What Christians Believe
The Articles of Faith

New Testament From the earliest days of the church, there have been disagreements over the teaching of Christ and of the apostles. Some of these disagreements have arisen outside the church, while others have come from within the church. For instance, Paul frequently wrote against the Jewish Christians who demanded that Gentile converts be circumcised, as in Galatians 5. And in 2 Peter 2, Peter warned that there would be false teachers in the church. The New Testament is full of examples of Jesus and the apostles correcting the mistaken ideas of various people.

And errors in the church are dangerous when critical beliefs are at stake. This is why Jesus and the authors of the New Testament were so concerned to correct errors on fundamental points of theology. And the remarkable thing is that as they offered their corrections, they agreed entirely with each other. Despite the many false teachings that existed in the church at this time, the New Testament exhibits unfailing doctrinal unity with itself.

The fact that the church established a canon made up of these books — which by the way took the church centuries actually to do, so it wasn't just a quick process — indicates that the considered judgment of the church is that there is a core of unity here. That's not a consideration that we can easily pass off, and as a matter of fact, that has been the judgment of scholars within the church over the last 2000 years. And yet, while we can talk about a core of unity between the New Testament documents, you do have to acknowledge that there are differences in perspective between them. I think the operative issue is that the differences of perspectives do not actually come down to a contradiction of doctrinal assertions. You get different perspectives, different emphasis, different ways of talking about the reality, different aspects of the reality. But, in my judgment at least, there is no blatant contradiction between the various books of the New Testament. [Dr. David Bauer]

In light of this unity, when the New Testament affirms the articles of faith listed in the Apostles' Creed, it is fair to say that it does so universally. It consistently argues for the divinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, while at the same time insisting that there is only one God. The Gospels present the creedal facts of Christ's conception, birth, life, ministry, death, resurrection and ascension. And the books of the New Testament entirely support the creed's statements about the church and salvation.

Having looked at the New Testament, let's see how these beliefs have universally characterized Christianity throughout church history.