Oxford reads and quotes Thou Shalt Keep Them, our book on the biblical theology of the perfect preservation of scripture.  Someone alerted me that The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in America quoted me, and upon review in an unfavorable manner.  Our book appears in the bibliography and a chapter I wrote in particular is supposedly “quoted” — exactly three words.  I’ll get to those.

I am said to be quoted in a chapter by Jason A. Hentschel, the senior pastor of the Wyoming Baptist Church in Wyoming, OH.  As a little tip, if you go to the church website, the most recent sermon came from Dr. Emily Hill.  It is an American Baptist Church.  His chapter, however, is entitled, “The King James Only Movement.”  The first page of the chapter starts with an illustration of a “Reverend Martin Luther Hux” lighting a Revised Standard Version on fire in the bed of his pick up truck in North Carolina.  Almost every possible advocate of the King James Version (KJV) is lumped in with the burning RSV.  Showing his absolute lack of a grasp of the issue, he traces blame to evangelical J. I. Packer.

Hentschel bemoans the underlying presupposition of certainty among the proponents of the KJV or the textus receptus Greek text behind the KJV New Testament.  He says these evangelicals, who support the KJV, must save it from history or escape from history to take their position.  A tell-tale sentence from Hentschel reads:

Of course, we must ask at this point why it is assumed we must have certainty of faith, why we must be certain that what we know to be true is really true.

Overall, whatever his problem with a KJV only position and even what that means to him (because he doesn’t explain it), his real problem is with the idea that professing Christians are either certain of the Bible or they receive certainty from it.  His view of faith is one in which God retains a mystery unfettered by the bounds of a book.  The definition of faith itself depends on uncertainty, so that one’s view of God transmogrifies amoeba-like just out of touch of anything concrete in the imagination.  This isn’t the God of the Bible, which makes the Bible always a problem for one with God as comfortable abstraction.

The “quote of me” comes within the following portion of a paragraph:

For these in the King James Only movement, to chase after ancient texts or to pretend that scholars can piece together lost autographs with any measure of certainty is a fool’s errand, the unmistakable mark of an unbeliever.  As Edward Hills contends, if God has left his word so vulnerable, then the Christian faith and Christian orthodoxy “would always be wavering.”  Or, as another follower put it, there would be nothing left but “despair and doubt.”

Okay.  Hentschel says those last three words are a quote of me from Thou Shalt Keep Them, the chapter titled, “First Century Textual Attack.”  Apparently, I get one less word than his quote of Edward Hills’s, “would always be wavering.”  First, “despair and doubt” are three words on page 150, which is not in my chapter on first century textual attack.  Nope.  It’s in the following chapter by Thomas Corkish, titled “Pure Words of God.”  I apologize to Dr. Corkish for no mention for writing those three words.  I’m sure most people are not going to check the accuracy of his endnotes.  I didn’t write them though.

In the chapter written by Corkish, not by me, Hentschel is quoting from the last sentence of a section of the chapter:

All Christians must take hope in a preserved and infallible Word, or despair and doubt will fill their hearts.

This sentence ends a paragraph that references Psalm 12 and its promise to the poor and needy there.  The words are like a contract. God refers to the surety of His words like He does the surety of His promise to the poor and needy.  If the words are unsure, the contract is, and not anything on which to depend.  In the very passage, God makes the fulfillment of His promise dependent on the surety of the words.

If God’s words cannot be trusted, how can God be trusted?  This is not to say that scripture is bigger than God.  Even if scripture is lesser than the greater, the actual fulfillment of God’s promise, then despair and doubt do proceed from the untrustworthiness of scripture.  This point can be made from the text.  It’s either true or it isn’t.  If it isn’t, isn’t that attributable to God?  God Himself is saying that it is attributable to Him.  He is saying that if we cannot trust His Word, then we cannot trust Him.  Yet, we can trust Him and His Word.

Hentschel doesn’t deal with the point of the quote in its context.  I’ve found this to be normal for all manner of the left, including the theological left.