Faith and Resilience for Evangelism
The dictionary of Oxford Languages says that resilience is “the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.” The American Psychological Association writes: “Resilience is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.” Everyday Health says: “Resilience is the ability to withstand adversity and bounce back from difficult life events.” Psychology Today says: “Resilience is the psychological quality that allows some people to be knocked down by the adversities of life and come back at least as strong as before.”
Evangelism Is Hard
You get it. True evangelism, where someone preaches a true gospel and doesn’t depend on gimmicks or cut corners, is difficult or hard. So much so, most professing Christians do not evangelize.
Right before the Great Commission in Matthew 28:19-20, verse 18 says: “And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.” At least because of the difficulty of evangelizing the lost, Jesus prefaced His command to do it by reminding His followers of how much authority He possessed. “I have all authority to tell you to do anything, especially this difficult thing.”
Evangelism is unlike anything else that you do or will do. It’s not like sales. It shouldn’t be. We’re not selling a product out there. If you are going to sell something, you want it to be something that people want. In general, you can’t earn a living trying to sell things people do not want.
People Don’t Want It
The message of salvation, the gospel, is greater than anything. You can’t find a better “product.” Nonetheless, people don’t want it. You can only offer it. And even that’s not easy, because people very often won’t even give the opportunity.
You want to give the gospel and people say, no. Then you give the gospel, and they say, no. Sometimes, you give the gospel, they say, yes, and then fall away very quickly. Extremely disappointing.
If you are a painter, you get done with your day, and you look at results. You finished room or rooms, maybe a whole house. You get satisfaction or fulfillment out of those results. Same with mowing lawns or a large range of various jobs, almost anything else. Sometimes doing evangelism can feel like digging ditches and filling them. It doesn’t seem like anything is happening.
People Don’t Like It
As a whole, people are not happy even to see you show up, if you are there to evangelize. They put signs on their doors to discourage you. It doesn’t make you more popular.
I went to every door in our neighborhood. I’ve noticed since then that very often people won’t even look at us. They don’t want eye contact. I understand. With my peripheral vision, I look for them to glance my way, so at that very moment, I can wave in a friendly manner. They know I’m doing it so they keep their heads turned away the entire time.
Everything I’ve written so far after the first paragraph undergirds the need for resilience. I have a goal to evangelize every single day if possible. I know how to do it. Good conversations are a norm. I preach the gospel many times. Even with that, a vast number of times I have little to nothing to show for it.
What Provides the Resilience
Yes, the question comes, why do it? Or, why keep doing it? Getting through the hardship of the difficulty in evangelism is the resilience. I want to keep doing it, to keep going back to the well.
The key for me is faith. I believe in what I’m doing. When I say nothing is better than the gospel, that means I believe in the gospel. If I went months with no one receiving Christ, I still believe in how great it is. Heaven rejoices over it. I believe that. My labor is not in vain. I believe that.
I still struggle, but my faith keeps me going. My faith looks up to God. It looks to His Word.
My mind goes to a couple of traditional hymns we sing. In faith I have a resting place. Faith is the victory that overcomes the world.
The Theology of John Wesley and Its Impact on the Methodist and Wesleyan Churches (Part Two)
John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield began their search for the truth within the infrastructure of the Church of England in the early 18th century. John started the formal Christian religious denomination, the Methodists, with a break from the Moravians after having been an ordained Anglican cleric. No one sent him. He operated as a free agent without authority to start what he wanted, maybe listening to a mystical voice-in-his-head. Perhaps he gave up because he thought nothing represented the truth as he saw it. Others have done the same in starting new religions with unique belief and practice.
Holiness
A chief concern for the Wesleys, as seen in their writings and those of others who heard them, was the lack of holiness among those professing Christianity. They expected a more strict lifestyle in accordance with moral law. I understand that assessment. However, what causes this absence of holiness among those who call themselves Christian? Their conclusion was an observable deficiency of discipline, a need of a different method, hence Methodism.
Scripture, however, shows that holiness comes as fruit of the Holy Spirit through true conversion. You can’t whip it up or pull it up by the bootstraps. The Church of England still advocated a false gospel like unto Roman Catholicism from which it proceeded. Unbelief will not produce holy living. The ritual of sacrament and ceremony doesn’t cause holiness.
Nonetheless, the Wesleys wanted more holiness among professing Christians. Under the patch work of disparate theological influences, the Wesleys styled a view of the atonement to generate the greatest personal holiness. They rejected straight judicial, penal substitution with its imputed righteousness for what men now call, “participatory atonement.”
Grace Alone?
Roman Catholicism says grace saves us. Mormonism says grace saves us. Almost every Christian denomination or religion says grace saves us. If you asked the Judaizers in Galatia whether grace saved us, surely they would also answer, “yes.” A unique sect of Christianity could easily say that grace alone saves us. The Wesleys taught that at the moment of the new birth God imparts to someone the power or ability to live holy. This impartation comes through a mystical experience one has in participating with the death of Christ.
John Wesley had a problem with the teaching that imputed righteousness justifies a sinner. He received imputed righteousness, but it pardoned only his past sin. At that point, God imparted righteousness that enabled him to strive for holiness and live a holy life. These good works are required for salvation.
With Methodist or Wesleyan doctrine, someone may receive righteousness by faith, but faith that comes through the experience. The experience includes repentance. In the works of John Wesley, you can read of conversations in 1744 between the Wesleys and a few others to form a catechism of questions and answers. It read:
But must not repentance and works meet for repentance, go before this faith? Without doubt; if by repentance you mean conviction of sin, and by works meet for repentance, obeying God as we can, forgiving our brother, leaving off from evil, doing good, and using his ordinances according to the power we have received.
