In the late nineteenth century, so-called bible or theological scholars began conforming their views of origins and Genesis to Darwin. This was the influence of modernism, which changed the basis of epistemology from know by faith to know by human reasoning. One could say that this was the time of the bifurcation of science and faith or science and theology, moving religion to the arts side of the campus. Darwinism had not truly been tested. It was embraced not because of science, but despite it, and professors with a desire to conform and please capitulated. One can read it even in The Fundamentals with some of the authors promoting old earth creationism. The two book approach validated the most foundational of the fundamental.
Now we know how the cell works. We know about DNA. We have looked into the fossil record. We get irreducible complexity. We see that philosophy or even rebellion was the basis of replacing God with naturalism or uniformitarianism. Faith was still the way to know. God still expected men to believe what He said. What He said and wrote to us was and is still the truth.
Since scripture is true and a valid, unimpeachable knowledge, what Peter called the pure mother’s milk or sincere milk and what James referred to as without variableness or shadow of turning, we can and should say there is one truth. The one truth proceeds from one God. God expects us to embrace his own truth, what Jude called “the faith” once delivered unto the saints. The wrenches thrown into the gears or the speed bumps formed on the way from secularism, naturalism, or evidentialism are not to sway or corrupt the church or God’s people. They are to keep receiving God’s Words.
At the time of the first printed editions of the Greek New Testament shortly after the invention of the printing press, godly men believed and promulgated a doctrine of verbal, plenary preservation of scripture. They knew the existence of textual variants. Their view, I believe, is well represented by this statement by Richard Capel:
[W]e have the Copies in both languages [Hebrew and Greek], which Copies vary not from Primitive writings in any matter which may stumble any. This concernes onely the learned, and they know that by consent of all parties, the most learned on all sides among Christians do shake hands in this, that God by his providence hath preserved them uncorrupt. . . . As God committed the Hebrew text of the Old Testament to the Jewes, and did and doth move their hearts to keep it untainted to this day: So I dare lay it on the same God, that he in his providence is so with the Church of the Gentiles, that they have and do preserve the Greek Text uncorrupt, and clear: As for some scrapes by Transcribers, that comes to no more, than to censure a book to be corrupt, because of some scrapes in the printing, and ‘tis certain, that what mistake is in one print, is corrected in another.
Many other statements were made by Christian men, church leaders, through those hundreds of years of printed history, that represent their bibliology and historic Christianity, showing that they believed they possessed in copies the very words of God in the language in which they were written. They took this position from scripture, assuming that God would do and did what He said. What changed?
Premoderns saw and believed truth was transcendent. Truth is known by revelation, bypassing depravity, what I have called the trampling of the crime scene. One can think he knows the truth by evidence, but he must not trust first his lying eyes and second the effects of a sin-cursed world on the evidence he thinks he sees. Darwinism is a sample, a big one. It changed the landscape of man’s thinking, and it was based upon limited observation, where credit was given that was not really earned in an effort toward compatibility with scholarship.
Textual criticism is similar in that it defers to a modernist’s approach, depending on rationalism. Believing God is just not good enough and scripture is not to be depended upon. What is it that textual critics, of a modern so-called science, notice? There are variations in the handwritten copies. They point those out. They do not belie God’s preservation. Divine work is involved, using men, not only in making the copies, but judging the copyist errors.
Scripture reports the expectations, every word. God works in what He says He will do. Textual criticism, the so-called science, is a different epistemology, knowing, albeit not really knowing, in a different way than what God wants men to know or has even ordained them to know. The godly should presuppose what God said He would do and doubt their own observational abilities. If someone doesn’t believe in preservation, no settled text, based on different presuppositions and really a different view of the world, a modern one, he sees an ongoing, never-ending adjustment, tweaking, and never being certain.
A shift occurs from divine to human. Men are still searching, still discovering, applying rationalistic criteria in the way of man-made rules and in the context of unbelieving methods. This. is. what. is. happening. It is not the same thing as what true Christians believed and did. They settled. They possessed God’s Words in their hands, preservation equaled availability.
Erasmus in the 16th century did not invent a preserved text of scripture when he published the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament. That text already existed and was already received by God’s people. Kurt Aland, who has no skin in the doctrine of preservation, says with unpretentious honesty (“The Text of the Church?” in Trinity Journal, Fall, 1987, p.131):
[I]t is undisputed that from the 16th to the 18th century orthodoxy’s doctrine of verbal inspiration assumed this Textus Receptus. It was the only Greek text they knew, and they regarded it as the ‘original text.’
This didn’t start in the 16th century either. Kurt Aland’s wife, Barbara Aland, writes in her book The Text of the New Testament (pp. 6-7):
[T]he Textus Receptus remained the basic text and its authority was regarded as canonical. . . . Every theologian of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (and not just the exegetical scholars) worked from an edition of the Greek text of the New Testament which was regarded as the “revealed text.” This idea of verbal inspiration (i. e., of the literal and inerrant inspiration of the text) which the orthodoxy of both Protestant traditions maintained so vigorously, was applied to the Textus Receptus.
Kurt Aland in his publication, The Text of the Church?, writes: “[T]his Byzantine text was regarded as ‘the text of the church’ . . . from the 4th . . . century.” He also wrote in The Text of the New Testament (p. 11) writes:
We can appreciate better the struggle for freedom from the dominance of the Textus Receptus when we remember that in this period it was regarded even to the last detail the inspired and infallible word of God himself.
I quote the Alands, because again they have nothing to hide. They don’t care what the church believed.
For the premoderns, the doctrine of preservation from scripture guided a presupposition of a perfect text. This corresponded to the nature of God. One God, one doctrine, one scripture. An irony exists among professing evangelical textual critics for a comparison between the doctrines of canonicity and preservation. The Holy Spirit was at work in the acceptance of a perfect number of books, sixty-six, but not for what scripture actually teaches, perfect words.
The deviation from biblical epistemology, knowledge by faith, creates uncertainty. The doubt fuels suspicion of biblical teaching and practice. It can’t buoy against worldly attack and rejection. It diminishes the authority of scripture, which causes faintheartedness and apostasy. Biblical standards of holiness have fallen. They clash with the world and the doubt saps strength to stand for Christian living.
"Erasmus in the 16th century did not invent a preserved text of scripture when he published the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament." That, Pastor Brandenburg, is a vital point. This is what I appreciate about you and the men who contributed to your book on a Biblical theology of verbal preservation. The entire matter is not necessarily about history or manuscript evidence (although neither one is antithetical to the perfect verbal preservation view) as it is about Bibliology, and the Scriptural verses that directly and indirectly point us to believing such a doctrine. In the 1950's Edward Hills defended the MT/TR/KJV yes, but he came at it heavily from a "providential" perspective and ended up with "maximum certainty" against a perfect preservation view. The closest MT/TR/KJV advocate to espouse a Biblical defence of verbal preservation was Donald Brake's contribution in Davis O. Fuller's third volume, Counterfiet or Genuine? Brake's chapter stands the most Biblically oriented in all of Fuller's three vol. treatment. Not sure if Mr. Brake still holds to that position today, though. Just wanted to say amen and thank you for this good article and keeping the priority of the Biblical evidences over the historical ones (though we see no contradictions between the two systems).