Jayson & Carrie Whelpley

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.

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.

While Carrie and I have been in Colorado these past few weeks we have been talking about a lot of things that deal with leadership of teams and being reminded about the things that identify Campus Crusade for Christ as different and distinct from other ministries that cover similar areas. Last week we talked about the Campus Crusade for Christ statement of faith that identifies the beliefs that we’re willing to take a stand on. As we talked about it I thought it would be fun to think through the 17 points of it and share the reasons why we choose these hills to metaphorically die on – we are not willing to give them up.

When Carrie and I came on staff in 2003 we both had signed a copy of this committing to uphold these beliefs and to say that wa can agree to them without any hesitation. These are not things that we hold our financial partners to, and they’re not things that we require of non-leader students in our movements; if someone is thinking about leading in an official way – volunteer, student leader, intern, staff, etc. it would be necessary for them to agree to these points in a way that at least they would committ to not teach anything that disagrees with these points.

So, as I go into this series I want to let you all know that I actually am excited about thinking through this because as missionaries it empowers what we do, it defines who we are as a staff team and it defines what we teach students.

This series may take a while to get through, but I want to make sure that you continue to understand and get even deeper what we do and the ways we do it.