Christianity is old. There is no new and improved version of it. It is what it started to be. Changing it isn’t a good thing. Let me expand.
Modern and Modernity
Right now as I implement the term “modern” I am using it in the way it is in the word “modernity” or “modernism.” I think modernism is a perversion of something good that occurred, which is the advancement proceeding from the printing and vastly greater distribution of the Bible after 1440. It fulfilled a cultural mandate lost with the domination of Roman Catholicism, “subdue and have dominion.” Feudalism went by the wayside. Quality of life improved.
In Judges in the Old Testament, Israel turned away from God, which resulted in bad consequences both indirect and direct from God. Israel cried out to God. God delivered and Israel then prospered again. Prosperity led back to turning away again, the bad consequences, and the cycle begins again.
The prosperity brought by the printing, distribution, and reading of the Bible brought the modern life. With all the massive new amounts of published material to read, people saw themselves as smarter than they were. They thought they could take that to God, the church, worship, and to the Bible. In essence, “let’s take our superior knowledge and apply it now to the Bible.”
Evidentialism
Modernism included evidentialism. Something isn’t true without exposure to man’s reason and evidence. No, the Bible stands on its own. It is self-evident truth, higher than reason and evidence, at the same time not contradicting reason or evidence.
Modern textual criticism arose out of modernism. The prosperity from the fulfillment of the cultural mandate proceeding from publication and distribution of scripture brought this proud intellectualism. Like in the days of the Judges, it isn’t even true. It isn’t better.
People have cell phones today, but who right now thinks that we are superior to when men believed the transcendentals? Objective truth, objective goodness, and objective beauty? We have a 60 inch television with a thousand channels, but we lost the greater transcendence. Modernists put the Bible under their scrutiny, undermining its objective nature.
Sincere Milk
The Apostle Peter called the Word of God “the sincere milk,” which is “the pure mother’s milk.” Like James wrote and identical to God, the Word of God is pure with neither “variableness, neither shadow of turning” (James 1:17). This is why true believers of the gospel message of scripture are begotten “with the word of truth” (James 1:18). God inspired His Words and He preserves His Words using His means, His churches.
Modernists came to the Bible to improve it with their humanistic theories. They would say, textual variants prove its corruption. They would restore it to near purity using modernistic means of the modern academy.
The text of true churches, they believed “God . . . by his singular care and providence, kept pure in all ages.” They received that text. The modernist academy came along saying, that text is not the oldest, so not the best. The better text is shorter for ideological reasons. Therefore, everyone has a basis only for relative and proportional confidence, not absolute certainty in the Words of God. Scripture became subject to modern intellectual tinkering.
Proud Intellectualism
Even in an evidential way, the critical text, a product of critical theories, is not superior. It allured the proud intellect of modern academics. It shifted scripture into the laboratory of the university and outside of the God-ordained institution of preservation.
Textual critics cherry pick words and phrases, attacking the text received by the churches, saying, this is found in only one late manuscript. Meanwhile, 99% of their text comes from two manuscripts. A hundred lines of text have no manuscript evidence. They admit themselves educated guessing. They elevate the date of extant manuscripts above all criteria, including scriptural presuppositions.
Call to Consider Former Things
I ask that we reconsider the spoiled or poison fruit of modernity, arising from a corruption of the prosperity of the printing and wide distribution of the Bible. God through Isaiah in 41:21-22 says:
21 Produce your cause, saith the Lord; bring forth your strong reasons, saith the King of Jacob. 22 Let them bring them forth, and shew us what shall happen: let them shew the former things, what they be, that we may consider them, and know the latter end of them; or declare us things for to come.
“Former things” relate to the present and to the future, “the latter end of them.” To understand the present and the future, we need to look to the past. When did we go off the rails into modernism and now postmodernism? I call on churches to turn back the clock to former things in a former time. See the cycle of the Judges, repent and cry out to God. Like James wrote later in chapter one (verse 21):
Wherefore lay apart all filthiness and superfluity of naughtiness, and receive with meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save your souls.
Sincere doesnt mean pure, it means honest or like genuine. Dictionary says free of dissimulation
Sincere milk” is speaking of the honesty and genuineness of Scripture, not its purity Gods word is pure definitely but thats NOT what James 1;17 is saying
Why did you change sincere to pure? Are you changing God’s word
Sorry if I come off mean just trying to understand?
Hello Miguel,
The KJV translators had their meetings or deliberations in Latin and their understanding of the English also related to the Latin. The English language is a Romantic language, proceeding most from the Latin, some from the Greek, obviously the Anglo and Saxon too in their uniqueness. “Sincere” comes from the Latin sincerus, which means clean, pure, or sound. You see this in the Oxford English Dictionary as the understanding of sincere during the KJV translation.
“Sincere milk” needs interpretation, because this is not common language for today, but neither is pure mother’s milk, but the latter helps as a metaphor. You say it’s not related to James 1:17. Maybe you aren’t trying very hard on this. The mother’s milk goes to her baby without any other intervention, no human intervention, straight from mom to baby, unlike other milk. God changes us through revelation, not through our discoveries. With God and His Word there is no variableness or shadow of turning. His Word and God are not relative as is everything else. It comes direct and so undiluted or affected unlike our eyewitness or findings. We can’t trust these lying eyes or that there hasn’t been some kind of intervention in nature. This is why faith is superior to human discovery, because it depends on God.
