Here is a brief portion of a recent interview Dr. Riddle did on Dwayne Green’s podcast where Dr. Riddle clearly and concisely lays out the teaching of providential preservation both from the words of Scripture and from the works of John Owen.

Last Sunday I had the privilege of hearing a sermon from Romans 8:26 with particular emphasis on the term “helpeth”. The pastor began his exegesis by telling a story. He told of a time when he went to a local farmers market, one of his favorites, where the Amish would bring fresh apples and press them then and there to make fresh apple cider. People would gather around the cider press all day watching the work done and waiting for their turn to try some of the delicious results. This of course meant that there needed to be tons of apples.

As the day wore on and the crowd began to clear it was time for the Amish to pack up shop and head home. Just then the pastor was leaving but in leaving he looked back over at the cider press and notice a young man struggling to get the last basket of apples into his buggy. The basket was full and the struggle was real. Tried as he may, the young man could not get the basket to its destination. The pastor hopped out of his truck and went over to help him make the lift. When he finally got close, the pastor notice a potential contributor to the young man’s difficulty. He only had one arm and so could only grasp one handle of the basket full of apples. At that moment the pastor took the other handle and helped put the basket in the buggy.

The translation of “helpeth” in Romans 8:26 comes from the Greek word, συναντιλαμβάνεται which is the union of three Greek words, συν meaning “with”, αντι meaning “against” or “over against”, and λαμβάνω meaning “to take” or “lay hold of”. The pastor stood with the young Amish man but over against him, that is, on the other side of the basket and then took hold of the basket and they together accomplished a goal that the young man simply could not do by himself.

This is a perfect example of the Holy Spirit’s providential preservation spoken of in the Westminster Confession of Faith 1.8. That is, the Holy Spirit has kept and continues to keep His word pure by His singular care and providence. It is impossible for anyone, saint or otherwise, to keep the text of Scripture pure throughout all ages. The Holy Spirit must συναντιλαμβάνεται. He must be with the saint and his words but on the other side of the equation and there take hold of the preserving process and do that which we cannot in and of ourselves.

This of course is very similar if not identical to the sanctification process where it is impossible for the saint to sanctify themselves. It is the Spirit through the word which sanctifies the believer in body and soul, in mind and affect. In short, συναντιλαμβάνεται is a common function of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church. In the context of Romans 8:26 it is the Spirit helping the saint in prayer. Prayer is common to the believer. Sanctification is common to the believer. Preservation is common to the believer.

But you say, “Textual criticism falls under Providential Preservation, just like Warfield says.” Indeed, textual criticism does fall under the providence of God as do the words of false prophets, the Holocaust, and the murder of Jesus Christ on a cross. But such an admission does not somehow make the act of false teaching or the murder of the Son of Glory somehow good or something that we should continue in.

More specifically given the preceding material, was the Holy Spirit aiding the Jews who yelled, Crucify him. Crucify him? In other words, was the Holy Spirit picking up the other side of the murder-Jesus basket? Or was it the Holy Spirit who lifted the other side of the false-prophecy basket? In these cases it seems the answer is, no. Why then should we conclude that the Holy Spirit is helping to lift the text-critical basket that rejects the Church’s Bible and openly calls God’s people to doubt portions of that Bible whether they be the long ending in Mark or that illusive 1-5% of the text today’s scholars can’t settle on? What is it about modern evangelical textual criticism that makes it distinctively Christian? Where are the robust exegetical and theological groundings in support of the way modern evangelical textual scholars treat the Bible year in and year out?

Sure, textual criticism falls under the providence of God but that does not make modern textual criticism a good thing in submission to Christ. The task ye to be accomplished across 150+ years of modern textual criticism is to show that modern textual criticism is a work of Christ’s Kingdom.

As it currently stands, there seems to be little which differentiates modern evangelical textual scholarship from a secular false religion other than the fact that the Bible is the object of their scientific experimentation. Again, such experimentation comes about under the providence of God but that is not same as saying the Holy Spirit is helping that false secular religion to lift that which it cannot.

On this point of providential preservation is where Warfield failed and it is where the modern evangelical textual critics continue that tradition of failure.

