Competing Bibles and the Fire that Renovates Sin-cursed Creation

            Imagine if you will the implications of a text of Scripture that is not what it claims to be, that is a prevaricating text confronted with the glory of heaven and not at all possessing the transcendent qualities it claims for itself. Not pure, certainly not immutable, and conspicuously not eternal, and not even sure of how long or short it is. What is to become of such a lying monstrosity in the eternal state with the removal of the curse? Only a few limited responses can address the abject failure of such a self-aggrandizing document:

  1. It is burned up with the entirety of the created order and as such in the Scriptures destruction the curse of sin upon in is removed and thus the New Heaven and New Earth exist and heaven remains a holy place because the corrupted scripture is by God’s hand eradicated. Such a conclusion would imply a willing deception on the part of God the Holy Spirit to believe a lie in every way the Bible describes itself in terms of God’s holy words being eternal and immutable. The corrupted Scripture would then be no more, Christ, the Word being alone sufficient in heaven. This also implies that Scripture was in the plan of God a corrupt document that had suffered the ravages of the Fall, was only “good” until the eternal state, and suffered the fate of every other man authored book.
  2. The corrupted scripture requires some kind of divine intervention to redeem the text from its corruption. God Himself would make every correction aligning the text with the autographa as always intended. This “redemption” would be no better that (1) above, except in quantity or degree, but not in quality or substance. Rather than eradicating the whole of the sin cursed document, only the verses and sections that make the text corrupt would be changed by divine choice. This leaves the glorified saint forever knowing again that the Scripture was not what it claimed to be and still the Holy Spirit claimed to guide the believer into all truth when all truth was not present. Additionally, the text would truly be double inspired, first by God in the 1st century and 2nd by God for the eternal state, the wildest of conjectures. This notion also robs the Church of possessing a standard from which to determine sound doctrine defeating the purpose of immediate inspiration.
  3. The Scripture as we have it already exists as an end times document, and as such is “already” a component part of the “not yet” eternal state. That we “already” hold a slice of heaven in our hand that stands apart from the cursed world as God’s Word and is in no need of “redemption” in that Scripture’s self-attesting witness of its transcendent, heavenly qualities are true and manifestly received by the covenant keeper.

Currently there are two traditions of Bible’s vying for recognition as the better text – the TR/KJB and everything else. At least one of these traditions is going to be burned up at the eschaton being unsuited to exist in glory because of its corruption. The other, has by God’s singular care and providence kept pure throughout all ages and is therefore “already” a component part of the “not yet” eternal state. Ask someone who is an advocate of “everything else” if they believe their bible is pure, immutable, and uniquely suited for heaven. If they say no, then you will know that this is the text that is going to burn with the sin cursed world. Then ask the other folks if God has providentially preserved their Bible and kept it pure through all ages understood to be so because of the internal witness of the Holy Spirit by and through the Bible and then you will know you have found a Bible suited and ready for the eschaton.

Theology and Ward’s False Friends

In this video, I discuss the possibility that theological words could be construed as “false friends” under Ward’s definition. As such, it seems all of our Bibles have words in them we think we understand but, in the end, we do not because language changes, and along with it so do the meanings of words, particularly theological words. Ultimately then ought we to hold to a standard definition of words like “God” and “sin” given the possibility of their being “false friends?”

Evangelism, Religious Liberty, and We Almost Got Arrested

Occasionally I go out with a group of students to the campus of Virginia Tech and share the Gospel via Christian apologetics and Christian worldview. Oddly enough we all hold to the KJV and yet here we are doing apologetics. I seem to remember a certain Christian apologist telling me that people who hold the TR and KJV in the way we do are unable to offer persuasive apologetic arguments. Well they seemed to be persuasive enough that someone called the local police on us yesterday, Oct. 4th.

This is our story…

Here is some of the raw footage.

Ad hoc attacks on the Authority of the King James Bible as the Word of God in English and Theological Bomb Throwers

Against the individual academic pretender’s ad hoc disparagement of the AV stands the irrefutable historic truth that the AV has been and continues to be the standard sacred English text for the contemporary covenant keeper. Not every covenant keeper of course because spiritual maturity and intellectual acumen is a perpetual variable in the Church.

So-called “defenders of the faith” act like social democrats, read Mark Ward and comrades, who feel some sense of duty to save the Church of theological ignorance and spiritual maladjustment by disparaging the Bible the saint desires to read. They just want to be left alone without some self-appointed “scholar” telling them what to read. Like Ren and Stimpy’s happy helmet, if you’re not happy enough according to the scholar’s happiness quotient, critics just turn up the happy dial until your life is miserably ruined by the modern textual critic’s notion of “happiness.”

But more than that, every criticism by a wannabe critic stands alone against the united testimony of over 400 years of theological and ecclesiological acknowledgement and use that the King James Bible is the standard sacred text for English speaking people. But still we read about some argument that has never been answered, “so there, take that all you King James Only people. See, I’m right and the entire churchly tradition has lived in gross theological error until I came along and solved the problem for the Church!”

