What We Believe
We Believe in God
Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, is the one in whom we trust for salvation, to whom we pray, and whose word we believe.
We Believe the Bible
The Bible is "God's word written." It reveals God's nature and character and witnesses to God's saving acts in human history.
We Receive the Christian Tradition
Generations of Christians have gone before us. We receive the faith from them, honouring their legacy and respecting their authority.
Doing Theology
Reasoning about God as revealed in scripture, with the guidance of the tradition.
Christians believe in a God who reveals himself. He has shown himself to holy people throughout history, many of whom he also inspired to write scripture. And God has definitively revealed himself in his Son, Jesus Christ.
​
Believing in revelation doesn't mean that we leave reason behind. Reason is a gift of God, and without reason we would not be able to consider the meaning of the scriptures. The Bible itself acknowledges that scripture is "hard to understand" and careful thinking is required (2 Peter 3:16-17).
​
We don't do theology alone. We have the guidance of the Christian theological tradition as we interpret the Bible. These authors and councils state the principles of our faith clearly and warn about errors which have arisen in the past.
God
The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit
Our faith is not primary in the Bible, nor in a set of doctrines or ideas, but in God. We trust God's goodwill for humanity, which he has shown to the world in Jesus Christ, who saves us from from our sins and to leads us into new life. Communion with God through Jesus Christ is the centre of the Christian faith.
​
Reflection on the scriptures led the early church to perceive that God is three persons. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit have lived together in perfect communion for all eternity. Each person is God, and each person is distinct, but all three work together for human salvation.
God the Son dies for our sins to reconcile us to the Father. The Holy Spirit gives us the gifts of faith and new birth by which we experience life in God. To be a Christian is to become part of the life of God the Holy Trinity.
The Holy Bible
God's Word Written
We believe the Bible because God reveals himself to us through it.
​
In the scriptures, God speaks to us using the words of historical authors whom he inspired to write what his people would need to hear in all times and circumstances. The Bible is God's word, and therefore it is entirely trustworthy.
​
The Bible is also a human book, written in many times and places and in several genres and languages. These voices work together as a cohesive witness to God's character and his saving acts in human history.
​
Reading the Bible well requires a humble heart to receive God's truth, an attentive mind to weigh interpretations, and the guidance of the church to avoid common misunderstandings.
Tradition
Passing on the Faith
The origin of the word "tradition" is simply the Latin for "to pass on" (tradire). Church tradition is not a building block of the faith parallel to scripture, but a process of receiving and passing on biblical faith, honouring what we have been taught, and bringing it to bear on the concerns of each succeeding generation. The tradition bears the authority of a trusted elder. Although it is not infallable, we place ourselves humbly under its instruction.
​
We especially trust and honour the theological writers of the earliest Christian centuries because they are historically closer to the apostles, and because they wrote for a church which was not yet divided. And we respect the great Anglican theologians because we have directly inherited our faith from them and continue to worship using patterns they developed.