The sincerity, the purity, is that it comes as one, which is the meaning of the Latin “sin,” one. There is oneness to the nature of God and to His revelation. It is entirely cohesive, non-contradictory, not mixed with any kind of error. I’m sorry that you want to come along and disrespect this to protect, it seems, a kind of Ruckmanism, which doesn’t believe in preservation, nor does it go to the Words that God inspired and preserved. In their translation, they should represent the original, which is what I’m doing, and what the King James translators did. Ironically, I’m not changing God’s Word. You are.
Ok think I understand. I like this I apreciate this answer.. But if sincere meant pure during KJV trnslation did Satan change English or I guess I don’t understand why not chance sincere to pure?? I speak Spanish so it’s kind of close but I dont get Latin. How am I suposed to know Latin and check Oxford Dictionary?
Thank you for ansering my quetsions. I dont believe Ruckmansism I beleve translation should “represent “original hebrew and Greek like you said… I love KJV1611…
Hi Miguel,
I’m sorry if I came too hard on you, but I read your comment in a different way than perhaps you meant it. It read Ruckmanite. I was explaining “sincere,” what it means according to the word from which it was translated.
No problemo no apologies necassary.
I will cross out sincere and Iwill write pure in Philipines 1;10 and I peter 2:2 in my KJB.
Strongs concordance says those are the olny places where sincere is in KJB
Thank you for your help !!
Hello Miguel!
Don’t cross out anything in your Bible. If you want to put a marginal note defining the word in the margin that’s great.
I am curious, I understood “sincere” the same way Miguel did… if English has changed so much that the word sincere today doesnt mean what it meant in 1611, would it be wrong to update the English to a more understandable word like “pure” or would that be changing the word of God? Does this sort of thing happen a lot? How can i be sure I am understanding God’s word correctly?
or actually would it be better to say that modern dictionaries are wrong? I feel like I prefer to question the modern dictionaries definition instead but maybe that is an unreasonable position.
Thank you for your patience with all my questions. I am new to all this.
Hello Elikr,
You will probably need to learn some words, like sanctification, justification, atonement, etc. You can do it if you want. It’s actually not that many words relatively. Many words had and still have multiple meanings and you have to determine those in the context. I explained that sincere in that one verse, mean’s pure mother’s milk, which is not the same thing as sincere today, but I would say there is no English equivalent today. This is where study comes in, and pastors, and a church.
I think Mark Ward has an anonymous account.
Mark has put out a video which mentions your sincere milk referenced here. He was tripped up trying to make it a new false friend. He said it means pure, unadulterated—which it does. However he did not do his homework. If you look it in the modern Dictionary.com, #3 gives the very definition he gave: pure; unmixed; unadulterated. I realize it is most commonly used differently, but he doesn’t get to create his own facts that it only means today what he says it means.
Thanks for the heads-up, Robert. I really don’t mind the word “sincere,” since I believe the meaning is something more than “pure.” I’ve written that in many, many places and Ward didn’t seem to get it, even though I reference it a number of times in various blog posts. 1 Peter 2:2 is a key verse that I use when I explain the Christian worldview. The Greek word for sincere doesn’t mean merely “pure.” The word “pure” was around in 1611 and the King James Translators didn’t use it. I don’t believe, like I said (and he actually quoted), that a modern equivalent exists that gives the actual meaning in the usage for 1 Peter 2. Maybe I’ll write a post on it, that will explain this point more.
I wouldn’t translate it “pure mother’s milk.” That’s an explanation of what Peter is saying. If you translate it “pure,” that’s a false friend too, because that’s not the point of the word. “Dolos” the word in 1 Peter 2:1 is guile. The same word is translated “deceit.” “No guile” and “no deceit” are not the same thing as “pure.” It actually fits sincere better.
This also does not mean that I don’t acknowledge antiquated words, what he calls false friends. I have not used his exact language, but I have acknowledged his point. He couldn’t ever say that I got it right in my explanation, but if I got it wrong, he would have said that. He implied I got something wrong, but never says what it is, because what I said was completely right on that word. I believe he’s actually got it wrong.
Hi Kent,
I made a similar point in a sermon recently concerning the word “chambering” in Romans 13:13. From my studies, it didn’t appear that there was a good modern equivalent (perhaps “cohabitation”, but even that, many people don’t probably know what it means anymore). I’m curious if you would say the same thing about that word.
Thanks!
I agree, Mat.
Kent, thanks. To clarify, I understand that people will read “sincere” and run with what they think it means without looking further, and certainly that plays into Mark’s point. The main thought going on in my head however, when I saw his video, was that he once again did not do his homework (or is being slightly deceptive). He ran immediately to say that sincere means pure or unadulterated, shows some dictionary clip to say it does not mean that today, and, of course, suggests you can’t know anything about it without checking the OED. But modern dictionaries show the definition he used, such as Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com. So it seems to me that he tells the part of the story he wants people to know, and hides the rest.
Like you, I acknowledge that we have to deal with some antiquated words in the King James Bible. I do not call them false friends, unless I am speaking about them in reference to Mark. He actually fudged those two words to make the phrase mean what he wants it to mean. I have not used his exact language, but I have acknowledged his point. He excels in implying someone got something wrong when it fits his purpose to do so. Yes, I think you are right that it is he who actually got it wrong. If we can judge from past experience, he will not admit it.