1. Places where you lift these up, make them known
Shaped by Faith in the One God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
Growing in the Church’s biblical faith in the Triune God
Everything I do at UDTS reflects UD/UDTS’s commitment to historic Trinitarian Christian faith, thought, life, discipleship, community and mission. This in the focus of both the required two-course Doctrine sequence, my UM Doctrine course, and my Theology of John Wesley course. My new DMin program embraces a participatory Trinitarian perspective that overarches everything.
2. How you see these specially reflecting our unique context and constituency
UDTS for the entire 44 years I have been a part of it first as a student and then as a professor has always provided a centrist Trinitarian theological option for candidates (especially PCUSA and UCM) for ministry who are right of center that they cannot find in other mainline seminaries. It is why I attended UDTS to study under Donald Bloesch and Dona McKim. Our UM students over the past 30+ years have nearly all been right of center and have selected UDTS because it was a seminary that welcomed them.
3. And
then note a point where you see the UD and UDTS missions as complementary.
As a community, the University practices its Christian commitments
UD is committed to a hospitable Christian environment which respects other faith traditions
A Trinitarian theological perspective provides best framework of ultimate beliefs and practices for embraces unity in diversity and diversity in unity because it is rooted in God’s own inner Trinitarian life also a unity in diversity and diversity in unity. The Triune God is the primordial source of all other unity in diversity. Strick moral Monotheism often leads to a coercive unity destructive to diversity. In much the same way dogmatic ideological pluralism is also coercive demanding unbridled diversity without a common center that alone can hold diversity together and ends up as destructive to any diversity that does not affirm the ideology of pluralism. The irony is that Monotheism’s coercive unity and pluralism’s dogmatic diversity have a whole lot in common. Trinitarian provides the only way to hold unity and diversity together. (See Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace)