Selden College receives the great credal statements which the Church has affirmed as faithful summaries of the teaching of Holy Scripture:The Apostles’ Creed, The Nicene Creed, and the Definition of Chalcedon. Moreover, we believe that the Reformed confessions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries most fully and accurately summarise the system of orthodox Christian doctrine revealed in Scripture. Therefore, the specific statements below do not exhaust our doctrinal understanding, but rather summarise our Statement of Beliefs.
1. We believe in one God who is eternally existent in three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
2. We believe this one uncreated Triune God created ex nihilo all things that exist in heaven and on earth.
3. We believe the creation account in Genesis 1 functions as a foundational creation text and affirms that the various “kinds” of animals described in Genesis 1 were the unique result of God’s immediate act of creation, and that God created Adam and Eve as a special creation and from their marriage descend all mankind.
4. We believe that through the disobedience of Adam (and not before), all agonistic death entered the world, and that this rebellion plunged himself and his entire posterity, represented in him, into the hopelessness of death in sin.
5. We believe that the Lord Jesus Christ is, according to the flesh, the long-promised descendant of king David. He is, at the same time, God incarnate, born of the Virgin Mary. He is fully man and fully God. He died on the cross, was raised to life bodily from the grave, ascended into heaven and is sitting at the right hand of the Father until His enemies have been made his footstool, and from where He will come again to judge the living and the dead.
5. We believe that salvation from death and sin is only through faith in Christ and His redeeming work in His life, death, resurrection, and ascension, and thus is all of grace and not of works.
6. We believe in the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son and with the Father and Son is worshipped and glorified. This Holy Spirit dwells in the hearts of all those who trust in the Lord Jesus and effectively works to change them into the likeness of Christ.
7. We believe the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments are the inspired and infallible Word of God and the ultimate rule of faith and conduct.
8. We believe in the Church. When God blesses the preaching of the gospel, the result will always be a visible collection of saints bound in covenant to Him. They will be characterised by their assembly around the preached Word, their faithful administration of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and their orderly and disciplined government according to the Word of God.
10. We believe that God created mankind in His image and wonderfully and immutably creates each person as male or female. These two distinct, complementary genders together reflect the image and nature of God.
11. We believe that marriage is the uniting of one man and one woman in a single, exclusive union, as set forth in Scripture. We believe that God intends sexual intimacy to occur only between a man and a woman who are married to each other.
11. We believe that all human life is sacred and created by God in His image. All human life is of inestimable worth, including unborn babies, the aged, the physically or mentally challenged, and every other stage or condition from conception through natural death. We are therefore called to defend, protect, and value all human life.
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