The gaping jaws of dogma

Virgil, a similar observation about these 15 points, but from a critical perspective, was made at metalutheran.blogspot.com:

Notice there is nothing unique on this list, and this is deliberate - Emergents don’t want to say anything that any dogmatic Christian tradition couldn’t get behind. However, seriously engaging points 1-12 and 14-15 will lead one straight into the gaping jaws of dogma, which the bloggers at OST seem desperate to avoid.

I would say that the 15 definitions reflect what emerging theology is at the moment, at a certain stage in the development of a certain aspect of mostly Western theology; there is no reason to suppose that things will stay as they are. The current distrust of dogmatism may well mutate into something else - I’ve always felt that we need to do a lot of unlearning and forgetting before we start learning again.

That something else may (or may not) look rather like what we now regard as modern dogmatism. We can’t make the process of thought stand still, and I’m not sure that it would be right to try to build into an emerging theology an absolute horror of ‘systematic theology, dogmatism, creedalism’, etc. I would have thought there is a natural oscillation in our theology between statement and restatement, construction and deconstruction, certainty and uncertainty.

In any case, I think we are already learning to find beauty and meaning in a more confident and coherent telling of the biblical story; and my hope would be that we keep the narrative - as a dynamic and self-sufficient discourse - central and regard more ‘dogmatic’ formulations are secondary, contingent, provisional, revisable responses to it.