I think it is unfortunate that this section is first. It is clunky and until you get all the way through it you are likely scratching your head as to what it actually wants to address in our handling of scripture. This is doubly unfortunate in that I think what it calls us to do is the right thing to do, but I wish they had hammered on this one a bit more and not tried to stick so many exterraneous qualifiers in there. Right off the bat, why the need for an acknowledgement of God as Trinity? And why the appeal to Rules, rules does not carry the same meaning in our culture as what I believe they are intending and just serves to complicate this section further.
I think that the primacy of the Biblical narrative should be early on in the call, it is interesting where statements regarding the role of Scripture in communities falls in their statements of faith. But as a call this document has to zing and grab your heart. Restoring the Biblical narrative as God's "story of the world" has a lot of traction, that should be the focus and forget the posturing. This is a call, not a statement faith. As a call it should grab our hearts and make us long to wrestle through to meaning in our own contexts. And at the risk of sounding heretical, this should capture our hearts whether we are Trinitarian or not.
3 comments:
I'm curious - why wouldn't trinity be amongst the first things mentioned?
It could be in a call to creedal fidelity. But here it is stuck in as kind of an afterthough (and that was how it happened in the writing process so I am biased). I simply think it is in the wrong section of the call. Bible makes sense first as we are speaking first to evangelical communities which tend to be more Biblecentric, at least they like to think they are Biblecentric.
Ah - that makes sense.
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