On Scripture: Faithful Witness and Sure Guide

We believe the Holy Scriptures are given by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and are our faithful witnesses to Christ. They are not the Word of God in the same way that Jesus is the Word of God, but they are the authoritative, reliable, sufficient record of His coming, His teaching, His work, and His promise. The Scriptures bear witness to Christ. Every passage points toward Him or flows from Him or prepares for Him. To read Scripture well is to read it Christologically, asking in every text: where is Christ being revealed, prefigured, promised, or proclaimed?

We believe the Scriptures are sufficient for salvation and for the training of believers. They are our sure guide to knowing God. We do not add to them, subtract from them, or replace them with human tradition or institutional pronouncement. Yet we also believe that the Scripture's sufficiency does not mean its meaning is self-evident to the isolated reader. The Spirit opens the eyes of the disciple to see what the text contains. Community, tradition, scholarship, and the accumulated wisdom of the Church across the centuries all serve the disciple's understanding. But the Scripture remains the standard against which all these are measured. When the Church's tradition contradicts Scripture, Scripture judges the tradition, not the reverse.

The claim that Scripture bears faithful witness to Christ is not made in ignorance of the questions it raises. Honest readers have wrestled with the Bible's human features — its literary complexity, its historical texture, its apparent tensions, the marks of the cultures through which it came. This confession does not flee those questions. It answers them with a different frame: the Incarnation's logic operating in the written Word as it operated in the living Word. God took human flesh — fully human, in a specific time and place, under the full conditions of human existence — and was fully God at the same time. Scripture is fully human in its composition, fully historical in its setting, fully shaped by the people and moments through which it came — and fully the faithful witness of God to His Son. The two are not in tension. They are the same pattern repeated.

The Old Testament is not superseded by the New. The promises to Israel are not revoked. God has not replaced the Jewish people with the Church. Instead, through the gospel, the Gentiles have been grafted into the story that began with Abraham. We read the Old Testament as the record of God's faithfulness and the Jews as the people with whom God is not finished. The future salvation of all Israel is not a separate issue from Christian hope. It is woven into it.