Frequently Asked Questions

No name is attached, and no committee or organization stands behind it. The statement is published anonymously and placed in the public domain.

What can be said is this. The author is a Christian from a believers'-baptism tradition who affirms everything the statement contains, and a good deal besides that is commonly held to be orthodox. But setting those further convictions out here — establishing doctrinal or denominational credentials before the statement could be received — would run against the very thing the Appeal asks for. The document simply states the floor it proposes. It asks to be weighed against Scripture and the ancient rule, and improved or set aside on that basis, rather than accepted or refused on the strength of who wrote it.

None. It is not the product of a denomination, and it is not written to represent one. Its spine is the Apostles' Creed, which predates every current division, and its content is limited to what the ancient rule of faith named.

No. There is no organization, membership, leadership, or affiliation. It is a document in the public domain, offered for any church or believer to use, weigh, or improve.

No. "Basic Christianity" describes the subject — the basic, load-bearing faith. Any resemblance to John Stott's 1958 book of that title, or to Basic Christianity magazine, is coincidental use of a common term; there is no connection to either.

Because allegiance is what the ancient confession was. To say "Jesus is Lord" in the first centuries was to swear loyalty to a King against Caesar's rival claim, at real cost. Said now in perfect safety, the same words can pass as a fact to be granted rather than a King to be followed. The title, and the fourth article, restore the pledge that the confession always was. The subtitle — A Statement of Christian Essentials — carries the descriptive work.

No one, and no church — not yet. The statement is offered without endorsements. It stands or falls on whether it names the faith rightly, which any reader can judge against Scripture and against the early sources set out on the History page. Churches and believers are free to weigh it, use it, improve it, or set it aside.

Yes. The Statement, Commentary, Appeal, and History are public domain. Copy it, print it, post it, put it in a bulletin, quote it, or build on it. Scripture is quoted from the Berean Standard Bible, which is itself public domain, so nothing in the material is encumbered.

One thing is asked in the other direction: please don't sell it. The author's request is that this statement and the other content on this site be given freely, not sold — "Freely you have received; freely give" (Matthew 10:8).

No. Attribution is welcome but not required.

Yes. The text is public domain, and nothing about it is fixed or protected. Adapt it, shorten it, add to it, or rewrite it as your congregation needs.

One caution worth weighing first. Each clause here was weighed carefully, to name a scriptural truth in language a wide range of orthodox traditions could affirm in good conscience. A phrase that sharpens one tradition's conviction can easily be a phrase that shuts another tradition out — often without the editor intending it or even noticing it's happened. Before tightening a line, it's worth asking what it would cost a believer from a different tradition to still say it.

One further request, which is a request and not a condition: if the wording is changed materially, consider circulating the result under a different title, so that a reader who encounters the name knows which document he has. For example, a church might give its adapted text a name of its own rather than retaining "Confession of Allegiance," or keep the title but mark it as a variant — "The Main Street Baptist Confession of Allegiance," say.

Yes, freely, and no permission is needed.

Yes, a church may adopt it — but its purpose is narrower than a statement of faith, and it is not written to replace one.

A statement of faith usually does several jobs at once: teaching the young in the faith, marking off errors, testing those who preach, and deciding who may belong. This document is built for the last job only. That is easiest to see by setting three documents side by side, each answering a different question.

A denomination's confession or articles of faith is adopted by a body of churches, and answers what those churches hold in common, such that they can cooperate and credential ministers together. It states the terms on which those churches associate and the standard to which their ministers are held; such documents often say plainly that they carry no authority over any believer's conscience.

A congregation's statement of faith is adopted by one church, and answers what will be taught there. It gives the church its public identity, marks the boundary of the pulpit, and is the standard its teachers are held to.

This statement answers a third question: what a person must confess to be received. It binds no teaching, and sets out no church's fuller convictions.

Because the three answer different questions they are not rivals, and a church may hold all three at once. Adopting a floor takes nothing away from a confession, and holding a fuller statement does not make a floor redundant. They are not the same work at different lengths.

