Confessing Christ: A Quest for Renewal in Contemporary Christianity

William J. Abraham
Albert Cook Outler Professor of Wesley Studies
Perkins School of Theology
Southern Methodist University

One of the more remarkable developments within the last ten years is the sudden emergence of Confessing movements within mainline Protestantism. Independently and serendipitously confessing groups have sprouted across the face of virtually all the older, established traditions. Without any orchestration and with a minimum of organization, a network of convictions and concerns have surfaced which has taken many by surprise. Until the dust settles, it will be impossible to provide a comprehensive analysis of this development. However, there is a clear need for a modest interim report. In this paper I shall initially provide a survey of the nature and etiology of some of these movements. Thereafter I shall stand back and provide a more searching account of what is at stake for modern Protestantism. I shall conclude by suggesting that the emergence of these movements makes manifest a fascinating fault-line within the Protestant tradition as a whole.

The term "Confessing Movement" has a recent but honorable place within twentieth century Protestantism. It is famously connected with those who gathered around the Barmen Declaration in the nineteen thirties in protest against the capitulation of the churches in Germany to the culture of the day. It would be a serious mistake, however, to limit the idea of "confessing the faith" to that isolated incident. The history of the church before and after the Reformation is peppered with moments when the church has had to confess its faith resolutely and firmly in response to competing confessions and convictions within and without its boundaries. Perhaps the most famous of all was the confession of the Trinitarian and Christological faith of the church at Nicea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon in the fourth and fifth centuries.

There is no grand theory which will explain the motives and intentions of the members and agents of the church at times of confessional crisis. The church has confessed its faith when required according to the needs and circumstances of the hour. There is no Platonic blueprint or divine plan for the content and shape of a confessing movement. It is precisely so today. The nature and etiology of the various confessing movements are shaped by the history, the commitments, and the circumstances of the denominations in which they have arisen. Global generalizations are fraught with danger.

Thus in the Christian Church - Disciples of Christ, the emergence of its Confessing Movement involves a radical revision of a long-standing vision of the place of creeds within the church. Whereas the protest against creeds was entirely in place in the nineteenth century when the church could rely on the culture to teach the common core of Christian doctrine, this situation has drastically changed in the twentieth century. Given doctrinal illiteracy in the public square due to the secularization of the central institutions of society, it is a serious mistake to maintain the traditional antipathy to creeds and confessions. To do so is to invite capitulation to the values and ideas of a postchristian society. Contrast this with the central concerns of the confessing movement within The United Church of Christ. Here the primary focus is the articulation of a centrist theology which cuts between the polarized extremes of fundamentalism and various versions of radical Christianity. Contrast both of these with what has happened within The United Methodist Church. In this instance a fragile coalition of groups and individuals from a variety of backgrounds have come together to seek for the doctrinal renewal of the church as a whole. Essential to this renewal is a recovery and redeployment of the early canonical decisions of the Methodist movement when it became a church. Such a recovery radically calls into question the self-understanding of United Methodists over the last hundred years, but does so in the name of a more historically accurate account of its origins. Hence it has argued for a confessional understanding of United Methodism, something not available to the Disciples of Christ; and it has no deep stake in the development of a centrist theology, even though many in the Confessing Movement within United Methodism would happily support such a venture.

It is helpful to stay with the United Methodist case as we seek to get a sense of what is at stake in the debate. The Confessing movement in the United Methodist Church arose as a kind of accident. Over the years various groups had assembled to pursue complementary visions of renewal. As a result of informal contacts and networking, a cadre of leaders gathered together a diverse cross-section of people to talk together about the current state of the church. As often happens in such gatherings, a host of topics and concerns surfaced. In this case conversation coalesced around the importance of doctrine for the health of the church. Within this the significance of confessing the faith faithfully suddenly became the focus of discussion and debate. It is doubtful if anyone knows how the group gravitated towards the idea of sending out a call to the church as a whole or how the idea of a "confessing movement" first emerged. Within twenty-four hours both ideas had captured the imagination of the group as a whole and the movement was launched.

