In Matthew 19:26, Jesus said,

With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.

“Impossible” translates the Greek word adunatos, which means, “incapable of happening or being done.”  It is a compound word — “a,” meaning, “not,” and “dunatos,” meaning, “able” — hence, “impossible.”

On his blog, canon fodder (excellent blog name for the author and what he does), Michael Kruger (a professor who has dedicated himself almost more than anyone on the subject of the canon of scripture) writes on December 3, 2014:

Although we can acknowledge that absolute certainty about every single variant is unattainable, we can also acknowledge that absolute certainty is not necessary.

Kruger is concluding that man, the church, anyone, everybody, cannot know what God’s Words are, that it is impossible for men to know what God’s Words are anymore.  Has man ever known exactly what God’s Words were, all at once?  Has anyone had a full Bible in his hand that had every Word of God’s Word?  I’m interested in the evangelical answers to these types of questions.  I know they don’t like answering these questions, even being asked them.

No one that I’ve read is rejecting Kruger’s statement.  I haven’t heard anything.  That’s what evangelicals believe.  It is their go-to position.  It is also the position of many fundamentalists, strongly a segment represented by graduates of Bob Jones University, Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary, Central Baptist Theological Seminary, Maranatha Baptist Bible College, and others.  They would consider themselves to be the educated or academic wing of fundamentalism.  They also don’t believe we can know what God’s Words are.

For the sake of being all inclusive, all Ruckmanites, English preservationists, and King James double inspiration folks out there also see the text of scripture to be unattainable.  There isn’t much difference on the doctrine of preservation between these two groups.  The former would hate to be lumped in with the latter, but they just deal with or react to the unattainability of the text of scripture in two different ways.

Many evangelicals, I think including Kruger, believe that we can and do know what the books of the Bible are, that is, we know what the canon of scripture is.  That is not impossible.  That is attainable. What is different between the canon and the text of scripture that makes one attainable and the other unattainable?

What makes the canon attainable is degree of difficulty.  Surmising the exact original text of scripture is unattainable because that is more difficult than deducing the canon of scripture.  To them, our knowing the Words of Scripture is impossible with God, but knowing the books of the Bible are possible.

Christianity is a supernatural outfit.  To be a Christian you have to be a supernatural.  You believe in hell and heaven.  You believe in bodily resurrection, virgin birth, forgiveness of all of someone’s sins, and thousands of prophecies and their fulfillment.  A lot of Christianity is a high degree of difficulty. However, the things that are approved impossible things or unattainable things, that are still to be believed as not impossible and not unattainable, are those things that can’t be inspected.  Speaking of fodder, this is really great fodder for those who would attack Christianity.

Christians believe there is a God and He intervenes in His creation.  You have to believe that to be a Christian.  They believe God is sustaining things on the macro and micro level beyond comprehension.  The sheer complexity of everything argues for God doing the supernatural.  But those things are like what I talked about in the previous paragraph.  There is no direct trace, like a fingerprint or DNA, that says that God is in fact doing them.  We just believe His Word, and that is what faith is like.  Those are acceptable presuppositions, like writing in the sand not being caused by waves — it’s reasonable that God must have done those things.

Enter the perfect preservation of scripture.  And that’s not all, but at least that.  God promised perfect preservation, and there was at least a three or four hundred year period in which most to all Christians believed in perfect preservation.  That is what you read in doctrinal statements.  This is pre-enlightenment.  It is a presuppositional apologetic.  It is an apriori approach.   This way says that the Bible is truth, what we would call objective truth today.  So what it says, goes.

But along came more and more textual variants, more hand copies found, and along came a new epistemology.  How do we know what we know?  Before, it was faith.  Theology was the queen of the sciences.  Not anymore.  Now we know in different ways than those pre-enlightenment forefathers.  Their positions are called today, “less refined.”  Or, “they didn’t have the wealth of textual evidence then that we do now.”  So now, knowing what the Words of God are, is unattainable. And now scripture doesn’t teach the same thing about its preservation that it once did.  Everything changed with degree of difficulty and new DNA.

How would men have known scripture in the first place?  How would anyone be able to check on whether each one of those Words were scripture?   That’s another impossible that just happens to be at a time that no one can prove wrong anymore.

