Statement of Faith
WE BELIEVE
Ӣ in one God, eternally existent in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Ӣ in the deity of our Lord Jesus Christ, His virgin birth, His sinless life, His atoning death through His shed blood, His bodily resurrection, His ascension to the right hand of the Father and His return to power and glory.
Ӣ in the Bible as the inspired and infallible Word of God; the only authority for Christian faith and life.
Ӣ in man as the image-bearer of God yet fallen in sin and in need of a Savior.
Ӣ in salvation through Jesus Christ alone and regeneration by the Holy Spirit which results in repentance and faith in the believer.
Ӣ in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit which enables the Christian to lead a godly life.
Ӣ in a bodily resurrection of life for the saved and a resurrection of damnation for the lost.
Ӣ in the spiritual unity of believers in Jesus Christ.
Kendall, I take it that you post this because you are impressed with it. So am I. Yet I wonder whether Catholic-minded persons (obviously I include many Anglicans) should hesitate a little before signing on the dotted line. Yes, we believe in the Bible as the inspired and infallible word of God; but not as ‘the only authority’ because we believe in the witness of tradition. Then there is that reference to the necessity of regeneration by the Holy Spirit resulting in repentance and faith. I certainly hope and pray that the Holy Spirit is at work in me in this way; I know only too well that I am a sinner, and I ask the mercy of God in and through Christ. But I also know that I have always believed in the Lord Jesus. Although there have been deeply significant turning-points in my faith journey, there has not been one big conversion experience. Would that satisfy them, do you think? As they say in Scotland: I hae ma doots.
If the Bible is “the only authority” why do you need the other seven beliefs?
I am often struck by the “three solas” – sola fide, sola gratis, sola scriptura.
None of them is “sola,” otherwise, there wouldn’t be three of them.
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
The school is non-denominational. The website is found [url=http://www.thebccs.org/index.php?id=1 ]here[/url].
I wonder how Episcopalian schools are doing with the gravitationally downward pull of the name-brand Episcopal?
I’m not a huge fan of anything other than the Nicene Creed for a “statement of faith”. Mostly because words like “infallible” tend to rub me the wrong way; they are incredibly unclear. Do we mean that there are no factual errors in the Bible? (If so, we need to toss out much of science since Galileo.) Do we mean that the Bible is the only thing that instructs our behavior? (First, it doesn’t do that all the time – it’s a story and a process much the same way that our own lives and experiences with God are.) Do we mean that, as Terry Tee wrote, reason and tradition should be discarded as lacking “authority”? (If so, I will never sign up to this – apostolic succession and the authority of bishops/archbishops matters.)
Points like these (especially for non- or inter-denominational congregations/schools) seem to rarely focus on outward expressions of Christ’s love, but more on the internal workings of “faith” or “belief”. I know many “Christians” who would sign on the dotted line and completely fail to live into the righteousness to which they are called. One of these statements should be “-in a life judged by works [in the Spirit]”; enabling one to “lead a godly life” (above) tends to look more like an ‘I’m-right-you’re-wrong’ attitude about politics/religion rather than good works, without which faith is dead.
And great point about the “solas” Phil – although, I think there are five (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_solas). 🙂
Grace and peace,
Eric Gregory
I think it is wonderful that the school, which I had never heard of before, has this statement of faith for its students to consider. While it is true the Bible alone is sufficient to show all the other seven points, I think it is useful to have a “snapshot” reference list that can be shared when asked: “What do you believe?” Even the list of eight may not be complete, but it surely does a great job of covering the basic tenets.
What? No MDGs? Surely they jest.
Eric
Infallibility of Scripture is the belief that the Scripture is without error on all things related to faith and behavior; or all things necessary for salvation.
Inerrancy of Scripture is the belief that the Scripture is without error on all things; science, faith, etc.
#4 It’s Episcopal schools. Having attended and sent my children to Episcopal schools I can tell you they are doing very well.
I am sure Kendall posted this in large measure as a result of yesterday’s memorial service for Alex Heidengren which was like none other that I’ve ever attended. It was a wonderful testimony to a very full life, well, lived, albeit far too short. The praise and worship was wonderful and so very moving, the funeral message by Alex’s BCCS principal was bibical, heartfelt, hopeful and above all else showed how much he and the student body loved Alex. The unshakeable faith of the Heidengren family was a testimony that words cannot describe but one can only respect, admire and hope to emulate if such a fate would ever be visited upon one of us. Probably the greatest testimony was the number of young people present (maybe half of the 700 people present)—high school and college friends, fellow camp counselors and friends from the two or three churches where Alex ministered—all of them sold out for Jesus! In the midst of my sadness for John and Blanche and their children seeing all those young people I came way with great hope in the future of our nation, of the Christian faith and even of North American Anglicanism.
I’m a bit surprised by the ungenerous nature of the first few responses. It’s simply a general statement of faith of a non-denominational Christian school. No more. No less.
I think that this is a good statement of “mere Christianity,” although I wish that the third point said that the Bible is the ultimate or final authority and not the “only authority.”
