A CALL TO
AN ANCIENT EVANGELICAL
FUTURE
Table of Contents
Prologue
1. On the Primacy of the Biblical Narrative
2. On the Church, the Continuation of God's
Narrative
3. On the Church's Theological Reflection on
God's Narrative
4. On Church's Worship as Telling and
Enacting God's Narrative
5. On Spiritual Formation in the Church as
Embodiment of God's
Narrative
6. On the Church's Embodied Life in the World
Epilogue Sponsors
Prologue
In every age the Holy Spirit calls the Church to examine its
faithfulness to God's revelation in Jesus Christ, authoritatively
recorded in Scripture and handed down through the Church. Thus, while
we affirm the global strength and vitality of worldwide Evangelicalism
in our day, we believe the North American expression of Evangelicalism
needs to be especially sensitive to the new external and internal
challenges facing God's people.
These external challenges include the current cultural milieu and the
resurgence of religious and political ideologies. The internal
challenges include Evangelical accommodation to civil religion,
rationalism, privatism and pragmatism. In light of these challenges, we
call Evangelicals to strengthen their witness through a recovery of the
faith articulated by the consensus of the ancient Church and its
guardians in the traditions of Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism,
the Protestant Reformation and the Evangelical awakenings. Ancient
Christians faced a world of paganism, Gnosticism and political
domination. In the face of heresy and persecution, they understood
history through Israel's story, culminating in the death and
resurrection of Jesus and the coming of God's Kingdom.
Today, as in the ancient era, the Church is confronted by a host of
master narratives that contradict and compete with the gospel. The
pressing question is: who gets to narrate the world? The Call to an
Ancient Evangelical Future challenges Evangelical Christians to restore
the priority of the divinely inspired biblical story of God's acts in
history. The narrative of God's Kingdom holds eternal implications for
the mission of the Church, its theological reflection, its public
ministries of worship and spirituality and its life in the world. By
engaging these themes, we believe the Church will be strengthened to
address the issues of our day.
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1. On the Primacy of the Biblical Narrative
We call for a return to the priority of the divinely authorized
canonical story of the Triune God. This story-Creation, Incarnation,
and Re-creation-was effected by Christ's recapitulation of human
history and summarized by the early Church in its Rules of Faith. The
gospel-formed content of these Rules served as the key to the
interpretation of Scripture and its critique of contemporary culture,
and thus shaped the church's pastoral ministry. Today, we call
Evangelicals to turn away from modern theological methods that reduce
the gospel to mere propositions, and from contemporary pastoral
ministries so compatible with culture that they camouflage God's story
or empty it of its cosmic and redemptive meaning. In a world of
competing stories, we call Evangelicals to recover the truth of God's
word as the story of the world, and to make it the centerpiece of
Evangelical life.
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2. On the Church, the Continuation
of God's Narrative
We call Evangelicals to take seriously the visible character of the
Church. We call for a commitment to its mission in the world in
fidelity to God's mission (Missio Dei), and for an exploration of the
ecumenical implications this has for the unity, holiness catholicity,
and apostolicity of the Church. Thus, we call Evangelicals to turn away
from an individualism that makes the Church a mere addendum to God's
redemptive plan. Individualistic Evangelicalism has contributed to the
current problems of churchless Christianity, redefinitions of the
Church according to business models, separatist ecclesiologies and
judgmental attitudes toward the Church. Therefore, we call Evangelicals
to recover their place in the community of the Church catholic.
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3. On the Church's Theological
Reflection on God's Narrative
We call for the Church's reflection to remain anchored in the
Scriptures in continuity with the theological interpretation learned
from the early Fathers. Thus, we call Evangelicals to turn away from
methods that separate theological reflection from the common traditions
of the Church. These modern methods compartmentalize God's story by
analyzing its separate parts, while ignoring God's entire redemptive
work as recapitulated in Christ. Anti-historical attitudes also
disregard the common biblical and theological legacy of the ancient
Church. Such disregard ignores the hermeneutical value of the Church's
ecumenical creeds. This reduces God's story of the world to one of many
competing theologies and impairs the unified witness of the Church to
God's plan for the history of the world. Therefore, we call
Evangelicals to unity in "the tradition that has been believed
everywhere, always and by all," as well as to humility and charity in
their various Protestant traditions.
