What the Word Says, and What We Believe It Means

Before any of the thirteen. Someone asked Christ which is the great commandment in the law, and He answered plainly: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” And: “This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” (Matthew 22:37-39). Then He said where everything else stands: “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:40).

Paul says the same from the other side, twice: “he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law” (Romans 13:8), and “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.” (Romans 13:10). James calls it the royal law (James 2:8). Paul tells Timothy that “the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned” (1 Timothy 1:5).

And He does not leave the second commandment abstract. He puts Himself inside it: hungry, thirsty, a stranger, naked, sick, in prison, and then “And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” (Matthew 25:40). The righteous in that parable do not know they have been doing it to Him. It was not a program; it was a life. And the other half is said just as plainly: “Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.” (Matthew 25:45).

At the end of the book the waiting is explained. He is waiting for a bride who “hath made herself ready” (Revelation 19:7), and He waits because He is “not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). The last invitation in Scripture is hers as much as His: “And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.” (Revelation 22:17).

That is the first thing and the last thing, and it is what the whole book is for, from Genesis to Revelation. Everything below is an attempt to say carefully what it means and what it costs. If the thirteen articles ever get in the way of it, the articles are wrong. The argument is made in full in The One Word, Over and Over.

Every letter on this site argues a piece of something larger, and a reader has a right to see the whole shape at once and to test it. This is that shape. It was written the way the letters were: the Word first, quoted whole in the King James so nothing hides in a paraphrase; then what we believe the Word means; then where the earliest church stood, since the men nearest the apostles are the best witnesses to how the text was read before anyone had a system to defend; then the letter where the argument is made in full. The last article lists what we hold loosely, because a confession that cannot say "we are not sure" is not honest, and because every line the church has drawn where Scripture did not has divided the Body. Test all of it against the text. If any article fails that test, the article is wrong, not the text.

1. The Word

What we believe it means. Scripture is God-breathed and is the measure of every teaching on this site, including this page. The early Fathers are quoted here constantly, but as witnesses to how the text was read by people nearest the apostles, before there were systems to defend; they are not the authority. When a Father and the plain text agree, that is worth hearing. When they part, the text wins. Scripture is quoted in our own prose in the King James, because some of the readers this site is trying to reach hold to it, and because the King James, the Berean Standard and the Douay-Rheims are the three we are free to reproduce in full. That is a practical choice, not a claim that one rendering is the true one. The Study Bible sets all three side by side so no one has to take a rendering on trust, and where another version is quoted we name it.

Where the early church stood. Irenaeus, Athanasius, and Chrysostom argued from the text and appealed to the apostles' writings as the rule; the canon they handed down is the one we hold.  ·  Read: The Authority of Scripture, The Canon, the Study Bible

2. One God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit

What we believe it means. There is one God in three Persons, and the Word who was with God and was God became flesh. This is not a later development; it is what John wrote and what the church confessed at Nicaea and Constantinople against every attempt to make the Son a creature or the Spirit a force. Everything else on this site stands or falls here.

Where the early church stood. Confessed by the whole church, East and West, in the Creed of 381, and contended for through the whole fourth century, at the cost of Athanasius’s repeated exile, before it was settled.  ·  Read: One God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, The Word Made Flesh, Christ Before Bethlehem

3. Christ, and what the cross did

What we believe it means. Christ died for our sins, was buried, and rose bodily on the third day. Scripture gives the cross more than one picture and never tells us which is chief: a ransom paid, a victory won, a healing worked, a debt satisfied. Christ binding the strong man and breaking death from the inside is as much in the text as the verdict borne. Different centuries have leaned on different pictures, and the church has been poorer whenever it has kept one and dropped the rest. We hold them together, with the resurrection as the hinge of the whole faith and the firstfruits of ours.

