Songs from Scripture

Scripture and apostolic Tradition belong to one deposit of faith entrusted to the Church.

Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterium function together; sola Scriptura is rejected.

Scripture is the foremost written witness within the larger Holy Tradition of the Church.

Fathers, councils, liturgy, and historic worship provide the ecclesial setting for interpretation.

Scripture is primary while historic Christian tradition and reason assist interpretation.

A mediating approach between autonomous biblicism and Roman magisterial authority.

Scripture remains primary - prima Scriptura - while tradition, reason, and experience aid interpretation.

Prima Scriptura within the later-described Wesleyan Quadrilateral.

Scripture alone is the Church's infallible norm; creeds and teachers have subordinate authority.

All traditions remain corrigible by Scripture.

Scripture speaks fundamentally in Law, exposing sin, and Gospel, giving Christ and forgiveness.

Law/Gospel becomes a major interpretive and preaching framework.

Jesus' direct teaching and example receive exceptional ethical priority.

Enemy-love, simplicity, truthfulness, discipleship, and nonviolence.

The apostolic Church supplies a recoverable pattern against which later practices should be tested.

Desire to restore identifiable New Testament faith and practice.

Present illumination and guidance of the Spirit receive unusual attention.

Silent waiting worship, spontaneous ministry, and inward sacramentalism.

Jesus' recorded sayings receive deliberate ethical priority.

Particular attention to Jesus' teachings on discipleship, mercy, enemies, wealth, and the marginalized.

Inspiration entails complete trustworthiness in everything Scripture affirms.

Strong harmonization and defense of biblical factual reliability.

Preservation promises are sometimes understood as culminating in the KJV textual/translation tradition.

The KJV may receive unique or near-unique authority.

God's providential preservation is understood to favor the Greek text historically received by Reformation churches.

Preference for the TR over modern eclectic critical texts.

The OT canon is ordinarily aligned with the Hebrew/Jewish collection.

The 39-book Protestant Old Testament.

A wider inherited collection of sacred books is received canonically.

Books such as 1 Enoch occupy canonical status unavailable in most Christian traditions.

God's authoritative revelatory activity is not understood to have closed with the biblical canon.

Additional scriptures and continuing prophetic authority.

Scripture has an internal spiritual sense extending beyond surface historical meaning.

Extensive correspondential and allegorical interpretation.

Marcion radically privileged a restricted Pauline/Lukan canon and rejected Israel's Scriptures.

An extreme historical case of canonical weighting.

Fallen humanity cannot initiate saving return to God without prior divine grace.

Strong original sin and priority of grace.

God's efficacious grace causes free human action rather than competing with it.

Strong divine causality together with genuine secondary human willing.

God's knowledge includes what free creatures would do in unrealized circumstances.

"Middle knowledge" is used to reconcile providence and libertarian freedom.

Election is unconditional and saving grace effectually brings the elect to faith.

Predestination, effectual calling, monergistic conversion.

God's saving provision genuinely extends to all and grace may be resisted.

Conditional election and resistible grace.

Grace precedes conversion and graciously enables genuine response without necessitating it.

Universal gracious enablement.

God's revelation, gospel, Spirit, and provision are sufficient to enable responsible faith without irresistible regeneration.

Universal provision and a genuine gospel response.

Election centers primarily upon Christ and the corporate people united to him.

Individuals participate in the chosen people through union with Christ.

Spiritually dead sinners must be made alive in order to exercise saving faith.

Regeneration logically precedes faith.

God grants new life to those who respond in divinely enabled faith.

Faith logically precedes regeneration.

Eternal life is received through faith alone and carefully distinguished from the cost of discipleship.

Strong assurance and distinction between salvation, discipleship, and reward.

Genuine saving faith necessarily produces repentance, allegiance, and fruit.

Persevering obedience is evidence of true conversion.

God preserves true believers and therefore they ultimately persevere.

Final perseverance accompanies genuine election.

Genuine salvation, once received, cannot finally be lost.

"Once saved, always saved," often without the same doctrinal emphasis on inevitable perseverance found in Calvinism.

Apostasy warnings address genuine Christians and describe a real danger of final falling away.

Salvation can be forfeited through decisive apostasy.

God declares the ungodly righteous through faith because of Christ, apart from their works.

Forensic justification stands at the center of salvation.

Justification includes actual renewal by grace, not merely an external legal declaration.

Faith, grace, sacramental life, and love are integrated.

Salvation culminates in participation in divine life while divine grace and human response cooperate without erasing the Creator-creature distinction.