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4. On Church's Worship as Telling
and Enacting God's Narrative
We call for public worship that sings, preaches and enacts God's story.
We call for a renewed consideration of how God ministers to us in
baptism, Eucharist, confession, the laying on of hands, marriage,
healing and through the charisma of the Spirit, for these actions shape
our lives and signify the meaning of the world. Thus, we call
Evangelicals to turn away from forms of worship that focus on God as a
mere object of the intellect or that assert the self as the source of
worship. Such worship has resulted in lecture-oriented, music-driven,
performance-centered and program-controlled models that do not
adequately proclaim God's cosmic redemption. Therefore, we call
Evangelicals to recover the historic substance of worship of Word and
Table and to attend to the Christian year, which marks time according
to God's saving acts.
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5. On Spiritual Formation in the
Church as Embodiment of God's Narrative
We call for a catechetical spiritual formation of the people of God
that is based firmly on a Trinitarian biblical narrative. We are
concerned when spirituality is separated from the story of God and
baptism into the life of Christ and his Body. Spirituality, made
independent from God's story, is often characterized by legalism, mere
intellectual knowledge, an overly therapeutic culture, New Age
Gnosticism, a dualistic rejection of this world and a narcissistic
preoccupation with one's own experience. These false spiritualities are
inadequate for the challenges we face in today's world. Therefore, we
call Evangelicals to return to a historic spirituality like that taught
and practiced in the ancient catechumenate.
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6. On the Church's Embodied Life in
the World
We call for a cruciform holiness and commitment to God's mission in the
world. This embodied holiness affirms life, biblical morality and
appropriate self-denial. It calls us to be faithful stewards of the
created order and bold prophets to our contemporary culture. Thus, we
call Evangelicals to intensify their prophetic voice against forms of
indifference to God's gift of life, economic and political injustice,
ecological insensitivity and the failure to champion the poor and
marginalized. Too often we have failed to stand prophetically against
the culture's captivity to racism, consumerism, political correctness,
civil religion, sexism, ethical relativism, violence and the culture of
death. These failures have muted the voice of Christ to the world
through his Church and detract from God's story of the world, which the
Church is collectively to embody. Therefore, we call the Church to
recover its counter-cultural mission to the world.
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Epilogue
In sum, we call Evangelicals to recover the conviction
that God's story shapes the mission of the Church to bear witness to
God's Kingdom and to inform the spiritual foundations of civilization.
We set forth this Call as an ongoing, open-ended conversation. We are
aware that we have our blind spots and weaknesses. Therefore, we
encourage Evangelicals to engage this Call within educational centers,
denominations and local churches through publications and conferences.
We pray that we can move with intention to proclaim a loving,
transcendent, triune God who has become involved in our history. In
line with Scripture, creed and tradition, it is our deepest desire to
embody God's purposes in the mission of the Church through our
theological reflection, our worship, our spirituality and our life in
the world, all the while proclaiming that Jesus is Lord over all
creation.
This Call is issued in the spirit of sic et non; therefore those who
affix their names to this Call need not agree with all its content.
Rather, its consensus is that these are issues to be discussed in the
tradition of semper reformanda as the church faces the new challenges
of our time. Over a period of seven months, more than 300 persons have
participated via e-mail to write the Call. These men and women
represent a broad diversity of ethnicity and denominational
affiliation. The four theologians who most consistently interacted with
the development of the Call have been named as Theological Editors. The
Board of Reference was given the special assignment of overall
approval.
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