Where the early church stood. Irenaeus, Athanasius, and Gregory of Nyssa read the cross as the defeat of death and the devil; Anselm's satisfaction theory came in the eleventh century, and penal substitution as a system with the Reformers.  ·  Read: What Did the Cross Do?, The Resurrection, The Resurrection Body

4. The Spirit who remained

What we believe it means. The Holy Spirit is God, the Comforter Christ promised, and He was never a stranger to men: He filled Bezaleel, rested on the seventy, came on Saul and departed, came on David and stayed “from that day forward,” filled John the Baptist in the womb. The Hebrew is not saying one thing four times: the Spirit rushed on Samson and Saul and David, clothed itself with Gideon, filled Bezaleel, and settled on the seventy elders. Isaiah promised that last verb of the Messiah, that the Spirit would rest upon Him, and at the Jordan the remaining was the very sign given to the Baptist, the mark by which he would know the one who baptizes with the Holy Ghost. What is new there is not that the Spirit stayed, for He had settled on the seventy and stayed with David; it is that the staying was promised of the Messiah and seen, and that from Christ the Spirit is poured out on a whole Body. He abides with the Church for ever because He abides on the Head for ever; each of us shares in that by abiding in the Vine. He can be grieved, quenched, resisted, and lied to, and Scripture says all four in those words.

Where the early church stood. Chrysostom, of “abide with you for ever”: “The Spirit does not depart even at death.” Gregory the Great holds both halves together on the same words: in the gifts necessary to salvation “the Holy Spirit ever abides in all the Elect,” while those given for the procuring of others’ salvation He does not always abide in; and Christ has Him without measure and always. Chrysostom also reads Hebrews 6 as a real warning to real partakers of the Spirit.  ·  Read: Take Not Thy Holy Spirit From Me, The Spirit Isn’t Always Tidy, The Vine

5. Salvation: by grace, from beginning to end, through a living faith

What we believe it means. What went wrong reaches everyone. Sin entered by one man and death came with it, and death passed upon all, “for that all have sinned” (Romans 5:12). The image in us is damaged and it is not erased. We are born into a dying race and we make the sin our own. What Scripture does not say is that the guilt itself is handed down: “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son” (Ezekiel 18:20). We do not claim to know what God reckons of a child who never chose anything; nobody has been told that, and Scripture nowhere describes it. We believe, on the strength of that verse and of the silence where a doctrine would be, that a newborn is not held guilty of another man’s sin, and we hold it as a belief and not as knowledge. Where Scripture stops, we stop. Paul describes the ruin exactly: “to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not” (Romans 7:18). The wanting survives; the power does not.

Against that, this is the site's confession in its own words, written before any of these letters. We believe that through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has revealed His grace and opened the way of salvation to all who trust in Him. Faith trusts God, hope clings to His promises, and agape is active love. Loving obedience to Jesus Christ expresses an ongoing relationship with Him and proclaims His Lordship. By God's grace, from beginning to end, He saves us through this living relationship with Jesus Christ, not through a one-time declaration that offers false assurance of salvation. Through this relationship He humbles us, turning us away from the works of the flesh and shaping our hearts toward complete, self-giving agape, which fulfills the law. That turning is repentance, and Paul preached it and faith as one message rather than two. It is not self-punishment and not a mood, and it is not finished at the start: godly sorrow keeps turning a man home, where the sorrow of the world drives him further away. Nothing we do earns the open door; that is grace, and the beggar who opens his hand for bread has not baked the bread. What we do standing in the door is ours. Faith is a verb; the working is what the faith looks like, not what earns the gift.

The church has divided here since Augustine, and not where people assume. Calvin, Wesley, Gill, Augustine and Bellarmine all grant that Ezekiel means what it says; they divide over what it is answering. The argument is set out with the sources in Born Fallen, Not Born Guilty.

Where the early church stood. Clement of Rome, in the 90s, said we are "justified by faith, not by ourselves nor our own works," and in the next breath urged zeal in good works; The tension between Paul and James was felt early, and Augustine wrote a whole treatise, On Faith and Works, about it. What is new at the Reformation is not the tension but the setting of the two apostles against each other as rival systems.  ·  Read: Grace, Faith Is a Verb, Lord, or Just Savior?, Justification, The Bored Ear, The One Word, Over and Over

6. Saved, being saved, will be saved

What we believe it means. In His grace we have been saved, are being saved, and will be saved, as He faithfully brings this relationship to its fullness in Jesus Christ. The same three tenses run through adoption, sonship, sanctification, the kingdom, the resurrection, and the coming of Christ: a real gift already given, a real work now underway, a real completion still ahead. Cut any tense away and the doctrine breaks. Paul, at the end of his life, said "not as though I had already attained," and we say it with him. The middle tense is a road, and Christ told us what is on it: “The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you” (John 15:20). He did not soften what it costs, and He did not pretend it away in Himself: in the garden His soul was “exceeding sorrowful, even unto death” (Matthew 26:38), and “his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:44). A faith with no room for that is smaller than the Bible it claims.