Terry T, the point on regeneration does not say that regeneration is always and only at a recognizable point in time, simply that the Holy Spirit is the one who engenders new life. I would imagine that many of those who originated this statement, and many of the students, could not tell of a particular conversion experience, simply that God has been at work in their lives and that they depend upon the mercy and grace of God in Jesus. I cannot remember my conversion, although I can tell you of a number of major turning points in my spiritual life.
“Inerrancy” asserts that what the Bible says is reliable, in history, science, etc, as well as in spiritual matters. Inerrancy does not assert, however, that what the Bible says about science is going to be stated in terms that a contemporary scientist would say are precise and accurate. Nearly all who hold to inerrancy would say that the Bible speaks truly about scientific matters from the perspective of the “ordinary observer,” and uses language such as “the sun rose” not to assert that the sun goes around the earth, but that to a person standing on the ground, the sun comes up.
“Literal interpretation” does not mean wooden interpretation. It means taking the Bible as God’s Word and interpreting passages according to their genre, so that the trees clapping their hands in the Psalms means that all creation praises God, not that trees have hands and clap them. Poetry is to be interpreted poetically, narrative as narrative, and so on, using the various figures of speech that one encounters as figures of speech.
The Nicene Creed should be a sufficient statement of faith, but over the centuries, there are those who have made murky the language that was used to make things plain. The Nicene Creed is not useful as a statement of faith because so many have convinced themselves of ways to reinterpret it that stand it on its head.
12, good comment.
For any discussion on inerrancy etc. it is critical that the term be defined and that any discussion be tied to the definition. Otherwise you talk past each other. For a discussion see: http://www.standfirminfaith.com/?/sf/page/24508
For the Chicago Statement see: http://www.bible-researcher.com/chicago1.html
#8 Brian from T19, most who hold to Biblical infallibility and/or inerrancy would define both differently than you have. For myself and many others, the [url=http://www.bible-researcher.com/chicago1.html]Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy[/url] is the most accurate and complete statement of our position on the matter. The [url=http://www.bible-researcher.com/chicago2.html]Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermenutics[/url] may also be helpful to see how apparent contradictions in Scripture are dealt with.
You may be interested in 2 recent and rather lively SFIF posts on the issue:
http://www.standfirminfaith.com/?/sf/page/24480
http://www.standfirminfaith.com/?/sf/page/24508
#11. stevejax,
I’m in total agreement with you. This is a strong statement that is far better than what gets peddled in many churches. Perhaps the framers of this statement did not have a resident theologian to second guess all their statements, or perhaps they could not determine which denomination they had to please.
Just another proof that no good deed goes unpunished.
How tragic and shameful that most TEO bishops could not honestly profess their personal belief in even one of the assertions of this statement!
Probably neither “infallible” nor “inerrant” are useful terms to describe Scripture, if for no other reason than they are commonly misunderstood. Our worthy opponents love to take something out of context, render it in a literal sense such as to make it impossible and then think they’ve proved that nothing in Scripture is authoritative or truthful.
I recall one such encounter in which the protagonist pointed to a place which indicates that the square of a circle is three. Of course, we all know that the square of a circle is 3.1416. Well, no. It isn’t. It is something like 3.1415926535897932384626433832795…. Pi has been computed on modern machines to the millionth place and still not come to the end of it. 3.1416 is a convenient rounded value. And if we were to round that to an integer, we get 3. Which is what the Bible says. Pretty clever for a language which has no good way to express even the simpleist fractions.
What is the case is that at least at one time the Christian Church (and the Jewish Synagogue) did not attempt to read Scripture through the lenses of Kant, Schopenhauer, Neitzche, Satre, Wittenstein or the “higher criticism” of 19th century German “bible scholars”.
If we take the record of Jesus’ sayings, he was a biblical literalist and fundamentalist. Torah means what it says, quite literally, and is authoratative in matters of faith. Take for example, his response to the Saducees when questioned about resurrection. “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” God tells Moses according to Torah. And so Jesus concludes: God is not the god of the dead, but of the living. That would cause a post-modern “bible scholar” to faint in horror. And so with most of Jesus’ use of the Law and the Prophets. The same, by the way, can be said of the Apostle Paul.
The Church Fathers were not unaware of apparent contradictions and mistakes in the Bible. They are, for one thing, quite able to distinguish between literary gendres. There is a difference between poetry and prose. There is a difference between parable and historica account. They are aware of such things as the difference between the Greek of the Apocalypse and the Gospel of John and the problems this creates in terms of authorship. They are aware of differences in style and vocabulary in the different epistles of Paul. They are aware of conflicting accounts of what seem to be the same event in the gospels. But this does not become for the Church Fathers a cause for disputing the authority of Scripture. And, in the case of the gospels, they attempt to reconcile the differences and, failing that, to suppose that different, but similar events are described. But most post-modern “bible scholars”, operating under the traditions of Kant, Schopenhauer, et al. reject such an approach as being “unscientific”, as if Kant, Schopenhauer, et al. are “scientific”.
