Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five Part Six
The quotations for this series rate as worth two or three times the gargantuan amount already provided, because they represent what biblical theologians, pastors, and churches thought and believed. Even if men are going to claim those confessions today, they should take them for what these men meant when they wrote what they did. They believed in perfect preservation of scripture and absolute certainty of the preservation of words on the level of their certainty on the inspiration of those words. The men wrote the apographs were identical to the autographs.
It doesn’t matter that this series is not in an academic journal. Qualifying for a journal is not any scriptural end goal. What matters is the truth. Of course all these men from the invention of the printing press to the beginning of the 19th century knew about textual variants, because printed editions of the Textus Receptus varied to a very small degree. This did not change their belief, just like it doesn’t change mine and men like me today. It’s not harder today to believe what they did then. They believed it because the beliefs come from scripture.
I know that men would want to marginalize, disparage, downplay, or diminish the content of the posts in this series in almost any way possible. Easily men would start thinking about how to spin all that they wrote to conform it to their modern or postmodern position. Either that, or just do what it takes to ignore the content here. Don’t read it or look at it — why? Red herrings. Such as: KJVO., Dangerous., and Tone violations in the past. Furthermore, speculation in the following nature: these men didn’t have what men have today and if they did, they wouldn’t take those positions they took then.
The Standard View of Bibliology and then the Doctrinal Change
Standard View of Believers
The doctrine found in Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) 1.8, which asserts that the scriptures were “kept pure in all ages” by God’s “singular care and providence,” was not an isolated conviction. It represented the standard view of bibliology at least from the 15th century to the 19th century. This view essentially holds that God did not just inspire the original autographs (the autopigrapha), but also actively preserved the same or identical text in the copies (the apographa), whether handwritten or printed, to ensure the church always had an authoritative Word.
Doctrinal change always occurs. It is part of history and even an aspect of doctrine. Men change on doctrine. This also reflects in future statements. Scripture lays out proper biblical change. Sanctification is change. The Bible warns against changing from something scriptural to unscriptural based upon naturalistic presuppositions. God’s Word doesn’t welcome that kind of novelty.
Arguments for Doctrinal Change?
All around the Westminster Confession of Faith one can trace back and forward as revealed in the historical writings. On the preservation of scripture, the WCF 1.8 was the gold standard, embraced verbatim. When bibliological statements changed in the 19th century, what precipitated those changes? Did all those previous generations of true believers err in their belief and teachings? If so, what are the exegetical arguments to debunk what they wrote? It reminds me of what God declares and asks in His proposed arguments of Isaiah 41-45.
Isaiah 41:22, “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.”
Isaiah 43:9, “Let all the nations be gathered together, and let the people be assembled: who among them can declare this, and shew us former things? let them bring forth their witnesses, that they may be justified: or let them hear, and say, It is truth.”
Where are the arguments? Bring them forth. Show them that we may consider them. Declare this. And I’m very fine with that. I ask for it. It just doesn’t happen.
Change Detected in the Silence of the New Hampshire Confession of Faith of 1833
A major next doctrinal statement, a first that diverted from what believing leaders wrote for all those centuries, was the New Hampshire Confession of Faith of 1833 (NHCF). They did not repudiate the WCF 1.8 or the other statements that emulated those words. Someone can see a subtle change, however, mainly in its silence. The NHCF was good. It wasn’t what it said, but what it didn’t say. The authors would not repudiate the WCF 1.8 on scripture. No. This is what they wrote:
We believe that the Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired, and is a perfect treasure of heavenly instruction; that it has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth without any mixture of error for its matter; that it reveals the principles by which God will judge us; and therefore is, and shall remain to the end of the world, the true center of Christian union, and the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds, and opinions should be tried.
The NHCF says nothing about the preservation of scripture. What happened?
The Shift, the Change: Modernism, Roman Catholicism, and Naturalistic Presuppositions
Modernism happened. With the turn of the 19th century, the rise of Lower Criticism of scripture began to challenge the idea of a perfectly pure received text. These professing believers, and in some or many cases not believers, did not yet abandon a received text and perfect preservation, but they questioned it. With their silence, they provided space for a different belief without announcing it. If doctrine is to change, that is not how it is to happen. It is not the biblical model, paradigm, or template for godly change.
The shift away from the strict providential preservation view of WCF 1.8 didn’t happen overnight; it was a slow erosion caused by the rising tide of textual criticism. The earliest denials or repudiations arose on two fronts: the Roman Catholic polemicists who used textual variants to undermine Protestants and separatists, and later, academics many times in religious institutions who felt they could no longer defend WCF 1.8 statement because of textual criticism which arose out of naturalistic presuppositions.