In 1976 renowned fiction writer of Jurassic Park fame, Michael Crichton wrote The Eaters of the Dead. Crichton wrote the book on a dare. He had an academic colleague who proposed to teach a class on the “The Great Bores” of literature the first of which he considered to be Beowulf.

Crichton disagreed. He thought Beowulf was a compelling story and the only reason why people thought it was a bore was because it was not presented to them in a way they liked [Doesn’t that sound familiar in the Bible version world?]. That night Crichton began his work on The Eaters of the Dead, a story of twelve Vikings and one outsider who were called upon by a desperate king from the north to deliver he and his kingdom from an unspeakable evil – the Wendols.

Crichton first sought to demythologize Beowulf by seeking out an eyewitness account of ancient Vikings. He recalled such a one from his undergrad work, a 10th century record of an Arab, Ibn Fadlan, who had traveled into Russia and there encountered the Vikings. His work was a record of his experiences with them.

Crichton took Ibn Fadlan’s record, and with little modification made the first three chapters of The Eaters of the Dead. From there Crichton mimicked the style and phrasing of Ibn Fadlan for the remainder of the work, passing it off as a kind of Beowulf 2.0. But in doing do Crichton realized that he had confounded himself. In the third appendix of The Eaters of the Dead he wrote,

“But certainly, the game that the book plays with its factual bases becomes increasingly complex as it goes along, until the text finally seems quite difficult to evaluate. I have a long-standing interest in verisimilitude, and in the cues which make us take something as real or understand it as fiction. But I finally concluded that in Eaters of the Dead, I had played the game too hard. While I was writing, I felt that I was drawing the line between fact and fiction clearly; for example, one cited translator, Per Fraus-Dolus, means in literal Latin “by trickery-deceit.” But within a few years, I could no longer be certain which passages were real, and which were made up; at one point I found myself in a research library trying to locate certain references in my bibliography, and finally concluding, after hours of frustrating effort, that however convincing they appeared, they must be fictitious. I was furious to have wasted my time, but I had only myself to blame.“

I relate this story to make on simple observation. Michael Crichton was unable to ascertain the original of his own work because of prior emendations, fault in memory, compelling evidence, and inability to locate the supposed source. These are the same kinds of conditions and faults which are present to every scribe and modern textual critic. It seems naïve then to conclude that modern textual critics 2000 years removed from the original could accurately and authoritatively identify all of the original words by mere scientific evaluation. The burden for such a task is too great for them and the merely scientific tools for the task, too impotent.

Only the Spirit of God moving through the word of God in the people of God can determine what are and are not the words of God. All other transcendentless attempts to identify the words of God are at best mere suggestion.

It was recommended yesterday by one of our readers that I offer a brief treatment of the interrelation of the following positions: Traditional Text position, Ecclesiastical Text position, Confessional Text position, and the Standard Sacred Text position.

Often when seeing different terms we expect that each term would denote different things. In this case, as I wrote yesterday, I believe these terms mean the same thing though their emphasis falls in different places. In other words, there are differences but the differences are not substantial in the defense of the Scriptures.

In order to show these similarities, Dean Burgon’s The Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels and Theodore Letis’ The Ecclesiastical Text will suffice. We will see in brief that each position held to the TR and the KJV as the standard sacred text given their respective linguistic spheres, but they held to that position for different reasons than the others. Beginning with Burgon and the Traditional Text position, Burgon writes,

“Speaking generally, the Traditional Text of the New Testament Scriptures, equally with the New Testament Canon, rests on the authority of the Church Catholic. ‘Whether we like it, or dislike it’ (remarked a learned writer in the first quarter of the nineteenth century), ‘the present New Testament Canon is neither more nor less than the probat [i.e., to establish the validity of] of the orthodox Christian bishops, and those not only of the first and second, but of the third and fourth, and even subsequent centuries.'”

Burgon, Traditional, 23.

