FAQ 19: What is your approach to the Bible and the traditional Christian creeds?

Truly biblical faith is about forgiveness, hope, repentance (radical change), a new community, magnanimity, peacemaking and the thirst for justice - both personally and socially. This is the heart of the way, life and truth fleshed out in and as Jesus. It is also key for the Hebrew prophets, mystics, liberators and lawmakers he followed.

But the biblical texts also illustrate how our human experience of the God of life (who is beyond description and manipulation) can be abused and defiled. It is therefore a story containing horror and genocide, crucifixion and suffering.

To be ‘biblical people’ is to inhabit this narrative (personally and as part of a community) today - and to recognise it as a matter of inspiration and warning. It is to discover how divine love triumphs over death-dealing, often in spite of 'religion'.

Similarly, the historic Christian formularies are about trying to figure out, in the weak vessels of human language and thought, how the eternity of God and the fallibility of humanity are brought together, most particularly in the person of Jesus – so that, far from cancelling each other out, they open up possibilities of renewed life beyond our imagining.

This is the rationale of the traditional Christian commitment which motivates and shapes us.

We affirm the 'core convictions' of the Anabaptist Network UK - http://www.anabaptistnetwork.com/coreconvictions

See also: What difference does God make today?, an in-depth paper on the relationship between some foundational categories of Christian belief and contemporary concerns.

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