Baptism and Eternal Security
According to this, a faith that might justify would only do so through works meet for repentance. In addition, concerning baptism John Wesley said:
What are the benefits we receive by baptism, is the next point to be considered. And the first of these is, the washing away the guilt of original sin, by the application of the merits of Christ’s death. . . . . By baptism, we who were “by nature children of wrath” are made the children of God.
The perfectionism of the Wesleys meant that with their view of sin, someone could live a technically sinless life. This theory of participatory atonement required participation. Without it, someone could lose his salvation. In the same catechism referred above, the Wesleys said:
Are works necessary to the continuance of faith? Without doubt, for many forfeit the free gift of God, either by sins of omission or commission. Can faith be lost for want of works? It cannot but through disobedience.
You can find statements where it seems that John Wesley did believe in salvation by grace alone through faith in Jesus Christ alone. Yet, if you can lose salvation, who is doing the saving? Some of what he wrote seems to agree with judicial, penal substitution. All of that you must also see in the context of everything else he wrote and said that contradicts penal substitution. Then today you look at the fruit in Methodist and Wesleyan belief and practice.
The Unholy Fruit
Holiness doesn’t just happen. It comes the way scripture explains that it comes. Holiness won’t occur through a different means than what God says. That proves itself out too. Methodists and Wesleyans might call themselves holiness, but their deficient and skewed beliefs won’t produce true holiness. This manifests itself over a period, where the trajectory of personal living moves away from holiness.
Holiness is an attribute of God. People don’t live holy without God. The holiness people receive comes through true conversion and the atonement of true conversion is penal substitution. Other views of atonement are not true or scriptural and they do not provide for holiness. The failure to live holy comes from not receiving holiness by grace through faith.
The Wesleys taught faith as the threshold of holiness. It opened for someone the opportunity for a process. If that process did not end in perfection, that person was not saved.
Confusion or Clarity?
If you are reading this post and confused about what Wesley believed, join the club. It’s difficult to sort through what he said, perhaps nothing as so plainly muddled as reading a sermon he preached, “The Scripture Way of Salvation.” I found it almost impossible to understand. His teaching made it very difficult to have assurance of salvation. On many different occasions in his lifetime, through letters he expressed extreme doubt, surely because of his convoluted understanding of salvation.
Salvation is clear in the Bible in contrast to salvation of Wesleyan and Methodist teaching. Paul taught grace and works as mutually exclusive. Romans 11:6 says:
And if by grace, then is it no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace. But if it be of works, then it is no more grace: otherwise work is no more work.
One who adds works to grace, like the Wesleys did, “Christ profits [them] nothing” and they become “debtor[s] to do the whole law.” Jesus is clear. Paul is clear. The Wesleys were not and Wesleyan and Methodist belief, teaching, and practice are the fruit of that.
The Theology of John Wesley and Its Impact on the Methodist and Wesleyan Churches
In my thirty-three years of church planting and then pastoring in the San Francisco Bay Area, I never met a converted or saved Methodist. It was just the opposite. They were some of the most liberal, unsaved people I ever met.
I’m not Methodist. Even when I look at the history, I ask from where do the Methodists get their authority. If I ask about the Methodists, then I definitely ask the same of the Wesleyans. They can’t trace their lineage to a true church. They functioned in and from the state church, taking on some of the characteristics of the apostate denomination from which they came.
The Wesleys and Whitefield
The Wesleys arose within the Church of England. They knew something was amiss there. They changed. When I read Wesley, as have others, I see a heap of contradictions though. They never understood nor broke from the corrupt root from which they sprang.
George Whitefield and John Wesley had their break-up. Whitefield studied and went an orthodox biblical direction. He preached a true gospel the basis of the Great Awakening in the American colonies. Wesley took the Methodists a different direction with a different theology than the true salvation preaching of Whitefield. Every way that Wesley countered Whitefield, he headed the wrong way compared to Whitefield.
Now I look at the fruit of what Wesley taught. Mostly today, Methodism went liberal. Whatever errors John Wesley believed, the Methodists took a trajectory then away and then further away from the truth. The perversion in Wesleyan doctrine interrelates in several points of biblical doctrine. Wesley’s unbiblical errors, even though they leave quite a bit of truth in Wesleyan and Methodist belief, they spoil the whole pot or body.
Wesleyan and Methodist Fruit
While I write on Wesleyan and Methodist error today, I’m working in the Midwest United States in Indiana. With their wrong doctrines, they still associate themselves with Christianity. This dominates my present county and surrounding counties where I serve the Lord. It blinds the population. It produces false doctrine and practice.
I tend to think right away that Wesleyans and Methodists are wrong. However, when I listen to some of them, I hear enough truth that it becomes difficult to sort out where they divert from the truth. There are many subtle errors that massed together they become very significant.
John Wesley and Sin
John Wesley taught a convoluted, unscriptural view of sin. In the Works of John Wesley, Volume 12, p. 394, we read that Wesley wrote:
Nothing is sin, strictly speaking, but a voluntary transgression of a known law of God. Therefore, every voluntary breach of the law of love is sin; and nothing else, if we speak properly.
When you read that first sentence, it might sound good. The next one becomes problematic, especially his saying, “and nothing else, if we speak properly.” Sin is more than just a breach of the law of love. He also says, “voluntary breach,” so that a person must give assent, activate his will, for sin to occur. This definition sets Wesley and his followers up for greater problems.
Perfectionism
If sin is this breach of the law of love, it is easy then to see how that a different view of atonement and salvation occurs. By limiting or twisting the definition of sin, according to John Wesley someone could live without sinning, a theology called “perfectionism.” I might call it, “dumbing down sin.” 1 John 3:8 says:
He that committeth sin is of the devil; for the devil sinneth from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil.