Here Burgon takes “Church Catholic” not to mean Roman Catholic but rather and particularly, to mean the Anglican Church of which Burgon was the Dean of Chichester Cathedral. For Burgon the New Testament Canon rested upon the authority of the Church Catholic and that text was the Textus Receptus and the Authorized Version or the King James Versions being approved by, as Letis points out,

“all the Bishops of the Anglican Church…but it was called ‘authorized’ because James I, the Supreme Governor of the Church, had given this translation his authority and sanction.”

Letis, Ecclesiastical, 175-176.

Burgon clearly held to the TR and KJV or AV as the standard sacred text for the true Church and he did this by leveraging the witnesses of the Church reaching back to the first and second centuries. In his view, the TR and the KJV were the text the true Church had traditionally held to since the inception of the NT Church. And being a High-
Churchman, tradition was not merely local custom. Rather, “tradition” carries with it a divine superintendence of God’s Spirit in God’s people thus leading them to orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

Next let’s turn to the Confessional Text position which is most recently propounded by the likes of Dr. Jeff Riddle from Louisa, VA. Perhaps the modern progenitor of this position though is found in the work of Edward F. Hills in his work, The King James Version Defended aka Text and Time. Letis notes of Hills,

“Hills came to many of the same conclusions as Burgon, but in the place of the high church argument of apostolic succession as a guarantee (perhaps more implicit than explicit in Burgon), he appealed directly to the affirmation of the Presbyterian Westminster Confession of Faith.”

Letis, Ecclesiastical, 183.

So while Hills and Burgon came to many of the same conclusions regarding the TR and KJV; their emphasis on how those conclusion were to be drawn differed. Burgon’s derived his arguments in favor of the TR and KJV from the his Ecclesiology and Pneumatology while Hills and subsequently Riddle derive their arguments from Bibliology and Pneumatology.

For Burgon the Church Hierarchy has authority because the Spirit has preserved that hierarchy and therefore the deliverances of that hierarchy have authority. For Hills and Riddle, God has kept His words pure in all ages through His singular care and providence and that by the Holy Spirit. Still, whether Burgon or Hills, both arrived at the same conclusion: the TR ought to be the standard sacred text undergirding the standard sacred text of the English-speaking Church, the KJV.

Turning now to the Ecclesiastical Text position, remaining in line with Burgon and Hills, Letis turns his attention (his emphasis if you will) on the role of corporations and money in the making of Bibles. To that end, he concludes,

“Pandora’s box has been pried open and the Bible, no longer in the possession of the Church and her specific theological criteria for a religious understanding of the translation task, is now a commodity of the ‘Bible society’ and the Bible landlords of the corporate world.”

Letis, Ecclesiastical, x.

Letis understood that the textual issues facing the Church are more complex than merely an assessment of variant readings. Part of the Church’s problem is that there is lots of money to be made in the making of multitudes of translations and study helps and designer Bibles. In other words the textual issue is an issue of text and an issue of consumerism.

Letis’ goal then was to put the Bible back into the hands of the Church, to make the Bible the possession of the Church again with all her “specific theological criteria for a religious understanding of the translation task.” The starting place for the Church’s repossession of her Bible is to acknowledge the TR and KJV as the Church’s Bible, indeed, to admit that the Church has a Bible.

The Standard Sacred Text is merely the next iteration in the flow of these three positions. We attempt to carry the emphasis of Burgon in that we see the Church as the vehicle through which God preserves and recognizes His words though our emphasis is not as heavy on the authority of the clergy. We carry identical positions with the Confessional Text position in that we argue that the Holy Spirit preserves His word by an act of singular care and providence. Thus when combining these two [Burgon and Hills] you get that regular refrain around here, The Church knows what is and is not the word of God because the Spirit of God speaks through the words of God to the people of God.

Furthermore, we have taken a queue from Letis, recognizing that the Church’s textual issues and the version debate at large are more than a debate about textual variants. There are robust historical, theological, philosophical, exegetical, economic, methodological, ecclesiastical, and educational considerations to take into account when some person or entity endeavors to change the one traditional confessional text of the English-speaking Church which has formed and informed the West for the last 400 years.

Over the weekend I had a couple interesting experiences. On Saturday I spent over 3 hours watching this debate between a real and properly defined KJVO advocate and Nate Cravatt co-host of The Recovering Fundamentalist podcast and MVO advocate.

