Statement of Faith
“But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.”
2 Peter 3:18
Introduction
This page sets out the theological positions that shape every article, sermon, and video on Bible Proclaimer. They are not offered as infallible pronouncements, but as carefully considered conclusions about what Scripture actually teaches, governed by the text itself rather than by any particular theological tradition. Where genuine complexity exists, that complexity is acknowledged. Where Scripture speaks plainly, the plain reading is followed.
The framework here is Biblicist in orientation, non-Calvinist in soteriology, dispensational in its understanding of God’s programme, and pretribulational premillennial in its eschatology. All Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV).
For fuller treatments of any topic listed here, see the corresponding questions and answers and Introduction to Doctrine pages.
The Bible
The sixty-six books of the Protestant Old and New Testament canon are the inspired, inerrant, sufficient, and authoritative Word of God, given to the church as its final rule for faith and practice. Inspiration is verbal and plenary, extending to the actual words of the whole of Scripture. The human authors were genuinely active, their personalities and literary styles evident throughout, yet the Holy Spirit so superintended the process that the result was precisely what God intended.
Scripture as originally given is without error in all that it affirms. The Apocrypha is not part of the inspired canon. The canon was recognised and received by the church, not determined or conferred by it; authority resides in the books themselves because they are God-breathed.
Two principles govern the use of Scripture: sola Scriptura (Scripture alone is the final authority for faith and practice) and tota Scriptura (all sixty-six books carry that authority; there is no canon within the canon). Interpretation follows the literal-grammatical-historical method, taking each passage in its natural sense whilst recognising genre, idiom, and the historical context in which it was written. The Holy Spirit’s illumination is essential for genuine reception of Scripture, but illumination is not new revelation; the Spirit opens the reader to what the text already says.
God
There is one God, eternally existing in three Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, co-equal in being and power, distinct in Person, undivided in essence. The classical Trinitarian errors of tritheism, modalism (including Oneness Pentecostalism), and partialism are rejected as failing to do justice to the biblical witness.
God is eternal, holy, just, loving, faithful, and good. His knowledge is complete, encompassing all actual events and all possible outcomes; nothing surprises him. His power is unlimited save by his own character; he cannot lie, cannot be unfaithful, and cannot do evil. His wrath is active and personal, not merely an impersonal consequence of broken moral order.
Human beings possess genuine free will, and God’s complete foreknowledge does not override or negate that freedom. Open Theism (the view that God’s foreknowledge is limited) is rejected; God knows all choices exhaustively. At the same time, election is understood as based on God’s foreknowledge of faith rather than as an unconditional decree, and predestination as relating primarily to standing and service rather than to eternal destiny.
God is not the author of evil. Human will and Satanic influence are the causes of evil; God permits it as a consequence of creating beings with real freedom, and works through it toward purposes that often become visible only in eternity.
Jesus Christ
Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God, the second Person of the Trinity, who did not come into existence at the incarnation but has always existed as fully God. In the incarnation, the eternal Son took to himself a fully human nature, born of the Virgin Mary, and so became truly God and truly man in one Person.
The Chalcedonian Definition of AD 451 accurately expresses this mystery: one Person, two natures, unconfused, unchanged, undivided, and inseparable. The divine nature is fully God; the human nature is fully human, lacking only the corruption of sin. The classical Christological errors of Arianism (Christ as a created being), Docetism (Christ as merely appearing human), Nestorianism (Christ as two persons), and Eutychianism (Christ’s natures mixed into a third kind of thing) are rejected.
Christ lived a sinless life, was unable to sin by virtue of the divine nature, yet was genuinely tempted in every respect such that he can sympathise with human weakness. He died a substitutionary death on the cross, bearing the full judicial weight of human sin. The Word of Faith teaching that Jesus became a sinner, was born again in hell, or had to defeat Satan before rising is rejected as serious Christological error.
Christ was raised bodily from the dead on the third day, ascended bodily to heaven, and now reigns at the Father’s right hand in glorified resurrection humanity, where he intercedes actively for his own.
The Holy Spirit
The Holy Spirit is fully God, the third Person of the Trinity, co-equal and co-eternal with the Father and the Son. He is a Person, not a force or impersonal spiritual power. He may be lied to, grieved, quenched, and resisted, as Scripture testifies. He proceeds eternally from both the Father and the Son.
