Details, details...

Carl Trueman (who is a professor of Theology at Westminster Seminary, not the main character in a Peter Weir movie) writes quite a lot of quirky books and articles. I've just finished "Minority Report". It's certainly an eclectic collection but it seemed to me that one of the (few) unifying themes was that quite a number of the articles were critical of what Trueman calls "Mere Christianity", the phrase taken from the title C S Lewis' famous book.

Trueman acknowledges the usefulness of what might be called minimalist doctrinal statements, those setting out only what somebody considers "essential". They are helpful for holding together groups of people from different churchmanship but who are united in their understandings of, say, the Scriptures, the doctrine of God and the atonement. The trouble is, Trueman argues, they often turn out not to exclude people that the founders of those doctrinal statements certainly would have wanted to exclude and, when applied in churches, can cause such an erosion of theological thinking that even the minimalist doctrinal statement itself comes under threat.

As someone with a very strong background in UCCF and Christian Unions I am, I guess, comfortable with the idea of evangelical essentials. But I also think that Trueman has a point when he says that: "the meaning and significance of such doctrinal bases is necessarily unstable precisely because they are so minimal... the isolation of a statement from a wider doctrinal matrix renders it a formula which is, if not contentless, at least vague and ill-defined."

Instead, Trueman argues, we should give thanks for and even celebrate the much greater level of detail in documents like the Heidelberg Catechism and the Westminster Confession. For the devil, he argues, dwells not in the details but "in the rather large gaps that mere Christianity's fear of detail tends to leave behind."

All of which set me thinking about how, practically, one manages such things. It seems to me that we must accept that, to draw support from a wide range of evangelicals, organisations like UCCF, the North West Partnership or the FIEC, all of which I am personally involved with and supportive of, need to have relatively minimal doctrinal statements; or they will become very narrow or spend all their time arguing about what should and shouldn't be covered!

But any individual Christian, or indeed, any given local church, needs to understand that such organisations are therefore always particularly open to somebody or some group of people coming in from the outside and subverting the meaning of the doctrines while formally upholding them. We therefore mustn't mistake being "properly" evangelical with supporting any of the various pan-evangelical organisations that exist.

It could be objected that the Church of England has a much more detailed doctrinal statement than any of the organisations I have mentioned so far and is also in a much bigger theological mess than any of them! This is true. But the C of E is also in a very different situation. Precisely because the 39 articles are so detailed they have to be entirely abandoned by liberals (and some who call themselves evangelical) in the C of E; they cannot formally uphold them but mean something different.

In a local church whilst not, perhaps, insisting on very detailed doctrinal understanding for admission to membership it does seem that we need to have a comprehensive doctrinal framework, shared by the leaders who teach the church.

A real challenge to me then to know what I think about things, rather than just reckoning that if it's not absolutely central I can afford to be agnostic. I can't!