Distinctives

Distinctives at Redeemer

Our distinctives at Redeemer are our Core Values. We hope to bring each one of these elements into the educational process for our students as they are prepared for ministry. Rather than viewing the academic process as just transferring information, or a hermeneutic, or simply discipleship, we hope to bring a fuller picture of what it means to study God’s word and give a glimpse of his glory.

1. THE GLORY OF GOD

God discloses his glory—who he is, what he is like, and the eternal dynamic of holy love within the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—through the unfolding story of his creative, providential, and redemptive activity in history. He himself tells us this story to manifest his glory among all his creatures, and our proper response to this living God is to trust, love, and fear him. He is never to be reduced to a concept lest we worship the idol of our own imagining.

2. THE MISSION OF GOD

The mission of God in a fallen world is cosmic in scope:

to reconcile the world to himself in Christ (2 Cor 5:10),
to establish his reign over it,
to fill it with his glory,
to create a new heavens and new earth where righteousness dwells (2 Pet 3:13). The depths of God’s mercy are revealed in his concern to rescue the lowliest in a fallen society, those most subject to the devastating effects of sin, including widows, fatherless, slaves, the poor, the displaced, the lonely and marginalized.

The mission of God is also intensely personal:

to call us into the communion of self-giving holy love that exists eternally within the Trinity (1 John 1:3),
to know us as sons as he knows Christ and to conform us to the image of his Son,
to be known as a Father to us as he is to Christ. Accordingly, we consecrate our wills to his will in worship, like Christ and in Christ, who consecrated himself to his Father on the cross for our sake.

3. THE WORD OF GOD

God calls us to himself through his powerful and effective Word. Scripture, the Word of God written, is missional in both its purpose and form. The Word of God comes to us in historical form and participates fully in history without losing the fully divine character by which it accomplishes its purpose. Scripture is God-breathed to the extent of its very words and, therefore, infallibly true and so without error in all that it affirms, and fully authoritative for both faith and life. As such we embrace it and seek to submit to it and allow it to judge our lives—including all of the assumptions we bring to its interpretation.

4. REDEMPTIVE-HISTORICAL HERMENEUTIC

Scripture presents the mission of God as unfolding in a grand narrative culminating in Christ. Christ is the center of God’s redemptive purposes in the prophetic and apostolic Scriptures and the goal to which all Scripture points. The history of redemption is one story from beginning to end, but comes to a climax in the incarnation and death and resurrection of Christ and finds final resolution in his return in glory. We now live in the times between: The age to come has already broken into the present age through what God has already done in Christ; we await the consummation of all of God’s purposes in the return of Christ. This already and not yet dynamic defines our present life as disciples of Christ.

5. THE REFORMED TRADITION

In these between-times, during which God has continued to accomplish his mission through the church empowered by the Holy Spirit, we identify ourselves as belonging to that church in the whole of its historical development. But we also hold that the internal coherence of the teaching of Scripture focused on the good news of God reconciling the world in Christ has been best understood historically within the classic Reformed tradition exemplified in the Westminster Confession and Catechisms, the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Canons of Dort and the Thirty-Nine Articles. We stand within this tradition and seek to remain true to it by constantly reforming all traditions by the teaching of Scripture itself.

6. COMMITMENT TO A REFORMED EPISTEMOLOGY

“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” (Prov 1:7). With the Reformers we affirm that faith grounds and leads to understanding. The Reformers restored the Augustinian order (crede ut intelligas), rejecting the scholastic dichotomy between knowledge based on reason and nature, on the one hand, and knowledge based on faith and revelation, on the other. Similarly, we reject the dream of the enlightenment with its dichotomies between facts and values, objective and subjective, theory and practice. True knowledge begins with the personal realization that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. We cannot know ourselves and the world around us truly and rightly, except in the light of knowing God. The fall of humanity has distorted our capacity to know things truly. This distortion must be healed through faith in God’s promise in Christ brought home to us by the testimony of the Holy Spirit. So true knowledge is personal and relational and cannot be abstracted from divine revelation, faith and repentance. The grand narrative of Scripture, whose meaning and ramifications for the church are drawn out by prophets and apostles within Scripture itself, enables us to develop a worldview that is true and comprehensive in principle, and we await the final establishment of God’s truth in the consummation.

7. THE CHURCH AS THE OBJECT AND INSTRUMENT OF GOD’S MISSION

The church is the center of God’s missional purposes, the object of Christ’s self-sacrificial love, and the means of carrying out his redemptive mission. Through the gospel God is gathering some from all nations and peoples into union with Christ to create a new humanity. Although Redeemer Seminary does not claim to be a full particular and local manifestation of the church of Christ entitled to administer Christ’s sacraments and to exercise his discipline over his people through church officers, it does strive to live as a gospel community filled with the Spirit in which the word of Christ dwells richly. More particularly, Redeemer seeks to be a discipling community centered in Christ, ministering to its own and with an eye to ministering to others.

8. CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION OF THE GOSPEL

God’s mission crosses cultural barriers, and this truth shapes the church’s work of discipling the nations for the glory of Christ. The mission of the church requires culturally sensitive, theologically competent ministers, who can emulate God’s own missional communication in Scripture by interpreting and communicating the one true gospel into the varied and changeable cultural contexts of those peoples God longs to rescue and gather into his church.

9. UNITY IN THE CHURCH

God desires his church to be one and so must we. Because there is “one body and one Spirit,” and because there is “one Lord, one faith, one baptism,” we are called to “bear with one another in love with all patience and humility” and “make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph 4:2-4). This unity does not imply uniformity; rather true unity entails mutual respect and consideration of a variety of gifts, differences in context, and variation of worship styles within the body.

10. THE NECESSITY FOR PERSONAL DISCIPLESHIP

The servants of Christ must experience the transformative grace of the gospel and personally embody the humility and mission of Christ in order to minister effectively to others. With God’s grace, a lifestyle of humble and holy affection for Jesus Christ, modeled by the board, administration, and faculty, will rouse students to a deeper devotion to Christ and a sense of their own participation in the mission of God.