The Spirit convicts the world of sin, regenerates those who believe, and indwells every believer at the moment of conversion. Spirit baptism occurs at conversion for all believers (1 Corinthians 12:13); there is no second-stage Spirit baptism subsequent to conversion. The sealing of the Spirit at conversion is once-for-all and is the foundational ground of the believer’s eternal security.
The filling of the Spirit is ongoing and renewable (Ephesians 5:18, present continuous imperative), relating to the believer’s yieldedness rather than to the fact of indwelling. The filling can be grieved and lost; the indwelling cannot.
The spiritual gifts have not ceased. Cessationism is rejected on exegetical grounds; the gifts continue, including prophecy and tongues, under the regulation of Scripture and within the framework Paul establishes in 1 Corinthians 14. At the same time, tongues is not the necessary evidence of Spirit baptism, prophecy carries genuine but limited authority and is to be weighed, and several common charismatic practices (being “slain in the Spirit,” gold dust manifestations, prosperity-gospel healing claims, the dominant practices of the New Apostolic Reformation) have no defensible biblical basis and are not endorsed.
Humanity
All human beings are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27). The fall has damaged but not destroyed this image, which grounds both universal human dignity and universal human accountability. Personhood begins at conception. There are two sexes, fixed by creation: male and female, with gender identity properly corresponding to biological sex.
The human person consists of three genuinely distinguishable elements: body, soul (psyche), and spirit (pneuma). The position is trichotomist, held with appropriate tentativeness about the precise metaphysics while maintaining confidence in the reality of the distinction the biblical texts describe. The whole person, in every dimension, is the object of God’s redeeming work.
Adam and Eve are historical, literal individuals, the single progenitors of all humanity. The historicity of Adam is essential to the logic of the atonement, since Romans 5 grounds the parallel between Adam and Christ on it.
Sin
Humanity inherits a sinful nature from Adam, and all are guilty before God because all sin as a result of that nature. The Reformed doctrine of direct guilt-imputation from Adam is not held; guilt is the consequence of one’s own sin arising from the corrupt nature inherited.
Sin affects every dimension of human nature, but humanity retains the capacity to respond to the gospel when the Spirit convicts and the cross draws. Total depravity in the Calvinist sense of total inability is rejected, as is Pelagianism in the opposite direction (the view that human beings can choose good without divine help). All people are sinners by nature and by practice, in need of grace they cannot supply.
The Catholic distinction between mortal and venial sins is rejected as lacking biblical foundation. The categories of sins of commission (doing what is forbidden) and sins of omission (failing to do what is required) are biblical and real.
Salvation
Salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. It is the gift of God, not a reward for works (Ephesians 2:8-9). There is one name under heaven by which people must be saved: Jesus (Acts 4:12).
The cross was the place where God’s wrath fell actively and personally on the Son in the place of sinners. Penal substitution is the governing framework for the atonement. Other models (Christus Victor, moral influence) illumine real dimensions of the cross but are subordinate to penal substitution rather than alternatives to it.
The atonement is unlimited in its provision: Christ’s death is sufficient for every human being without exception, and the “all” language of Scripture is taken at face value. The atonement is applied only to those who receive it through faith.
In the order of salvation, faith precedes regeneration logically. Justification is forensic and instantaneous: at the moment of saving faith, God declares the believing sinner “not guilty” on the basis of Christ’s finished work. This standing is fixed and permanent. Fellowship with God, distinct from standing, can be disrupted by unconfessed sin and is restored through confession (1 John 1:9).
The believer is eternally secure on the basis of God’s faithfulness, not human perseverance. The sealing of the Holy Spirit at conversion (Ephesians 1:13-14) is the believer’s guarantee, and no human failure can unseal what God has sealed. The warning passages in Hebrews and elsewhere are addressed case by case; some refer to those who were never genuinely converted, and several involve conditional Greek constructions that do not function as straightforward threats to genuine believers.
