RTS was established to provide serious, realistic training for ministry so that people would be won to Christ and built up in the faith, resulting in healthy, growing churches and a perceptive application of the Bible to all facets of life.
Since the Bible is absolutely and finally authoritative as the inerrant Word of God, it is the basis for the total curriculum. Students are equipped with the necessary skills to understand and teach the Scriptures, developing above all a burning desire to know and do the will of God as revealed in the Old and New Testaments, for the essence of Reformed theology is a willingness constantly to conform all of life to the Word of God. Our primary distinctives are a commitment to historic Reformed theology and the Bible as God’s inerrant Word.
The seminary recognizes that there are evangelical and Reformed brothers and sisters in Christ within various denominations and Christian organizations who hold views concerning doctrine, missions, and evangelism different from its own distinctives. While committed to fulfilling its purpose and distinctives in these areas, the seminary resolves to maintain openness to and appreciation for Christians in differing denominations and organizations in a loving and winsome spirit, thus contributing to the purity and the unity of the Christian community and witness.
RTS is free from denominational control. All who are associated with it, however, are individually under the jurisdiction of the various church courts of the denominations of which they are members. To ensure that the original purpose and doctrinal distinctives of the seminary are maintained, each trustee, senior administrator, and voting faculty member, with solemn awareness of accountability to God in all that he feels, thinks, says, and does, engages in and subscribes to the following Statement of Belief and Covenant:
- There is but one only, the living and true God; and there are three persons in the Godhead, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; and these three are one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory.
- Scripture is the inspired, inerrant Word of God, the final authority, and only infallible rule of faith and practice. As the Word of God written, all Scripture is self-attesting and is verbally inspired by Almighty God, and therefore without error as originally given.
- Reformed theology as set forth in the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms as adopted by the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America as its subordinate standard of doctrine at its first General Assembly in 1789 is founded upon the Word of God, and therefore is to be learned, taught, and proclaimed for the edification of God’s people, the government of the Church, the propagation of the faith, and the evangelization of the world by the power of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.
- I sincerely own and believe the statements above, and I will firmly and constantly adhere unto them, and to the utmost of my power I will assert, maintain, and defend the same.
- NOW THEREFORE, the undersigned, in the presence of God, states and signifies that he consents, agrees, and binds himself to all of the foregoing without any reservation whatsoever, and that he further obligates himself immediately to notify in writing the Provost should a change of any kind take place in his belief and feeling not in accord with this statement. Amen.