What We Stand For
By James A. Garfield*
- We call ourselves Christians, or Disciples of Christ.
- We believe in God the Father.
- We believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, and
our Savior. We regard the divinity of Christ as the fundamental truth of
the Christian system.
- We believe in the Holy Spirit, both as to His agency in conversion
and as indwelling in the heart of the Christian.
- We accept both the Old and the New Testament Scriptures as the
inspired Word of God.
- We believe in the future punishment of the wicked and the future
reward of the righteous.
- We believe that the Deity is a prayer-hearing and prayer-answering
God.
- We observe the institution of the Lord's Supper on the Lord's Day.
To this table we neither invite nor debar; we say it is the Lord's Supper
for all of the Lord's children.
- We plead for the union of God's people on the Bible and the Bible
alone.
- The Christ is our only creed.
- We maintain that all the ordinances should be observed as they were
in the days of the apostles.
* James A. Garfield, 20th president of the United
States, was the last of our nation's "log cabin" presidents.
He is the only
Christian minister to become a US president. Others, i.e., Pres.
Carter, have been well known leaders in their churches, but only
Pres. Garfield was an active minister.
He was also the first person associated with Christian
Churches and Churches of Christ to become a US President. During much
of his life he served as a "lay preacher" in those churches. As
both Rep. Garfield and Pres. Garfield, he was asked many times about
the group of believers with whom he worshiped. This classic
statement was his answer.
He became well-known during the post-Civil War period as a
Congressman who was a "principled reformer." Sadly he was assassinated
in 1881, his very first year as president, by a disgruntled
patronage seeker. Therefore, he never had a chance to get the
Congress to adopt any of his "decency" reforms. One
wonders what the nation lost when he was killed.
Another fascinating fact about the man was his mathematics skill. He developed the
"trapezoid proof" of the Pythagorean Theorem.
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