Salvation Story: Salvationist Handbook of Doctrine - Hardcover

This book is about the faith of the Salvationist. It is based upon the eleven Articles of Faith which, since 1878, have been the basis of The Salvation Army's witness to the Christian gospel. Some may wonder why Salvationists place such emphasis upon a written statement of faith. After all, they are people who rightly maintain that a Christian is one who enters trustfully into a relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ and is born again of the Holy Spirit. They emphasise that faith is a personal affair, often springing from an experience of God's grace that is beyond the reach of definition or analysis. They may well be suspicious of any attempt to reduce this lif-changing encounter to a form of words on a page. Yet without words, the experience fails to be named, clarified or shared. Faith is not only personal: it has a public face. The earliest Christians acknowledged one another in the simple confession: 'Jesus is Lord' (1 Corinthians 12:3). This was their creed. As they shared it, they grounded their personal experience in the risen Christ, verified one another's experience and called upon the world to acknowledge the lordship of Christ. It was from these biblical beginnings that the creeds of the Church grew to be authoritative statements of the Christian faith. They have a long history, some of which is referred to within these pages. (from introduction)