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Essentials of the Christian Faith Essentials of the Christian Faith Sixteen Essential Doctrines from the Bible and the Ancient Christian Creeds NORMAN L. GEISLER Essentials of the Christian Faith: Sixteen Essential Doctrines from the Bible and the Ancient Christian Creeds By Norman Leo Geisler Copyright © 2020 by Norm Geisler International Ministries. All rights reserved. Published by Norm Geisler International Ministries Indian Trail, North Carolina, USA https://ngim.org All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. This is a pre-publication draft dated May 7th, 2020, made for use by students of the Norm Geisler Institute. NGI students may print a copy of this book but should not share it with non-NGI students without written permission from NGIM. Please report any typos in, problems with, or constructive criticism for this draft to the editor by [email protected]. After all edits have been made, this book will become available as a soft cover book at https://www.amazon.com/Norman-L.- Geisler/e/B000APBJR8. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright @ 1973, 1978, 1984 by the International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. Verses marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Verses marked ESV are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Verses marked ASV are taken from the American Standard Version of the Bible. Verses marked NASB are taken from the New American Standard Bible, © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. (www.Lockman.org) Contents Chapter Page Foreword 1 An Overview 1 2 God’s Unity 14 3 God’s Tri-unity 27 4 Christ’s Deity 42 5 Christ’s Humanity 58 6 Human Depravity 70 7 Christ’s Virgin Birth 79 8 Christ’s Sinlessness 92 9 Christ’s Atoning Death 101 10 The Bodily Resurrection of Christ 113 11 The Necessity of Grace 127 12 The Necessity of Faith 138 13 The Bodily Ascension of Christ 153 14 Christ’s Priestly Intercession 165 15 Christ’s Bodily Second Coming 176 16 The Inspiration of Scripture 188 17 The Literal Interpretation of Scripture 207 Bibliography 223 End Notes 233 “Watch your life and doctrine closely, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers.” 1 Timothy 4:16 Foreword When the Apostle Paul challenged his protégé Timothy to “watch your life and doctrine closely,” the reasons he gave were of the utmost importance: “because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers” (1 Timothy 4:16). Norm Geisler wrote Essentials of the Christian Faith with that same set of doctrines and that same salvation in mind. Norm was the consummate evangelical, one who cares most about the euangellion—the gospel, the good news about the free gift of salvation from sin and death. A little surprised that no satisfactory attempt to rightly divide the essential doctrines from the non-essential doctrines had been produced before, Norm set himself to the task. He was uniquely qualified to do so. By the time he began this focused investigation, he had studied the Bible daily for over sixty years, had taught systematic theology as a professor for fifty years, and had already completed his four-volume Systematic Theology. This book is the fruit of that labor. This book was also written to protect the essential doctrines of the Christian faith from “doctrines of demons” (1 Timothy 4:1), “distortions” by “ignorant and unstable people” (2 Peter 3:16), “wicked nonsense” (3 John 9-12), and many of the winds and waves of doctrine” (Ephesians 4:14) that cause the faith of some to suffer “shipwreck” (1 Timothy 1:19), “spread like gangrene,” cause some to “depart from the truth,” and proceeds to “destroy the faith of others” (2 Timothy 2:18). Norm was uniquely qualified to write this book to accomplish this purpose. He was far more concerned with truth and error than most. And he had a tremendous gift for detecting error. He was quite fluent with all of the arguments of the greatest heresies that have challenged orthodoxy over the centuries and had been doing counter-cult ministry for sixty years. He was one of the greatest masters in all of church history to date in “demolish[ing] arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God” (2 Corinthians 10:5). He didn’t shy away from the fact that “opponents must be gently instructed, in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of truth. .” (2 Timothy 2:24). This book is also a noble attempt to foster unity, fraternity, peace, and cooperation among those who truly believe in the essential doctrines of the historic Christian faith. In the search for what C.S. Lewis so famously called “mere Christianity,” Norm wrote in the irenic spirit of Meldenius’s famous dictum: “In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, charity.” In one sense, then, this book is ecumenical. It is not ecumenical in the sense where most every doctrine is swept away and replaced with a vague Jesus who is little more than a mascot for social change. Quite the opposite, it is ecumenical in the sense of having nothing to do with which church denomination or tradition one belongs to so long as he or she belongs to the group that holds to all of the essential doctrines with conviction—but without compromise. By keeping the list of essentials to their absolute minimum, and de-emphasizing other doctrines that may be critical but not crucial, Norm succeeds in presenting a platform for unity rather than uniformity. He aimed at the teaching that allows “the body of Christ” to “reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature” (Ephesians 4:12-13). And here again Norm was uniquely qualified. He grew up in a Roman Catholic family but became an evangelical Protestant in his teenage years, earned his Master’s degree and Ph.D. from two Roman Catholic universities, and continued to hold Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo, two Roman Catholic thinkers, as his favorite theologians. He wrote Roman Catholics and Evangelicals: Agreements and Differences (Baker, 1995), a book that was well received by many evangelicals and many Catholics, in the wake of the Evangelicals and Catholics Together controversy (1992). He also served for ten years (1987-1997) in important roles in the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy (ICBI), a council that emulated the first church council of Acts 15, echoed the other ancient ecumenical church councils whose judgments helped shape this book, and made pronouncements of its own that echo in this book. The ICBI was ecumenical in the sense that it included scholars from a wide range of Protestant denominations. It also included non- denominational scholars like Norm. His non-denominationalness helped to create this non-denominational, trans-denominational book. As they focused on fundamental matters like the inerrancy of the Bible and the need to interpret it normally, they succeeded in putting aside their many differences—differences of the non-essential variety—and were able to find unity and harmony in the essentials. Norm only held the Bible alone to be inspired, infallible, inerrant, and authoritative for faith and practice. However, he also had a deep appreciation for the fidelity to the biblical faith shown by the thinkers who formed the earliest Christian creeds against the backdrop of challenges to the faith. Norm agreed with Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), who famously said, with slight paraphrase here, that the basis for historic Christian orthodoxy is found in one Bible, two Testaments (Old and New), three Creeds (Apostles, Nicene, Athanasian), four councils (Nicaea, First Constantinople, Ephesus, Chalcedon), and five centuries—roughly the time before Emperor Theodosius set “Nicene Christianity” as the official religion of the Roman Empire. While the ancient creeds were important sources in Norm’s quest for the essential doctrines, they were secondary and only important insofar as they were faithful representations of the Bible and the apostolic tradition. Norm recognized that they were faithful representations. One of the reasons we are thrilled with this book is the unique depth of insight Norm had when he wrote it. Whereas several other Christian thinkers today dismiss the doctrine of biblical inspiration, as a matter of tertiary importance, for example, and therefore only an impediment to apologetics and evangelism, Norm saw it as a different kind of essential. Agreeing that biblical inspiration (with infallibility, inerrancy, and authority) are not necessarily doctrines one must believe to be saved, the doctrine of inspiration still underpins all fourteen of the doctrines we need to hear and believe to be saved. So Norm presents it as a true essential of the faith—just one of a different, more subtle, more neglected, and more fundamental kind. Always looking at the bigger picture, he had the insight to consider meta-doctrines that are crucial for the more obvious doctrines. Similarly, he was always cognizant of the fact that, as Thomas Aquinas once put it, “a little error in the beginning leads to a great one in the end.” This book is basically a reprint of the first half of an earlier book that was a great blessing to many--Conviction Without Compromise: Standing Strong in the Core Beliefs of the Christian Faith (Harvest House Publishers, 2008).
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