Jayson & Carrie Whelpley

Hi everyone! Carrie and I are both doing very well and we’re working on our January newsletter that will be out to you soon.

In the meantime we wanted to pass on some information about how you can join Campus Crusade’s response to the ongoing disaster in Haiti.

Even as the search to rescue people in the rubble turns into a recovery effort there are still hundreds of thousands of people now homeless, hungry, sick and possibly injured. Regardless of the reason WHY God allowed this to happen, our response needs to be filtered through the words of our Lord:

Matthew 25:40
And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’

You may or may not know about the Global Aid Network (GAiN), but it is the humanitarian aid arm of Campus Crusade. Currently there is already a group of GAiN staff in the suffering island nation as well as the campus ministry team that is there to reach their own college students (the last I heard, the national director still had not located one of his parents).

The need from this disaster creates a need that surpasses political and ideological barriers. Please join us in giving by going to http://GAiNusa.org and share as the Lord would lead you.

Thank you for reading and, we’ll be sharing with you again soon!

(I typed this up on my phone, so I apologised for any typos.)

This summer at our US Staff Conference Tim Keller spoke a few times, and encouraged us to remember the Gospel. He even quipped, “I’m going to talk about the Gospel. What kind of idiot would talk about something else at a Campus Crusade for Christ conference?”

Here’s a clip from his talk the first evening.

We do not merit any part of our salvation! This is the Good News!!

Tim Keller is the pastor at Tenth Presbyterian Church in New York City and the author of one of the best books about explaining the Gospel to our friends and neighbors today – The Reason for God. I’d recommend anything with his name on it.

This first point of the actual statement of faith concerns the question of “Who is God?

1. “There is one true God, eternally existing in three persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – each of whom possesses equally all the attributes of Deity and the characteristics of personality.

Three Persons

In this first point it’s important to notice a couple of things. We are Trinitarian we believe in God as one deity in three persons. I’ve heard it said that God is one What and three Whos. Each member of the Trinity is fully God; the Holy Spirit, when looked at separately, is fully God, the Father, when looked at separately, is fully God, and the Son, when looked at separately, is fully God. The word “equally” is also important; the Son is not inferior to the Father and the Father is not inherently superior to the Son and the Spirit. Each member of the Godhead has the same ontological value, that is they have the same power and glory and majesty as each other member. The relationship, though, is one of voluntary subordination – the Son, from eternity past has chosen to submit to the Father not because Jesus is lesser than the Father or that the Father is, in some sense really God where the Son is not, but because He chooses to defer to Him and give the Father glory.

The first point separates us from the non-orthodox “Christian” religions such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Latter-Day Saints, and from heretical Christian sects such as the non-trinitarian United Pentecostal Church or the Jesus Only Churches.

The Trinity

This also clarifies the orthodox position in relation to misconceptions of the Trinity. It does not allow for modalism (where each member of the Trinity is actually just one God wearing different masks depending on the situation), Tritheism (three gods) or Arianism (where Jesus is a lesser god to God the Father and the Spirit is either a lesser god as well or the Father’s active force).

Why?

Who God is is extremely important and the basis for all other points of our faith. When you get off track here the rest of your faith will be off all the more. It’s similar to firing a gun and aiming just 1 degree off; when you are aiming 10 feet away you’ll only be about an inch off, but when you’re aiming a mile away you’ll be nearly 50 feet off. Since our faith aims at eternity it’s incredibly important to get our beliefs about who God is very precise and faithful to the breadth of scripture.

Next time we’ll look at who the Son is and His life on earth.

I forgot one relatively major thing in the last post that is vital to understanding pretty much any Statement of Faith, and important to understanding the things that Campus Crusade for Christ has included in ours.

In a healthy representation of a person or groups faith there are three relatively distinct levels of belief or strength at which they hold a belief. Not everything is the same as far as importance, not everything is something that we should hold close to our heart.

Convictions

These are central beliefs which are crucial to salvation. These beliefs are the ones over which we break fellowship (if there is no repentance) and if it was a spiritual leader who held errant views we would be willing to publicly denounce. Also, these are the beliefs that it would be most necessary to choose death over denying them.

Examples of Conviction-Level beliefs: the Trinity, Jesus’ divinity and humanity, Christ’s death and the resurrection, salvation by grace through faith.

Persuasions

These are beliefs about which we are personally certain, but can still fellowship with other Christians who disagree since they are not matters central to the Gospel and/or the historic Christian faith. These may be issues over which local churches might amicably divide while still recognizing the other body as friends, co-workers and brothers & sisters in the faith.

Examples of Persuasion-Level beliefs: speaking in tongues, Calvinism/Arminianism, mode or method of Baptism, how the Trinity interacts within itself, model of Church government.

Opinions

These are beliefs, desires or even wishes which may not be clearly taught in Scripture or which may legitimately differ for various believers. These are beliefs that we should be able to discuss with an air of complete trust and light-heartedness.

Examples of Opinion-Level beliefs: the best Bible translation, musical worship style, age of the Earth or the method of creation, home schooling.

Why is this Important?