Where the early church stood. Chrysostom on Romans 6: when the greedy man turns generous, "even here a resurrection has taken place, the prelude to the other."  ·  Read: The Three Tenses of Salvation, Sanctification, Adoption, Suffering

7. Security that is real, and conditional

What we believe it means. The security of the believer is real and glorious: no one can pluck him out of the Father's hand. And it is the security of a living relationship, kept by God's power through a faith that abides, not a verdict filed once and forgotten. A Christian cannot fall away by accident or by a single sin, but a person can truly let go of a relationship that was truly his; the New Testament warns believers of exactly that repeatedly, and in every kind of writing it has, the Gospels, Paul, Hebrews, Peter, John, and Revelation. Christ says of the one who comes, “him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out” (John 6:37), and He stands at the door and knocks. Scripture also speaks of a door that shuts, and of a man who “found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears” (Hebrews 12:17). Christ said it plainest about a man who was already inside: at the wedding, at the table, found without a wedding garment and speechless, and the king said, “Bind him hand and foot, and take him away” (Matthew 22:11-13). We hold both, because both are there, and we do not claim to know where that hour falls for anyone. What we will not do is use the shut door to frighten a man who is still knocking, or the open door to tell a man there is no hour at all. "Once saved, no matter what" is rejected here; so is the fear that God is looking for a reason to put you out.

Where the early church stood. The early church read the warnings as addressed to real believers, and Chrysostom on Hebrews 6 is the clearest case. Augustine reads them otherwise: his late doctrine of the perseverance of the elect is the seed of the other view, which Calvin and Dort later systematized. We name him because he is the weightiest voice on that side, not to count him as the lone dissent; we have not made a survey of the Fathers on this and do not know what one would find. Luther, Wesley, Rome, and the East all hold that grace can be lost and regained.  ·  Read: The Security of Salvation, Perseverance, Every Warning, Gathered, The Parables of Readiness and Judgment, The Soul That Sinneth, When Grace Becomes a License

8. God sovereign, man free, both real

What we believe it means. God's plan cannot fail, and the people through whom He works it are genuinely free, even free to sin. Grace goes first; no one comes to God on his own; and the will really answers, and can really refuse. We refuse both ditches: the fatalism that makes God the author of the evil He condemns, and the chance that makes Him a spectator. A God who must script every creature to keep His plan has a fragile plan. A God who hands real freedom to every human who has ever lived, lets them say no, and still brings the story home is the stronger God. He wanted a bride, not a signatory, and love that could be compelled would not be love. The Reformed are honored here as guarding the freeness of grace, even where they press it past what the rest of Scripture allows.

Where the early church stood. Justin, Irenaeus, and Origen held the will free and responsible; the harder system began as a seed in the late Augustine and was built by Calvin. Irenaeus: "there is no coercion with God."  ·  Read: Free Will and the Plan That Cannot Fail, Predestination and Free Will, TULIP, Tested

9. One people of God, one return, one resurrection

What we believe it means. There is one people of God, grafted into one olive tree, not a church and an Israel on separate tracks; and God has not finished with ethnic Israel, for the natural branches can be grafted in again. Christ reigns now. He returns once, visibly, bodily, after the tribulation, at the last trump, and the same body that was buried will rise. Revelation spans the whole age. Who Babylon is we now hold as a reading and not a fact. This page asserted her as first-century Jerusalem until we checked the earliest witnesses and found that none of them read her that way; they read her as Rome. We still lean toward Jerusalem, for reasons set out in Armageddon and Babylon, but a reading the early church did not hold is not one we will state as a fact, and we would rather say we changed it than let a hedge look like humility we always had. The resurrection has three tenses: the saints who rose at the cross, every believer raised with Christ now, and the graves that will hear His voice. Christ has come three ways: in the flesh, to each believer in the Spirit, and in glory still ahead. The secret pre-tribulation rapture, the seven-year countdown, and the two-peoples system are nineteenth-century arrivals. On Revelation 20 we lean with Augustine and hold it loosely; Irenaeus and Justin read it otherwise, and the church never divided over it.

