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This is a very full-orbed book, but many of the statements have big holes in them. For example, a number of evangelical Protestant organizations have statements that fail to mention justification. And I can remember being part of conferences where drafters forgot to even mention the Holy Spirit. As you've gone through these many statements, are there any areas you think we tend to ignore?

Oden: There are a lot of things that are not present in the confessional tradition. The Apostles' Creed does not mention providence. If you were to look at the Westminster Confession, you would probably find some holes in that. The concern here is the documentary evidence of a substantial doctrinal consensus in the evangelical tradition in the last 50 years. And I think that you're right that justification was not fully enough treated before The Gospel of Jesus Christ: An Evangelical Celebration.

Packer: I think that's correct. Some statements aim to be fuller than others. And some statements are more preoccupied with immediate polemics and definitions repelling error than others are.

The Fundamentals was an example of a statement that didn't even attempt to be a balanced affirmation of the gospel. It's simply said that on these five points, we are prepared to fight liberals to the death.

Because of their polemical background, some of these statements become shibboleths—precise word tests to discover who is in and out. Is that a valid function for these faith statements?

Packer: No statement ever ought to become a shibboleth for anybody so that it's just a question of whether the right word is heard on the lips of the other guy. The statements, like all confessional statements, are ring fences around orthodoxy and truth. What's important is that in the organizations that sponsor the statements, everybody should be inside the ring fence rejoicing in the truth. They don't have to do it necessarily in the same words as the confessional statement uses.

I spend a lot of time with my students, trying to disabuse them of what I call "the magic word syndrome." That is the idea that you're not affirming something unless you affirm it in familiar language. I tell them that anything that you really understand you can express in different words. This is apropos of whether you do or do not use words like infallible and inerrant.

Words like infallible and inerrant bring to mind the split many years ago between Fuller Seminary and much of the rest of the evangelical movement. What is the significance that Fuller is quoted so fully in your book? Have times changed?

Packer: I want to reach out a friendly hand toward Fuller, because I think that the right thing to say historically is that they had domestic reasons for wanting not to affirm inerrancy, and that led them for a number of years to embrace this idea of non-infallibilist or non-inerrantist evangelicalism.

Under the present management, it's very clear that that's no longer the idea that is driving them. That's an era that they've left behind. They are seeking to be on board with the rest of us evangelicals, maintaining the evangelical faith on which we all agree. And then the question of whether they use exactly the words that we use or we use the words that they use is of secondary importance. They're inside the ring fence and anxious to make a point of being there.

Oden: I just want to emphasize that our concern here is an irenic one. We are not trying to renew old fights. We're trying to show where evangelicals indeed do find very deep consensus.

An affirmation about the Bible is the first item in some evangelical faith statements. Others put it somewhat later. Why does your book's structure place the Bible first?

Oden: I think the Bible takes the first place in confessional Protestantism, particularly in the Reformed tradition. So this is not an invention of the evangelicals of the last hundred years. You can go back to the Heidelberg Catechism and similar documents and find the order of the loci presenting the Bible, the authority of Scripture, first or very close to first.

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January (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48