The Mormons say their book of Mormon was written in reformed Egyptian on golden tablets.  There were a handful of men, long dead, they say, who said the book of Mormon was legit.  Why believe that?  There’s no verification.  What verification do we have of scripture being true, of being legitimate?  I’m not asking these questions, because I don’t believe it — just considering degree of difficulty for attainability.  We can’t disprove that scripture was given by inspiration any more.  That’s very convenient for degree of difficulty.  Benjamin Warfield knew that, which is why Richard Muller writes about Warfield (p. 433, Post Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Vol 2):

The case for Scripture as an infallible rule of faith and practice . . . rests on an examination of apographa and does not seek the infinite regress of the lost autographa as a prop for textual infallibility. . . .  Those who claim an errant text, against the orthodox consensus to the contrary, must prove their case. To claim errors in the scribal copies, the apographa, is hardly a proof.  The claim must be proven true of the autographa.  The point made by Hodge and Warfield is a logical trap, a rhetorical flourish, a conundrum designed to confound the critics — who can only prove their case for genuine errancy by recourse to a text they do not (and surely cannot) have.

The degree of difficulty is a basis for rejection for Christians.  For instance, God answers prayers.  So if you pray for a man who lost a limb, to receive a new one, does he get one?  If you pray for a blind man to see, does he see?  No, you don’t pray those prayers.  You pray for someone with the flu or someone with bad headaches, something that is attainable.   That is, in these instances you can’t count on God for the unattainable.  Or is it that God hasn’t promised to answer those prayers?

Yet, God has promised to keep His Words for every generation of His people.  That was always attainable for Christians, because they believed God’s promises.  And then the discovery of even more textual variants, especially those between Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, rendered a perfect text of scripture to be unattainable, impossible with God.

Faith believes the impossible, the unattainable.  That’s part of what it means to be a Christian. Christians believe what is impossible, as long as God says it.

Historiography as it stands today refers to the methodology used by historians to decide history.  It covers the approach a historian will use for judging what happened in the past.  This is important to Bible doctrine, because there is a history to Bible doctrine, and to the text of scripture, because there is a history to the transmission of the scriptural text.  Very often, if not always, one’s historiography will either determine or at least alter what he thinks the Bible is teaching and even what the Bible is.

One view of history might discount or even ignore divine intervention in history, assume that cannot happen or that the divine should be excluded from consideration for the sake of a true history.  That approach would separate the miraculous from the historical record.  Everything in history must be explained with some type of human reasoning.  Modern historiography especially disputes the historical reliability of the New Testament with its philosophies of history.

Early contrasting philosophies in history are seen in the methods of Herodotus and Thucydides. Herodotus was a Greek historian, who wrote The Histories, and though he overall emphasized the actions and characters of men, he also attributed an important role to the divine in the determination of historical events.  On the other hand, Thucydides, also a Greek historian, who wrote The ‎History of the Peloponnesian War, largely eliminated divine causality in his account of the war between Athens and Sparta, his rationalism setting a precedent for subsequent Western historical writings.

I believe there is a biblical approach to history found in Isaiah 40-48 in which God interconnects the past with the present and the future.  The sovereignty and eternality of God relate the present with the past and the future.  Since man is made in the image of God and knows God, He should relate everything to God and to God’s revelation.  God expects mankind to see His hand in history.  This is an argument made for the second coming in 2 Peter 1 and 3.  The Word of God records direct divine intervention in history and should be trusted.  We have an authority for our philosophy of history, for our method of deciding history.

Modern academic study of historiography was pioneered in 19th-century German universities and especially at the University of Berlin with Leopold von Ranke and then Johann Gustav Droysen, the former considered the founder of modern source-based history.  In her Essential Historiography Reader (p 68), Caroline Hoefferle says “Ranke was probably the most important historian to shape historical profession as it emerged in Europe and the United States in the late 19th century.” American Historian, H. B. Adams, asserted that Ranke was “determined to hold strictly to the facts of history, to preach no sermon, to point no moral, to adorn no tale, but to tell the simple historic truth.”

Droysen followed Ranke at Berlin.  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, among other places, ties the two together as such:

Like Ranke, Droysen is interested in the methodology of the historical sciences. Trying to break free from the idealistic tradition to which Ranke still adhered, Droysen makes the case for a theory of history that, like the methodology of the natural sciences, has less to do with the object of study (history or nature) than with the manner in which the study is carried out. The natural sciences uncover universal natural laws.

On behalf of the Schiller Institute, Helga LaRouche wrote The American Roots of Germany’s Industrial Revolution, and said:

At German universities, research and learning were unified, and more and more Americans came to Germany to study. At the end of the 19th Century, there was not a single professor in America who had not either studied in Germany or was the student of somebody who had. . . .  Americans appreciated the Germans for their aptitude for great, methodical thought, and that they valued the search for truth for its own sake.

