“A Conservative Christian Declaration”

Religious Affections Ministries released something called “A Conservative Christian Declaration” yesterday, and I was curious to get feedback on it. I read portions of it last night, and (as seems to be usual with RAM) agree with portions of it and scratch my head at other sections.

Has anyone else read it (link) and have comments?

Here’s some of the introductory comments:



Over the past six months, I have collaborated with a group of pastors and ministry educators to formulate a document that would accomplish a few goals:





• We want to clearly articulate a fully-orbed conservative Christianity that includes both doctrine and practice (including holy living and rightly-ordered worship).
  

• We want to help answer and prevent common caricatures of our positions on these things.
  

• We want something that like-minded men can rally around as an accurate statement of our convictions, while allowing for appropriate differences among us.
  

• We want to produce something that can be used as a tool to teach biblical conservatism.




Toward this end, we penned “A Conservative Christian Declaration.”…




Before introducing the declaration, here are a few clarifications and explanations of our purposes behind this document:





1. We do not intend to start a movement or an organization.
   

2. …We acknowledge that there are doctrinal commitments that are essential to Christianity but not articulated in the document. In other words, this document does not articulate the fundamentals of the gospel; we look to the traditional creeds and confessions for that.

3. We do not intend to imply that those who find affinity with this document will be able to work together in every circumstance (church planting, church membership, etc.). In other words, there are doctrinal and practical matters beyond what this document articulates that influence cooperation between Christians (such as denominational distinctives).
   

4. We see this simply as a document that goes beyond our core confessions to help define certain values that we consider important across denominational lines and that we fear have been lost in contemporary evangelicalism.