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The Baltimore Declaration
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 neverending,
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.
- "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.
- "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.
- 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.
- "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.
- "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.
- "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.
- "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.
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