Wesley wrote concerning this in Explanatory Notes on the NT (1818) on p. 661:
Whosoever abideth in communion with him, by loving faith, sinneth not – While he so abideth. Whosoever sinneth certainly seeth him not – The loving eye of his soul is not then fixed upon God; neither doth he then experimentally know him – Whatever he did in time past.
Participatory Atonement
Even though Wesley talks an acceptance of substitutionary atonement, he mixes in other various views of atonement that created a doctrinal quagmire. It’s why you hear so much differing and contradictory doctrine from Wesleyans and Methodists. It’s also why they can easily move into theological liberalism. For instance, Wesley communicates what is called “participatory atonement.”
John Wesley did not have a settled theology or doctrine of salvation before he became the head of a major Christian denomination. He was still working it out. He knew something was wrong in the Christianity he observed. Wesley never pinpointed what was wrong with the Church of England to the extent that he provided a separate correction of Anglican soteriology.
This view, participatory atonement, itself blends together various views of atonement. The cross of Christ is the means by which human beings can die with Christ and be reborn in Him. They experience the crucifixion of Christ with him in a mystical way. Many of the Wesley hymns make reference to this view.
The Place of Moral Example
Participatory atonement has strong parallels with the moral example theory of atonement, where Christ’s death on the cross was a kind of exclamation point of a life of love. By dying, Jesus provided a moral example, that if lived, atonement is received. With the Wesleyan participatory atonement, someone by faith subjects himself to the crucifixion that Christ suffered, fulfilling the law of love. God creates new life in the individual who enters solidarity with Christ in the love of His suffering and death.
The idea of dying with Christ sounds right even to someone who believes in penal substitution. However, this participatory atonement is something different than the historical interpretation of Galatians 2:20 (“I am crucified with Christ”). Concerning the defeat of the works of Satan through His death, Wesley wrote: “It is by thus manifesting himself in our hearts that he effectually ‘destroys the works of the devil’.” This mirrors the participatory atonement view. The Wesleys make more reference than other verse in the hymns of their hymnal than they do Galatians 2:20.
Wesley expressed opposition to the view of penal substitution. He saw the imputation of righteousness as a pass for unholy living. Everything is finished, so someone would just rest in that. Wesley had a great concern for the activation of holiness in a person’s life. He expressed a view of atonement that would yield that moral result.
Baptism and the Lord’s Table
Baptism and the Lord’s Table for Wesley become a means of grace by which men experience participatory atonement. In Wesley’s explanation of Romans 6:3, he writes:
In baptism we, through faith, are ingrafted into Christ; and we draw new spiritual life from this new root, through his Spirit, who fashions us like unto him, and particularly with regard to his death and resurrection.
Concerning the Lord’s Table, Charles Wesley wrote this hymn:
O the depth of love divine,
the unfathomable grace!
Who shall say how bread and wine
God into us conveys!
How the bread his flesh imparts,
how the wine transmits his blood,
fills his faithful people’s hearts
with all the life of God!
The Wesleys believed that the real presence of Christ was found in the elements imparting saving grace. Charles Wesley also wrote this:
With solemn faith we offer up,
And spread before thy glorious eyes
That only ground of all our hope,
That all-sufficient sacrifice,
Which brings thy grace on sinners down,
And perfects all our souls in one.
I’m very sure that most of you reading do not sing these Wesley hymns in your services or for worship. Charles wrote them and others like them though.
More To Come
I Don’t Want to Scare You But This Could Scare You
Artificial Intelligence
I was preparing to write about AI (Artificial Intelligence) today, something I started last week, before I even heard about the public interview with Elon Musk. What he said added to what I will write here. In general, I’m following two threads of thought. The first is the potential control of AI or whoever possesses the keys to AI. It relates to eschatology.
Many of you already think about it or thought about it. Maybe you already don’t put very much trust in institutions. I typed “human institutions,” but there isn’t any other kind. Every institution is a human one. How “off the grid” could any one person live and still fulfill his purpose for existence?
Dependence
Would I be wrong to say that something like 99% plus of people today depend on electronic systems? I draw a circle around myself and start working my way out. To start, I’m typing this on a laptop computer connected by WIFI through a router to the internet. As you read this, it started here where I sit and reached you through an amazing pathway at maybe something like the speed of light.
The power grid now depends on massive computers. The decision to bring generators on line or cut off an overloaded portion was not long ago done by people. In congested areas, computers control automobile traffic. Close to 90% use a mobile phone for that communication. These too are powerful computers.
Money
Even if only 40-50 percent of people use mobile banking, me included, all banking is computerized. Like probably all of you, I don’t see my money, if currency is money. Currency isn’t money, when it’s worthless as paper and ink. Some of you reading have gold somewhere, actual physical gold, in what you hope is a safe place. I hope that will work for you if or when everything breaks down. Maybe someone will trade you something you need for the gold you possess.
I hate to say this, but almost all of my money could disappear in less than one second of the time computers started controlling everything. Or, more likely in my opinion, when someone controlling all the computers took control of everything with the computers. I did not earn much in my lifetime, but I did relatively well with stewardship of the small amount. Still, all of that wealth over my entire lifetime could vanquish in one brief moment. How do I or how would I stop it?
Diversification?
The adage, don’t put all your eggs in one basket, I think I follow it. However, I have all of those eggs under the dominion of computers in some fashion. I own property. A computer says I own property. Maybe a piece of paper sits in a file somewhere too, but I’m really not sure on that. When computers take over, can I use a computerized mobile phone to talk to a real person about my ownership of that property?
