and then it's back and forth to ETS and AAR (The American Academy of Religion) in SD on Fri, Sat, and Monday.

In the wake of the rise of the Open Theism movement and now with the recent resignation of the president of ETS in the wake of his conversion to Rome, there are renewed calls for a more stringent statement of faith for members of the ETS, the Evangelical Theological Society.

[Open Theism is the doctrine that the future, to which we contribute, is "open" to God, that he neither can know or control the future but rather that he, like a divine chess player, has excellent reflexes and reacts to the future. It is driven by an impossibly naive biblicism. They argue that Gen 6 ays that God "repented," therefore, if we're to really take the Bible seriously, we must say that God literally thought one thing and then, at another moment, having seen how sinful we became (which was a surprise to him), he thought, "Oh my, I guess things didn't work out as I had hoped."

"Impossible" you say? "Not even Arminians think this way!" you say. Well, it really exists and it's being promulgated by a group of leading evangelical theologians. One of them, my favorite of the group because he's just so much fun to read, Clark Pinnock even dallied with the Mormon doctrine that God is bodily in his book, The Most Moved Mover. Strangely, while concern has been expressed by leading evangelical theologians about Pinnock's doctrine of Scripture, to my knowledge, no one has pointed out his positive citation of Mormon theologians. Does this say something about the state of evangelical theology or about how many people read the book all the way through? I don't know.]

Anyway, with the rise of Open Theism, evangelical theologians have begun to clamor for an expanded statement of faith for the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS). To be sure the ETS statement is impossibly brief.

The ETS Doctrinal Basis says:

The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written and is therefore inerrant in the autographs. God is a Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each an uncreated person, one in essence, equal in power and glory.

Arguably, the brevity of the statement reflects the widespread consensus on other issues when ETS was founded by the older neo-evangelicals. Many of the leading neo-evangelicals in the 1940s and '50s assumed, more or less, a Reformed soteriology and Christology but simply rejected the Reformed doctrine of the church. Others, such as Timothy George in First Things argue that the two point statement reflects the fundamentalist roots of neo-evangelicalism.

Whatever the original reason, whatever the original assumptions behind the ETS, it seems highly unlikely that the ETS will be able to add to the current statement without alienating significant segments of its constituency.

Let's say they start to add propositions about God. If they say that God is omniscient, they will alienate the Open Theists and those who think that Open Theism is tolerable. If they propose anything regarding Christology, will both Lutherans and Reformed folk be able to sign? Will Calvinists and Arminians be able to sign whatever the propose regarding soteriology? What about the Roman Catholic members of ETS (there are some)? What about the New Perspective Proponents or the Federal Visionists? If they say sola fide, which was the essence of what it meant to be "evangelical" in the 16th and 17th centuries, surely the Roman members and the New Perspective members, and the even some others will complain that ETS is imposing someone else's soteriology upon them. Then there is a question for confessional Protestants: Should confessional Protestants (Lutherans and Calvinists) sign anything else beside their ecclesiastical confessions? I'm working on an essay on the role of Calvin as a "negative boundary marker" for confessional Lutherans and if they are to be faithful to their tradition, it's hard to see how they can sign anything in common with us Reformed folk since we are, according to their 19th-century writers, thinly disguised Enlightenment rationalists and fanatic anabaptists!

What is it that makes one "an evangelical" anyway? What's the one conviction that all post-1720 "evangelicals" share? I contend that the only universal all "the evangelicals" share is an immediate encounter with the risen Christ. Everything else seems to be up for debate. In other words, the ETS statement is reductionist because post 1720-evangelicalism has become reductionist. Religious experience is the only thing that binds them together.

That's why I say now, for what it's worth, I'm "evangelical" but I'm not "an evangelical" in the same way I'm catholic but I'm not "a (Roman) catholic." The Reformed faith is evangelical. It is catholic. It is a lot of other things. The Reformed faith cannot be properly reduced to one universal, but I can reduce contemporary "evangelicalism" to "has had an immediate encounter with the risen Christ" without doing a great injustice.

Then, as Mike Horton pointed out when this issue came up ca. 2001, there is the nature of ETS as an academic society. Is it appropriate for an academic society to exclude and include folk the way that some are proposing? To this Reformed confessionalist, the evangelical power struggle about who is "in" and who is "out" seems not only unseemly but inappropriate to an academic society. Some evangelicals seem minded to treat ETS as if it were some sort of Synod. Well, it isn't. I certainly don't recognize ETS as any sort of ecclesiastical or quasi-ecclesiastical entity with disciplinary powers.

Why don't the powers that be propose some academic standards? I'm not setting myself up as the arbiter of all things academic and perhaps the standards are fine (though they are allowing me to give a paper so that's prima facie evidence of low standards), but if the ETS is an academic society, perhaps more attention should be given to academics, to the quality of scholarship in the journal and at the society, than to the theology of the members?

There was a time (in the days of Carl Henry, the early days of Fuller Seminary, the early days of Christianity Today) when it might have been possible to sort out the theological boundaries of ETS and to exclude Open Theists and Roman Catholics but how can that be done now with the bewildering diversity of views all claiming to be authentically "evangelical"?

When the baby-boomer children of the neo-evangelicals took the reigns of evangelical power in the 1970s whatever consensus existed prior to the 70s passed into oblivion. Today Pandora's box is wide open and how are they going to stuff it all back in? It doesn't seem possible and perhaps it's not even desirable.

Dateline Paris, 1534.
© Paris News Service
By Guy LaFontaine

Jean Calvin, 25, of Noyon, a leading scholar of the classics and law student in the University of Paris, has reportedly converted to the evangelical cause. A classicist with a bright future before him, Calvin published a promising work on Seneca's On Clemency just two years ago.

That future has become considerably cloudier of late. Sources tell us that it was likely young Calvin who wrote the provocative sermon given by Nicholas Cop, rector of the University. Since the so-called Affair of the Placards (during which one of the Protestant radicals actually posted a placard on the chamber door of his Majesty!) the authorities are cracking down on the movement and the evangelicals have scattered. Calvin may be living under an assumed name. There are some unconfirmed reports that he has left Paris and may be heading to Basle, a known haven for the Protestant rebels. When contacted, some of the other so-called "humanistas," led by the Dutch scholar Erasmus and Jacques LeFevre d'Etaples, are reported to have rejected the new movement as too radical. Erasmus expressed the strongest measure of disappointment saying, "It seems that another son of the church has been persuaded by Luther's De servo (On the Bondage of the Will). I had hoped to moderate that movement but I guess it isn't happening." LeFevre was less critical saying only, "Calvin is a bright young man. I have high hopes for him."

Calvin has apparently joined the so-called Protestant movement begun about 13 years ago at Worms by the German monk Luther. Most of the theology faculty in the University reckon that this movement will be short-lived. Said one of the theologians, "We'll crush these people just as we did the Cathars. Why do you think we have an inquisition?" The press office of the Holy See said that they were aware of a disturbance in Paris but had little information about Calvin.
Students in the University, however, are said to be excited by the news. Said one of them, "He could be a pain. We call him 'The Accusative Case' because he always has his nose in a book. He's always so serious, but If you need help with a translation, he's definitely the 'go-to' guy. He was really wound up about the new theology. I saw him talking to several groups of students about Luther. I hate to see him go. He's a little uptight, but he's a good guy."