Louis Cappel in the 17th Century
Challenges to the biblical and historical doctrine of the providential, perfect preservation of scripture never stopped, because those are of the nature of Satanic attack through history. In the middle of the 17th century, French Protestant scholar Louis Cappel revolutionized biblical studies by applying a rigorously naturalistic lens to the Hebrew Old Testament. He challenged the prevailing dogma of his era, which held that the Masoretic Text was an infallible, divinely preserved replica of the original autographs.
In his work, Critica Sacra, Cappel argued that the Hebrew text was a human product subject to the same transmission errors as any other ancient manuscript. He claimed that the Hebrew vowel points and accents were not divinely inspired but later inventions of the Masoretes. His deconstruction of the antiquity of these points promoted profound doubt regarding the absolute clarity and stability of the traditional text. Cappel also insisted that the consonants themselves had undergone corruption over centuries of copying, so were not preserved. His work was not accepted by churches that claimed biblical authority.
Answer by Buxtorf and Owen
Most notably Johannes Buxtorf II and the Puritan John Owen met Louis Cappel’s naturalism with a robust defense of divine providence and the integrity of the sacred oracles. They argued that if God breathed out the scriptures, His character necessitates the supernatural preservation of every jot and tittle throughout history. Owen specifically contended in The Integrity and Purity of the Hebrew Text that a corrupted source text would render the promise of Sola Scriptura a hollow mockery, as it would subject divine revelation to the fallible whims of human conjecture.
The historical rebuttal emphasized that the Hebrew vowel points, while perhaps codified later, represented an unbroken oral tradition that reached back to the inspired authors themselves. From an exegetical standpoint, defenders pointed to Matthew 5:18 as a divine guarantee that not even the smallest stroke of the Law would pass away until all is fulfilled. They viewed Cappel’s reliance on the Septuagint, a translation, to correct the Hebrew original as a logical absurdity that prioritized a stream over its fountain.
Buxtorf’s Tiberias meticulously argued that the Masoretes were not innovators but faithful guardians who recorded a pre-existing, perfect phonetic system. The rebuttal maintained that God’s “singular care and providence” ensured the Hebrew text remained “pure in all ages.” To suggest otherwise was seen as a “naturalistic infection” that invited total skepticism into the sanctuary of faith. Owen argued that his treating the Hebrew text like profane literature, he stripped the church of its infallible rule of faith. It allowed the uncertainty of the critics to replace the certainty of the Holy Spirit.
The Westminster Assembly (1643–1653) occurred while this debate with Cappel was brewing. The Assembly members specifically phrased 1.8 to safeguard against his conjectures. By suggesting the Hebrew text had corruptions that needed fixing by using an apparent translation, Cappel was repudiating the truth that the apographa were “kept pure” in the way the WCF represented the teaching of scripture and their historical beliefs.
Johann Jakob Wettstein
In the 18th century, the Swiss scholar Johann Jakob Wettstein emerged as the successor to Cappel, pushing textual criticism into even more controversial territory. Wettstein turned the same philosophy as Cappel to the New Testament by amassing lists of variant readings in various New Testament Greek manuscripts. Again, he went about this with a similar naturalistic predisposition similar to Cappel and in sharp contrast to the doctrine of the churches of his era.
Wettstein’s 1751–1752 edition of the Greek New Testament published an apparatus of variants, challenging the Textus Receptus, the Greek text which underlay the many translations then of the Bible. His naturalistic presupposition treated the biblical text as a historical artifact governed by the laws of human error rather than a supernaturally preserved one. He famously argued that the Greek word for “God” in 1 Timothy 3:16 was actually originally “who,” suggesting that scribes turned a description of Christ into an explicit declaration of His deity. The defenders of WCF 1.8 opposed Wettstein as attempting to dismantle the doctrinal foundations of the faith.
While the scholar, Johann Albrecht Bengel, attempted to bridge the gap between criticism and faith, believers of the 18th century rejected the very premise of textual reconstruction. They argued that if the text were unstable or required restoration, then the certainty of faith would be lost. These men held strictly to the WCF 1.8 position: that God had not only inspired the words but had, by a “singular care,” kept the received text of the church free from corruption. Bengel did not stand with WCF 1.8, such as the following men did.
John Gill (1697–1771)
The great Baptist theologian John Gill was perhaps the most formidable opponent of the new critics. He argued that even the smallest vowel points were preserved by God to ensure the certainty of the text. In A Dissertation Concerning the Antiquity of the Hebrew Language, Letters, Vowel Points, and Accents, he wrote:
It is not reasonable to suppose that God, who has made a revelation of his mind and will to men. . . . should leave it in such a precarious manner. . . . that it should be in the power of any, either through carelessness or wickedness, to alter it, or to add to it, or take from it; but that he would, by his singular care and providence, preserve it pure and uncorrupt.