The modus operandi was one of quietly waiting upon providence. Within a relatively short time a host of people responded. It was clear that the call to the church had struck a chord. This was something of a surprise for the initial declarations were direct in tone and speech, so that it was relatively easy to dismiss the movement as an exercise in strident rhetoric during the preparations for the General Conference of 1996. Such criticism emerged despite the fact that political and legislative action was deliberately eschewed as the way ahead. Part of the problem in the church, it was felt, was precisely the politicization of its spiritual and doctrinal life; hence recourse to further political action was seen as a perpetuation of the problem in hand. So the strong and immediate response was a major surprise. Indeed some of the leadership were so taken aback that they were at a loss as to how to keep up with the pace of response. A skeleton organization was set up, operating on a shoe-string budget and staff. Over time the movement held two more conferences, published a set of substantial papers developing the case for doctrinal renewal, distributed various short tracts, responded to its critics, and is now in the process of institutionalizing its goals and energies.

The coalition involved is drawn from several wings of the church: evangelicals, charismatics, centrists, sacramentalists, traditionalists, and moderates. One of the reasons such a coalition is possible stems from the fact that there is a consensus that The United Methodist Church is committed to the apostolic faith as articulated in the early creeds. This means that there is not the pressure to articulate any new doctrine; what is needed is the fresh appropriation and owning of the apostolic faith as something intrinsically important to the health of the church’s ministry. Hence it is misleading to see The Confessing Movement as a reaction, say, to the famous Re-Imagining Conference in Minneapolis. In fact the Confessing Movement was already up and running before the Re-Imagining Conference. Equally, it is false to see the Confessing Movement as a reaction to the agenda of the Reconciling Movement, that is, to the move to alter the church’s official teaching on homosexuality. The agenda of The Confessing Movement is first and foremost committed to the cause of doctrinal renewal understood as the reclamation of the classical faith of the Christian tradition as grounded in scripture and expressed in the early creeds. Such a reclamation is seen as intrinsically worthwhile, as constitutive of Christian identity, and as the necessary background to any ethical commitment.

This is not to say that The Confessing Movement exists in a doctrinal and ethical vacuum, or that it is diffident about other alternatives to the classical faith of the church. On the contrary, the choice of how to present the challenge facing the church was determined by contextual considerations. The banner under which the movement has flown is sharply focused on Christology. Without in any way slackening its commitment to the classical faith of the church, it has lifted up the confession of Jesus Christ, as Son of God, Savior, and Lord as the point of contact with the church as a whole. This confession is seen not only as central to the faith down through the ages, but as precisely that element in the faith which at this moment in history needs to be resolutely reasserted and reappropriated. Such a confession calls for the repudiation of christological alternatives which are sub-christian or postchristian in nature; and it requires the positive embrace of the teaching of the church’s Savior and Lord as an alternative to the moral commitments in the culture. Saying "yes" to Jesus Christ as Son of God, Savior, and Lord, at this moment in history requires that we say "no" to other values, principles, and commitments which have been embraced as final and ultimate in the church and the culture.

Such a stance makes manifest a transition which is probably germane to all contemporary confessing movements. It is increasingly recognized that the intellectual landscape is changing drastically before our very eyes. One way to express this is in terms of a transition from the hegemony of Liberal Protestantism to that of Radical Protestantism. Where the former was very common in seminaries in the sixties and seventies, the latter has become the theological orthodoxy of the eighties and nineties. The crucial and relevant difference between these two traditions is this. The Liberal tradition on the whole saw the classical faith of the church as a culturally relative expression of Christian experience adequate for the patristic period but now in need of representation in a culturally sensitive way. The Radical tradition on the whole sees the classical faith of the church as a socially constructed vision of reality in the service of various desires and passions and hence in need of repudiation in the interests of contemporary healing and liberation.

This division is in turn related to wider cultural and philosophical developments. Thus the Liberal Protestant project is seen as wedded to the canons of modernity, that is, to such values as objective truth, to the original intention of authors, and to the scholar as a neutral agent of critical reflection. The more Radical project is associated with the development of a postmodernist agenda which sees truth as a cultural project, denies the whole idea of authorial intention of texts, and is committed to the idea of the scholar as an engaged intellectual in the service of various oppressed communities. Where formally the classical tradition was treated with respect it is now often seen as an ideology developed to represent in a covert way a network of oppressive and immoral practices. The latter reading of the tradition naturally precipitated an urgency to replace the classical faith of the church with more representative and healthy reconstructions of the Christian tradition. It is surely small wonder that in these circumstances movements should arise to reclaim those elements of the faith which have been excoriated and marginalized by scholars and their disciples committed to political and ecclesial engagement designed to undermine what has long been cherished by both scholars and saints, not to speak of a host of ordinary Christians.

