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The
Baltimore Declaration
1991
Throughout the history of the Christian Church, there have
been times when the integrity and substance of the Gospel have come
under powerful cultural, philosophical, and religious attack. At
such times, it has been necessary for Christian believers, and especially
for pastors and preachers, to confess clearly, unequivocally, and
publicly "the faith which was once for all delivered to the
saints" (Jude 3), and to define this faith over against the
heresies and theological errors infiltrating the Church. Thus the
Church is led into a deeper comprehension of the Gospel of Jesus
Christ and the communal identity of the Church is strengthened in
its mission to the world.
We, the undersigned, who are baptized members
of the Episcopal Church of the United States, believe that such
a time has now come upon the Church which we serve. We are now witnessing
a thoroughgoing revision of the faith inconsistent with the evangelical,
apostolic and catholic witness, a revision increasingly embraced
by ecclesiastical leaders, both ordained and lay. In the name of
inclusivity and pluralism, we are presented with a new theological
paradigm which rejects, explicitly or implicitly, the doctrinal
norms of the historic creeds and ecumenical councils, and which
seeks to relativize, if not abolish, the formative and evangelical
authority of the Holy Scriptures. This paradigm introduces into
the Church a new story, a new language, a new grammar. The "revelations"
of modernity, infinitely self-generating and never ending, supplant
and critique that historic revelation which God the Holy Trinity
has communicated by word and deed in the life, death, and resurrection
of Jesus the Israelite.
Fully aware of our own sinfulness, as well as
the spiritual dangers inherent in issuing such a call, we humbly
and prayerfully summon the Church to return to and remain steadfast
in that Gospel entrusted to it by the Apostles of Jesus Christ.
We also summon the clergy of the Church to stand up boldly and declare
that Trinitarian faith which they have sworn at their ordinations
to uphold and preach. We are well aware of the possible personal
and professional costs of such a confession in the present situation;
but we are convinced that the integrity and substance of the Gospel,
that Gospel which is the only hope and salvation of the world, are
at stake. The Lord is calling us to fidelity to him and to him alone.
We offer, therefore, the following Declaration
of Faith. This is not a comprehensive confession. It addresses those
critical theological issues which we believe to be at the heart
of the present crisis.
I. "All authority in heaven and on earth
has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded
you" (Matt. 28:18-20).
By the command and mandate of her risen Lord,
the Church of Jesus Christ is commissioned to baptize disciples
into the revealed name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This
proper name faithfully identifies the Savior and Lord of the Holy
Scriptures. While human linguistic formulae cannot exhaust the mystery
of the ineffable Deity, the threefold appellation - given to us
in the resurrection of Jesus - truly names and designates the three
Persons of the Holy Trinity as disclosed in the biblical narrative,
and summarizes the apostolic experience of God in Christ. To reject,
disregard, or marginalize the Trinitarian naming is to cut ourselves
off from that story which shapes and defines the identity of the
Church; ultimately, it is to cut ourselves off from the God of Israel
himself. The confession of the triune name is required in the celebration
of Christian baptism, and it properly structures the liturgy and
prayer of the Christian community: We rightly pray to the Father,
through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. As St. Basil the Great declared:
"For we are bound to be baptized in the terms we have received
and to profess belief in the terms in which we are baptized, and
as we have professed belief in, so to give glory to Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit."
We repudiate the false teaching
that God has not definitively and uniquely named himself in Jesus
Christ, that we are free to ignore or suppress the revealed name
of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and worship the Deity with names
and images created by our fallen imaginations or supplied by secular
culture, unreformed by the Gospel and the biblical revelation.
II. "In the beginning when God created
the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness
covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the
face of the waters. Then God said. . ." (Gen. 1: I-3).
"Long ago you laid the foundation of the
earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish,
but you endure; they will all wear out like a garment. You change
them like clothing, and they pass away, but you are the same, and
your years have no end" (Ps. 102: 25-27).
The triune God is the holy creator who freely
speaks the universe into contingent existence out of nothing (creatio
ex nihilo). He is the sovereign Lord, utterly transcending his creation,
yet actively immanent within it, guiding and directing it to its
eschatological fulfillment in the Kingdom. As creator, God is free
to act within his universe, both providentially and miraculously,
to accomplish his purposes and ends.
