The basis for these six statements
Most people never need this page. The six statements say what they mean in ordinary English, and nothing here changes them. This is for anyone who wants to know what they rest on, and for the reviewers who have to apply them.
The six statements are a plain-language rendering of the doctrine of God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit set out in the Nicene Creed of 381. That creed is the common inheritance of Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christianity, which is why it can mark a boundary without favoring any of them. We did not write a new statement of faith and we did not adopt any denomination's.
We ask authors to affirm the content rather than to subscribe to the creed as a document. Some traditions decline creedal subscription on principle — Churches of Christ and the wider Restoration Movement, many Baptists, Quakers — while affirming everything the creed teaches. Requiring subscription would have excluded them on procedure rather than on belief, which would have been a mistake.
We enumerated the articles rather than quoting the creed for a second reason. The Eastern and Western texts differ over one clause, added in the West, concerning the procession of the Holy Spirit. That clause is not in our six statements and is not a condition of certification. An Orthodox author and a Western author sign exactly the same words here.
How a complaint is judged against these statements
| The statement signed | What it corresponds to in the creed |
|---|---|
| 1. There is one God. | One God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible. |
| 2. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — three persons, one God. | The creed's three-article structure taken as a whole, with the Son of one Being with the Father and the Spirit worshipped and glorified together with them. |
| 3. Jesus is fully God and fully human, not created, has always existed. | God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God; begotten, not made; of one Being with the Father; and incarnate, become truly human. |
| 4. Born of Mary, died, rose bodily, will come again. | Incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary; crucified, suffered death and was buried; rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures; will come again in glory. |
| 5. The Holy Spirit is God, not a force. | The Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified. |
| 6. Offered as a Christian work; not written to argue against Christian faith. | Not creedal. This is our scope rule, published in the Standard. |
A complaint must cite specific passages and name one of the six statements. A panel then considers a single question: does the text of the edition contradict the statement its author signed? The panel does not rule on any question outside the six, and it does not decide whether a book's teaching is correct.
Two things we deliberately left out
We do not ask authors to affirm anything about salvation. How grace and justification are described divides Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians, and any wording we chose would have taken a side. It would also have excluded publishers already recognized by this registry, and it would not have filtered out anyone the six statements do not already filter out.
We do not ask authors to affirm anything about Scripture. A statement on the authority or inerrancy of the Bible would start a live argument among evangelical, Catholic, and mainline traditions while filtering nobody, because the groups these six statements exclude all affirm the Bible and add other texts alongside it. We address Scripture a different way: the Standard requires that Scripture be quoted accurately and that the translation be identified, and we check it.
What this is not
This is not a creed we are asking anyone to join, a test of theological knowledge, or a judgment about anyone who believes differently. It is the shortest honest answer we could find to a reader's question about what the word Christian means on a registry record.