I was thinking about this subject as it related to college loans. I finished college and graduate school with zero debt. Other people out there have huge money they owe. A few people could in essence push one button and all of that debt disappears. Someone got paid. Instead of the student or his parents paying, everyone shares in the elimination of their debt in a computer. That’s you and me. We’ll pay that modern art professor or critical theory instructor with higher expense for eggs and milk.
How to Prepare?
Much more could be said. What we know from the Bible is that at some future time on earth, a few people will control everything on earth by controlling the power to buy or sell. It’s much easier to see how they can do that. If anything close to that occurs before that future time, like a dress rehearsal, how should I prepare for that?
Programmed to Deceive
This year at Easter time, and I prefer Resurrection time, I prepared a resurrection sermon. In doing so, I read what ChatGPT, an AI, wrote about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. I read this article with eagerness, because I thought that the AI would write without bias. AI would take all the information on the internet and tell the truth. It did not.
As a disclaimer, ChatGPT was relatively objective. It said the resurrection of Christ had historical evidence. However, it called it still a matter of faith, differentiating that from, what we might call, a historical event. That part of the ChatGPT’s assessment others programmed into it. They would not allow ChatGPT to call the resurrection true, just function according to all the information out there.
Present powers don’t want an objective AI presence. They want to program parameters and algorhythms for purposeful misinformation, a bias that supports their view of the world. Scripture indicates that in the future deceit will increase to all time proportions. A few people could easily use a ChatGPT to fool more people than the lies already occurring.
Changes in Personal Belief and the Effects on Relationships (part two)
Very often I tell people that I don’t know if I’m done changing in doctrine and practice. As I get older, I am changing less, but I haven’t found that changing ends. I think I’m done and then I encounter something else or another way I might need to change.
Changes
Other people always want me to change. When I evangelize I encounter others every week who want me to change in my beliefs, and I don’t. When I try to help others change, I cannot in good faith attempt to do that without the willingness to change myself. If I was not willing to change in a discussion of doctrine, I would call that, being closed minded. I expect open mindedness from others who I want to change, so I must be willing too.
In all my years of working for the Lord in and through churches, I have watched many changes on the landscape of churches and religious institutions in the United States. As I grew up, I rarely heard an expository sermon. Then I would attend preaching meetings and hear little exposition. Now I hear exposition for half the sermons at the same conference. I see this as a good change.
I have also seen many bad changes, so many that churches are worse today than ever. The worst changes are not doctrinal so much. They are cultural. The culture of church in the United States changed. It sadly followed the world, the spirit of the age. This then affects the whole country in a very negative way.
Changes in doctrine and practice followed the culture in the United States. Many churches don’t even know they changed. It occurred slowly over a long period of time, like watching a toddler grow up to a teenager. It was slow, but the outcome is very noticeable.
Change and Relationships
Because change can be bad, very bad, sometimes any change, especially if it isn’t a more conservative one, can seem bad. As a parent, maybe you have changed the rules or the code of conduct at home. You gave the children more liberty than they had. You had good intentions for loosening up on the standards. That could look like a change for the worse to some people. In fact, a parent may change his approach to teach discernment, so a way of helping his children.
Very often someone won’t change because of its potential effect on his relationships. Others will criticize him for changing. They may threaten him not to change. He doesn’t want to face that. Almost every change I’ve ever made affected relationships and sometimes in a major way.
When someone takes one position and changes to another, it might look like something is wrong. Why did he change? The truth doesn’t change. He believes and practices the truth. Is he forsaking the truth in some way?
Sanctification
I agree that the truth doesn’t change. It doesn’t. We must change though. It’s part of our sanctification. 2 Corinthians 3:18 says:
But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit.
You can see that Paul uses the controversial “C” word, “changed.” Jesus doesn’t change. You must though.
It is even harder to change something as a leader. Whenever you change as a leader, people you’ve led will question the change.
Knowledge
When a leader changes in an area that he himself taught or preached, so that people followed, it might be very hard for the followers. This is one reason why as a leader you have to be very sure about something you teach or preach. Nonetheless, it can and will happen. You thought you understood fully. You thought you did. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13:12:
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
Belief and practice relates to knowledge, something Paul addresses in 1 Corinthians 12-14 among the spiritual gifts. Even though God gifts in knowledge, a person on this side of glory still sees through a glass darkly. He has knowledge. He still needs more knowledge until his glorification. Not until he sees Jesus face to face will he not need knowledge anymore.
Replay
Mulligan
I haven’t played golf much, but I understand playing golf and hitting some bad shots. It will happen. Among those who play golf as a hobby or for exercise, they understand the idea of a mulligan. Everyone knows you will hit a tee shot into the woods. You tee up another ball and start over. You give yourself a mulligan.
Even if you try to get everything right as a leader, you still need a few mulligans. You see through a glass darkly. You are trying to see through a glass clearly. If you are a preacher, did you ever preach a sermon, and you had to come back and correct something you said? I have. I hate it when I have to do it. Very much, I would rather not do that. I’m always afraid that I’ll lose the trust of the people if I come back to make the correction.
Editorial Process
Readers probably relate to the editorial process. You edit and find mistakes. When you think you have them all, you read again and find more mistakes. You edit. When you think you’ve got that all done and then give the piece to someone else to read, he finds many more mistakes. You publish the piece. Readers find more errors in the published document, something you hate the worst. It’s too late. Corrections must occur now in the next edition.
Some might say that we don’t get any mulligans in real life. I would say, hopefully we do. We all need mulligans in this life. Christians should understand that better than anyone.