Where the early church stood. One visible return and one bodily resurrection are confessed in the creeds by every tradition; the church held both the amillennial and the historic premillennial readings of the thousand years without division for fifteen centuries.  ·  Read: The End Times: One Story, Not Two, Is the Rapture in the Bible?, Eschatology at a Glance, What Is Dispensationalism?

10. One Body, and no more lines

What we believe it means. Christ prayed that His people would be one so that the world would believe, and He tied the world's belief to our unity. Every line drawn beyond what Scripture plainly says has cost the Body something, and the lines are multiplying. We believe the body of Christ lives among the denominations, in spite of them. There is "one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; One Lord, one faith, one baptism" (Ephesians 4:4-5), and Paul writes that in the present tense to a church already quarrelling. Clement of Rome, writing to Corinth while the apostles were barely cold, asks the question we would still ask: "Why do we divide and tear to pieces the members of Christ, and raise up strife against our own body, and have reached such a height of madness as to forget that we are members one of another?" We do not pretend this is the only reading. Cyprian ties the one body to the visible church and asks whether a man who resists the Church can think he holds the faith, and Augustine grants that men may have the one baptism who have not the one Church. That is a real objection from serious men, and we answer it this way: the divisions are real and they are a wound, not a doorway, and we are not excused from working against them. But the body is Christ's before it is any institution's, and He has not lost track of His own. We are not a denomination and are not starting one. We honor Rome, the East, Wittenberg, Geneva, and the free churches where they hold the faith once delivered, and we test each of them, and ourselves, by the same rule: when did the church start believing this? We reach out most to those who have drawn the most lines, and to those whose teaching has travelled furthest from what the church believed first. Not because those brothers matter less, but because that is where the most has been added to what Scripture plainly says. We would rather win a brother than an argument. Merely Christian is the whole ambition.

Where the early church stood. Clement's letter to Corinth is written about a schism and is largely about ending it; Ignatius warns against division in nearly every letter he sends; Cyprian wrote a treatise called On the Unity of the Church.  ·  Read: Every Line Drawn Is Another Division, Loving the Church You Disagree With, The Church, One Story, Where the Church Drifted

11. The water and the table

What we believe it means. Baptism is God’s appointed way, where a believer is buried and raised with Christ, washed, and clothed with Him, and where faith goes public; it is not an empty symbol and it is not a second ingredient added to faith. It is commanded plainly and without conditions attached, and Scripture speaks of it as doing something. How it does that, and how it stands in relation to the moment of faith, the church has argued about for centuries, and we do not pretend the argument is over. Faith is the hand; baptism is where the hand takes hold in public.

On the manner, the oldest instructions we have are practical rather than strict: immersion is the assumed norm, and the church’s own earliest manual says what to do when the river is not there. A person should not go unbaptized for want of a pool. Neither the water nor the table earns grace; both answer it, and the early church took both far more seriously than most of us do, and never set either against faith. The Lord's Table is more than a memorial: a real feeding on Christ, however the mystery is explained. Paul does not treat it as a formality; he says some who ate unworthily became weak and sick, and some died.

Some churches count seven of these and call them sacraments; others count two and call them ordinances. The count is not ours to fix. We say what Scripture says: these are things the Lord commanded and gave, and marriage is a holy thing God made and Christ honored, whether or not anyone numbers it, and what it is for is set out in Marriage, and the Love That Fulfills the Law. Why the counts differ, and what the word itself carries, is set out in Holy Things, and the Counting of Them.

