Doctrine
Scripture, the Trinity, the five solas, the doctrines of grace, covenant theology, the law and the gospel, the church, and the things to come.
Start Here
Doctrine is simply what you believe about God. You already have some. The only real question is whether it is true.
People sometimes say they want Jesus and not doctrine. But the moment you say the name Jesus you have said something doctrinal. You have said he is real. You have said something about who he is and what he has done. The man who says God is love is teaching doctrine. So is the man who says God would never send anyone to hell. Nobody stands outside of doctrine. We only stand inside good doctrine or bad.
There is a real danger here, and it should be named. A person can know the terms and never know the Lord. He can argue well and pray little. That is a hard and pitiful thing, and Scripture warns about it. But the cure for cold knowledge is not less knowledge. It is knowledge that reaches the heart. You cannot love a God you have refused to learn anything about. You cannot trust a Savior whose work you have never understood. The doctrines on this page are not a cage around Christ. They are windows. Each one lets more light in on his face.
If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
John 8:31-32 (KJV)
So read slowly. Look up what is cited. Ask God to show you himself in it.
Sola Scriptura
Everything else on this page rests here. If God has not spoken, we have nothing to say.
God has spoken, and his speech has been written down. The old word for it is inspiration. The Bible did not float down from heaven. Men wrote it, in their own words and settings and styles, and the Holy Spirit carried them along so that what they wrote is what God says.
All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.
2 Timothy 3:16-17 (KJV)
Because God breathed it out, and because God does not lie, the Bible is true in all that it affirms. Inerrancy is not a claim that every copy and every translation is perfect. It is a claim about what God gave.
Because God gave it for this purpose, it is enough. Sufficiency means you do not need a new revelation in order to be saved and to live before God. You do not need a private word or a hidden tradition either. The whole counsel of God needed for salvation, faith and life is either expressly set down in Scripture or follows from it by good and necessary consequence, as the Confession says in WCF 1.6.
And because God meant to be understood, the Bible is clear where it matters most. Not every verse is equally easy. Peter said as much about Paul. But the things you must know to be saved are set out clearly enough that an unlearned reader, using the ordinary means, can understand them. WCF 1.7 says so, and it is why a working man with a Bible and a lunch break can feed on the Word of God.
What then about the confessions and catechisms this site holds? They are subordinate standards. They are a faithful summary of what Scripture teaches, tested by the church across centuries, and they sit under the Bible and never beside it.
The supreme Judge, by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.
Westminster Confession of Faith 1.10
Theology Proper
Before there was a world to save, there was God. He was not lonely. He was not waiting. He was full.
God is spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth. He did not come from anywhere. He does not grow or shrink or improve. He is not one part of the universe, and the universe is not one part of him. He made it out of nothing and upholds it every second by the word of his power.
His attributes are not pieces bolted together. God is not partly holy and partly loving. Everything in God is God. His love is holy love. His justice is good justice. His mercy never embarrasses his righteousness, which is exactly the problem the cross answers.
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord:
Deuteronomy 6:4 (KJV)
This one God exists as three persons. Not three gods. Not one person wearing three masks. The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God, and there is one God. The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father. Each person is fully and equally God, undivided in essence, distinct in person.
The Confession puts the distinction carefully in WCF 2.3. The Father is of none, the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, and the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son. None of it is a matter of one person coming after another in time or ranking below another in being.
There are three persons in the Godhead; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory.
Westminster Shorter Catechism Q&A 6
This is not a riddle invented by councils. It is what the Bible forces on anyone who reads it whole. Jesus sends his people to baptize in one name that belongs to Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Salvation itself is Trinitarian. The Father chooses, the Son redeems, the Spirit applies. If you have been saved, all three persons have been at work on you.
Guard your words here. Every homespun illustration of the Trinity, water and ice and steam, a man who is father and son and husband, ends up teaching an old heresy. It is better to say less and say it carefully.
The Five Solas
The Reformation did not recover five slogans. It recovered one gospel, and these are the five hinges it turns on.
For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.
Ephesians 2:8-9 (KJV)
At the center of all five sits justification. God declares the guilty righteous, not by making them righteous first, but by pardoning their sins and counting Christ’s righteousness as theirs.
Those whom God effectually calleth, He also freely justifieth: not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous; not for any thing wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone.
Westminster Confession of Faith 11.1
Sanctification follows that verdict. It never props it up. You obey because you are accepted, never in order to become accepted. The gospel page works out the imputed righteousness of Christ at length.
The Doctrines of Grace
These five points were never meant to be the whole of the faith. They are an answer to a specific question. When God saves a sinner, who does the saving?