William Whitsitt became a historian and then president at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.  He had attended German graduate school.  The History of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary says:

His study of history in Germany rather predisposed him to view himself as a scientist and to view history as governed by natural laws.

It records Whitsitt as saying, “I was profoundly impressed by the lectures and methods of Johann Gustav Droysen, Professor of History at the University of Berlin.  In particular I gave a great amount of study to the work of Droysen, entitled Grundriss Der Historik, and have often taken time to review it while I occupied the chair of ecclesiastical history in the theological seminary.”

In The German Roots of Nineteenth-Century American Theology,  Annette G. Aubert, writes (p. 28):

In light of the great migration of American students to German universities in the nineteenth century, American scholars in the humanities became indebted to German scholarship in terms of both method and substance. . . . Between nine thousand and ten thousand American students attended German universities from 1815 to 1914. . . . The first American students studying in Germany tended to favor Halle and Gottingen, but the University of Berlin eventually became the preferred institution. Among the students who studied at German theological universities were  . . . Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, to name a few.

The University of Berlin was the hotbed of scientific historiography, really a modernistic method of history.  This was the influence on both Whitsitt and Warfield.   Warfield wrote (Studies in Theology, p. 580, Vol. IX in Works):

I am free to say, for myself, that I do not think that there is any general statement in the Bible or any part of the account of creation, either as given in Genesis 1 and 2 or elsewhere alluded to, that need be opposed to evolution. The sole passage which appears to bar the way is the very detailed account of the creation of Eve. It is possible that this may be held to be a miracle (as Dr. Woodrow holds), or else that the narrative may be held to be partial and taken like the very partial descriptions of the formation of the individual in Job and the Psalms, that is, it teaches only the general fact that Eve came of Adam’s flesh and bone.

Scripture says the gates of Hell will not prevail against the Lord’s church.  Whitsitt says a scientific method of history won’t allow that.  Based on history, the gates of Hell did prevail.  Scripture says God would preserve every Word of Scripture.  A scientific approach to the text of scripture says “no” to Warfield.  These are just two of many doctrines changed through a modernist historiography hatched out of 19th century Germany.  Doctrine should not proceed from a scientific method of history.

The Apostle Paul in two of the pastoral epistles lists qualifications for the office of the pastor of a church.  In 1 Timothy 3:2-7, in the form of a list, they are

blameless
the husband of one wife
vigilant
sober
of good behaviour
given to hospitality
apt to teach
not given to wine
no striker
not greedy of filthy lucre
patient
not a brawler
not covetous
one that ruleth well his own house
having his children in subjection with all gravity
not a novice
have a good report of them which are without

blameless
the husband of one wife
having faithful children not accused of riot or unruly
not selfwilled
not soon angry
not given to wine
no striker
not given to filthy lucre
lover of hospitality
lover of good men
sober
just
holy
temperate
holding fast the faithful word as he hath been taught

But against one already in office a bare report is not to be received; there must be an accusation supported by two or three witnesses, to eject him from office, or bring him under censure.

But before a minister can be justly deposed from office, there must be deduced full and indubitable evidence of his disqualification.

Recently I’ve taken up the cause of the preservation of Scripture, mainly in view of an edition of Frontline magazine, which has an article by David Shumate, entitled: “The Doctrine of Preservation: The Need of the Hour in the Bible Version Debate.”  John Vaughn referenced this same statement, “the doctrine of preservation is ‘the need of the hour in the Bible-version debate.'”  He refers to our book, Thou Shalt Keep Them, in his article.

In so many posts through the years, I’ve repeated the point that this doctrine of perfect preservation that we teach is the biblical and historical doctrine.  I’ve mentioned that Dan Wallace agreed with this.  I’ve mentioned that presentation of renowned historian, Richard A. Muller, and his Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. 2: Holy Scripture : The Cognitive Foundation of Theology. The position we take is the one found in John Owen and Francis Turretin and the Westminster Confession of Faith and the London Baptist Confession of Faith, and more.  Nothing else was taught as a position.  There was not a debate on this fact.

Men know that it wasn’t until we get Benjamin Warfield, reading a new position into the WCF, that we get the modern position.  It’s brand new.  Warfield had his reasons for inventing it.  It should be admitted that he did this.  Admit it.

Of course, I know why men don’t admit it.  Dan Wallace does though.  And again, we’re talking about the doctrinal position on preservation.  This is what Christians believe.  Was there a total apostasy on the correct doctrine?  This really needs to be established if we’re going to go with a new doctrine and it should be developed by the theologians.  Where are the developed doctrinal statements with the new position?  And if not, why not?

