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Ray Van Neste
2001 ETS Annual Meeting
`Does the ETS Doctrinal Statement Say Enough?'
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The events of Sept 11 have raised awareness of the importance of boundaries or
limitations, boundaries determining who may be admitted into our country and who may
not, or determining what may be carried onto airplanes and what may not. Boundaries
exist to include and exclude; and, as we have seen, the failure to properly exclude has
disastrous results.
Something similar can be said of doctrinal statements which serve as theological
boundaries. To function well- indeed, to be of any use at all- they must clearly demarcate
a line of exclusion and inclusion. If doctrinal statements fail to exclude properly, they
provide neither definition nor boundaries to any group. A group without bounds then
easily becomes a group with out cohesion, and, like a word without definition, loses any
relevance it may have had. It is the contention of this paper that the current ETS
doctrinal statement is simply inadequate as it fails to include significant doctrines
commonly held to be essential to evangelicals and it fails to exclude many who would not
normally be considered the intended constituents of an Evangelical Theological Society.
As a boundary, the current doctrinal statement is like a chain link fence without the chain
links.
It may be useful to note that in making this argument I mean no disrespect to the framers
of the original ETS doctrinal statement. Some of those men are heroes of mine.
However, the work must be critically examined, especially while we are considering the
,,Boundaries of Evangelicalism. Therefore, I will examine the doctrinal statement in two
ways. In the first part of the paper, I ask whether the statement says enough or whether
there are crucial elements left out. In the second section I test the excluding value of the
doctrinal statement by pressing the statement vigorously in order to determine what can
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Special acknowledgement is due to Dr. Carl Trueman, formerly of the University of Aberdeen and
currently at Westminster Theological Seminary, for the conversations which originally spurred the idea of
this paper.