Salvation is understood strongly as healing, union, and transformation.

"Works of the law" and justification are read heavily within first-century debates over Jewish covenant membership.

Justification also identifies God's one Jew-Gentile covenant family.

Baptized covenant membership is given a stronger objective significance than in conventional evangelicalism.

Covenant members may experience genuine covenant blessings without all finally persevering.

Christ bears the judgment due to sinners as their substitute.

Legal substitution becomes a central model of the cross.

Christ's obedient self-offering satisfies the objective disorder/debt created by sin.

Satisfaction language rather than punishment alone explains the atonement.

Christ's death and resurrection conquer sin, death, Satan, and hostile powers.

Victory becomes the central atonement image.

Christ gives his life as a ransom that liberates enslaved humanity.

Redemption and liberation dominate the picture of salvation.

The cross supremely reveals divine love and draws humans into transformed love.

The subjective moral- transforming effect of the cross receives priority.

Christ's suffering publicly demonstrates God's righteous moral government while making forgiveness possible.

Common in some Arminian/Holiness traditions.

Christ as the new Adam faithfully retraces and restores human existence.

Incarnation, obedient life, death, and resurrection all have saving significance.

Christ's death has a particular saving intention toward the elect.

The atonement certainly secures salvation for those for whom Christ dies.

Christ genuinely dies for every person although salvation is received through faith.

Universal provision with particular application.

Universal restoration/reconciliation language ultimately encompasses every person.

Hope or expectation of eventual universal restoration.

Eternal judgment language describes continuing conscious punishment.

Historic doctrine of everlasting hell.

"Death," "destroy," and "perish" culminate in final destruction rather than endless conscious existence.

The finally impenitent cease conscious existence.

Immortality is God's gift, not an intrinsic possession of every human soul.

Often supports annihilationism or mortalism.

Some of the saved undergo postmortem purification.

Prayer for the dead and final purification of believers.

Death is repeatedly described as sleep until bodily resurrection.

Adventist, Christadelphian, and related traditions deny a naturally conscious immortal-soul state.

Personal profession of faith precedes baptism.

Baptism is restricted to professing believers, ordinarily by immersion.

Baptism is closely joined to forgiveness and entry into Christ rather than being only subsequent testimony.

Baptism normally belongs to the conversion event itself.

Baptism is fundamentally God's gracious action, not chiefly the believer's testimony.

Infants can receive baptismal grace and regeneration.

Covenant continuity means children of believers remain within the visible covenant community.

Infant baptism as covenant sign without requiring baptismal regeneration.

Baptism sacramentally regenerates and incorporates into Christ and the Church.

Infants should receive baptism rather than await adult profession.

Baptism, chrismation, and Eucharistic participation form sacramental initiation into Christ.

Even infants may receive baptism, chrismation, and communion.

Baptism witnesses to prevenient covenant grace rather than guaranteeing final salvation.

Infant baptism followed by later personal appropriation of faith.

Baptism follows conscious repentance, faith, and commitment to discipleship.

Rejection of infant baptism and stress on voluntary church membership.

Apostolic examples of baptism "in Jesus' name" are given controlling weight.

Explicit Jesus-name baptism.

The essential Christian baptism is inward baptism by the Spirit.

Friends generally do not practice water baptism as an ordinance.

Inward spiritual reality is not understood to depend upon an outward baptismal rite.

Water baptism is not required as an ordinance.

Paul's reference is understood as evidence of an actual proxy ordinance on behalf of the dead.

Temple baptism on behalf of deceased persons.

Christ's words are understood as a real sacramental giving of his body and blood.

Transubstantiation and Eucharistic adoration.

Communion truly communicates Christ's body and blood as mystery without requiring the Latin scholastic explanation.

Strong real-presence sacramental worship.

"This is my body" and "participation" are given very direct force.

Christ's true body and blood are received with the bread and wine.

Believers truly feed upon Christ by faith through the Spirit without Christ's body being locally contained in the elements.

More than memorialism but not bodily/local presence.

"Do this in remembrance of me" receives controlling emphasis.

The Supper primarily remembers and proclaims Christ's death.

Apostolic breaking of bread is read as a continuing weekly pattern.

Weekly Lord's Supper.

Eucharistic fellowship expresses real ecclesial and doctrinal unity.

Communion is limited according to membership, confession, or church fellowship.

Responsibility for examining readiness rests significantly with the communicant.

Christian visitors may commune without belonging to that denomination.

Covenant children may share the covenant meal before mature intellectual self-examination.

Communion of baptized young children.

