At its meeting on Tuesday morning, April 12, the Council of The Gospel Coalition, by unanimous vote, made two changes in our Foundation Documents (download PDF). We do not make changes lightly or quickly, so we want to explain why we made these two. In one case, we made a change because we were not clear enough; in the other, a sharp-eyed critic convinced us that what we said was not in line with Scripture. Here are the changes:
(1) Our Preamble used to read, in part:
Our desire is to serve the church we love by inviting all our brothers and sisters to join us in an effort to renew the contemporary church in the ancient gospel of Christ so that we truly speak and live for him in a way that clearly communicates to our age. We intend to do this through the ordinary means of his grace: prayer, the ministry of the Word, baptism and the Lord’s Supper and the fellowship of the saints.
These words were taken by some to mean that we see ourselves as trying to take the place of the church, or somehow standing outside the church and telling the church what to do. Nothing could be farther from our intent and our passion. The Council members are either pastors or have been pastors, and we are churchmen through and through. But we recognize that our statement was not clear. We have therefore modified the second sentence by adding additional words: “As pastors, we intend to do this in our churches through the ordinary means of his grace . . .”
So the relevant part of the Preamble now reads:
Our desire is to serve the church we love by inviting all our brothers and sisters to join us in an effort to renew the contemporary church in the ancient gospel of Christ so that we truly speak and live for him in a way that clearly communicates to our age. As pastors, we intend to do this in our churches through the ordinary means of his grace: prayer, the ministry of the Word, baptism and the Lord’s Supper and the fellowship of the saints.
(2) In Article 9 of our Confessional Statement, on “The Power of the Holy Spirit,” the second sentence formerly read:
He [the Holy Spirit] convicts the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment, and by his powerful and mysterious work regenerates spiritually dead sinners, awakening them to repentance and faith, baptizing them into union with the Lord Jesus, such that they are justified before God by grace alone through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone.
In other words, our statement asserted that the Holy Spirit is the one who baptizes people into union with the Lord Jesus. In the Bible, however, the Spirit is not the one who does the baptizing; more commonly, he is the one in whom we are baptized. We have therefore replaced “baptizing them” with “and in him they are baptized.” The revised statement now reads:
He [the Holy Spirit] convicts the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment, and by his powerful and mysterious work regenerates spiritually dead sinners, awakening them to repentance and faith, and in him they are baptized into union with the Lord Jesus, such that they are justified before God by grace alone through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone.
We hope that those who have adopted The Gospel Coalition’s Foundation Documents as their own will make the same changes. You can now download these statements in several languages, including Spanish, French, and Chinese. A full list of the translations case be found on our website.
Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?
In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