What is commonly observed is that churches write the first two and leave the third unwritten. Where it goes unwritten it does not disappear; it survives as a shared understanding, which can shift over time without anyone deciding that it should, or else the statement of faith comes to serve in its place. This document is offered for that place. A church that adopts it will still teach far more than it contains, and may rightly require more of its elders and teachers. The Appeal draws the distinction at greater length.

A bifold PDF is available for download and printing, laid out to fold as a single sheet. The Commentary serves as the study guide, walking the statement clause by clause with the Scripture behind each.

There is no separate recitation-length version. The statement is short enough to be read or said in full.

A creed in the technical sense is a text formally adopted by an ecclesial body — a council, synod, or denomination — and given binding force, sometimes with anathemas attached. Nothing of that kind stands behind this. It is a statement, and more precisely a fresh presentation of the ancient rule of faith, which was itself never a fixed text but a shared body of teaching held in common and stated in each writer's own words.

No. The Apostles' Creed is the statement's spine; nearly every line of Articles 2 and 3 follows it. A church that recites the historic creeds loses nothing by this document, and needs none of it as a substitute.

The question the statement answers is narrower: what must be confessed to be received into fellowship. On that question it confesses what those councils defended — one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; the Son truly God and truly man — without making their technical vocabulary the test.

That follows the older pattern rather than departing from it. The baptismal line ran on past Nicaea without ever taking up its one extra-scriptural word. It kept confessing the Son in the same plain language it always had, and settled in time into the Apostles' Creed that serves as this statement's spine. Nothing here is set against the councils; a church that holds them can adopt this floor without amendment.

Because Scripture gives the whole faith without gathering the terms of fellowship into a single list, and the Church has always had to say, in some words or other, what it holds. It did so inside the New Testament itself — the compact summary Paul says he received and delivered (1 Cor. 15:3--5), the confession "Jesus is Lord" (Rom. 10:9), the fragment quoted to Timothy (1 Tim. 3:16). A summary of Scripture is not a rival to it. It stands under Scripture and is answerable to it.

It would be, if it claimed authority of its own or added anything to the deposit. It does neither. It is unenforced, unowned, revisable, and public domain; it names nothing the apostolic writings do not; and much of its wording is Scripture's own. Irenaeus put the standard the statement tries to meet: the one who says much about the faith adds nothing to it, and the one who says little takes nothing away.

No — the opposite. The Appeal says plainly that a church will and should believe and teach far more than any short statement contains, and may hold those convictions with all its strength. The argument is about which document does which job, not about thinning out doctrine.

The Appeal answers directly: not a lower view of doctrine but a clearer one. Nothing here asks a church to teach less, defend less, or care less. It asks only that the standard built to guard the pulpit not become, unnoticed, the standard that guards the door.

It is contested, and the author does not pretend otherwise. Rather than invent a fresh criterion, the author has taken the answer the undivided Church already gave — the rule of faith, the earliest witness we have to what had to be confessed to be received — and presented it again. That answer is open to inspection: the primary texts are quoted directly, with sources cited, on the History page. Anyone who thinks the line is drawn wrongly can say where, using the same evidence.

To more. The Appeal is explicit: the man who will shape a congregation's teaching for a generation is not received on the same terms as the believer who asks only to be received as a brother.

The floor is itself a boundary. A man who denies what is named here has not taken up a difference within the faith, and a church has every ground to act. Nothing about a short statement of essentials leaves it defenseless against that.

But the question usually has something narrower in view — a teacher who holds the floor and denies what the church teaches above it. There the answer is that the floor was never the standard for teaching. It governs who may be received into fellowship, not who may stand up and instruct the congregation. A church may require its own fuller doctrine of anyone it entrusts with teaching, and may withdraw that trust without also removing the man from fellowship. These are different acts: a church that keeps them distinct can withdraw someone's standing to teach without treating it as a verdict on his standing to belong.

Nor does the floor license a member to campaign against what his church holds. Much of what the New Testament addresses under discipline concerns conduct and divisiveness rather than doctrinal error — the man who stirs division after a first and second warning, the disorderly, the unrepentant. A church retains every one of those remedies. What it gives up is only the practice of receiving or refusing a brother on the strength of convictions Christ did not make terms of belonging.