We repudiate the false teaching
of monism, which indissolubly unites deity and cosmos into an interdependent
whole, the world being construed as God's body, born of the substance
of deity, and thus divine. On the other hand, we repudiate the false
teaching of deism, which distances the creator from active involvement
in the preservation, redemption, and consummation of his creation.
III. In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning
with God. All things came into being through him, and without him
not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was
life, and the life was the light of all people... . And the Word
became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the
glory of the Father's only Son, full of grace and truth. . . . From
his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. The law indeed
was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to
the Father's heart, who has made him known" (John 1:1-4,14,16-18).
"All things have been handed over to me
by my Father and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no
one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses
to reveal him" (Matt. 11:27).
Jesus of Nazareth is God. He is the Word made
flesh, the incarnation and embodiment of the divine Son, truly God
and truly human, "of one being" (homoousios) with the
Father and the Spirit. In this wondrous union of deity and humanity,
the triune God is perfectly and definitively revealed. In Christ,
and in him alone, we are freely given true apprehension of God in
his immanent reality, freely given to share in the Son's knowledge
of the Father in the Holy Spirit. The crucified and risen Lord,
in all of his historical particularity, is thus the source and foundation
of our knowledge of the living God. We rejoice in the triune God's
gift of himself in Jesus Christ, and declare Jesus as the eternal
Word who judges all preachings, teachings, theologies, actions,
prayers and rituals. We acknowledge that God is free to communicate
himself in many and diverse ways to the peoples of the world; but
we confess that saving and authentic knowledge of the Deity in his
inner Trinitarian life is possible only in and through the incarnate
Son, Jesus Christ, the God-man.
We repudiate the false teaching
that Jesus Christ is only one revelation or manifestation of God,
that there are other revelations and other experiences (political,
ideological, cultural, or religious) to which we may look or must
look to gain knowledge of the true God.
IV. "l am the way, and the truth, and the
life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6).
"This Jesus is the stone that was rejected
by you, the builders; it has become the cornerstone. There is salvation
in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among
mortals by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:11-12).
By his incarnation in Jesus the Israelite, the
eternal Son of God has assumed to himself our human nature, cleansing
and healing it by the power of the Spirit, redeeming it from sin
and death by the cross of Calvary, raising it to everlasting life
in his resurrection, and incorporating it into the triune life of
the Godhead by his ascension to the right hand of the Father. Thus
this Jesus, who is called the Christ, is the Savior of the world,
the one mediator between God and humanity, in whom, by faith, repentance
and baptism, we find forgiveness, rebirth in the Spirit, and eternal
life in the Kingdom. While we do not presume to judge how the all-holy
and all-merciful God will or will not bring to salvation those who
do not hear and believe the preached Gospel, we do emphatically
declare Jesus the rightful Lord and Savior of all humanity, and
we embrace the Great Commission of our Lord to proclaim with evangelical
fervor his Good News to the world. To deny this historic conviction
in the absolute lordship of Christ Jesus and his exclusive mediation
of salvation is to eviscerate the heart and vitality of the Church's
evangelistic mission.
We repudiate the false teaching
that the salvation of humanity by the sovereign action and grace
of God is unnecessary or that salvation may be ultimately found
apart from the atoning death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We
repudiate the false teaching that Jesus is merely one savior among
many - the savior of Christians but not of humankind.
V. "The hour is coming when you will worship
the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship
what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is
from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the
true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for
the Father seeks such as these to worship him" (John 4:21-23).
"So that you may not claim to be wiser
than you are, brothers and sisters, I want you to understand this
mystery: a hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the full
number of the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved;
... As regards the gospel they are enemies of God for your sake;
but as regards election they are beloved, for the sake of their
ancestors; for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.
Just as you were once disobedient to God but have now received mercy
because of their disobedience, so they have now been disobedient
in order that, by the mercy shown to you, they too may now receive
mercy. For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may
be merciful to all" (Romans 11:25-26, 28-32).
By the call of Abraham and the covenant of Moses
enacted on Mount Sinai, the triune God has gathered to himself the
people of Israel to be his holy nation and royal priesthood, consecrated
to his service in the redemption of the world. To them he has entrusted
his Torah, Wisdom, and prophetic Word. From this people God has
brought forth his Messiah, born in Bethlehem of the Virgin Mary,
Jesus the Jew, the son of David, who is the fulfillment of the promises
of God to Israel and the Savior of humanity and of all creation.
