Jonathan, I agree that the

Jonathan, I agree that the list is much more about method, about how we talk about the living God in our midst. The reason for this is basically that I wanted to avoid pre-empting discussion about the content of a theology, which is what this site is for. I wrote a personal and provisional statement of faith a couple of years back, but I’m not sure it would have been right to have included this, or something like it, in an attempt to sketch the boundaries of an emerging theology.

Your phrase ‘divinely-conferred authority of Scripture’ is precisely the sort of prejudgment that I think an emerging theology needs to avoid. It is the product of an older battle that I’m not sure we’re fighting any more. Similarly, to insist here that an emerging theology must accept that the Christ is not ‘in any way less than fully divine’, in such terms, seems to me a mistake - not because I want to say that it’s not true or that I believe Christ’s lordship must be understood functionally (whatever you mean by that), but because I want to make space to consider in what sense - taking into account the other statements in the list - it might be true or meaningful. These traditional formulations do not make good starting-points for an honest and critical examination of the biblical texts or of their place in our intellectual and cultural environment.

Having said that, it surprises me a little that you don’t think a philosophical materialist would have problem with the first statement about a community in ‘self-conscious continuity with the biblical people of God and the calling of Abraham to be blessed and be a blessing to the nations of the world’. Admittedly it’s minimalist, for reasons already given, but if nothing else, it means we have to take very seriously the God who calls and blesses. The fifth point must ensure that we are not merely interpreting what it means to be community. And the language of eschatology and the renewal of creation in point 15 ought to safeguard the place of God as a final guarantor of hope for the world.

It might be interesting to get a real philosophical materialist to scan these points and see what he or she makes of them.