A Confession of Faith
On Christ: His Work, His Person, His Return
Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Logos made flesh, the second person of the Trinity, who became human for us and for our salvation. His incarnation was not docetic — a mere appearance of humanity — but a genuine taking on of human nature in its fullness except without sin. He was tempted as we are tempted, learned as humans learn, grew in wisdom and stature as humans grow. He lived in complete dependence on the Father, modeling for us the relational knowing that is eternal life.
The work of Christ centers on the cross, where He died under Pontius Pilate for us and for our salvation. The cross is the place where the justice of God and the mercy of God meet. It is the place where our debt is addressed, where our guilt finds its end, where relational breach is healed. We do not specify a single theory of how the cross saves — whether as ransom, as substitute, as victory, as sacrifice, as relational restoration — because the cross is large enough to contain all these truths. What we know is that the cross changes everything. The sacrifice has been offered. The victory has been won. The ransom has been paid. Through the cross, access to the Father is opened to all who believe.
Christ rose bodily on the third day. Not as a spiritual principle or as an idea that became powerful in the disciples' minds, but as a man in a body that could be touched and yet was transformed. The bodily resurrection is the pledge that our humanity is redeemable, that our bodies matter, that the material world is not something to escape but something to be renewed. The resurrection is the beginning of the new creation breaking into the old.
The bodily resurrection has been questioned in every century since the first. The tomb was mistaken, or the disciples were projecting grief, or the account grew in the telling — these are the alternatives that have been offered. But the first witnesses were not mystics reporting a feeling. They were people who ate with the risen Jesus, who touched the wounds, who had been expecting something else entirely and found themselves confronted by something that upended everything they had prepared for. The testimony they gave cost most of them everything. The alternative theories require the evidence to behave in ways the evidence resists: a mislocated tomb remembered by everyone who needed to disprove the story, a mass hallucination sustained across multiple individuals in multiple locations over forty days, a fabricated account whose fabricators gave their lives for it. The resurrection is not a conclusion this confession reasoned to. It is the ground on which everything else stands.
He ascended to the Father's right hand, where He sits as the glorified man, interceding for us. His ascension is His return to the place He vacated for our sake. It is His establishment in the position of cosmic authority. From there He rules all things, not through force but through the quiet authority of His resurrection. He is the righteous king before whose throne the nations are nothing.
He will come again to make all things new. The Second Coming is not the end of history but its renewal. He is coming to judge the living and the dead. This is not a doctrine designed to terrify but to clarify: there is a reckoning coming, and it is just. For those who have known the Father and the Son through the Spirit, it is coming home. For those who have refused it, it is the consequence they have chosen. At His coming, the resurrection of the dead will occur, the dead will be raised imperishable, the heavens and earth will be renewed, and we will see Him face to face in the full completion of eternal life that we have begun to experience now.
The wrath of God is real. This is not a metaphor for impersonal consequences or the natural result of choices accumulating over time. It is the personal response of a holy God to the sustained, chosen rejection of His love — and it has been the consistent witness of Scripture from the prophets through the apostles. The same God whose nature is love is also holy, and holiness confronted with persistent unrepentant rebellion does not remain indifferent. This is not a contradiction. It is the inner logic of love. Love that does not care what happens to the beloved is not love. A God who watches His image-bearers destroy themselves and one another and feels nothing has no love to pour out.
The cross is the place where wrath and mercy meet. The Son bore what we deserved so that we might receive what He deserved. Remove the wrath and the cross becomes a tragedy rather than a rescue — a good man killed, not an exchange of immeasurable weight. The atonement is not understandable as the act of a God who was not angry and had nothing to absorb.
The final judgment will be a real event. Every person will stand before the One who sees everything — not weighed by works as though sufficient good deeds might tip a scale, but to have the orientation of the heart made permanently visible. Those who have known the Father and the Son through the Spirit will stand clothed in the righteousness of the One who has already borne their judgment. For them, the judgment is the confirmation of what is already true. For those who have refused the knowing — who have chosen the trees over the face of God, whose lives have been a sustained turning away — the judgment confirms what they have already chosen. Eternal loss is real. This confession does not flinch from it. Hell is not a doctrine invented to terrify the disobedient. It is the honest accounting of what it means to refuse, finally and irrevocably, the only Source of life.