Dress Rehearsals
A statement I often use is this: “Life has no dress rehearsals.” At various times of my life, I directed dozens of plays and programs. I’m not promoting drama as an element of worship. We had dress rehearsals for the plays and programs in our school. I am glad we had them.
It’s true that life doesn’t often have a dress rehearsal. Sometimes I thought I believed exactly right. It wasn’t until later that I found that a particular belief came from a tradition and I didn’t know it. I thought I had studied that myself. Once I did study it, I wondered how I defended that position.
Defending Positions
Tradition
Sometimes what will happen is that we have a belief or practice based upon a tradition and we teach it or preach it. At some point someone challenges the belief or practice. Rather than admit that we got that from tradition, we scrape up some arguments to defend the tradition. The tradition, maybe not a scriptural teaching, becomes more entrenched.
I’m not opposing all tradition. Paul uses the word (2 Thess 3:6) in a positive manner. Tradition isn’t enough for keeping the position though. Bad traditions can continue when we defend all traditions.
Inconsistency or Principled?
I’m fine with the word, inconsistent. It closely relates to another good word, principled. I noticed that some of the same people who attacked the January 6 protestors defended the Tennessee capital protestors. The attack was inconsistent. It wasn’t principled.
If we get further information about some position or issue and it merits a change, it is principled to change. It is not inconsistent. Changing might be easier. It could be harder. Whether it is easier or harder to change may not relate to consistency or principle. It relates to the reaction of other people and your future relationships.
Further Information
Let’s say that in the morning, you tell your children they must go to bed at 9pm. You get home at 9:15pm. Your children are still up. You say, “Get to bed.” The oldest child asks, “Can I ask you a question?” You say, “Yes.” He says, “Mom said we could stay up, because school was cancelled for tomorrow.” That’s new information that you didn’t have. You can change. You can think about what you said before, understand that you didn’t have all the information, and you can change your position. It isn’t inconsistent.
Evaluation of Leaders
Paul saw division in the church at Corinth. One major reason for division was bad evaluation of leaders. When leaders think of the evaluation of others, it can affect what they do in either a good or a bad way. I am not saying that they shouldn’t listen. Paul called the leaders, the “ministers of Christ” (1 Corinthians 4:1).
“Ministers” translates the Greek word for “galley slaves.” The galley slaves work together on the oars, moving the ship forward, because they have one master. He calls out the rhythm of the oars. This simplifies the process for them. They’ve got one person to please. The person most important to please as a leader is Christ Himself.
The Hypocrisy and Deceitfulness of the Chief Critical Text Attack on the Received Text of Scripture
The Ross-White Debate produced at least one major and helpful revelation. It showed the hypocrisy and deceitfulness of the chief modern critical text attack on the received text of scripture. I want you to understand this. White called the USB/NA textually superior because the Roman Catholic humanist Erasmus in 1516 had one extant manuscript for one variant in Ephesians 3:9. He said that variant opposed nearly the entire manuscript tradition.
Erasmus, Humanism, and Roman Catholicism
Roman Catholic?
Before I dig into White’s assertion, let’s consider the information about Erasmus, a major part of his and other’s contention. In 1516 Erasmus published a printed edition of the Greek New Testament, essentially the same text used for every translation of the New Testament for any language for hundreds of years. True believers called this their Bible. They broke from and stood against Roman Catholicism because of it, which advocated a Latin text, not an original language one. It also opposed in general the Bible in the hands of the populace.
Erasmus was Roman Catholic in 1516. Who wasn’t Roman Catholic in 1516? Martin Luther still was. John Calvin, albeit a boy, still was. Ulrich Zwingli was. William Tyndale was. No one was Protestant. Erasmus at least conflicted with the Roman Catholic Church when that was rare. The English Reformation didn’t start until 1534. This point should be a laughable one. Almost every historian considers Erasmus a key forerunner of the Reformation.
Humanist?
Erasmus was a humanist, but that is not by a modern definition, where man is the measure of all things. Secular humanists don’t believe in God. Erasmus believed in God. His humanism was a defense of the humanities. This advocated for the study of the classical languages, literature, grammar, rhetoric, and history. Regarding scripture, he promoted the study of the biblical languages, Hebrew and Greek. Part of Erasmus’s humanism was Philosophia Christi, a simple, ethical Christianity without the rituals and superstitions of then Roman Catholicism.
The trajectory of the text of Erasmus moved through then to Stephanus and Beza, becoming the basis of the translations into the common languages: English, German, Spanish, French, and Dutch. Churches received this text and translated from it into their languages. This did not become anything acceptable to Roman Catholicism. They continued embracing the Latin. The Roman Catholic Inquisitions ordered the destruction of Bibles in the vernacular.
What is White doing with his use of humanist and Roman Catholic? I believe he is doing at least two things. One, he is attempting to mute the reality that the titans of the critical text, they’re unbelieving. Modern textual criticism proceeds without theological presuppositions and with solely naturalistic ones. He wants to frame Erasmus into the same category.
Two, White wants to paint an unsavory association of the received text with humanism and Roman Catholicism. He doesn’t want his audience to think of the humanities, but of secular humanism. He doesn’t care that this isn’t the kind of humanist Erasmus was. He’s hoping for the chaos or confusion of the deception. White doesn’t care if Erasmus was Roman Catholic. That doesn’t bother him about Athanasius or Augustine. He knows too about the reality of Erasmus. This is a mere rhetorical tactic.