This genre of pathetic argumentation seems to proliferate not from sound scholarship but from those who have an axe to grind because of the spirit King James Bible proponents possess about their Bibles. They love their Bible, they trust their Bible, they assert the authority of their Bible, all attributes foreign to modern version advocates. There is nothing to love about the new versions, everyone knows new versions are untrustworthy and have no authority. It bruises the ego too much to advocate for such feckless documents when confronted with those who cherish their Bible, and so the pretender must take the King James Bible advocate down a notch.

Facebook posts seem to be the favorite platform for throwing theological molotov cocktails – strongly assert some imagined rebuttal and then run for the hills. Standard Sacred text.com would like to offer our platform for all bomb throwers to minimize the geographic distribution of smoke and debris of weak and ineffective attacks upon the King Kames Bible and Textus Receptus. If you have the end all, terminal, eschatological conclusive rebuttal to the defense of a standard sacred text, we invite you to use this platform for the discussion either in writing or video.  

You know what we do here. What ever perspective you take we will dissect it exegetically, theologically, philosophically, historically, and eschatologically to see if you are really the new Luther and the beginning of a neo-Reformation. Just think, John Doe and the neo-Reformation by nailing your 95 thesis on the StandardSacredText.com blog dismantling the 4-plus century long standard sacred text of the English-speaking people. What a name you could make for yourself!

For those who may not know, there is still a standing invitation to Dr. Mark Ward to come on which he has refused to do which may tell you something by analogy about how truly committed theological bomb throwers are to their discipline.

Blessings!

A Normative and Indeed Welcome Response to the Presentation of Academic Papers

Dr. Mark Ward, Dr. Will Ross and Dr. John Meade recently released a joint YouTube video on what Dr. Ward describes as a means to “help me break my two-year silence* on Confessional Bibliology” and “to respond to their recent Reformation Bible Society Conference.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wozfw14b4n8&t=221s

Both Drs. Van Kleeck delivered lectures at the conference. Dr. Van Kleeck, Jr’s lecture was commented on by the men, but it was apparent from their comments that their academic training left them unprepared to evaluate his lecture. Not critiquing every lecture, unsurprisingly, Dr. Ward and guests were critical of what was in their opinion a lack of academic rigor throughout the conference largely in part due to Dr. Ward’s disagreements with the tenets of Confessional Bibliology. The criticism of poor scholarship, however, is the ubiquitous straw man response of unfavorable reviews, and given from a conspicuously pejorative perspective looses it’s cool, balanced, academic luster. Frankly, my first response to this news was elation. In the perpetual work of saying only those things that God has already said about Himself in His Word, all news is good news and that to have Dr. Ross’ and Dr. Meade’s review of the lectures was a good thing. This in turn prompted the writing of the short post below as a note of encouragement and edification.

A normative and indeed welcome response to the presentation of academic papers expresses itself in the critical review of the research by others in the same discipline. This response is normative because only rarely are academic papers ignored without a critical response. No matter how sympathetic or antagonistic the reviewer to the topic, there is always more work to be done, perhaps a better way to say something, and the need to further tighten up the flow of a thesis. And, speaking anecdotally, erudite critics of a paper usually serve the future development of a topic better than do those sympathetic to the proposal.

This normative aspect of academic review can better be recognized as “iron sharpening iron.” The nature of academia is to review papers. Entire journals are given to book reviews and rebuttals of proposed topics. The response is also welcome for several reasons. The first, is that oft times, unfortunately, a critical review of a lecture is taken personally. I say unfortunately first because sometimes a critical review smacks of vitriol no matter how thinly veiled, rather than constructive criticism. After all, the review should bolster a refining work in the writing and research of the presenter. A welcoming spirit enables a balanced, academic, professional focus of a review despite the reviewer’s potentially obtuse trajectory.

Secondly, the review should be welcomed because it is the nature of academia to perform such a service within the discipline. One mark of academic credibility and veracity is a lecture’s peer review. And lest one thinks for a fleeting instance that peer reviews of papers are necessarily favorable and generous to a favorite presenter, there are few papers that escape the ravages of the review. Indeed, if the paper is not thoroughly reviewed, the fault lies with the reviewer which begs the question, “Why was Dr. So and So soft on the presentation.” It is the thought invested by one scholar to dismantle the work of another that makes the entire enterprise so rewarding, because, beloved, there is no end to the cycle of writing and reviewing favorable and unfavorable academic papers. And so, we should all embrace a normative and welcome response, whether favorable or unfavorable, to the presentation of academic papers.

Rather than taking any offense whether real or imagined, my suggestion is to embrace the banter, hold the interlocular’s proverbial feet to an honest appraisal of the lecture, fully expecting that in this realm of academic work like so much of life, the adage “what goes around comes around” is in full force, and that both sides can professionally take what the other side dishes out without crying “foul!”

Blessings!