If what is required is further doctrine, yes. That is the Appeal's claim, and it is worth stating plainly: a church holds no authority of its own by which to bind a brother's conscience where Christ has not bound it. To make a conviction the price of belonging is to ask of a man what Christ has not asked. A believer who confesses the faith and has been baptized has met the terms Christ set; a church that adds to them is not being careful but is exceeding its commission. This is Paul's own instruction, not a later inference from it — he told disputing churches to receive one another despite differing convictions each side held in earnest, because the one who holds them answers to Christ for them, not to another believer (Rom. 14:4; 15:7) — and the Appeal traces the argument in full.

That is not a verdict on everything a church asks of its members. It may rightly ask more of them than of a stranger at the door — instruction in the faith, commitment to the congregation, submission to its discipline and care, presence and accountability among the people — and more still of those it entrusts with teaching. These belong to a different question. What Christ fixed is what it takes to receive a brother; what a church teaches, expects, and forms in him afterward is its own proper work, and nothing here constrains it.

Not as the statement is worded. Someone holding the official teaching of those churches cannot simultaneously affirm the Confession of Allegiance — not because every clause excludes them, but because a few specific ones do. No clause here is decorative: each names something the faith cannot do without, and each excludes whoever denies it.

For Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox the difficulty is clear. The statement holds the Scriptures to be the supreme authority for faith and practice; both communions hold Scripture and Tradition as one deposit, with a teaching office as its authentic interpreter. And the statement says plainly that baptism is received upon profession of faith, which is not what either practices. For Latter-day Saints the distance is wider: the God confessed here made all that is, seen and unseen, out of nothing; the Scriptures named here are the Old and New Testaments and no others; and the Church confessed here is the whole company of God's people of every time and place, not a body restored after its disappearance.

This is a judgment about a confession, not a verdict on a soul. The question here is only whether a person can affirm the Confession of Allegiance while holding his church's official teaching. Whether that same person stands right with God is a different question, and one Christ will settle at the last. A church is obliged to guard its own gate, not Heaven's.

Because they are not one question but three, and none of them is the one this statement answers.

Sexual ethics and marriage are questions of obedience. They concern how a disciple must live, not who God is or what He has done. The ancient rule was silent about them for the same reason it was silent about honesty, greed, and the treatment of the poor — not because the apostles were indifferent, but because a confession of the faith is not a catalogue of commands. The Apostles' Creed names no sin and no duty from beginning to end. That silence has never been read as permission.

Women in ministry is a question of church order — who may hold which office, and on what terms. The creeds are likewise silent here, and on ordination, polity, and government generally. Churches that agree entirely about God, Christ, and the gospel have ordered themselves in different ways.

The third is doctrine proper, and that is what this statement is for. It names the essentials — the load-bearing convictions the faith cannot do without — and stops.

But silence at the floor is not indifference, and the statement does not leave the believer unbound. Article 1 places him under the Scriptures as the supreme authority for faith and practice — both words matter, and practice is exactly where these questions live. Article 4 pledges him to submit to Christ's word and to follow Him in obedience. A church is right to hold its members to those commitments; they are commitments the statement itself already asks of him. What the statement does not do is settle in advance how they are worked out on particular questions. That work belongs to a church's teaching, where it can be done with the care it deserves — under Scripture, with the congregation instructed, and with the elders answerable for what they teach.

So the distinction is not between weighty questions and light ones. It is between what a believer must confess to be received, and what he is then bound to obey and be taught. The first is short and fixed. The second is the whole Christian life, and no confession of essentials was ever meant to contain it.

The substance is present: forgiveness is received through faith in Christ — pardon is His to give and ours to receive, not a thing we achieve. What the statement does not do is adopt the sixteenth-century formula and the framework attached to it, which arrived long after the rule of faith and divides traditions that agree on the substance. A church that holds the formula loses nothing by adopting a floor stated in Scripture's own idiom.

Most such projects assemble a floor by present-day consensus — what a group of contemporary Christians can agree to leave out. This one works historically instead: it takes the rule of faith as the answer already given, keeps the Apostles' Creed as its spine, and restores what the compressed baptismal creed left unspoken. It differs in three further ways: it is a pledge, not only a list of beliefs; it names Scripture, baptism, and allegiance because those are the rule's own frame made explicit; and it takes a visible position on baptism, which most essentials projects avoid.

