Since the early 19th century is there anyone who believes that the MVO position can produce a text to replace the King James Version having proven that the two things that are different cannot be the same axiom makes it impossible to come up with a definitive answer to the believer’s question as to whether the Church is in possession of the words of God? The neutral text failed, the genealogical method failed, the oldest, shortest, most difficult and text that is the source of another reading failed. Reconstructing the original failed leading to accepting the fluidity of the initial text. The science project of evangelical textual criticism over the past 100 years has moved the Church no closer to the original reading of Scripture while constantly disparaging the Received Text. Clearly, the King James Version has no credible contender as the Bible of the believing Church.
Justice Samuel Alito’s draft of the Supreme Court 5-4 decision striking down Roe vs Wade uncovered and highlighted the visceral attachment of pro-death advocates to the killing of babies in the womb. The fact that the 49-year law was egregiously void of Constitutional grounding is irrelevant to the howling mob. By mob, in kinder, gentler terms “mob” could be restated as a “consensus expressed forcefully.” The mob is not motivated by the rule of law but by a heightened emotional attachment to this visceral desire in many cases expressed violently. Note that reason or the rule of law does not ameliorate the emotional high in the least. Indeed, appeal to reason exacerbates the emotion. For the mob, there is no place for reason.
The mob is powerful. If the mob is forceful enough or intimidating enough, the rule of law will be forsaken and what the mob wants will take its authoritative place. And when the mob rules, chaos ensues. When the mob rules two things that are different can be the same, like the MVO. For 400 years the KJV has been the Law of God to the Church and morally an element of civil government to the Nation. Supporting the Law are thousands of pages of Protestant Dogmatics, like legal briefs successfully and eruditely arguing for the credibility of the Law. But a visceral desire to throw off the Law and replace it with the passion of the mob, or a “consensus expressed forcefully” that characterizes this cultural milieu. For the MVOist, what God has said has been replaced with what the evangelical mob approves of.
So pastors and professors, fearful of the mob have remained in their academic domiciles, intimidated by the Academy or Church that will have them fired if they speak against them. Writers and thinkers know not to go cite the Law. The mob is camped on their front lawn waiting to scorn them for their appeal to historic orthodoxy.
We will have to see what kind of impact the mob has on the Justice’s ruling. I suspect it will hold up, but if it doesn’t take notice. If this ruling is reversed, and the rule of law succumbs to the mob, then the mob becomes the law. Alito and the four other Justices were correct in their analysis and application of the Constitution, but their finding will be irrelevant to the saving of the unborn. MVOism is the religious element that feeds cultural mob mentality. MVOism is not exegetically, theologically, philosophically, or historically grounded, but it is viscerally, emotionally, and irrationally maintained as the present measure of Christian orthodoxy. The fact that the root of MVOism perpetually fails is not enough to dissuade the evangelical mob from its passion. For much of Christianity in 2022 the evangelical mob, not Scripture, is the law.
Standard Sacred Text.com 