Self-examination implies personal faith and sufficient discernment.

Communion normally follows profession/catechesis.

"Ye also ought to wash one another's feet" is treated as an ongoing literal practice.

Congregational foot washing.

Christ grants ministers a real authority connected with forgiving and retaining sins.

Sacramental confession to a priest.

Believers approach God directly through Christ without required priestly sacramental mediation.

Confession primarily to God, though pastoral confession may be beneficial.

Heavenly saints remain alive in Christ and participate in the communion of the Church.

Christians may ask saints to pray for them.

Christ's unique mediation gives believers direct access to the Father.

Prayer is directed to God rather than requests being addressed to departed saints.

The Incarnation supports sacred depiction; honor shown to an image is distinguished from worship due to God.

Icons and sacred images may be venerated.

The second commandment is applied strongly against devotional representation of God.

Sparse worship and resistance to religious images.

God can mediate blessing through material objects associated with holy persons.

Relics and blessed material objects may have devotional roles.

Peter receives a distinctive pastoral and governing commission understood as continuing in the Roman episcopate.

Papal primacy and universal Petrine ministry.

The apostolic council models episcopal conciliar discernment rather than universal jurisdiction of one bishop.

Authority through communion and councils of bishops.

Historic episcopacy is regarded as a fitting continuation of ancient church order.

Bishops, priests/presbyters, and deacons.

Ministerial authority is transmitted through ordered succession from apostolic ministry.

Historic episcopal ordination and succession.

Elders govern locally while churches remain accountable to wider councils of elders.

Sessions, presbyteries, synods, and assemblies.

Final earthly responsibility for discipline and membership belongs significantly to the gathered congregation.

Autonomous local churches.

NT local churches appear ordinarily governed by multiple elders.

Elder plurality without a single hierarchical bishop.

Gathered believers may contribute ministry as spiritually gifted without one permanent officiating pastor.

Participatory meetings and plural leadership.

Separation from doctrinal and ecclesial error receives exceptional weight.

Restricted fellowship and sometimes strict communal boundaries.

Domestic and participatory gatherings are viewed as particularly close to NT church life.

Small decentralized churches with limited institutional structure.

Spirit-led ministry may arise through any worshiper.

Historically weak clergy-laity distinction.

Apostles and prophets continue alongside evangelists, pastors, and teachers until the Church reaches maturity.

Contemporary apostolic and prophetic ministries.

Restrictions on authoritative church teaching are understood as transcultural.

Pastor/elder office ordinarily restricted to qualified men.

Restrictive passages are understood contextually and alongside examples of women serving prominently.

All church leadership offices may be open to women.

Jesus' selection of male apostles and received ministerial practice are understood as significant for ordained priesthood.

Male-only priestly/episcopal office.

Pentecost's sons and daughters prophesying is read programmatically for Spirit- empowered ministry.

Women may preach and exercise significant ministerial leadership.

Every believer has direct priestly access to God through Christ.

Strong resistance to an ontological sacramental division between clergy and laity.

The visible local church should consist as nearly as possible of credible professing believers.

Membership follows conversion and believer's baptism.

NT commands to sing are treated as the positive pattern for congregational music.

A cappella corporate worship.

Biblical approval of instruments is not understood to have been revoked.

Musical instruments remain legitimate in Christian worship.

"Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs" are understood as inspired canonical song categories.

Congregational singing limited chiefly or entirely to biblical Psalms.

Corporate worship should include only elements warranted by Scripture.

Greater caution about adding worship practices.

Practices not prohibited by Scripture may be used wisely for God's glory.

Greater worship flexibility.

Paul's head-covering directions are understood as transcultural church practice.

Literal coverings during prayer/worship.

Modesty and nonconformity warrant concrete communal dress standards.

Amish, Mennonite, Apostolic, and Holiness forms of plain dress.

"Swear not at all" is read directly and universally.

Affirmations rather than civil/judicial oaths.

Enemy-love and refusal of retaliation prohibit Christians from intentionally killing enemies.

Conscientious objection and nonviolence.

Civil authority may legitimately use force, and Christians may participate under morally constrained circumstances.

Christian military participation under just-war criteria.

Radical renunciation and celibacy can constitute particular vocations of undivided devotion.

Monastic poverty, chastity, prayer, and community.

Celibacy is especially fitting for many ordained ministers as undivided service.

Celibacy normally required of Latin-rite priests as discipline.

The Jerusalem church's common possessions provide a continuing communal model.

Community of goods and collective ownership.

Separation from worldly patterns deserves visible communal expression.