Gill was a premier defender of the Textus Receptus and the Masoretic Text during the height of 18th-century skepticism. He viewed the work of critics like Wettstein as a Satanic attempt to undermine the believer’s certainty. In his Cause of God and Truth, he wrote:
If the New Testament has been corrupted. . . . if there is such a thing as a ‘critical’ uncertainty in the original Greek, then the foundation of our faith is shaken. But we believe that the same Spirit who inspired the writers has, by a singular and extraordinary providence, guided the hands of the copyists, so that the Word remains in the Church today as it was first delivered.
In his A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, Gill wrote:
We have the word of God preserved in the Greek copies we now enjoy. . . and though there are various readings, yet these do not affect any one article of faith or practice. . . . God has so watched over his word, that it is not in the power of men or devils to corrupt it.
Thomas Boston (1676–1732)
Thomas Boston was a fierce defender of the Hebrew text’s integrity. He believed that to admit even a single error in the Masoretic text was to pull the thread that would unravel the entire garment of scripture. In his Tractatus Stigmologicus, Hebraeo-Biblicus, he wrote:
The sovereign authority of the Scriptures of the Old Testament, as the rule of faith and life, depends on the purity of the Hebrew text; which if it were corrupted. . . . the church of God had been in a miserable case. . . . But the providence of God hath sufficiently provided for this, in keeping it pure and uncorrupt.
John Brown of Haddington (1722–1787)
The Scottish John Brown was a staunch defender of the WCF 1.8 position. He argued that God’s sovereignty over history ensured the text’s purity. In his A General History of the Christian Church, he wrote:
The providence of God hath in a most wonderful manner preserved the Scriptures. . . . while other books are lost or corrupted, God has kept these as a precious treasure to the Church. . . . Not one sentence, or essential word, has been lost or changed in the original Hebrew and Greek, but they remain a sure and infallible rule.
In Brown’s The Self-Interpreting Bible, Preface, he wrote:
The Greek New Testament. . . . by the singular care of its Author, is come to our hands untainted. . . . though the copies be numerous, and the variants many, they are of such a nature that they do not obscure one point of religion. This is the providential preservation of the Oracles of God.
Herman Witsius (1636–1708, influential throughout the 18th century)
Witsius provided the theological framework used by many 18th-century believers to rebut naturalistic criticism. He argued that textual variants were peripheral and did not touch the authentical text preserved by God. In his Economy of the Covenants, he wrote:
It is inconsistent with the holiness and the wisdom of God to suffer [permit] that book, which He gave to be the rule of faith and life, to be so corrupted as not to be fit for that purpose. . . . We must believe that the original text has been preserved by God’s singular care.
Augustus Toplady (1740–1778)
The author of “Rock of Ages” was a fierce polemicist who believed that textual criticism without a supernatural presupposition was a “pathway to atheism.” In The Works of Augustus Toplady, we read:
To suppose that the Great Head of the Church would leave His Bride without an infallible and unchanging record of His will is to impeach His love. The Greek text we hold is not the product of human chance, but of Divine preservation; it is the very breath of God kept pure for us.
Abraham Booth (1734–1806)
A key leader among Particular Baptists (2nd London Baptist Confession), Booth argued against the naturalistic trend of the day, insisting that the Spirit’s witness is tied to the preserved Word. in his Paedobaptism Examined, he wrote:
The Bible is not a common book; it is a Divine Revelation. To treat its text as if it were a classic of Rome or Greece, subject to the same decay, is to deny its Divine origin. The purity of the copies is as much a work of God as the inspiration of the originals.
Preservational Logic
One can summarize the preservational logic that these men utilized, as follows:
| The Critic’s Claim (Wettstein) | The Believer’s Rebuttal (Gill/Brown) |
| Manuscripts have many errors. | God’s “singular care” overrides human error. |
| We must “restore” the original. | The original has never been lost to the Church. |
| The text is a historical artifact. | The text is a living, divine instrument. |
| Older manuscripts are more pure. | The received text of the Church is the pure one. |
Believing church leaders of the Wettstein era of the 18th century argued that the certainty of the believer’s soul could not rest upon the shifting sands of a critic’s latest manuscript discovery. Their rebuttal to Wettstein centered on these three pillars:
- The Infallibility of the Author: If the Author is God, the preservation must be perfect.
- The Visibility of the Church: God would not allow His Church to use a corrupted Bible for 1,500 years.
- The Internal Witness of the Spirit: The believer recognizes the voice of God in the received text, which no variant reading can silence.
More to Come