The clause uses Paul's own word for what Scripture is (2 Tim. 3:16) and states its function: supreme authority for faith and practice, in the believer and in the Church. That is the conviction under contest today. The technical terms and their attendant qualifications are later, and divide churches that agree Scripture is God's word and binding. The clause does not deny inerrancy, and a church that holds it can adopt this floor without amendment.

The ancient rule was likewise silent, and for the same reason — nothing was pressing it into dispute. But sin is presupposed everywhere here: the Son given in love for our salvation, forgiveness of sins received as we turn from sin, Christ triumphing over sin, death, and the powers. What the statement does not do is specify a doctrine of the fall's transmission and extent, which is disputed among churches that agree entirely that man is a sinner needing a Savior.

Because they do different work. Baptism is the act of entry and the setting at which the confession was made — a document about the threshold of fellowship cannot be silent about the threshold. The Supper belongs to the ongoing life of those already received. The ancient rule, itself a baptismal confession, was just as silent about the Supper.

Deliberately. The statement declares the triumph as accomplished fact — over sin, death, and the powers — and leaves to the individual the fuller understanding of how Christ accomplished it at the cross. Christians who differ about the mechanism confess the same victory.

The statement affirms plainly that Christ will come to judge the living and the dead, and leaves the shape and sequence of that day unspoken — as the Apostles' Creed does. It neither teaches nor forecloses any account of the outcome, because those accounts are not what the ancient rule required of a person to be received. Silence at the floor is not endorsement; a church will teach what it holds.

These are among the doctrines the Appeal has directly in view — faithful Christians have divided over them for centuries, and neither the ancient rule nor the creeds made them terms of reception. Churches will teach their convictions; the floor does not ask a believer to settle them to belong.

The return and the judgment are confessed; the schema is not. The creeds kept the same restraint.

Yes. The article confesses the Spirit who empowers the people of God and does not say how far that empowering extends, leaving the measure of His gifts to the One who gives as He wills.

It does exclude it, and the exclusion is deliberate. But the premise behind the question is worth correcting first: every clause in this statement is load-bearing, and every one of them excludes whoever denies it. That is what a floor is. A confession that shut no one out would not be naming essentials; it would be naming preferences. The Creator clause excludes those who hold that matter is the work of a lesser god. "Truly God and truly man" excludes those who make the Son a creature. Baptism is not doing anything the other clauses aren't.

It does not question the motives or the sincerity of those who baptize infants. It does not diminish the faith of parents who have brought their children to God in the way their tradition taught them, or suggest that faith was anything other than genuine.

Nor does it presume to say whom God has saved. The statement describes what the Church has received and is bound to practice; it does not undertake to say what God will do with those who have followed Him faithfully in another understanding. The old maxim holds: God is not bound to the sacraments, though man is. He knows the heart, and the judgment is His and not the Church's. What the Church can do is say what it has been given, and say it honestly.

The clause draws more notice than the others for a different reason. Most of what this statement names divides Christians from those outside the faith; this one falls between traditions that hold everything else here in common, and the difference is real rather than verbal. It could not be avoided. Baptism stands at the threshold, so a statement about the terms of reception has to address it directly — unlike the Supper, which belongs to the life of those already inside. Silence would not have been neutrality; it would have left the threshold undescribed.

And the argument for a shared floor is unharmed. That argument is not that the floor should be wide enough to include everyone. It is that the floor should be where Christ set it and no higher — that a church may not add its distinct convictions as further conditions of belonging. A floor with a boundary the ancient rule presupposed is exactly what the argument calls for. What it forbids is raising the floor above it.

The clause neither teaches it nor rules it out. The words are Scripture's own. Paul writes that all who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death, buried with Him through baptism into death, so that they too might walk in newness of life (Rom. 6:3–4); and that having been buried with Him in baptism, they were raised with Him through faith in the power of God, who raised Him from the dead (Col. 2:12). The clause says what the apostle says and stops there.