Plainness, guarded technology, and strong communal discipline.

Separation from disciplined members may include substantial social avoidance.

Formal shunning practices in some communities.

The Sabbath's moral principle continues but finds Christian expression on the resurrection day.

Strict or substantial Sunday observance.

Warnings concerning intoxication and holiness are applied through total abstinence.

Teetotalism.

Bodily stewardship and biblical dietary principles receive unusual practical emphasis.

Strong health practices and frequent vegetarianism.

Pentecost is read not only historically but as a pattern of post-conversion Spirit empowerment.

Distinctive "baptism in the Holy Spirit."

Tongues are understood as the initial physical sign of Spirit baptism.

Expectation of tongues accompanying Spirit baptism.

Conversion, entire sanctification, and Spirit baptism may be distinct works of grace.

A three-stage Holiness-Pentecostal pattern.

Entire sanctification is not a necessary separate completed work preceding Spirit baptism.

Conversion followed by Spirit empowerment rather than mandatory three-stage experience.

God's oneness and the fullness of deity in Christ are read against classical Trinitarian distinctions of persons.

Oneness theology plus Jesus-name baptism.

Scripture gives no clear pre- Parousia termination of prophecy, tongues, healing, and related gifts.

Charismatic gifts are expected throughout the Church age.

Sign and revelatory gifts are closely associated with foundational apostolic ministry.

Prophecy and tongues are not expected as ordinary continuing gifts.

Pentecostal-style charisms can flourish within Catholic sacramental and ecclesial life.

Tongues, prophecy, and healing alongside Catholic sacramentalism.

Jesus' "already/not yet" Kingdom provides a framework for healing, prophecy, and spiritual gifts without classical Pentecostal initial-evidence theology.

"Power evangelism" and expectation of Kingdom signs.

End-time Church restoration includes renewed charismatic ministries and greater maturity.

Restoration of apostles, prophets, and powerful gifts.

Christ is especially presented as Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, and Coming King.

Fourfold framework for ministry and proclamation.

Believing and speaking God's promises are given unusually strong operative significance.

Strong emphasis on confession, faith, and receiving promises.

Material blessing texts are applied broadly to believers' financial and physical welfare.

Expectation that faith/giving is normally associated with prosperity.

Prayer and anointing for bodily healing are treated as ordinary ministries of the Church.

Organized healing prayer and expectation of supernatural recovery.

Christ's redemptive work is understood as providing bodily healing in a particularly direct way.

Strong expectation that healing belongs to Christ's atoning provision.

Casting out demons is treated as an ordinary and substantial part of Christian ministry.

Formal deliverance ministries.

Demonic powers and spiritual conflict form a prominent lens for Christian struggle.

Spiritual-warfare prayer and discernment.

"They shall take up serpents" is treated as a continuing literal sign accompanying believers.

Literal handling of venomous snakes and sometimes other Mark 16 signs.

God can purify the believer's heart in a distinct work of entire sanctification while growth continues afterward.

Strong doctrine of perfect love and heart holiness.

Sanctification is strongly framed through surrender, union with Christ, and trusting appropriation.

Emphasis on yieldedness and victorious Christian living.

God's redemptive dealings possess strong covenantal unity across the Testaments.

One covenant-of-grace people expressed under different administrations.

The Mosaic covenant as covenant has ended; Christians live under the law of Christ.

Greater discontinuity with Mosaic law than classic covenant theology.

Biblical covenants progressively culminate typologically in Christ.

A middle position between classic covenant theology and dispensationalism.

Israel and the Church remain distinguishable within God's unfolding purposes.

Future national role for Israel and distinct dispensations.

Kingdom promises are already inaugurated in Christ while future fulfillment for Israel remains.

More continuity between Israel and Church than classic dispensationalism.

Paul's distinctive apostleship and revelation govern the present Body of Christ; the Body is often placed with Paul's ministry rather than Acts 2.

Gospels and early Acts are especially associated with Israel's Kingdom program; Pauline letters receive exceptional direct applicability.

The present "mystery" calling is especially associated with Paul's post-Acts prison epistles; even earlier Pauline material may belong to another administration.

Very strong differentiation of the direct dispensational relevance of different NT books.

OT judicial law retains moral relevance unless later revelation modifies it.

Biblical civil law is treated as important for thinking about social order.

Jesus' fulfillment of Torah is not understood as rendering Sabbath, feasts, food practices, and similar commandments irrelevant.

Renewed Torah observance among Gentile believers.

Faith in Messiah does not erase Jewish covenantal identity and vocation.

