Doctrinal Statement

“Watch your life and doctrine closely.” (1 Tim. 4:16)

Bastion Books is a bastion of orthodox, conservative evangelical, protestant Christian thought.

By Christian, we mean first and foremost that we confess the Jesus as both Lord and Christ.

By Orthodox, we mean that we uphold these sixteen essential doctrines of Christian orthodoxy:

  1. God’s Unity   
  2. God’s Tri-unity   
  3. Christ’s Deity           
  4. Christ’s Humanity
  5. Human Depravity   
  6. Christ’s Virgin Birth   
  7. Christ’s Sinlessness   
  8. Christ’s Atoning Death
  9. The Bodily Resurrection of Christ
  10. The Necessity of Grace   
  11. The Necessity of Faith
  12. The Bodily Ascension of Christ
  13. Christ’s Priestly Intercession
  14. Christ’s Bodily Second Coming
  15. The Inspiration of Scripture
  16. The Literal Interpretation of Scripture

These essential doctrines are found in the 66-books of the Bible and are echoed in these four early Greco-Roman Christian creeds:

The “root basis for historic orthodoxy is found,” according to Dr. Geisler, “in one Bible, two Testaments (Old and New), three creeds (Apostles’ [c. 150], Nicene [325], Athanasian [428]), four councils (Nicea [325], First Constantinople [381], Ephesus [431], Chalcedon [451]), and five centuries.”

By Protestant we mean that we agree with the five solas of the Protestant Reformation:

  • sola scriptura (Scripture alone)
  • solus Christus (Christ alone)
  • sola fide (faith alone)
  • sola gratia (grace alone)
  • soli Deo gloria (glory to God alone)

By evangelical we mean that we hold to the convictions and attitudes that permeated the Great Awakenings and the Revival movements among Bible-believing Christians:

  • Biblicism: the highest possible regard for the Bible as the infallible, inerrant, and ultimate source of authoritative information for faith and practice.
  • Crucicentrism: a focus on the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross as making possible the redemption of sinful humanity. (1 Cor. 1:17-23 & 2:2)
  • Conversionism: the belief that an individual needs to make a personal decision to repent away from sin, idols, and false saviors, turn towards the living God, investing his or faith into the crucified-risen Lord Jesus alone for salvation from the guilt and penalty of sin and from death. Lives need to be transformed in some kind of conversion experience and be followed by a life-long process of following Jesus.
  • Activism: based on thankfulness for the sacrifice of Christ in the past, the present power of the Holy Spirit to change and empower us, and the future return of Jesus to judge humanity, evangelicals want to change the world primarily through evangelism, discipleship, church planting, missionary work, and through being “salt and light” in the world. We don’t want to lose track of our primary mission on earth as Christ’s ambassadors but we also do not seek to be “so heavenly minded that we are of no earthly good.”

By conservative we mean that we are conserving several of the convictions that all the noteworthy evangelicals of the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening, and basically all evangelicals up to 1948 held and which many “progressive evangelicals” and emergent church movement members do not share today. Towards this end, the authors at Bastion Books can be expected to give assent to most or all of the propositions in the following statements:

As for the open-theism controversy, you can expect Bastion Book authors to be conservative with the traditional, historical, orthodox view of classical theism and not teach that God changes, that he is ever surprised, or that he doesn’t have full sovereignty over his creation.

Further reading:

A Bastion of Conservative Evangelical Christian Thought