What I Believe
The following confessional statement was lifted from The Gospel Coalition. It constitutes part of their
Foundation Documents. I am in full agreement with pretty much every single part of it, and I am reproducing it here so that others may know what I mean when I describe myself as "an evangelical Christian broadly in the Reformed tradition." (I have changed the wording slightly, replacing "we" with "I" and so on. Also, the part with which I disagree is redacted with strike-through text below.)
1. The Triune God: I believe in one God, eternally existing in three equally divine persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—who know, love, and glorify one another. This one true and living God is infinitely perfect both in his love and in his holiness. He is the Creator of all things, visible and invisible, and is therefore worthy to receive all glory and adoration. Immortal and eternal, he perfectly and exhaustively knows the end from the beginning, sustains and sovereignly rules over all things, and providentially brings about his eternal good purposes to redeem a people for himself and restore his fallen creation, to the praise of his glorious grace.
2. Revelation: God has graciously disclosed his existence and power in the created order, and has supremely revealed himself to fallen human beings in the person of his Son, the incarnate Word. Moreover, this God is a speaking God who by his Spirit has graciously disclosed himself in human words. I believe that God has inspired the words preserved in the scriptures, the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments, which are both a record and a means of his saving work in the world. These writings alone constitute the verbally inspired word of God, which is utterly authoritative and without error in the original writings, complete in its revelation of his will for salvation, sufficient for all that God requires us to believe and do, and final in its authority over every domain of knowledge to which it speaks. I confess that both our finitude and our sinfulness preclude the possibility of knowing God's truth exhaustively, but I affirm that, enlightened by the Spirit of God, we can know God's revealed truth truly. As God's instruction, the Bible is to be believed in all that it teaches; as God's command, obeyed in all that it requires; as God's pledge, trusted in all that it promises. As God's people hear, believe, and do the word, they are equipped as disciples of Christ and witnesses to the gospel.
3. Creation of Humanity: I believe that God created human beings, male and female, in his own image. Adam and Eve belonged to the created order that God himself declared to be very good, serving as God's agents to care for, manage, and govern creation, living in holy and devoted fellowship with their maker. Men and women, equally made in the image of God, enjoy equal access to God by faith in Christ Jesus and are both called to move beyond passive self-indulgence to significant private and public engagement in family, church, and civic life. Adam and Eve were made to complement each other in a one-flesh union that establishes the only normative pattern of sexual relations for men and women, such that marriage ultimately serves as a type of the union between Christ and his church. In God's wise purposes, men and women are not simply interchangeable, but rather they complement each other in mutually enriching ways. God ordains that they assume distinctive roles which reflect the loving relationship between Christ and the church, the husband exercising headship in a way that displays the caring, sacrificial love of Christ, and the wife submitting to her husband in a way that models the love of the church for her Lord. In the ministry of the church, both men and women are encouraged to serve Christ and to be developed to their full potential in the manifold ministries of the people of God. The distinctive leadership role within the church given to qualified men is grounded in creation, fall, and redemption and must not be sidelined by appeals to cultural developments.
4. The Fall: I believe that Adam, made in the image of God, distorted that image and forfeited his original blessedness—for himself and all his progeny—by falling into sin through Satan's temptation. As a result, all human beings are alienated from God, corrupted in every aspect of their being (e.g., physically, mentally, volitionally, emotionally, spiritually) and condemned finally and irrevocably to death—apart from God's own gracious intervention. The supreme need of all human beings is to be reconciled to the God under whose just and holy wrath we stand; the only hope of all human beings is the undeserved love of this same God, who alone can rescue us and restore us to himself.
5. The Plan of God: I believe that from all eternity God determined in grace to save a great multitude of guilty sinners from every tribe and language and people and nation, and to this end foreknew them and chose them. I believe that God justifies and sanctifies those who by grace have faith in Jesus, and that he will one day glorify them—all to the praise of his glorious grace. In love God commands and implores all people to repent and believe, having set his saving love on those he has chosen and having ordained Christ to be their Redeemer.
6. The Gospel: I believe that the gospel is the good news of Jesus Christ, God's very wisdom. Utter folly to the world, even though it is the power of God to those who are being saved, this good news is christological, centering on the cross and resurrection. The gospel is not proclaimed if Christ is not proclaimed, and the authentic Christ has not been proclaimed if his death and resurrection are not central. The message is "Christ died for our sins ... [and] was raised." This good news is biblical (i.e., his death and resurrection are according to the Scriptures), theological and salvific (i.e., Christ died for our sins in order to reconcile us to God), historical (i.e., if the saving events did not happen, then our faith is worthless, we are still in our sins, and we are to be pitied more than all others), apostolic (i.e., the message was entrusted to and transmitted by the apostles, who were witnesses of these saving events), and intensely personal (i.e., where it is received, believed, and held firmly, individual persons are saved).
7. The Redemption of Christ: I believe that, moved by love and in obedience to his Father, the eternal Son became human: The Word became flesh, fully God and fully human being, one person in two natures. The man Jesus, the promised Messiah of Israel, was conceived through the miraculous agency of the Holy Spirit and was born of the virgin Mary. He perfectly obeyed his heavenly Father, lived a sinless life, performed miraculous signs, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, arose bodily from the dead on the third day, and ascended into heaven. As the mediatorial King, he is seated at the right hand of God the Father, exercising in heaven and on earth all of God's sovereignty, and is our High Priest and righteous Advocate. I believe that by his incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension, Jesus Christ acted as our representative and substitute. He did this so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. On the cross he canceled sin, propitiated God and, by bearing the full penalty of our sins, reconciled to God all those who believe. By his resurrection Christ Jesus was vindicated by his Father, broke the power of death and defeated Satan who once had power over death, and brought everlasting life to all his people. By his ascension he has been forever exalted as Lord and has prepared a place for us to be with him. I believe that salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name given under heaven by which we must be saved. Because God chose the lowly things of this world, the despised things, the things that are not, to nullify the things that are, no human being can ever boast before him—Christ Jesus has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness, and redemption.
