I believe that the starting point for my personal beliefs on the major doctrinal issues of the Christian faith is the Bible. The Bible--especially the New Testament--is significant because it explains and interprets the life, work, example, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In history, the New Testament had a mission that made Christianity universally significant to moral experience.
I believe that the nature of God is divine and all loving, as both the Creator of the world and its Providential protector. I believe that God is engaged with humanity, always encouraging us toward life and light, and that the greatest gift to humanity was Jesus Christ. God is also engaged with the universe, always encouraging it toward the movement that is an indicator of life.
I believe that sin is a condition of the human heart in which we turn away--deliberately or thoughtlessly--from God's goodness and protection and that its consequences are felt in our relationships with other people. Sin is self-defeating, however, because any advantage is short-term, and it cuts off the possibility of complete happiness.
I believe that Christianity could be nothing without Christ, who, in the person of the Son of God, vividly embodies the relationship of God to human life and the character of the relationship of Christians both to one another and to non-Christians. Christ is bound up with human experience, having partaken entirely of human experience and, through the Redemption, having supplied the supreme example of the potentiality for human affinity with God. Jesus's death as the Son of Man shows his complete humanity, and the Resurrection shows that in his divine aspect Jesus embodied God's promise of overcoming the finality and fear of death.
I believe that salvation is linked to the Redemption of Jesus and to the benevolence of God the Father as creator. I believe that the journey to salvation can be blessed by reason of membership in the ...