Extant Manuscript Support for the Received Text or the Critical Text
Majority Text
On many other occasions and in the Ross-White Debate, James White said the received text (TR) was inferior because of lacking textual support. Until Zane Hodges and Arthur Farstad published their “Majority Text” in 1985, many, if not most TR advocates and others, called the TR, the majority text. Men stopped referring to the TR as the majority text because people would think they referred to the Hodges-Farstad publication. Why did men call the TR the majority text and the critical text, the minority text?
The TR is based on the majority of the manuscripts. It is a Byzantine text. A majority of the extant Greek manuscripts of the New Testament come from the area of the Byzantine Empire. The TR agrees 99 percent with a majority of the manuscripts.
Hypocrisy and Deceit
White pointed to one word in Revelation 16:5 having no extant manuscript support. This is his favorite argument against the TR. He says that it is a conjectural emendation of Beza. He points to one word in Ephesians 3:9 having the support of one extant manuscript.
Ross exposed the hypocrisy and deceitfulness of White’s chief argument against the TR and in favor of the USB/NA (critical text). He showed how that in over a hundred places a line of reading in the USB/NA has no (zero) manuscript evidence. White has one example. Ross had over a hundred.
In addition, the entire critical text relies on a minority of the manuscripts, which is why men called that text, the minority text. How could the TR be worse because one percent of it has support in the minority and the critical text does that for its entire text? The USB/NA relies on very few manuscripts. If that’s worse, as seen in White’s attack on the TR, how could he support the USB/NA over the TR?
In every place the USB/NA has no extant manuscript support for its lines of readings (again, over 100), the TR has manuscript support. This should end White’s manuscript argument. Ross pointed this out in the debate in a very clear fashion. White would not recant of his position.
Ad Hominem
Instead, as he almost always does, White used ad hominem argument, attacking Ross personally, and then he tried to confuse the audience about what Ross said. With no evidence, he told the audience this just wasn’t happening. In essence, he said, “Don’t believe Ross, he doesn’t know what he’s doing and what he says really isn’t the truth,” followed by zero proof of that.
By writing this post, I could be associating with someone who is ignorant and a liar. I should be careful. This is what White wants his followers to believe about Ross. Joining me in an association with Ross’s arguments is Jeff Riddle. He and I do not know each other, but he too supported what Ross said.
I didn’t hear or see one person on White’s side, which would be in the thousands, debunk with any proof at all what Ross showed in the debate. Since the debate, I read more of the White technique of slandering his opponent. They focused on how many slides he had and how fast he talked. They said the KJVO position was awful, not understanding that Ross showed in the debate how that according to White, the KJVO position fits a wide spectrum of possible positions.
A Choice
White and others have a choice. They can concede to Ross and those who believe like him, including myself. Or, they can go back to the drawing board to try to get better arguments. I would say, get arguments period. The Ephesians 3:9 and Revelation 16:5 examples do not qualify as an argument from someone who supports readings with zero manuscript support.
The future bodes tough for White and his associates. The situation is not going to change. They have what they have. Nothing new is arriving for them. Personal attack, hypocrisy, and deceit are the best they have.
Changes in Personal Belief and the Effects on Relationships (part one)
Growth and Change
No one comes into this world knowing every doctrine of scripture. For someone to grow in grace and knowledge, he will change in his personal belief. He could go either way, better or worse. A person won’t remain static. Growth requires making good changes and avoiding bad ones.
Like anyone else, I have a story of change in personal belief. I have often told people that I changed on eight to ten biblical doctrines or issues of various significance through the years. No one should change from something right to something wrong. I always believed I was moving from wrong to right, but not everyone agreed with that.
Adding and Subtracting
God says, don’t take away from or add to scripture. Both directions are bad, subtracting and adding. Furthermore, someone doesn’t do better if he takes every doctrine or issue to the most strict or extreme place that he could.
In the Garden of Eden, Eve said the following in Genesis 3:2-3 to the serpent:
We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
God had said the following in Genesis 2:17:
But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
When you read the two statements, you can see that Eve added to what God said. God said nothing about touching the fruit of the tree. Yet, Eve did. She took an even more extreme position than God, which was wrong.
Almost every change I ever made in belief or practice, I moved in a stronger, more strict or conservative direction. Certain other Christians opposed some of those changes. In a most recent change, that developed over a number of years, I loosened in my belief or practice. I see liberty on something where I once saw regulation. Those accustomed to my rightward movement saw this as inconsistent.
Precipitating Change
In every instance I changed, some event precipitated the change. Very often I changed while preaching or teaching a series through a particular book. Sometimes I was faced with a situation that I had never encountered. I had to make a decision.
In all my years of pastoring, that I know, I have never believed and practiced in an identical way with any other church. I know of no Baptist church that is identical to another in its belief and practice. Beliefs and practices might be close to the same, but with slight variation.
Here at this blog, Thomas Ross and I don’t believe or practice exactly the same. We have differences. We’re very close, but not the same. Some of you readers have read our debates here and elsewhere. Nonetheless, we still partner on this blog.
Through the years, our church still fellowshipped with other churches even with the differences we had. It’s usually not easy to clash with another church on doctrinal and practical differences. Even interpretational differences might bring conflict between believers or churches. Almost everyone thinks they’re right.
Reasons for Change and Differences
When I change, why believe or practice different than before? Why do Bible believing and practicing churches still have some differences with each other in doctrine and practice?
Direct Statements, Plain Inferences
Differences in belief and practice start with variated understanding of either direct statements of scripture or of the plain inferences from direct statements in the Bible. Not every teaching of the Bible comes from a direct statement. Some comes from a combination of direct statements and plain inferences. In general I haven’t changed in my adult life on anything in a category of direct statements or plain inferences from scripture.
