A confessing community: Salvation revealed

A confessing community: Salvation revealed

The Bible is a collection of inspired writings, spanning an array of genres, written by forty-plus authors over a span of some four thousand years. Yet it presents a single, united message. It is easy to miss this central theme in the complexity of the Scriptures,...
A confessing community: Salvation provided

A confessing community: Salvation provided

Sola 5, whose Confession we are studying in this series, is an association of God-centred evangelical churches in Southern Africa. While there is a degree of doctrinal diversity between the churches, all churches confess certain core doctrines. Most core to the...
A confessing community: Sin

A confessing community: Sin

The five solas of the Protestant Reformation remind us of the gospel truth that the Reformers recaptured: that salvation is by grace alone (sola gratia) through faith alone (sola fide) in Christ alone (solus Christus) according to Scripture alone (sola scriptura) for...
A confessing community: The fall

A confessing community: The fall

It is universally recognised that “nobody’s perfect.” Bad things happen to good people. Innocent people—including infants—die. Every culture in history has had to wrestle with why. What is the source of imperfection, death, and misery in the human race? From a...
A confessing community: Creation of angels

A confessing community: Creation of angels

Writing in 1941, German Lutheran theologian Rudolf Bultmann suggested that the Bible is filled with “mythological thought,” which can be traced to “Jewish apocalypticism” and “the Gnostic myth of redemption.” Bultmann suggested that such mythological thought “is...
A confessing community: Creation of heaven and earth

A confessing community: Creation of heaven and earth

It may surprise you—or perhaps it won’t—that Bible interpreters have never fully agreed on a single interpretation of the creation story in Genesis 1–2. Some of the early church fathers (e.g. Victorinus, Lactantius, Basil the Great, Ambrose of Milan, and John...