Jewish believers may continue Jewish calendar, customs, and communal identity.

The revealed Hebrew divine name and/or Hebrew form of Jesus' name receive exceptional importance.

Preferential or exclusive use of forms such as Yahweh/YHWH and Yeshua.

Reunification prophecies concerning Judah and Ephraim are applied to contemporary believing populations.

Some Gentile believers understand themselves as descendants/representatives of lost Israelite tribes.

Seventh-day Sabbath and biblical annual festivals are treated as continuing Christian observances.

Saturday Sabbath and biblical feast keeping.

Sabbath, commandments, and the three angels' messages carry special end-time significance.

Seventh-day Sabbath becomes closely associated with final faithfulness.

The fourth commandment retains literal seventh-day force without the wider Adventist prophetic structure.

Baptist theology combined with Saturday Sabbath.

Sabbath commandment-keeping remains a significant feature of Christian faithfulness.

Sabbatarian restorationist Christianity without all distinctive SDA doctrines.

God's promises to ethnic Israel and Jewish national restoration retain theological significance.

Strong conviction that Israel has a continuing place in God's purposes.

Israel's covenant vocation reaches fulfillment in Christ and his multinational people.

The Church inherits or fulfills Israel's covenantal calling in Christ.

The 2,300-day/year prophecy culminates in 1844 and a final phase of Christ's heavenly sanctuary ministry.

Distinctive sanctuary and investigative-judgment theology.

Christ bodily returns before a future millennial reign.

Premillennialism without necessarily requiring dispensational Israel/Church separation.

Millennium includes concrete future fulfillment of national promises to Israel.

Future earthly Kingdom with distinctive role for Israel.

The millennium symbolically depicts Christ's present/intermediate reign rather than a future political thousand- year era.

One final return, resurrection, judgment, and consummation.

The gospel is expected to achieve extensive historical success before Christ returns.

Long-term expectation of nations being discipled.

The Church is removed before the final tribulation period.

Rapture distinguished temporally from Christ's later public return.

The rapture is placed near the midpoint of a final seven-year period.

Church experiences the first half of the tribulation.

Christians experience Antichrist's persecution but are gathered before the outpouring of divine eschatological wrath.

Distinction between Satanic/Antichrist persecution and God's wrath.

The gathering of believers and Christ's public return form one posttribulation event.

Church remains through the final tribulation.

Much biblical judgment prophecy was fulfilled in first-century events, especially Jerusalem's destruction in AD 70.

Many "end-time" passages receive first-century fulfillment while final resurrection/return remain future.

Virtually all conventional end- time prophecy is interpreted within a first-century fulfillment horizon.

Even resurrection and coming texts receive nontraditional fulfilled interpretations.

Apocalyptic prophecy unfolds across successive centuries of Church and world history.

Revelation is mapped onto a long historical timeline.

Much apocalyptic judgment is assigned to a concentrated period still future.

Future Antichrist, tribulation, and climactic judgments.

Revelation's visions portray recurring spiritual realities of conflict, judgment, and divine victory.

Less emphasis on a one-to-one chronological timetable.

The 2,300 days were read through the day-year principle and calculated to culminate in 1843-44 with Christ's expected return.

Major nineteenth-century Adventist expectation.

Prophetic chronology assigns exceptional significance to 1914 as the beginning of Christ's heavenly Kingdom rule.

Distinctive modern eschatological timetable.

The Father alone is identified as Almighty God, with Jesus subordinate and not the eternal divine Son in the Nicene sense.

Rejection of Nicene Trinitarianism.

The command to abstain from blood is extended beyond food to receiving blood transfusions.

Refusal of specified blood transfusions.

Biblical unitarianism combines with mortalism and a literal future earthly Kingdom.

Rejection of the Trinity and naturally immortal soul; strong future Kingdom emphasis.

"One God, the Father" and Jesus' genuine humanity govern Christology.

Jesus is understood as God's uniquely exalted human Messiah rather than an eternal divine Person.

Jesus' healing ministry receives exceptional interpretive centrality within a distinctive metaphysical understanding of Spirit and matter.

Spiritual healing becomes central to Christian demonstration.

Divine sonship, joint-heir language, and differing "glories" are interpreted through later LDS revelation concerning exaltation and distinct heavenly kingdoms.

A markedly different anthropology and final-state theology from historic Nicene Christianity.

The 144,000 are understood literally as a limited group receiving heavenly life, distinguished from a larger earthly redeemed community.

A two-destiny structure of heavenly rulers and an earthly "great crowd."