Holding beliefs too lightly can lead to a slippery slope where we don’t believe anything strongly. Our faith becomes a matter of convenience and something that we’re willing to give up at the first sign of resistance; it becomes a faith that is, at its core, false and dead.

Just as destructively, we can hold beliefs too tightly. This is the defining element of what would be called fundamentalists; the irony is that they are not actually focused on the fundamentals! When you are as a group or a person more focused on verbally excommunicating people because they believe that God created everything via a different method than you think or espousing your pet Bible translation above or more often than glorifying Christ those good things (the Bible and pondering the creation) become idols that draw us away from the God who created them.

It’s important to remember that these categories are not about how strongly you feel about them; they are categories of how central they are to our faith.

The Statement of Faith

You’ll notice as you look at the CCC Statement of Faith that it only covers conviction and persuasion level issues. The number of contentious issues that it does not address is pretty large: Church government, women’s ordination, modes of Baptism, the Lord’s supper, miraculous gifts, Christians & war, the creation model, age of the universe, end times prophecy, how will Christ return, Bible translations, etc. This is because staff, students and volunteers have the freedom to hold views that are not in the Statement of Faith as long as they are based on Scripture and not a distraction to our mission. This also allows us to accomplish the mission of bringing the Gospel to the heart of every student on every campus by partnering widely with anyone and everyone who agrees with the statement of faith – even if we disagree on other things which are not on it.

It’s all about bringing the Gospel to people. We lead them to join a church that also agrees with us on these 17 points, but we know that these churches will teach beyond this as well and we welcome that because we’re just a piece of the puzzle; Christ is the whole picture.

The CCC statement of faith begins:

The sole basis of our beliefs is the Bible, God’s infallible written Word, the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments. We believe that it was uniquely, verbally and fully inspired by the Holy Spirit and that it was written without error (inerrant) in the original manuscripts. It is the supreme and final authority in all matters on which it speaks.

We accept those areas of doctrinal teaching on which, historically, there has been general agreement among all true Christians. Because of the specialized calling on our movement, we desire to allow for freedom of conviction on other doctrinal matters, provided that any interpretation is based upon the Bible alone, and that no such interpretation shall become an issue which hinders the ministry to which God has called us.

These two paragraphs provide a solid groundwork for understanding the why and the what that we believe and live out.

Let’s start with the second paragraph. “We accept those areas of doctrinal teaching on which, historically, there has been general agreement among all true Christians.” What this means is that we fall into the category of orthodox (small O, as in more general than the Eastern Orthodox churches), we are committed to the doctrines that are central to what it means to be a faithful follower of Christ and to what God has called us to as a ministry.

There are some controversial issues that the statement of faith will not cover – predistination, the sign gifts, what version of the Bible is the best, church government, modes of baptism, or the age of the earth and specifics on the methods of creation. The reasons that Campus Crusade for Christ does not take stands on these is because they do not affect at a basic level the ability to be a part of the mission of reaching the world for Christ. Also, there has not been a consensus over the course of history on these issues and God has not called us to take stands on these issues – He is using others to speak to those issues.

Also, it does take on issues that may not be in a church’s statement of faith because it also sets down some guidelines that are important and are central to the mission of Campus Crusade for Christ, you’ll see these toward the end of the list particularly dealing with our belief in the unversal call for all believers to “do the work of evangelism” regardless of their vocational call.

On the Bible

We do agree with the historically Protestant view on the the canon of the Bible, the Apocraphal books and sectionsof books that some Christan traditions view as scripture are seen as at best good history and insight into beliefs that some of the Jewish people had at certain times. For example the books of Maccabes are a good historical account of the Jewish rebellion agains the Greeks, also the canonical New Testament book of James quotes the book of Enoch which is not viewed itself as canonical but that James chose to quote something that is eternally true. I actually would encourage all Christians who have the free time to talk to one of your Catholic friends or a library and borrow a Bible that has the 6 or 7 apocraphal books and read them with very large grains of salt. Just as you would with any “Christian” literature or books you need to remember that only the 66 books of the Bible can be trusted 100% – everything else very probably contains errors.

The next half of the first paragraph contains some densely-packed statements. To clarify my statement of what can be trusted, only the original manuscripts can be trusted 100%. The hard part of that is that we do not have any of the original manuscripts that were physically written by the apostles or prophets. What we do have is a huge number copies of them so that we are able to be sure about every important passage. We’re able to compare them all and know where someone had merely made a mistake because the overwhelming evidence

“Uniquely, verbally and fully inspired”

These three words are very, very important in understanding what we we believe. The Bible is the only (uniquely) book that’s content can be considered to be God’s Word (fully) and God’s words (verbally). There is no other book, magazine, preacher, newsletter or any thing else that we read that can successfully contradict the Bible, if it does it is not God’s word and it is not to be fully trusted (without the aformentioned large or small “grains of salt”). This also means that we believe that no other religious text is inspired by God or to be trusted as vital for our spiritual growth. Also, all of the Bible is God’s word (it must be read in the right literary and historical context) and each individual word in the original manuscript is the word (in Hebrew, Greek or Aramaic) that God chose for it. All of this together indicates that, while other books may be good for our growth in our walk with Christ, only and all of the Bible is vital to our growth.