The effects of these developments are extremely interesting, and with these we return to the story within United Methodism. Twentieth century theologians and church leaders have long been aware that consensus on Christian doctrine has broken down in mainline Protestantism. They have lived with the fact that their denominations have become complicated coalitions of competing visions and practices. Clearly this was a reality which needed some sort of theory to provide unity and co-operation. Some coped with this uncomfortable reality by investing their energy in the ecumenical movement. The hope of a coming great church in which all the virtues of the competing visions and practices could be integrated into a single church was, then, something of a godsend. Others added to this a vision of the church which was inescapably pluralist in doctrine and life. Hence they sought to provide a vision of the Christian tradition which celebrated diverse and competing accounts of the faith not just as an unhappy reality but as constitutive of its very essence. With this in place it was possible to contain the various visions and factions in the church not as a necessity but as a great virtue.

United Methodists were especially drawn to this non-confessional ecclesiology. For them it had the happy coincidence of fitting nicely with the standard account of the origins of their tradition which emerged in the sixties. Thus it became commonplace to argue that their great hero and founder, John Wesley, was committed to a theological methodology encapsulated in a fourfold appeal to scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. On this reading to be a United Methodist or to stand in the Wesleyan tradition was to be committed to the Methodist Quadrilateral of scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. Provided one deployed this methodology any particular doctrinal position arrived at was to be accepted in good faith. Everything which could sincerely and reasonably be supported by the Quadrilateral was admissible. It is hard to underestimate the extent to which this became the working dogma of the United Methodist tradition.

One of the reasons why The Confesssing Movement within The United Church has been greeted with such incomprehension and even hostility is that some of its members have called this whole arrangement into question. The argument on this is now joined but the crucial points at issue are not difficult to identify. First, the pluralist, non-confessionalist ecclesiology at stake here is simply incoherent. On pain of contradiction it cannot allow its own methodological dogma to be called into question and hence it cannot include or permit those positions which for very good reason reject the Quadrilateral. Another way to express this point is to say that the pluralist position is tied to an ecclesiological doctrine which is especially privileged and which then cannot by nature permit the expression of an ecclesiological position which is radically different from itself. Hence it is inescapably exclusivist in character. Second, whatever the status of the Quadrilateral as a summary of the thought of John Wesley, the Quadrilateral never became part of the canonical heritage of The United Methodist Church. It was never adopted in a proper way constitutionally and corporately by the tradition as a whole. Hence to make it constitutive of the tradition rests on extensive doctrinal amnesia. It involves a serious misreading of the historical documents surrounding the origins of the tradition. In fact the founders of the tradition carefully excluded such an option in their actions.

The third objection takes us to the very core of the concerns of The Confessing Movement. The adoption of an ecclesiology of pluralism involves the displacement of the core doctrines of the tradition and their replacement by a speculative exercise in epistemology. Whatever the intention behind the invention and deployment of the Quadrilateral, its hegemony has meant that the classical faith of the church universal as enshrined in the early doctrinal documents of the Methodist tradition have simply become one option among many. Moreover, the whole focus on theological methodology has displaced the role of material Christian doctrine in the life of the church as a whole. In short the tradition has become subject to an acute case of doctrinal dyslexia. Obsession with secondary doctrines related to the epistemology of theology have made it virtually impossible to see the content of the actual and primary doctrines to which The United Methodist Church is constitutionally committed. In these circumstances the call in The Confessing Movement for doctrinal retrieval and reappropriation is entirely natural. At the very least the church as a whole should be given access to that faith which launched the church into existence in the first place. Failing that, if The United Methodist Church repudiates its own canonical doctrines, let this be done openly and in public rather than secretly and quietly behind closed doors.

The appearnace of a confessing movement clearly poses, then, a very serious challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy within the United Methodist tradition. The challenge, however, is inescapable. It is aided and abetted by other considerations. Thus it is becoming increasingly clear that pluralism as an ecclesiological theory is really a case of the church adopting the political mores of modern American democracy. Furthermore, pluralism is an essentially stop-gap arrangement. As soon as a serious crisis arises the church cannot sit on the sidelines. Once it has to speak decisively for itself to the culture or to its own members, pluralism will melt away. Moreover, pluralism is deeply incompatible with the whole ethos of the Radical option described above. Radicals call for engagement and action regardless of consensus. For them pluralism is simply one more ideology masking hidden interests and agendas. Finally, doctrinally speaking, the church in the end lives not by epistemology but by concrete and specific doctrines like the Trinity, incarnation, atonement, and the like. Hence its members and teachers in the end constantly gravitate to particular Christian doctrine rather than live off some speculative theory of doctrinal formation or construction.

