An educational creed

In a world of diverse religious traditions and influences on life there is a need for a Reformed understanding of God's kingdom for learning. To that end the following educational creed will be the confessional basis for ARIHE.

1. In harmony with the ecumenical creeds and the historic Reformed confessions, we affirm:
God has manifested himself in creation, in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, and in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.
Holy Scripture, God's own word, is of infallible divine authority, without error in all its teaching. It is to be believed in all that it affirms, obeyed in all that it requires, and embraced in all that it promises.
2. The origin, meaning, and purpose of creation, including humanity, consist of covenantal dependence upon the Creator, rootedness in Jesus Christ, and life through the Holy Spirit.
3. Because human life is religion, the calling of humanity always to acknowledge its Creator entails that life, including academic pursuits, unfolds itself since Adam's fall either obediently as service in Christ to the God of the Scriptures or disobediently as bondage to the idols of the sinful human heart.
4. In making possible true knowledge and in giving rise to a knowing activity of the human heart enlightened through the Word and by the Spirit, the Christian religion plays a decisive role in the understanding of everyday experience and theoretical pursuits.
5. Christian scholarship, in obedient response to the God-given cultural mandate, may explore all created reality and should promote an integrative understanding and faithful ordering of everyday life in the human community.
6. Although, through God's grace, scholarship which rejects God's Word as the ordering principle of life provides valuable insights into the structure of created reality, nevertheless, faithful Christian scholarship calls for reformation of all knowledge and instruction by letting Scripture direct thought and by bringing it into obedience to Jesus Christ.
7. Academic freedom, made possible by voluntary submission of the entire Christian academic community to the Word of God, must be protected against internal constraints as well as from external domination of non-academic institutions.