Sometimes you hear evangelicals say that fundamentalists define themselves by the doctrine of separation, when they should be delineating themselves by the gospel. Again, the reference for this that I most often hear is 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, which starts, “For I delivered unto you first of all,” which the New American Standard Version (NASV) translates, “For I delivered to you as of first importance,” a translation that they use to buttress their point.

Later in the same chapter in verse 33, Paul writes, “Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners,” which NASV translates, “Do not be deceived:  Bad company corrupts good morals.” The reason Paul gives for the doctrine of the bodily resurrection, so foundational to the gospel, being corrupted, was because of evil communications or bad company.  You have to separate from people for the gospel to be preserved.  If you love true doctrine, you have to do something about false doctrine and those who teach it.  If you don’t do anything more than talk about the false doctrine, you are not loving the true doctrine.  You have to separate from it.

If separation really was popular, there sure isn’t very much of it.  I don’t see it in evangelicalism. They don’t write about it, except to mock it.  Most of the attention is paid to what evangelicals call “unity,” which isn’t biblical unity, so it isn’t unity.  It’s the kind of unity you see at a family reunion, where everyone agrees to keep the conversation on a few non-offensive subjects.  There is far more talk about unity and emphasis on unity, very little to none on separation.  So I talk about separation again, a word that you rarely hear in evangelicalism, except to ridicule.

In one very important sense, the gospel is separation.  Jesus separates you from sin, and that is not just at the moment of justification, but in the ongoing sanctification that proceeds from justification. Noah and his family were saved by separating them.  The wheat and the tares will be separated.  2 Corinthians 6:14-7:1 say that those who are not separate are not God the Father’s sons and daughters. In the end, salvation is separation of the spiritually dead into Hell and the alive into Heaven.  The church is a place of separation, and that is the community of the gospel.  The Bible separates error from truth, darkness from light, wrong from right, and the profane or common from the holy.  You don’t have a gospel that doesn’t include separation in it or with it.  Since God separates, we will separate.  You will know that you are saved, because you will do that.

In a recent communication, John Piper, prominent evangelical was asked, “Do You Regret Partnering with Mark Driscoll?”  You can read that Piper wrote, “John Piper has no regret for befriending Mark Driscoll,” which is not answering the question.  It is not a good statement, but Piper is not a separatist.  He’s being expected by conservative evangelicals to what?  To separate?  Where would he get instruction for doing that or how to do that?  Evangelicals don’t separate.  They don’t talk about separating.  I think we should assume that “partnering” is “fellowshiping.”  If you were to “regret partnering” with another church in ministry, how would you avoid that regret?  By separating.  And for what reason?  Where is this line of separation to be drawn?

At the Strange Fire Conference this year, a panel including John MacArthur and Phil Johnson were asked to comment on statements John Piper made about speaking in tongues.  John MacArhur said (from 46:15 to 48:54):

With someone like John Piper, that is a complete anomaly. That is just so . . . off everything else about him. . . .  It’s not that he speaks in tongues, it’s not that he prophesies, he’s admitted that. It’s just that there is this anomaly in his mind that is open to that. That’s the way he’s always stated that, that he’s open to that, he’s open to that. He’s even made statements like, ‘I don’t know, I’m not sure, I don’t know exactly what to think about all of this.’ That’s a far cry from the propagation side of it and so I look at this with him and even with Wayne Grudem who has made such immense contributions in so many ways, as an anomaly, and I don’t know, and I don’t need to know, where the impulse for this comes from, where the influence comes from. Sometimes it comes from family, sometimes it comes from a spouse, you know we see that, we understand that, I don’t know where these influences come from. But I do know the great body of work that John Piper has done is true to the faith. And John is a friend whom I not only admire but whom I love. And I don’t know why on this front he has that open idea but it is . . . it is not an advocacy position for the movement and he would and he would join us in decrying the excesses of that movement for sure and even the theology of it. So I think if we start shutting everybody down who has got one thing they are not clear on or . . .  you know, we’re going to really find ourselves alone and uh, that’s going too far. I have no fear that John would ever tamper with anything that is essential to the Christian faith, starting from theology proper all the way through to the return of the Lord Jesus Christ, he’s going to be faithful to the word of God as he understands it in a historical sense. Uh, how to explain anomalies like this. . . .  I think at this point this is where love comes in to embrace faithful men . . . .