Read them as one sentence about one God working one salvation. Taken apart they can sound cold. Taken together they are a deep comfort, because they mean your salvation does not finally rest on how tightly you hold on.
Sin has touched every part of us, mind and will and affections, so that no one seeks God on his own. The word total is about extent, not degree. No part of us is clean enough to save the rest. Paul lays this out in Romans 3, and Ephesians 2 calls us dead in trespasses.
Before the foundation of the world God set his love on a people in Christ. The choice was not made because he looked down the corridors of time and saw who would choose him. It rested on the good pleasure of his will. Paul defends it at length in Romans 9, including the objections it raises.
Christ did not die to make salvation merely possible. He died to actually save particular people, and he will not lose them. His death is of infinite worth and is freely offered to every sinner who hears, and its saving design and effect are for his sheep.
Alongside the outward call of the gospel to all, the Spirit gives an inward call that raises the dead. Ezekiel 36 promised it, and the new birth is where God makes good on the promise. New life comes first, and then the sinner comes willingly, because he has been made willing.
Those truly united to Christ will be kept to the end. They may fall badly and grieve the Spirit, and they will be brought back. This is not a promise that a prayer you once prayed guarantees heaven. It is a promise that what God began in you he will bring to completion, as Philippians 1:6 says.
I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.
John 10:11 (KJV)
He does not say he makes a sheepfold available. He lays down his life for the sheep, and he gets them.
All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.
John 6:37 (KJV)
Both halves of that verse are yours to hold. The first half tells you election works. The second half tells you the door is open, right now, to you. If you are worried about whether you are chosen, stop looking inward and come to Christ. Nobody who comes is turned away.
Covenant Theology
God has always dealt with his people by covenant. Learn the covenants and the Bible stops feeling like a pile of disconnected stories.
Before creation, in eternity, the persons of the Trinity agreed on redemption. The Father gave a people to the Son, the Son agreed to obey and suffer for them, the Spirit agreed to apply that work to them. Reformed writers call this the covenant of redemption. It is the reason Jesus speaks so often about those the Father has given him.
In the garden God dealt with Adam in a covenant of works. Perfect obedience, and life. Disobedience, and death. Adam stood there not only for himself but for all who would come from him. He failed, and the ruin spread to every one of us.
God did not walk away. He made a second covenant, the covenant of grace, and he made it at cost to himself.
Man by his fall having made himself incapable of life by that covenant, the Lord was pleased to make a second, commonly called the covenant of grace; wherein He freely offereth unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ; requiring of them faith in Him, that they may be saved, and promising to give unto all those that are ordained unto eternal life His Holy Spirit, to make them willing, and able to believe.
Westminster Confession of Faith 7.3
Here is the part that changes your reading. There are not two ways of salvation in the Bible, law for the old and grace for the new. There is one covenant of grace administered in two ways. Under the old administration it came through promise, sacrifice, priesthood and shadow. Under the new it comes with the substance itself, Christ crucified and risen, preached to the nations. Abraham was justified by faith exactly as you are. The difference is that he looked forward and you look back.
And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.
Galatians 3:29 (KJV)
So when you open Leviticus, you are not reading a foreign religion. You are watching God teach his people, in blood and smoke and careful ritual, what sin costs and what a substitute is for. When you read the prophets, you are hearing a covenant Lord pleading with a covenant people. And when you reach the Supper, you hear Jesus say the cup is the new covenant in his blood, and the whole Old Testament leans forward into that sentence.
Law and Gospel
The law tells you what God requires. The gospel tells you what God has done. Confuse them and you will lose both.
The law is holy, and it is not the problem. We are. God’s law puts his own character into commandments, and it does three kinds of work.
Two errors wait on either side of that road, and both are deadly.
Legalism takes the law and makes it the ground of acceptance. It says God will love you if you clean yourself up. It turns obedience into a payment and Christ into an assistant. The legalist is either crushed or proud, and often both in the same week.
Antinomianism takes grace and uses it as permission. It says that since works do not justify, obedience does not matter. Paul had already heard that argument and he did not treat it gently.
What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?
Romans 6:1-2 (KJV)
The Confession says in WCF 19.6 and 19.7 that the believer is free from the law as a covenant of works and is still bound to it as a rule of life, and that these uses of the law are not contrary to the grace of the gospel but sweetly comply with it. The commandments do not threaten a justified man. They show him what love looks like in the concrete.
You keep the law because you are loved, never to become loved.
The Church
Christ did not save you and leave you on your own. He put you in a body, and he set a table in it.