Now what must be said is that the Church Fathers took the canon of Scripture to be just that–a canon. A ruler by which faith and doctrine are to be measured. That, along with the simpler “rule of faith” (i.e., the baptismal Creed) and the tradition received from those who went before them was the authority by which they judged and were to be judged. If a teacher was to depart from this, it was he who was in error, not the received Scriptures, Creeds and tradition.
I would just second everything that David said above. I’m something of an old fashioned Anglican, and so I’d probably tweak a statement like this quite a bit. But, let me tell you, if the “proof of the pudding is in the eating”–well, it was clear to me yesterday that the Beaver County Christian School has helped to form and inform a wonderful community of Christian young people–Alex Heidengren, whom I knew only at a distance as one of John and Blanche’s kids in the fun mob of our diocesan “clergy family” assembly, so evidently a fine representative. It was a blessing to worship with them and to gather all our prayers together to commend Alex to his heavenly Father and to pray God’s deepest and most tender blessing and comfort on the Heidengren family.
Bruce Robison
Dear #17, Ken Peck:
You make some good points. I would add these:
1. Jesus had a habit of telling stories to illustrate a crucial point, rather than formulating a creed. Perhaps we should aim to do the same. Creeds are fences that (mostly) keep the sheep from straying; Jesus is the shepherd who lures them and attracts them so they don’t want to stray. Stories by and about Jesus do more to form character and build the body of Christ than do creeds.
2. Jesus, in addition to being a scriptural literalist, was also an allegorist. Take for example his parable of the sower, or his remarks about Jacob’s ladder and Moses’ pole surmounted by a bronze serpent. I think it’s time to take up a modicum of allegorical interpretation when looking at appropriate scripture passages. In doing so, we are following the tradition of Jesus and Paul.
Sorry – hope this isn’t too far off topic. I didn’t realize the school’s creed was posted here to show what Mr. Heidengren’s school is like. As I hope I made clear above, creeds do have their uses.
I cited it because it was the faith of the school whose principal preached at Alex Heidengren’s service yesterday and because I thought it was of interest.
Robroy, no. 4, at the school of St. Vincent’s Cathedral of the diocese of Fort Worth we dropped the “E” word from our name in the fall of 2003. I can testify for a fact that there were parents of prospective students who turned away from us simply because (until last fall) we were affiliated with TEC, despite my best efforts to tell folks that “we’re not like that here in Fort Worth!” Here in the Bible Belt the brand-name “Episcopal” is compromised beyond redemption.
R.W. Foster+, Chaplain, St. Vincent’s School, Bedford, TX
Milton and Br Michael,
The Chicago Statement is fine for Evangelicals. I personally see the issue as hair-splitting. Many people spend an insane amount of time trying to justify the incongruences of Scripture. It stands on its own as it is.
The difficulty Brian is that standing on its own is not a sufficient demonstration of its truth content. As noted above, and as I have said many times, much of scripture is closer to poetry, not expository prose. In short, it is an art, not a science. Allegory is metaphor, and Jesus often turns to this technique because he faces the necessity of having to say what the clearest expository prose cannot say, that he, he must put into words what cannot be put into words. This is not a silly contradiction, but the clearest explanation of why poetry succeeds when standard prose fails. Much of what we know, most of what we believe, can be touched on only tangentially by expository prose because metaphor, like symbol, expands in scope as its suggestiveness is explored. Expository prose rests on a one to one relationship between declaration and meaning. Poetic utterance rests on a one-to-infinity relationship, and it is precisely and exactly here that Jesus’ words perforce arise.
Accordingly, inerrancy and infallibility have little place in scriptural analysis, since neither is capable of demonstration, any more than the whole scope of allegory, metaphor or symbol is capable of demonstration. Could Jesus be a literalist as cited above? But scripture is first and last, a story, a work of art, and his literalist declarations do not arise from or supersede the story. An older mindset than ours is necessary to read scripture properly, a mindset in which nonverbal truths were grasped without conflict or false expectation. Jesus spoke to this mindset, this antique way of knowing,
while we search for unqualified evidences, and, not finding a sufficiency, allow our minds to stagger into doubt and uncertainty. To read scripture properly, first we must study poetry, not biblical exegesis. Larry.
No CHURCH! no SACRAMENTS! How terribly evangelical. We Anglo-catholics unfortunately still have to ask “Lord, to whom can we go?”
#18: Nice to hear. It’s also nice to see differences, at least temporarily, put aside among those in the Epsicopal/Anglican Dioceses of Pittsburgh to properly commend this young man into the care of the Almighty at far too tender an age.
Peace,
-ms
#25
There are many of us on both sides of the divide in Pittsburgh who would like to work things out amicably rather than be engaged in winner-take-all lawsuits. Unfortunately the Standing Cmte of the TEC Diocese of Pittsburgh has adopted the lawsuit strategy which has severely damaged much of the goodwill that had previously existed here on both sides. Bruce (#18) has always been an advocate of the amicable approach and has much respect on the ACNA side of the divide.