It is precisely this that evangelicals, charismatics, sacramentalists, moderates, traditionalists, and centrists, and the like are coming to see and believe. The challenge to the classical faith of the church has awakened them from their doctrinal slumbers and brought them to realize that the church cannot depend on the culture to transmit the faith to children or to new converts. Nor can they be sure that the church itself will transmit the faith fully and substantially. Thus evangelicals are coming to see that their constant appeal to the authority of scripture does little to articulate the doctrine of the incarnation or atonement. Charismatics are realizing that a one-sided emphasis on the Holy Spirit, abstracted and disconnected from the doctrine of the Trinity, can easily lead to heresy. Sacramentalists know in their bones that any serious engagements with a high doctrine of the sacraments depends crucially on prior commitment to the main doctrines of the classical creeds. Moderates, traditionalists, and centrists are waking up to the fact that the great doctrines of the generous orthodoxy to which they are committed must constantly be renewed and reapproriated in the life of the church; they cannot assume that generations to come will receive them if they are left lying in the attic of the church like an ancient heirloom. In short, various groups in the church who have often ignored each other are realizing that what binds them together is a common commitment to the great truths of the faith which have been confessed from generation to generation. Such a stance does not eradicate differences of emphasis; nor does it totally ease the discomfort there is at times; yet it does make possible a form of ecumenism and working together which is relatively novel.

Not everyone will allow this generous reading of the situation. Some think that what is at stake is a narrow reductionism of the faith to some sort of brief Christological formula. This is simply a mistaken reading of the situation, for the focus on Christology is a carefully chosen point of contact with the church as a whole. What lies behind it is the wider classical faith of the church catholic. Moreover, whatever may be said in objection to the classical faith of the church, the least convincing objection against it is the claim that this faith is narrow and reductionistic. On the contrary the great doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation, for example, are at once profound and rich, requiring extended meditation and appropriation if they are to be received in a mature fashion. Also, such doctrines lead both the simple and the sophisticated believer into a world of such awesome mystery that even the most loquacious are lost for words.

Equally unconvincing is the claim that the confessing impulse is really a compensatory development which fits with a move away from a connectional to a congregational form of church polity. Robert Neville puts this point succinctly this way: "Many of the people calling for a shift to a congregational polity in the United Methodist Church recognize the danger of fragmentation in that move and seek to counter it by insistence on an abstract confession." Neville appears to be strangely uniformed about the situation. There is indeed a move to make the local church the pivotal unit of mission in United Methodism, but those who have led that trend have for the most part shied away from the confessional trend. They are in fact conspicuously nervous of associating with The Confessing Movement, perhaps in part because they are also nervous of what Neville calls "abstract confession." If this is the case then all concerned are mistaken. There is nothing abstract about the classical confessions of the faith which are at issue here. That faith is constituted not by abstract doctrine but by concrete, specific, living convictions about salvation, incarnation, the Trinity, and the like, for which the saints have lived and died.

Neville articulates a further point which is worth pondering. Any confession of faith, he suggests, must be expressed in a way that is fitting for us now. Important as the ancient creeds and confessions were in their time, they focused the gospel on the authentic conditions of belief for their periods. "But we cannot make a genuine confession of faith of our own until we have put the gospel into the language by which we live." Materially this means that until extensive work is done in interfaith dialogue, the imaginative arts, the relation of science to religion, and to the academic knowledge of religion and religions, "a confession of faith would be fake." Indeed, "most of the proposed confessions I read about for current United Methodists only repeat the phraseology of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which are not serious matters for a contemporary confession."

Neville probably speaks here for many church leaders and theologians. While granting, perhaps grudgingly, that confessions have had a place in the life of the church over the centuries, his enthusiasm for them is conspicuously luke-warm. If there is to be a confession of faith, he clearly looks to theological educators as the crucial agents in the development of any confession which would be viable for today. Four points need to be made by way of response.