The church is not a building and it is not an audience. It is the people Christ has bought, gathered under his rule, united to him and to each other. He has appointed unglamorous means by which he gives his grace, and they have not changed.
The outward and ordinary means whereby Christ communicateth to us the benefits of redemption are his ordinances, especially the word, sacraments, and prayer; all which are made effectual to the elect for salvation.
Westminster Shorter Catechism Q&A 88
The preached word comes first. Not a talk about the Bible, but the Bible opened, explained and pressed home, with Christ held out in it. God has been pleased to save and to strengthen through this plain thing week after week.
Baptism is the sign and seal of the covenant of grace, marking the washing away of sin, union with Christ in his death and resurrection, and belonging to God’s people. The Westminster Standards hold that it belongs to believers and to their children, as the covenant sign always has. The water does not save. It signifies and seals what God does.
The Lord’s Supper is not a fresh sacrifice, and it is not a bare memory either. Christ is really present, not bodily but spiritually, and he is received by faith as his people eat and drink. It is a meal for those who trust him and grieve their sin, not a reward for those who have arrived.
And they continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.
Acts 2:42 (KJV)
This is why membership matters. To join a church is to say you will be known, taught, corrected and cared for by particular people, and to place yourself under elders who will answer to God for your soul. Discipline belongs to that same care. It is not punishment for its own sake. It aims at repentance and restoration, and it begins quietly and privately.
On worship, the Reformed hold what is called the regulative principle. God himself determines how he is to be worshiped, and we come with what he has commanded rather than with what we have invented, as WCF 21.1 states. In practice that means Scripture read and preached, prayer, singing, the sacraments and the offering of ourselves. Christians who love the Lord have applied this differently and have disagreed about the details. Those disagreements are worth having honestly and without contempt.
Eschatology
Start with what every Reformed believer confesses. It is more than most people expect, and it is enough to live and die on.
Christ is reigning now, seated at the right hand of the Father, with all authority in heaven and on earth. He will return bodily, visibly, personally. The dead will be raised bodily, the righteous and the wicked alike. There will be a final judgment, real and just, and the wicked will be punished forever. Those in Christ will be acquitted openly and welcomed. Then come the new heavens and the new earth, where righteousness dwells and God himself lives with his people.
And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.
Revelation 21:4 (KJV)
From here on, faithful men differ. The question is how the thousand years of Revelation 20 relates to the present age and to Christ’s return. Three historic answers have been held by confessional Reformed Christians.
The thousand years is the whole present age between Christ’s first and second comings. Satan is bound from deceiving the nations so the gospel can go out, the souls of the departed reign with Christ now, and the kingdom advances through the Word while the world stays a mix of wheat and weeds. Christ returns once, and judgment and the new creation follow at once.
The same gospel that saves one sinner will, in God’s time, bring a coming age of widespread blessing, when the nations are discipled in great numbers and Christ’s rule is honored broadly on earth before he returns. That age is the fruit of ordinary preaching and the Spirit’s power, not a separate dispensation. Christ returns at the close of it to judge and to make all things new.
Christ returns before a real future reign on earth, which follows his coming rather than preceding it. The church passes through tribulation and is not removed from it. This view is ancient, and it is not built on a separation between Israel and the church.
This site does not stake out a millennial position. The man who writes it leans somewhere between the first two and has not settled it, and he is not going to pretend otherwise in order to sound certain. These are matters where brothers who confess the same Christ and the same Confession have differed in peace for centuries, and they should keep differing in peace.
Two cautions, though. Do not treat dispensational premillennialism, with its sharp split between Israel and the church and its secret rapture, as the Reformed position. It is not, and it came late. And do not let curiosity about the end replace readiness for it. The last things were given to make you holy and to comfort you while you wait.
Where to Go Next
None of this was worked out in a hurry, and you do not have to work it out alone.
The Westminster Confession of Faith, the Shorter Catechism and the Larger Catechism are among the clearest short summaries of the faith written in English. The Shorter Catechism is the place to begin. It is short and memorable, and it answers the first question a human being ought to ask. Read the full text at the The Westminster Standard, where the Confession is posted with its proof texts.
Take it slowly. One question a day with a Bible open beside it will do more for you in a year than a stack of books read fast. For books, teachers and places to start, see the resources page. If the gospel itself is still unclear to you, go to the gospel page first, because that is the doctrine everything else serves.
And remember who all of this is about. The King who ordained the covenant before the world was, and who will judge the living and the dead, says this to you.
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
Matthew 11:28-29 (KJV)
Learn the doctrine so you can see more of him, and then go to him. If something here raised a question you cannot settle, you are welcome to write and ask.