When I say direct statements and plain inferences, I also say that these proceed from only a grammatical, historical interpretation of scripture. Direct statements and plain inferences come from the actual meaning of the words of scripture in their context. I also consider the laws for the usage of those words, their syntax, and their meaning in their textual and historical context.
I take a stronger position on repentance and Lordship than I did forty years ago. In the past, I never denied that teaching. However, like every other doctrine and practice proceeding from direct statement and plain inference from direct statements, I grew in my grasp and conviction.
A Series of Overlapping Statements and Inferences
Some doctrines and practices proceed from a series of overlapping statements and inferences in the Bible. When you read all of the passages combined, you will come to certain conclusions that are also your beliefs and practices. The nation Israel, one third of its total number of people according to Zechariah, will receive Christ as the Messiah during the seven year tribulation period. Nations will surround her and at this juncture, Israel will repent with a confession such as Isaiah 53. God will save Israel.
I get my belief about the event of the salvation of Israel from conclusions arising from a series of overlapping statements and inferences in scripture. Furthermore, almost every belief and practice, comes from both the interpretation and the application of scripture. Application almost always depends on the reality of certain self-evident truths, assumed by God. God expects us to apply what He said. Man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.
Separating Differences
Many professing believers take what I call, unscriptural positions. Differences occur between believers and churches when one or more veer away from the teaching of the Bible. They might do that for many reasons. Some of them are just personal. An individual believer or a church leader may have a personal issue with someone. People might not like the way someone treated them or others with whom they fellowship.
Differences between churches may not be doctrinal or practical, but personal or political. They fellowship with others with different doctrine or practice, even with the same differences as someone with whom they won’t. Their decisions about relationship relate to hurt feelings or bruised egos. They won’t reconcile, forgive, or seek mediation because of pride. They wait for the other party to initiate reconciliation, and even if it does, they reject reconciliation or mediation. True churches separate, but scripture teaches constructive reasons, not personal or political ones.
More to Come
What In a Salvation Presentation Is the Chief Factor Toward Someone’s Conversion?
The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his Complete Letters (1868-1871) wrote:
If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.
Just know that if you remain with Christ, you also remain with the truth. Jesus said, “I am the truth” (John 14:6). That quote though makes it sound like something other than the truth is the main factor leading to saving faith. Others might echo the sentiment of Dostoyevsky, especially when one considers their methodology.
Three Categories
I will divide into three categories of argument or evidence for or vindication of the gospel message unto salvation. This answers, why should I believe the gospel?
Listening to professing conversion testimonies through my whole life, I heard different reasons for someone receiving the gospel. When I listen to apologists talk alone or in conversations with skeptics, I have heard them give varied reasons people will receive the gospel. People state epistemic, moral, and aesthetic arguments, evidence, or vindication. Thought leaders express these three, ranking them for their impact. People include them in their testimonies or salvation stories.
Epistemic
An epistemic presentation or epistemic preaching gives knowledge or information, makes intellectual arguments, trying to persuade the mind of a skeptic or lost person. This would include exegesis of scripture, using the Bible for elucidation of and authority for truth. It connects everything to history and will even show the compatibility of the scriptural account with history, science, archaeology, everything in the real world.
Moral
A moral presentation or preaching relies on the goodness of someone in the life of the skeptic or lost person. The moral quality of a friend, acquaintance, co-worker, or family member impacts him or her to the degree that they acquiesce to that influence. A person with a wrecked life sees this as the only way out. Maybe he sees it as the path away from drugs, obesity, alcohol or other harmful addictions. Perhaps he witnesses the quality and diligence of the efforts of a co-worker, making a moral impression upon him.
Aesthetic
An aesthetic presentation or preaching relies on the beauty or emotional effects of a personal testimony, a moving story, a fearful threat or warning, or just well-told, expressive anecdotes. It also may be the feeling of community or comradery of a group of individuals, how they get along, show friendship and solidarity, and experience satisfaction in all that.
Compelling Argument
Skeptics
Many skeptics would say that Christianity or the Bible doesn’t present compelling epistemic argument to persuade them. It does not provide enough knowledge to give up their present life to follow Jesus Christ. It is harder to believe that a man rose from the dead than to believe that men lied and said he rose from the dead, when he really didn’t. Even if they don’t possess great reasons for not believing the gospel account, they don’t have enough good ones either.
I heard one skeptic, still a skeptic though, report a frightening dream. He was on an airplane. The plane was crashing and in a semi-conscious state, he prayed to God for deliverance. When he woke up, it shook him. In his heart of hearts, despite his skepticism, he acknowledged the innate instinct or impulse to look to God for salvation.
Dostoyevsky
The profession of Dostoyevsky relates to either a moral or aesthetic urge or compulsion. Online Britannica gives some context to his quote that began this article:
In 1847 Dostoyevsky began to participate in the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of intellectuals who discussed utopian socialism. He eventually joined a related, secret group devoted to revolution and illegal propaganda. It appears that Dostoyevsky did not sympathize (as others did) with egalitarian communism and terrorism but was motivated by his strong disapproval of serfdom. On April 23, 1849, he and the other members of the Petrashevsky Circle were arrested.
Dostoyevsky spent eight months in prison until, on December 22, the prisoners were led without warning to the Semyonovsky Square. There a sentence of death by firing squad was pronounced, last rites were offered, and three prisoners were led out to be shot first. At the last possible moment, the guns were lowered and a messenger arrived with the information that the tsar had deigned to spare their lives. The mock-execution ceremony was in fact part of the punishment. One of the prisoners went permanently insane on the spot; another went on to write Crime and Punishment.