Observation 1: Cravatt was wholly incapable of appreciating the reality that beliefs can be properly basic and held in a rational and warranted way while at the same time recognizing a bad argument in attempt to demonstrate that properly basic belief.

Observation 2: Anyone who equates the Traditional Text position or the Ecclesiastical Text position or the Confessional Text position or the Standard Sacred Text position to the KJVO position as evidenced in the linked video above is simply and clearly ignorant or maliciously mischaracterizing the above positions. Such attempts to equate our position with KJVO represents a profound lack of charity and academic acumen.

Incidentally, before my readers start sweating the different names of the above positions I would contend that all the position above hold to the same tenets but have particular foci. It is all the same position with different points of emphasis.

Then on Sunday I had the opportunity to observe the baptism of an infant and hear a pastor preach an hour sermon from the ESV. Both practices I disagree with but nevertheless find it interesting and helpful to observe those with whom I disagree.

Having experiencing these two things over the weekend I came to several observations:

Assuming the different versions of the English Bible are close enough [which is a large concession given yesterday’s sermon. His text read “weakness” mine read “infirmity” because they mean the same…riiight???] and that a lost person can be saved out of them, the following still remain significant problems which the CT/MVO position has yet to remotely begin to answer.

1.) The fact is, and Mark Ward’s Which TR totally misses this point, when comparing the KJV and modern versions there are major sections in the other versions which are omitted, bracketed, or openly doubted in the text. We find this behavior both in the printing and asserting of such things to be exegetically and theologically untenable.

2.) The modern versions regularly flatten the metaphorical/analogical language used in the KJV and as such the modern versions are less precise and beautiful.

3.) The multiplicity of English-versions does not comport in any way with the language of the unity of the Church or unity in Christ found in the Scriptures.

4.) It seems to us that the multiplicity of versions is predicated on a love for money. The printing of the Bible and all subsequent commentaries and study helps is good for business. If it is wrong to make merchandise of God’s people (2 Peter 2:3) then it is seems wrong to make merchandise of God’s words.

5.) The current CT/MVO position has rejected its history as grounded in the Church and particularly the Reformation Church as it came out of the superstition of the Middle Ages. In a word, the current CT/MVO position is transient homeless position and is thought to be virtuous for it.

6.) If all the versions are basically the same then a call for one should be hardly controversial. But it is controversial. We are the one’s calling for one and it is the CT/MVO position that insists on the splintering of the text into as many sufficiently reliable versions that content our hearts. This is definition of schismatic.

7.) Our Greek and Hebrew texts differ in multitudes of places. Our foundations are different. If we are off by an inch at the beginning we will be off by a mile at the end.

8.) Our methodology is different. The CT/MVO position has little place for the Church’s input while running their methodology primarily and almost exclusively from academic sectors. Our methodology on the other hand grants the use and means of textual criticism but places its deliverances thereof under the authority of the Holy Spirit moving through His words in His people, the Church.

9.) The current CT/MVO position offers little or no exegetical, theological, or philosophical foundation for why they think themselves good and righteous in treating the Bible the way they do. We on the other hand treat the Bible the way we do because the Bible speaks of itself as one from one God to one Church for one salvation toward one Kingdom. No where in Scripture is the Christian called to doubt the content of Scripture or bracket the content of Scripture and certainly not to omit or add to the content of Scripture.

My point is, even if we admit that the TR and the CT are close in content or the KJV and the modern versions are close in content (which for us are problems in themselves), there still remains a series of other issues which reach far beyond a variant here or there.

Our resistance to the CT/MVO position is not merely textual but also methodological, philosophical, theological, exegetical, apologetic, socio-cultural, ecclesiastical, economic, and historical.

When a CT/MVO advocate claims that “weakness” is the same or close enough to “infirmity” we are not so truncated in our assessment as to merely attend to the textual apparatus. For us such claims could just as easily have methodological, philosophical, theological, exegetical, apologetic, socio-cultural, ecclesiastical, economic, and historical motivators which are neither objective nor right. And while we are at it, in many places we reject the CT/MVO assessment of the textual evidence as well.