ne of the most important things to understand about The Nashville Statement is that it was not primarily aimed at the outside world. It is aimed at the evangelical Christian world where so much confusion on these questions seems to remain. As I said in my opinion piece for The Hill over the weekend:
The Nashville Statement is not a culture-war document. It is a church document. It stakes out no public policy positions. It advocates for no particular piece of legislation or political program. Rather, it was drafted by churchmen from a variety of evangelical traditions who aim to catechize God’s people about their place in the true story of the world. And fundamental to that storyline is our “personal and physical design as male and female.”
The Bible begins in Genesis with a marriage and ends in Revelation with a marriage, and that is why the nature of marriage is fundamental to our story as well.
You may be asking, “If the Nashville Statement is simply a Christian confessional statement, then why has it dominated headlines this past week? What’s so newsworthy about that?” Truthfully, we too have been astonished by the amount of attention this has gotten in the press. It does not seem all that newsworthy to reassert what the church everywhere has confessed for the last 2,000 years.
But we are okay with the attention because we believe that God’s design for his world and his people is not bad news but good news. We all stand in need of grace. This story of sin and repentance, faith and forgiveness is my story too. It is our hope and prayer that everyone who reads The Nashville Statement will find it to be their story as well.
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