Where the early church stood. Chrysostom: "Baptism is the Cross." The Didache, Justin, and Ignatius all treat baptism and the Eucharist as the ordinary shape of the Christian life.  ·  Read: Baptism in the Early Church, The Lord's Table

12. Creation, and the God who made it

What we believe it means. God made the heavens and the earth, and man in His image; that is settled. How and when are questions we take seriously enough to engage the strongest secular arguments fairly, to present contested claims honestly, and to abandon arguments that do not hold. The image of God in man is the dividing line for every question about human life. We do not overstate, and we do not pretend the questions are closed where they are not.

Where the early church stood. The Fathers themselves differed on the days of Genesis; Augustine warned Christians not to speak nonsense about nature in the hearing of unbelievers.  ·  Read: Science and Scripture, The Image of God, A Clean Line

13. What we hold loosely, and say so

What we believe it means. Where Scripture plainly says a thing, we say it and stand there. Where Scripture plainly says two things, we stand on both and are slow to build the bridge between them into a wall. Where the Fathers divided, we say so rather than pick a side and call the other side lost. But loosely is not the same as nothing. Lewis called the common faith a hall with rooms opening off it, and he warned that the hall is not a place to live: it is in the rooms, not the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. Vincent of Lérins named the same floor long before him, what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all. That floor is not ours to move. God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Son became flesh, was crucified, died, was buried, rose bodily on the third day, and is coming again. Salvation is by grace, through faith in Him, and in no other name. Whoever denies these has walked out of the hall, and we say so plainly, not to condemn a person but because a word that means everything means nothing. Held loosely here: the thousand years of Revelation 20; whether a final personal antichrist is still to come; the details of Daniel's seventieth week; whether the departed hear our prayers; how the elements of the Table carry Christ; who Babylon is in Revelation; the mechanics and timescale of creation. On each we say what we lean toward and why, and we would rather be shown wrong from the text than agreed with anywhere else.

A word about “plainly.” It appears all over these articles and it is carrying weight, so here is the test behind it. A thing is plain when Scripture says it more than once, in more than one kind of writing, and it stands without a system holding it up; when you can state it without the word “clearly” doing the work; and when the church that received the text read it that way before there was a side to defend. Where all three hold, we say it and stand there. Where they do not, it belongs in the list below. And we know how the word gets abused, because we have abused it: men who love the text have called things plain that were only familiar, and this page has had to take some of them back, most recently about who Babylon is. If we call a thing plain and you can show us it fails that test, we would rather be shown.

Where the early church stood. Justin, of the millennium: "many who belong to the pure and pious faith, and are true Christians, think otherwise." That sentence is the model.  ·  Read: People and Open Questions, Taken, or Left?, What the Hail Mary Is

Where this lands

Read the thirteen together and they are one story, not thirteen: one God who made the world and wants a bride, not a signatory; one Son who went down into death and came up with its keys; one Spirit who came and went on prophets and kings and then, on that Son, remained; one people, one Body, one return, one resurrection; a salvation that was, and is, and will be, by grace from beginning to end, through a faith that abides; and a door that is open, that no one earns, that a man can walk out of, and that stands open to him while he is still knocking. One thing more, which the thirteen say once and should say twice: there is a day appointed and a Judge already named, and the raising of that Judge from the dead is the assurance God has given that the day is coming (Acts 17:31). We do not preach it to frighten anyone into the kingdom, and we do not soften it into a metaphor.

And the last thing, which is really the first. Eternal life is not defined in Scripture as a place or a length of time. It is defined as knowing Someone, present tense, beginning now: “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” (John 17:3). Doctrine is the trellis and not the fruit. A man can hold every article on this page and be a stranger to the One they describe, and a man can hold half of them badly and know Him. If reading this makes anyone better at winning arguments and no closer to Christ, it has failed, and we would rather be told so. The argument is made in full in The One Word, Over and Over.

That is what the Word says. That is what we believe it means. Where we are wrong, show us from the text, and we will change the page.

More in this section: Start Here. See also No Man Plucks Them, The Thief Did More Than Believe, Who Walked Away in John 6, Believe Into Christ, What Is Love?, No Party, One King. The confession in article 5 is the author's own statement of faith, written before these letters. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of God are marked in gold, the words of Christ in purple. Patristic references point to the site's library, where the Fathers are quoted verbatim from public-domain editions. If you only read one letter, read What I Want You to Know.