1. Construct an outline of the theological affirmations you believe to be essential to the Christian faith and life. Comment briefly on each of them, including evidence of your commitment to the current Doctrinal Standards of the United Methodist Church -- understood as our Articles of Religion, Confession of Faith, General Rules, and Wesley’s Standard Sermon and Explanatory Notes on the New Testament.
My drivel...
Christianity is an evangelical faith, and as such it is primarily narratival. The essence of Christian faith and practice is the story of God’s work in the world, in the Church, and in the life of the individual person. The central theological affirmations, then, follow the main movements of the plot, namely, Creation, Sin, and Redemption. These plot elements revolve around the main character of Jesus Christ whose life, death, and resurrection reveal the true meaning of the story. It is within this gospel narrative that the individual believer finds herself incorporated into the life of the Triune God whose story it truly is.
Creation
In professing the doctrine of Creation, I do not seek to wade into the murky waters of the cultural debates over evolution, intelligent design, or the 6,000 year-old Earth. Rather, I refer to Christianity’s affirmation of a truth that transcends the empiricism of the natural sciences: that which is most real is not us but that upon which our existence and essence contingently rests. The Christian faith confronts the egoistic self with its radical dependence upon an Other (not necessarily in a Schleiermachian sense, but his language is helpful). Implicit in this awareness and proclamation of the ultimate Other is an awareness, not only of the finitude of the self, but, more importantly, of the proper and original orientation of the self.
With my own pro-Nicene and Patristic biases, I am wont to declare that the doctrine of the creation is intimately tied up with the doctrine of the Triune God. Happily I find this disposition legitimated in the Articles of Faith, which begin by affirming the existence of the one God, “the maker and preserver of all things, both visible and invisible.” This same first article concludes with a rehearsal of the Trinitarian formula—as if it flows naturally from the declaration of God’s creative nature. The significance of this doctrinal association is the belief that the Triune God revealed in the work of redemption in the incarnation of Jesus Christ is the same God upon whom our very existence depends. The affirmation of the Trinity in Creation—of the Word through whom all was made and the Spirit that hovers over the waters—assures the unity of the story of faith. The God who creates is the God who redeems and recreates us. It is in the image of the Triune God that we are created, and it is into the life of the Triune God that we are incorporated through the Body of Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
This is why Wesley, in his Explanatory Notes on John 1:4 comments
In him was life-He was the foundation of life to every living thing, as well as of being to all that is. And the life was the light of men-He who is essential life, and the giver of life to all that liveth, was also the light of men; the fountain of wisdom, holiness, and happiness, to man in his original state.
In many ways the Christian doctrine of Creation is defined by the doctrine of the Triune God because it can only be understood as Christian through the hindsight of the redemption that is effected by the incarnation of the Word and the sanctification of the Spirit.
Sin
Like any good narrative, the gospel we proclaim turns upon a conflict. Because of the reality of Sin, the Christian proclamation of Creation contains an element of lament for the incongruity between it and our present reality. At its heart, sin is the turning away from this understanding of our created nature and its proper orientation. In “The Spirit of Bondage and of Adoption” Wesley describes this as the “natural man” (nature understood in a post-lapsarian sense): “He is in gross, stupid ignorance… He is utterly ignorant of God, knowing nothing concerning him as he ought to know” (I.1). This noetic fall is characterized by an ignorant pride that corrupts not only the mind but also the heart. False self-awareness leads to an inability to love oneself or one’s neighbor properly because there is no awareness of the God who teaches and enables such love through humility. The denial of our created and contingent nature corresponds to a denial of our sinful nature that proceeds from it.
Here we see the two interdependent poles of the doctrine of Sin: original and actual. The affirmation of the universal fall is grounded in the ubiquitous experience of discrete sin within the world, at both the individual and corporate levels. As the seventh Article of Religion states, “Original sin standeth not in the following of Adam, but it is the corruption of the nature of every man,…and of his own nature inclined to evil, and that continually.” The illness begets the symptom. The corruption of our nature is a perversion of Creation that reorients our minds and hearts away from the love of our Creator toward a delusional, self-serving pride that terminates in discrete actions of violence and sin against our neighbor. This turning away from the source of life results in our death; our selfish pride is our self-destruction.
Salvation
The essence of the Christian gospel, however, is not the awareness of our sorry state but the good news of the salvation effected in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ and through the gift of the Holy Spirit that restores creation. The resolution of the conflict in the Christian narrative operates at both the universal and individual levels. In “The New Creation,” Wesley speaks of the cosmic redemption whereby “all the elements… will be new indeed, entirely changed as to their qualities” (10); he further proclaims that “on the new earth no creature will kill or hurt or give pain to any other” (17). For Wesley, then, the doctrine of Salvation turns upon the doctrines of Sin and Creation by the overcoming of the former for the restoration of the latter.
Wesley qualifies, though (and the majority of the Christian tradition agrees with him) that “the most glorious of all will be the change which then will take place on the poor, sinful miserable children of men” (18). Salvation in the Christian faith is primarily about the restoration of humans, both corporate and personal, by way of the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is in the person of Jesus Christ that the doctrines of Creation, Sin, and Redemption meet, for God chooses to become human, embracing the otherness of God’s creation to overcome the sin that separates it from God. Our gospel is the Gospel of Christ because it is in his Cross that our sinful nature is overcome and transformed. It is with Christ that we die and are born again.
Wesley describes this salvation as effected in two ways. In “On Working Out Our Own Salvation,” he identifies Jesus, the Son as “a propitiation for the sins of the world” and the Spirit as the one “renewing men in that image of God wherein they were created” (2). Here we have the twin concepts of justification and sanctification, the one which sets us aright and the other which perfects us in love. Again, in the same sermon Wesley clarifies, “by justification we are saved from the guilt of sin, and restored to the favour of God: by sanctification we are saved from the power and root of sin, and restored to the image of God” (II.1). The key to this culmination of the Christian story is that it does not simply resolve the conflict of Sin but it “makes all things new” by restoring the glory of God’s original creation
It is appropriate that it is by the Spirit of Christ that we are incorporated into the Body of Christ and share in his death and resurrection. For it is this same Christ who is the Word through whom we were made, and it is the same Spirit that hovered over the waters of chaos at creation that now animates us in love by restoring order to our hearts. In the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ we are incorporated into the story of God’s work in the world. It is through the witness of Christ—both objectively and subjectively understood—that we learn to tell the gospel of Creation, Sin, and Redemption because it is a narrative that can only be told in hindsight through the lens of Jesus’ work in our own life, both as individuals and as a community. We proclaim this gospel, then, as an invitation for others to share in this story of God’s love.
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