Denver Seminary

2024-2025 Student Handbook 11 Foundational Commitments Mission Denver Seminary prepares men and women to engage the needs of the world with the redemptive power of the Gospel and the life-changing truth of Scripture. Through our educational programs and mentoring process, the Seminary challenges students to grow spiritually, intellectually, and professionally in order to lead God's people in the accomplishment of His mission in the world. Core Commitments Biblical Authority We are people of the Book, believing the Bible to be our final authority for faith and practice. Since our founding, the Seminary has been committed to the inspiration, inerrancy, and authority of the Bible. That commitment remains strong and unyielding; it defines us and shapes us. The Bible forms the basis of our doctrinal statement and the centerpiece of our curriculum. We study the Bible and look to it as our authoritative reference, assessing theories and arguments for congruence with what it affirms. We marvel at its intricacies and revel in its simplicity. We meditate on it and contemplate how profoundly it describes the human condition and God's saving solution for us. We preach and teach the Bible. We sing it, recite it, and constantly find ourselves looking to it for truth that endures while the world around us changes. Vigorous Scholarship We are people of the Truth, committed to seeking truth in all disciplines. We have the courage to ask tough questions and allow the text of Scripture to take us to answers that we may not want to face. Vigorous scholarship is robust and relentless, the kind of scholarship that does not blink when the skeptic questions our faith. Vigorous scholarship does not shrink back and retreat to the comfortable confines of tried and true axioms that the already convinced repeat to one another in order to avoid facing their own doubts. Neither does vigorous scholarship descend into the catacombs of academic irrelevance, "the knowing of more and more about less and less." At Denver Seminary, scholarship means knowing more and more about what matters--the real questions of real people in the real world. Vigorous scholarship is what Dr. Grounds described in 1965 when he wrote of the Seminary, "Here is no unanchored liberalism--freedom to think without commitment. Here is no encrusted dogmatism--commitment without the freedom to think. Here is vibrant evangelicalism--freedom to think within the bounds laid down in Scripture." Charitable Orthodoxy We are people of the Faith, committed to the great core confessions that have defined Christianity for centuries. We cling to these great core truths of the faith for they frame our understanding of God, the world in which we live, and His work in it. Furthermore, we confess these great truths as a way forward for those trapped in the mire of indifference and relativism. Around that common confession and our agreement with the doctrinal statement of the Seminary, we engage in gracious and serious conversations about many different areas of faith and life. At times we may disagree about the interpretation of particular passages, about theological issues of secondary importance, about the

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