Having laid out the nature of God and our stubborn violation of the good in its first two sections, the third section tells the story of God's response. It describes the point and purpose of Jesus, and the blessings of the Holy Spirit as it gathers and empowers those who are moved by the grace of the Gospel.
There are things, of course, that one can pick at and quibble with.
Calling Jesus a "Palestinian Jew," for example, is comprehensible but peculiar. Would any Judean of the first century have spoken of themselves in this way? Would Jesus? Generally speaking, the understanding of that region as uniformly "Palestine" is a historical imposition of imperialism, both Roman and British, which means it's got some wildly ironic resonances. Colonizing history with ideological anachronisms isn't just a venial sin of right wing nationalist hagiographers, eh?
Or in the very next sentence, where we are told that "Jesus showed that the brutality of facts does not define the truth of God." It's a very pretty sentence, but...huh. "The Brutality of Facts?" What exactly does that mean? Is factuality a problem? It sure is in our post-reality culture, where facts are whatever we say they are, and alternative facts are the wormed tongue of tyrannical systems. "We will not allow Our Truth to be defined by Facts," sounds like the sort of thing one hears from a White House spokesperson these days.
Saying "the brutality of facts" seems far less sharp than "the facts of brutality," which creates a cleaner mirrored couplet with "the truth of God." Assuming, of course, that this is what was meant.
I could keep going.
But I won't.
Mostly, this is because as I engage with these latter two sections, I can feel the Dark Spirit of Wordsmithing rising within me. Picking over language and legalistic quibbling are both bitter fruits of the Presbyterian compulsion to wordsmith, in which we imagine that we can build a semiotic tower to heaven if only we can workshop just the right words. I succumb to the prideful, perfectionist, endlessly dissatisfied obsessions of that particular demon just as easily as any other Presbyterian.
And mostly? Mostly these last two sections are lovely and thoughtful, gracious and faithful and hopeful. Really solid work.
I would have no trouble integrating large sections of them into my little congregation's weekly Affirmation of Faith, where we read from the Confessions as a shared expression of what we hold together.
Once I've stopped worrying at it, that is.
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