First, there is in this analysis a mistaken reading of the goal of confessing movements generally. It is simply not the case that they desire to return to the ideas of this or that century in the life of the church. The aim is to retrieve that faith of the church which has endured across the centuries. The focus is not the phraseology or the verbalization of the faith, say, in the eighteenth century, but the crucial concepts and essential judgments to which the church has committed itself across space and time. This is precisely what the early Methodists believed about their corporate doctrinal decisions. They refused to see themselves as a sect of the eighteenth century and expressed this by incorporating the faith of the ages into the constitution of their church. The phraseology and genre used to do this are necessarily context specific; they naturally used the conventions of the Anglican tradition out of which they emerged to express their convictions. However, it is mistaken to take this contingent feature of their discourse as a warrant for some kind of doctrinal relativism. On the contrary, they were determined to see themselves as an expression of the faith of the church catholic and universal. Even the distinctive doctrinal commitments of Methodism were rightly seen as efforts to retrieve treasures which had been neglected in the church of the West. Later interpreters were well aware of this fact.

Second, it is easy to miss the doctrinal continuity at stake here, especially if one is the grip of a hermeneutical assumption which reads the history of Christian doctrine essentially as a series of efforts to express the gospel or religious experience in the thought-forms of the day. On this view the Nicene Creed, for example, is essentially the gospel as expressed in the concepts and thought-forms of Greek philosophy. However, this is not how the Fathers saw their work; it is a modern appraisal of their work which rests on a flawed account of the relation between faith and philosophy in the patristic period. The Creed arose not as a response to philosophy but as a crucial exercise in catechesis designed to provide an accurate summary of what the church had come to know about God. While the Fathers were rightly convinced that the deep source of this teaching was divine revelation, there was no agreed theory of reflective rationality behind it, much less was there an agreed account of the relation between faith and philosophy. Moreover, the church as a whole committed itself to the Creed not as a provisional effort to be superseded by later generations but as a minimal vision of the God who had liberated the world from bondage to evil which future Christians would need to sustain their unity, their service, and discipleship. It is precisely to this kind of judgment about the classical faith of the church that contemporary confessing Christians are increasingly drawn.

Third, the objection under review would appear to harbor a wooden and unimaginative interpretation of the intellectual life of millions of contemporary Christians. It cannot seriously envisage the possibility that many modern Christians have found in the classical faith of the church the truth about God for which they have earnestly prayed and sought. It cannot imagine that anyone serious about the life of the mind might be converted to or by such an expression of Christianity. This explains much of the negative and patronizing language deployed against confessing movements. They appear to be retrograde, pre-modern, lacking in seriousness, narrow, fearful of Enlightenment learning, insensitive to social concerns, and the like. What is missing here is the capacity to envisage the possibility of deep intellectual conversion to the classical faith of the church. There is next to no sense that hosts of Christians have come to believe in the Trinity, the incarnation, and other great Christian doctrines as part of an authentic and profound encounter with the gospel in the contemporary situation. It is ironic in the extreme that those who call for dialogue with other religions or with modern and postmodern sensibilities are strangely unable to enter into serious dialogue with those who, for a host of reasons, embrace the classical faith of the church. The obvious explanation for this lacuna is a deep failure of imagination.

Fourth, this failure of imagination is not all that surprising when one bears in mind what is at stake for Neville. We cannot make a genuine confession, he thinks, until we have put the gospel "into the language by which we live." Clearly this means that Neville lives by a language which is other than that of the gospel or of the classical faith of the church. He does not spell out what that language is in any great detail, but whatever it is, it is to be distinguished from the gospel. Morever, the language is the language by which he "lives." This is a very telling phrase. It suggests that the real cues for living come from a place other than the gospel or its expression in the great doctrines of the faith. This is precisely what is at issue for those committed to confessing movements. They want to live out of the gospel and its classical expressions. They want their identity, their lives, their service in the church, and the like, to be formed by the gospel. Neville has reversed this relationship. The gospel has to be put into another language, a language which calls the shots as to how we live. To be sure, the gospel and the faith have to be related to the language of the world of today; but this is a far cry from putting them into the language "by which we live." It is precisely the accomodation of the gospel and the faith of the church to the many languages out of which the world lives which is being called into question.

It would be a mistake to infer from our argument thus far that all is plain sailing in the emergence of confessing movements. The very existence of confessing movements may well expose a significant fault-line in the ecclesiology of modern mainline Christianity. Their appearance makes visible what we might describe as a very serious canonical crisis for the church today. They bring to the surface a virus which has long been at work within the Protestant tradition as a whole. Let me explain briefly what I mean.