The believer faces a future assessment of works at the Bema seat of Christ (1 Corinthians 3:10-15; 2 Corinthians 5:10), where the quality of Christian life is examined for reward, not for salvation. The Bema does not put the believer’s eternal standing in question; it examines what has been built upon the foundation of Christ.
The Mosaic Law and the Believer
The Mosaic Law was given to Israel at Sinai as the covenantal constitution of a theocratic nation. It was a complete and indivisible covenant, not a collection of regulations from which some elements may be retained and others set aside. Paul treats the Law as a unit when he argues that Christ is its end for righteousness for the believer (Romans 10:4), that the era of the Law as tutor has ceased (Galatians 3:23-26), and that the first covenant is obsolete (Hebrews 8:13).
The believer is therefore not under the Mosaic Law in any part. This includes the Decalogue, which was the covenantal summary of the Mosaic Law rather than a timeless moral law extracted from it. What continues for the believer is not any portion of the Mosaic code but the moral character of God, which predates Sinai and is now expressed through Christ, the apostolic teaching of the New Testament, and the indwelling Holy Spirit who writes God’s character on the heart in fulfilment of Jeremiah 31:33.
The believer’s moral standard is the law of Christ (Galatians 6:2; 1 Corinthians 9:21), the royal law (James 2:8), the law of liberty (James 1:25), fulfilled in cruciform love. In substance this covers nine of the Decalogue’s provisions, often with greater depth than Sinai required, releases the Sabbath as Mosaic covenantal sign, and is applied internally through the Spirit rather than externally through a covenantal code. The believer is not without law; the believer is under the law of Christ.
Angels and Demons
Angels are real spiritual beings, organised in a hierarchy that includes cherubim, seraphim, archangels, and the various ranks named in Ephesians 6. Satan is a finite created being who fell through pride and now leads a network of fallen angels (demons) in opposition to God and his people. He is not omnipresent, omniscient, or omnipotent; his apparent ubiquity is the work of his agents.
A genuine believer cannot be demon-possessed. The indwelling Holy Spirit and demonic possession are incompatible. Believers may be oppressed, harassed, and attacked from without, but not inhabited and controlled. The contemporary charismatic obsession with strategic-level spiritual warfare, territorial spirits, and binding/loosing prayers against demonic powers goes beyond anything Scripture teaches. Genuine exorcism remains possible but requires discernment, certainty, and must always be connected to the proclamation of the gospel, since an “empty house” invites worse occupants (Matthew 12:43-45).
The Church
The church began at Pentecost (Acts 2). It is not a continuation, extension, or spiritual replacement of Israel; it is a new entity, a mystery hidden from previous generations and revealed in the apostolic era (Ephesians 3:4-6). The universal church is the company of all genuine believers across all time and place, united to Christ by the Spirit; the local church is the visible, gathered expression of that reality in a specific place. Both are real, with practical primacy belonging to the local church.
The two ordinances of the church are believer’s baptism by immersion (an ordinance of obedience and identification with Christ in his death and resurrection) and the Lord’s Supper (a memorial ordinance proclaiming the Lord’s death until he comes; no transubstantiation, consubstantiation, or mystical presence in the elements). The Lord’s table is open to all believers in right relationship with God and others.
Church government is elder-led with congregational accountability. The eldership and the primary regular teaching ministry of the gathered church are reserved for men, reflecting the consistent pattern of the Pastoral Epistles, whilst women are affirmed across all other ministry roles including evangelism, pastoral care, prayer, prophecy, counselling, and teaching in appropriate contexts.
Last Things
The position held is pretribulational premillennial, arrived at through consistent literal-grammatical-historical hermeneutics applied to prophetic Scripture.
The Rapture of the church (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; 1 Corinthians 15:51-52) is imminent, may occur at any moment, and removes the church from the earth before the seven-year Tribulation. The Rapture and the Second Coming are two distinct events separated by the Tribulation, not two phases of one event.
The seven-year Tribulation (Daniel 9:27; Revelation 6-19) is a period of unparalleled distress in which God resumes his programme with Israel and pours out judgement on a Christ-rejecting world. The church is not destined for this period (1 Thessalonians 5:9). During this time the Antichrist arises, makes and breaks a covenant with Israel, and demands worship as God; he is destroyed at the Second Coming.
