mmm fudge!
Fudge-makers, what’s not to love about them? Assuming of course that we’re talking about the guys who always let us have free samples of the more exotic flavors even though we always end up buying either maple walnut or plain chocolate. Then there’s the other kind of “fudging” – the kind where someone says one thing but means another, you don’t want to buy that kind of fudge no matter the variety of flavors to sample, which brings us to the EFCA Statement of Faith and the proposed Revision.
The writers of the Revision state “some consider it ‘fudging’ when people sign a Statement that uses the word ‘imminent’ when those people no longer use that word in the way it was originally intended.” There are three types of people who have a hard time with this fudging:
1. Dispensationalists who hold to the original meaning of imminent, 2. Those who think that a document should hold the meaning understood and communicated by the original author(s), and 3. A combination of the first two types (sorry, I don’t have a legitimate third type).
Hopefully we can agree that not finding ourselves in one of those three categories could land us in potentially hot water. The writers of the Revision couldn’t have said it better when they wrote “that that kind of erosion of a doctrinal statement is dangerous because of where it could lead – for if the words do not mean what they say as defined by those who wrote them, then they could mean almost anything.”
If you’re looking to make a case for a revision, whether it be the one presented to us or something else, look no further than this issue… The proof is in the pudding, or is it in the fudge?
posted by Sean Dennis at 12:02 AM
1 Comments:
This was the one rationale for revising the Statement with which I agreed. I dislike the degrading of language -- it's like debasing a nation's currency. "Imminent" means that something could happen at any moment, and the referent there is the coming of Christ. The historical context of that time tells us that they meant the pre-trib Rapture view. But since we stopped requiring that view in the mid 70's -- and I'm good with not requiring it -- it's appropriate that we drop the word "imminent" rather than play around with it. "Imminent", whether you look at it grammatically in the sentence, or historically as far as what the original drafters meant, doesn't mean that "the entire complex of end-time events could start at any moment".
But then the new SOF spoils this by going on to speciously claim that dropping pre-tribulationalism justifies dropping pre-millennialism. There can be some immediate practical differences between the Rapture views; but the hermeneutical, systematic, and practical effects of the differences between the millennial views are tectonic.
newcovenantliving.blogspot.com
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