This is in answer to Piper’s position on speaking tongues, as seen in this statement (found in a clip played here beginning at 42:22 and ending at 43:44).

But I thought of tongues, and I said I haven’t asked for tongues for a long time.  I just paused, I’m walking back and forth in my living room, Tala is up in her room, Noel is at the gym. And I said, “Lord, I’m still eager to speak in tongues.  Would You give me that gift?”  Now at that point you can try to say banana backwards if you want to.  I used to sit in the car outside church, singing in tongues.  But I knew I wasn’t.  I was just making it up.  And I said this isn’t it.  I know this isn’t it.  But this is what they try to get you to do if you’re in that certain group.  And I just…I did everything to try to open myself to this and the Lord has always said to me, without words, “No.”   No.  But He never just said no, He always said, “John Piper, I have given you a gift, I’ve given you the gift of teaching, of preaching, of shepherding.  You shepherd the prophets.  You shepherd the tongue speakers.  I’m not going to give it to you.”

But I don’t assume that’s His last word, and so every now and then I’m just going to go back to him like a child and say, “A lot of my brothers and sisters have this toy…this gift, can I have it, too?”

I’m only going to comment on this one situation, because I believe it so illustrative.  In other words, this isn’t a full fledged analysis, just a break down of this single instance as an example.

Piper does not separate over strange fire.  Does Piper practice strange fire?  From the content of the Strange Fire conference, yes, he does.  Is strange fire a separating issue?  It was and is to God.  It should be to us.  In an analysis of Piper’s comments, he’s seeking after a sign.  He’s allowing for it and encouraging it.  He’s praying for tongues, asking God to give them to him.  And then he talks about God speaking to him, saying, “The Lord has always said to me.”  The Lord “said” that to Piper.

MacArthur doesn’t separate from Piper.  Why?  He explains.  (1)  It’s an “anomaly.”  (2)  He’s not propagating the false position.  (3)  Direct quote:  “if we start shutting everybody down who has got one thing they are not clear on or . . .  you know, we’re going to really find ourselves alone and uh, that’s going too far.”  (4) Piper does not deny what is essential to the Christian faith.  And, (5)  Love embraces faithful men.  In a sense, this is the MacArthur code on separation and unity.  Earlier, Phil Johnson argues for fellowship with Piper with the example of Samson — Samson was in Hebrews 11 — and he leaves the conclusion up to you on what you are supposed to do with that.

Piper right now is being pummeled directly for not having separated from Driscoll (here and here). Again, how are evangelicals to know how to separate from other evangelicals?  They never talk about what separation is.  They usually mock and attack separation by making it look like separatists mainly are doing 3rd and 4th degree separation and then separating from someone for wearing wire rim glasses and pleated pants.  That’s how they frame it.

Piper is not repentant of the false doctrine.  He doesn’t separate from strange fire.  Should we ask John MacArthur and Phil Johnson, “Do you regret partnering with John Piper?”  Should that question be asked?

Read the MacArthur code on separation above.  Is any of that scriptural?  Any of it?  Where does he glean those five points from the Bible?  To decide what to do, what scripture is he relying on?  I contend that all five of them are horribly wrong.  It is not an anomaly with John Piper.   Then, he does propagate the position — that’s what he was doing with Driscoll and in the interview where he talked about wanting to speak in tongues, except God talked to him.  And then, would MacArthur really be alone if he practiced biblical separation?  Is being alone really going too far?  MacArthur says it is.  What verse do we have for “being alone,” “going too far?”  Jeremiah and Noah were alone. Jesus was often alone.  Paul was sometimes alone.  You don’t determine the truth by how many people are supporting it.  And then fifth, it isn’t love that MacArthur is describing, but mere sentimentalism.  His sentimentalism is what causes him to embrace this person.

What these men should consider is, “What does God say about separation?”  And, “what does God want from me as to separation?”  God wants it, so it does matter.  Not wanting to be alone, is akin to Baruch in Jeremiah 45.  He didn’t want to be alone.  But God told him to stop seeking great things for himself.  Being alone is a form of suffering.  God has called us to go outside the camp.  That’s what it means to be a Christian.  MacArthur confuses that, and it does matter.

I’m happy too where these men embrace the truth, but that doesn’t mean that we should partner with them and their churches.  More than the essentials matter to God, and He wants to separate over more than them.  Neither does he just want us talking about them, instructing about them, warning about them, but also actually separating from them.  You  have a conference about something really bad and then keep fellowshiping with it — that isn’t what God would do.

For more on separation, order and read A Pure Church.