At the Second Coming, Christ returns physically and visibly with his saints to defeat the Antichrist, rescue Israel, and establish his kingdom. The whole nation of Israel alive at his return mourns over him and is saved (Zechariah 12:10; Romans 11:26).
The Millennium is a literal thousand-year reign of Christ on earth (Revelation 20:1-6), with Christ ruling from the Davidic throne in Jerusalem in fulfilment of the unconditional covenant promises made to David. Amillennialism (the millennium as symbolic of the church age or intermediate state) and postmillennialism (the church gradually Christianising society before Christ returns) are both rejected.
The unsaved face eternal conscious punishment in the Lake of Fire. Annihilationism (the view that the unsaved are eventually destroyed rather than eternally punished) is rejected, as the parallel in Matthew 25:46 between “eternal punishment” and “eternal life” requires the same duration for both.
The New Heavens and New Earth (Revelation 21-22) are the final, literal, physical home of the redeemed, where God dwells with his people forever. Whether this involves an entirely new creation or a renewal of the present creation is held with appropriate humility, since Scripture does not press the question to a definitive resolution.
Date-setting is rejected categorically. No prophetic sign needs to be fulfilled before the Rapture; the timing of the return of Christ belongs to the Father alone (Matthew 24:36).
God’s Programme for Israel
God’s programme for Israel and his programme for the church are distinct. The promises made to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and David remain in force and will be fulfilled literally and concretely. Replacement theology (the view that the church has permanently replaced Israel in God’s purposes) is rejected, as it requires the Old Testament promises to Israel to be spiritualised in ways their language does not naturally allow.
The modern state of Israel is consistent with the prophetic expectation of a regathering of the Jewish people to the land before the end-times events, though Scripture does not warrant specific identification of contemporary events with specific prophecies. The full national restoration of Israel, including the spiritual conversion of the nation, awaits the return of Christ.
“The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29). God’s absolute faithfulness to Israel, despite Israel’s persistent failure, is the supreme demonstration that his promises to the church will equally not fail.
The Christian Life
The believer is called to grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ (2 Peter 3:18), to walk by the Spirit (Galatians 5:16), to be conformed to the image of Christ (Romans 8:29), and to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19-20). The Christian life is one of progressive sanctification, in which the whole person — spirit, soul, and body — is increasingly aligned with the character of God revealed in Christ.
The means of grace are ordinary and unspectacular: the reading and preaching of Scripture, prayer, the fellowship of the local church, the ordinances, and the cultivation of the spiritual disciplines. The pursuit of extraordinary experiences as a substitute for these is not the New Testament’s pattern of Christian growth.
The believer’s hope is fixed not on the improvement of the present world but on the return of Christ. The church is not building the kingdom; the church is proclaiming the King until he comes.
Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Distinctions
Not all doctrines carry the same weight. Primary doctrines are those on which salvation depends and over which Christian fellowship cannot be maintained: the Trinity, the full deity and humanity of Christ, the bodily resurrection, salvation by grace alone through faith alone, and the authority of Scripture. On these there can be no compromise.
Secondary doctrines are those on which genuine Christians disagree while remaining within the bounds of orthodoxy: modes of baptism, church government, eschatological frameworks, the continuation of the gifts. These are held with conviction and taught clearly, but fellowship is maintained with believers who hold different positions.
Tertiary matters — worship styles, cultural applications, areas where Scripture is genuinely silent — call for wisdom and charity rather than dogmatic assertion. The failure to observe these distinctions has caused as much damage in the church as theological indifference.
A Word on Tone
Doctrine matters because what we believe shapes how we live. Sound doctrine is spiritually healthy; false doctrine is diseased and, left unchecked, spreads. The goal of all theological reflection is not intellectual mastery but the knowing of a Person: Jesus Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3).
The positions stated here are held with conviction but without arrogance. Where Scripture speaks clearly, no compromise is offered. Where Scripture leaves room for honest disagreement, that room is honoured. Where I am wrong, I want to be shown — biblically, patiently, and with the goal of arriving together at what is true.
If you have questions about any of these positions, you can reach me through the contact page.
“But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.”
2 Peter 3:18
Rev. Ian M. Thomas
Bible Proclaimer