The Protestant tradition initially represented a massive effort to recover the gospel and the faith of the early church. Yet it found itself also committed to an epistemology of theology famously enshrined in the slogan of sola scriptura. Technically this committed the Reformers to a revisionist agenda which called everything into question except this epistemology. Even the doctrine of the Trinity began to idle, as doctrines of justification took center stage. Moreover, the whole Protestant agenda was shaped by skeptical attitude towards the great traditions of the church. The polemic with Rome made this virtually inevitable. Consequently the revisionist agenda took precedence over its initial retrievalist impulse, and the revisionist agenda was intimately tied to its epistemological agenda.

The Protestant epistemological agenda eventually collapsed, giving birth in the process to Enlightenment epistemologies of reason and experience. Thus the work of Descartes and Locke, far from being a secular or pagan enterprise, was really the response of the church's intellectuals to the political and intellectual chaos which emerged in the wake of the misguided exegetical optimism and biblicism of the Reformers. Consequently the Protestant tradition has been hostage to the prevailing epistemological theories of high culture. The current shift from a modernist to a postmodernist position does not alter the situation; on the contrary it perpetuates an arrangement which has been in place for centuries. The appeal to postmodernist sensibilities which is now growing apace is simply one more change in the epistemological dancing partner of the church since the sixteenth century. Indeed its proponents offer the new partnership as the latest and no doubt best effort to express the faith of the church. So the new partnership is but one more expression of the revisionist impulse of the Reformation. Like its forbears it is as essentially self-destructive enterprise; as soon as they new partnership has been sealed, a competing partnership will arise to challenge its hegemony.

In the light of this diagnosis contemporary confessing movements face an interesting dilemma. On the one hand, they have arisen as a retrievalist expression of the Protestant heritage. Hence they have focused on the recovery of the classical faith of the church enshrined in the canonical Creed of the church and expressed anew in the conventions of the Reformation traditions. On the other hand, they often echo the epistemological proposals which were the carriers of the revisionist expressions of the tradition which have over time eroded that same classical faith of the church. Hence they continue to be bound, albeit partially, by the bondage to epistemology and philosophy which has destroyed the Protestant tradition from within and which has led to the point where contemporary elites within the tradition are busy at work inventing their own canonical traditions. In short it is an open question whether contemporary confessing movements can escape the effects of the epistemological virus which effectively erodes the classical faith of the church as a whole. If I am right about this, then confessing movements cannot be anything more than a penultimate moment in the life of the church. They are effectively a warning light which draws attention to a much deeper problem within the tradition as a whole.

This is not the place to solve that deeper problem. It is, however, appropriate to identify what is at issue. The deeper problem facing contemporary Protestantism is whether it can really own for itself the full canonical heritage of the church so carefully worked out in the patristic period. The early church did not simply adopt a canon of scripture, that is, a list of books to be read in worship. It put in place a rich canonical heritage of persons, materials, practices, and places which were intended through the working of the Holy Spirit to heal the world. Within this scripture was one crucial component of the canonical heritage, but it was not the only component. Equally canonical and secure, for example, was the Nicene Creed. Over time, however, the church in the West changed the conception and content of the canonical heritage by transforming it into epistemological categories. The most dramatic witness to this is the transformation of the idea of canon from the modest notion of a list to the much stronger notion of a criterion. In this way various doctrines of revelation, which before were left to be informally transmitted as part of the midrash of the church, were smuggled into the canonical heritage of the church. Over time epistemological theories got the upper hand and eventually became the working rule of faith. Hence competing visions of the relation between faith and reason systematically displaced and undermined the rich doctrinal materials which originally constituted the central tracts of the patristic canonical heritage.

The deep question which the appearance of a variety of confessing movements poses for mainline Protestantism, then, is this. Can the destructive virus as represented by the explicit adoption of epistemological theory at the very core of the church's life be eliminated? Or is modern Protestantism doomed to an existence where serial marriage to the epistemologies of its cultural elites is ineradicable? If confessing movements help to cure the church of the lethal epistemological virus at work in its midst, they will make a signal contribution to the health of the gospel and the church at the start of a new millenium. If they do not, they may still serve their purpose if all they do is lift up and help the church appropriate the great doctrines of the tradition each time there is a new epistemological divorce and remarriage.