How baptism and that union are joined is the question left open. Colossians holds the two in one breath — buried in baptism, raised through faith — without parceling out which does what. Christians who hold everything else in this statement in common have long differed here: some read the act as conveying what it enacts, others as portraying a union given through faith alone. Both can affirm these words without qualification, and neither view is written into them. The statement asks assent to what Scripture says of baptism, not to an account of how it works.

The phrase is retained because it is the ancient title and John's own word. What closes the door is not that phrase but the one beside it: truly God and truly man. Arius could recite the older creeds precisely because they lacked such a clause; he could not have said this one. What is left open is a narrower, exegetical question: whether "only begotten" points to eternal generation — the Son begotten of the Father before all time — or to uniqueness of kind — the Father's one and only Son. Readers who disagree on that point of interpretation still agree on what the statement requires: that the Son is fully God, eternal, and not a creature.

Because "hell" in current English means the place of final punishment, which is not what the creed's word meant. The original refers to the realm of the dead — Hades, Sheol. "To the dead" renders the sense the creed actually carried: that Christ's dying was the real thing, and He entered the state of the dead as all the dead do, yet was not held there.

Because catholic meant "according to the whole" long before it named any particular communion, and modern ears hear the later meaning. "Universal" keeps the word's original force and the creed's claim: there is one Church, not many.

It renders the biblical idiom more closely — the age God brings, not merely unending duration — and it fits where the article is going: heaven and earth made one, God dwelling with His people, His glory filling all things. Not a flight away from the world but the world itself made new.

Because the apostles' own preaching did not skip it — Peter remembers how Jesus went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil — and neither did the fuller patristic statements of the rule: Tertullian keeps the preaching of the kingdom and the miracles between the birth and the cross. The baptismal creed's leap from manger to cross reflects what could be recited standing in water, not the shape of the gospel. The section restores what the compression left out.

No. It states what the New Testament states — death swallowed up in victory, the devil's power broken, the rulers and authorities disarmed and publicly exposed — which every account of the atonement affirms as accomplished. The statement makes no claim about the mechanism. Someone who holds penal substitution affirms this triumph and adds how it was won; the clause leaves room for the addition.

Because it is in the public domain, in contemporary English. That allows the whole project — Statement, Commentary, History, and the Scripture within them — to be given away without restriction. A translation under copyright would have made the public-domain release impossible.

No, and the History page says so directly. Its familiar wording is later than Nicaea, and several lines entered the text only gradually, some centuries on. What descends from the earliest period is its shape and substance, through the Old Roman Creed and the baptismal questions behind it.

It is the writers' own term — regula fidei, the rule of truth — used by Irenaeus, Tertullian, Novatian, and Origen, who each set it out at length. What would be a reconstruction is any single authoritative wording, and the History page denies one existed.

Because it was a body of teaching, not a memorized text — fixed in substance and free in expression, the way a family tells the same story many times without settling on a script. Irenaeus makes the point himself: the languages differ, the import of the tradition is one and the same.

Because ancestry is not the same as final wording. The line runs from the baptismal interrogatories through the Old Roman Creed, attested in Greek by the 340s and in Latin by Rufinus, and on into the received text. That line never took up Nicaea's technical vocabulary; it kept confessing the Son in the same plain language it always had. It is the older kind of confession even where its surviving wording is later.

The disputes are noted on the page itself, at each text: the authorship, date, and provenance of the Apostolic Tradition are flagged as contested, as are the date and origin of the Old Roman Creed. The argument does not rest on any single document. It rests on the convergence of many independent witnesses — Ignatius, Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Novatian, Origen — and the primary texts are quoted directly, with sources cited, so a reader can check the claim against the evidence rather than take it on trust.

They are selected, and the History page says which ones and why. But the argument for naming those three does not depend on them. It is that Scripture, baptism, and allegiance were the rule's frame rather than items within it — the ground it rested on, the setting where it was spoken, the pledge it always was — and that a freestanding statement, unlike a confession made standing in water, has to put into words what the setting once carried in silence. The Nicene Creed itself shows the move, naming baptism where the older baptismal rule had not. The fuller patristic statements confirm that naming these things was not foreign to the rule; they are corroboration, not the load-bearing argument.