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.
In one sense I agree. I've always enjoyed the adage, "constitutions and by-laws are written to prepare the church for the Holy Spirit's absence." I think Shults and other emergents are rightly rejecting the legalism that so easily ensnares those well meaning believers that set up these sorts of things.
On the other hand, the opposite can be argued. The Bible as a whole is in one sense a "statement of faith". To claim Paul, Luke and John didn't document right living and right belief is ludicrous. Of course they did. Certainly Jesus spoke while others documented right faith. To use word pictures to describe right belief and action is quite Biblical.
Our problem is that in an effort to be concise, we omit. In an effort to be clear, we shape to our own thinking. In an effort to convey thoughts we press others into bondage. All of that is wrong but I am of the opinion that Shults intended as much as he said and if so, then he was just as wrong.
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