For these majestic reasons, the Jews are to be regarded by Christians
as a reverend and blessed people. Following the teaching of the
New Testament, we eagerly look forward to that time when Gentile
and Jew will be fully reconciled and made one people in eternal
communion with the crucified and risen Messiah in the New Jerusalem.
We repudiate the false teaching
that the Jews may be persecuted by Christians and we especially
repudiate the repugnant and fallacious charge of "Christ-killers,"
which has been used by Christians down the centuries as an excuse
for hatred, bigotry, and violence against the Jews. All anti-Semitism
in thought, word, or deed is vicious and is to be decried and condemned
by Christians. But we also repudiate the false teaching that eternal
salvation is already given to the chosen people of Israel through
the covenant of Abraham and Moses, independently of the crucified
Christ, and the inference that the Gospel of Jesus the Messiah need
not be proclaimed to them.
VI. "But now, apart from the law, the righteousness
of God has been disclosed and is attested by the law and the prophets,
the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who
believe. For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and
fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace
as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom
God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective
through faith" (Romans 3:21-25).
"For by grace you have been saved through
faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God - not
the result of works, so that no one may boast" (Eph. 2:8-9).
The Gospel is the proclamation of the unconditional
love, grace, mercy, and forgiveness of God the Father, mediated
through Christ crucified, in the power of the Spirit. The Father
nurtures, protects, and cares for his children like a nursing mother:
he strengthens, directs, and disciplines them like a steadfast father.
His love embraces all humankind equally, female and male, and is
communicated to us in the preaching of the Word and the celebration
of the sacraments, received by the faith granted us in the gift
of the Gospel. This love cannot be earned nor bought: We are freely
justified by the grace given to us through Christ in his sacrificial
death and victorious resurrection, not by our religious, political,
psychological, or moral works.
We repudiate the false teaching
that God is male (except in the incarnate Christ) and that men are
consequently superior to women, or that God has institutionalized
in family, society, or the Church the authoritarian and sexist domination
of women by men. We repudiate the false teaching that God the Father
is the oppressor and subjugator of women, or that the divine Fatherhood
is rightly construed as the psychological projection upon the Deity
of the experience of human fatherhood. We therefore repudiate the
false teaching that the Father of Jesus Christ is inaccessible or
unavailable to contemporary women.
VII. "Do you think that I have come to
abolish the law or the prophets: I have come not to abolish but
to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away,
not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law
until all is accomplished'" (Matt. 5:17-18).
"All scripture is inspired by God and is
useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training
in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient,
equipped for every good work" (2 Tim. 3: 16-17).
We confess the Holy Scriptures of the Old and
New Testaments to be the Word of God, and to contain all things
necessary to salvation. The Holy Spirit, the ultimate author of
God's Word written, was active both in the inspiration of the sinful
human writers, redactors, and editors and in the process of canonization.
Interpreted within the tradition and community of the Christian
Church, with the use of responsible biblical criticism - always
under the guidance and lordship of the Spirit - the Scriptures,
in their entirety, are the reliable, trustworthy, and canonical
witness to God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ, and are our primary
and decisive authority in matters of faith and morals. Through the
Holy Scriptures the Church hears anew every day that Word who frees
us from the tyranny of the fashionable, the divine Word who renews
and inspires, teaches and corrects, judges and saves.
We repudiate the false teaching that the plain
testimony of the Holy Scriptures may, in whole or part, be supplanted
by the images, views, philosophies, and values of secular culture.
We repudiate the false teaching that only those sayings of the pre-resurrection
Jesus which can be demonstrated to be certain or probable by historical
criticism are authoritative for the life and mission of the Church.
We repudiate the false teaching that the Old Testament is not to
be interpreted in light of its messianic fulfillment in the person
of Jesus Christ as witnessed in the New Testament, or that the Old
and New Testaments stand hermeneutically, materially, and formally
independent of each other.
Pray for the Church.
The Rev. Ronald S. Fisher
The Rev. Alvin F. Kimel, Jr.
The Rev. R. Gary Matthewes-Green
The Rev. William N. McKeachie
The Rev. Frederick J. Ramsay
The Rev. Philip Burwell Roulette
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