Statement of Faith & Theological Commitment

Saint Luke's College of Theology holds the following convictions, which shape its curriculum, its community, and its understanding of the Christian faith:

We believe in God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and we speak of them as directional rather than flat. The Father initiates. The Son executes what the Father initiates. The Holy Spirit communicates between them and unifies their work. The Son does only what He sees the Father do, and the Holy Spirit speaks only what He hears. This is the divine order through which God has revealed Himself and accomplished His purposes in the world.

We believe that the Lord Jesus the Christ is YHWH, and that salvation comes only through Him and His purchase of us at the cross. The Son is the only path to the Father.

We believe that salvation is a jurisdictional transfer. Before the fall, the human creature belonged lawfully to its Maker. At the fall, legal authority over humanity passed into other hands, and every soul born since has entered the world inside that claim. The cross effects a lawful transfer of every believing soul out of that domain and into the kingdom of the Son. Forgiveness of sins is the consequence of the transfer, not the transfer itself.

We believe that Holy Scripture is the written message of God delivered through flawed human beings. It is not diminished by the humanity of its authors; rather, it is the means God chose to communicate His redemptive purpose across the centuries. We receive it as both a theological revelation and an historical document. The events Scripture records happened. The people it names lived. The story it tells is true.

We believe in the redemptive arc of Scripture as the central and organizing truth of the biblical message: that God created, that humanity fell, that God has been at work redeeming, and that He will bring all things to consummation. We believe in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and His daily guidance and wisdom in the life of every believer.

We believe that salvation is a gift of God and not the product of human works. No one earns their place in the Body of Christ. However, we also believe that once a person is in the Body, every Christian has a duty to produce works. Grace and obligation are not in conflict; they are sequential. We are saved by gift and called to labor.

We believe there is no contradiction between science and Scripture. The College does not hold to a 6,000-year-old earth. We understand Archbishop Ussher's chronology as marking the fall of the human creature, the moment when humanity entered spiritual accountability before God, not the creation of the physical cosmos, which is as old as honest science determines it to be. This presents no threat to the authority or truth of Scripture.

We welcome students and faculty from across the breadth of Christian tradition who share a commitment to Scripture as a unified divine revelation and to the intellectual life as an act of faithfulness to the God who gave it.