Dostoyevsky passed several minutes in the full conviction that he was about to die, and in his novels characters repeatedly imagine the state of mind of a man approaching execution. The hero of The Idiot, Prince Myshkin, offers several extended descriptions of this sort, which readers knew carried special authority because the author of the novel had gone through the terrible experience. The mock execution led Dostoyevsky to appreciate the very process of life as an incomparable gift and, in contrast to the prevailing determinist and materialist thinking of the intelligentsia, to value freedom, integrity, and individual responsibility all the more strongly.
1 Corinthians 1: Greek External Evidence and Jewish Experiences
I expressed here in other articles that men offer their reasons for not believing for which Paul accounts in 1 Corinthians 1. He says, Greeks seek after wisdom, Jews seek after signs. You could say that Greeks want intellectual arguments, something akin to their arguments in the Greek city states. They want external evidence.
Jews seek after signs. They tended in that day toward wanting further experiential proof. Something needed to move them in a personal way to prove reality. Even after the ten plagues in Egypt, most of the Jews still balked at listening to Moses and following what He said, that God told him to say. Scripture indicates that experience is not a basis of faith.
Faith Comes By Hearing the Word of God
The Bible provides the authority for what men need for salvation. In a simple way, it’s Romans 10:17: “So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” God will use the testimony of others, what they say and do. He might use a bad dream, smiting someone in his inner consciousness. God moves people with overwhelming beauty.
Hebrews 11:6 says that a person requires believing that God is a rewarder. Along these lines, Romans 2:4 says the goodness of God leads someone to repentance. Someone won’t receive Christ unless he thinks he’s better off with Christ as the Captain of his life.
Scripture does more than an epistemic presentation or preaching. It targets the mind, no doubt, but it reaches further than that. It affects the rebellion of a person in His will. Romans 1 says men know God (Rom 1:19). They suppress the truth though (1:18, hold the truth in unrighteousness). Their perverse natures rebel.
I believe scripture indicates in many places that the rebellion relates to human will or pride. People want their own way. They will choose their own way against their own self-interest. Men make choices that doom them, which they make so that they can stay in charge.
The Reach of Scripture
Jesus starts the sermon on the mount with, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matthew 5:3). A person must understand his own spiritual poverty, that he is not the master of his own fate. He can’t even get what he really wants on his own. He doesn’t have anything to get there. That humility doesn’t just occur. God works in a person through His Word.
When Hebrews 4:12 says that the Word of God is powerful to divide soul and spirit, that goes further than the mind. The soul includes emotion and will. God works in an epistemic, moral, and aesthetic way, all three. However, it must start with the mind. Someone must believe the gospel is true. God sanctifies through the truth.
Even with the moving of personal testimony and some stirring of emotions, everyone must receive the truth, which starts with the mind. For a person to believe, he must understand the gospel. More occurs through the gospel than just the intellectual, but that must occur.
Today I see the emotional or experiential calls for salvation as the biggest problem in evangelicalism. Evangelicals think more about what people will like or how they feel. They do not want to tell the whole truth, because people won’t like it. God saves people through the truth, not by leaving out the hard parts. Jesus never did that. Let’s do what Jesus did and then all of His apostles.
Cohesion
Agreement
The moral and the aesthetic must agree with the epistemic, but salvation centers on the epistemic. All the events of the gospel happened. Jesus is Savior. He is Lord. It doesn’t matter how you feel about it.
Moral and aesthetic presentation must cohere with the truth. You cannot separate truth from goodness and beauty. People get their view of God very often if not the most often from the aesthetic. If the aesthetic contradicts the epistemic, someone will get the wrong God. He will imagine a different God than presented by scripture. This keeps him from salvation. Even if he receives this god, it isn’t God.
Effect
A good moral example alone doesn’t save someone, but a bad one can hinder or repel salvation though. This includes a lascivious lifestyle presented as a product of the grace of God. Furthermore, regarding aesthetics, someone gets a wrong understanding of God from false worship music. He associates God with lust and worldliness. The right music doesn’t save, but wrong music, false worship, hinders or repels salvation.
The moral and aesthetic are important, but we must focus on the epistemic. Give the whole plan of salvation. Target the understanding. Don’t attempt to persuade with emotions and experiences. Use your stories to illuminate the truth to persuade in the mind. Scripture and the Holy Spirit will take care of the rest.
Textual Criticism Related to the Bible Bows to Modernity
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.
What About the Accusation of So-Called “Mystical Explanation” or “Omniscience” Against a Perfect Original Language Preservation of Scripture? (Part Two)
The Providence of God
As the church passed down the original language text of the New Testament, men made copyist errors. Preservation occurs through copying and then correcting the errors if they’re made. It didn’t occur through textual criticism, critical literary theories about older and shorter readings.
God insured the perfect preservation of scripture. He promised it. Opponents of this belief mock it as mysticism and requiring human omniscience. No one who believes God’s perfect preservation explains it this way. In part one, I asserted that they depend on Divine providence as biblically and historically understood. Providence isn’t mysticism. I don’t hear providence from the critical text side, but that’s what believers assert.
Internal Testimony of the Holy Spirit
In addition to Divine Providence, true churches or genuine believers point to the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit. This isn’t double inspiration. This is the internal guidance of the Holy Spirit using the various means He does according to scripture. This is an almost identical argument as for canonicity (see chapter 19 in Thou Shalt Keep Them). This isn’t mysticism.
Ephesians 5:18 commands, “Be filled with the Spirit.” A parallel text says (Col 3:16), “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.” Spirit-filling isn’t mysticism. How does it occur that the Holy Spirit controls someone and that shows up as love, joy, peace, etc., the fruit of the Spirit? True churches or genuine believers have never referred to Spirit filling as mystical.
James 1:5 says, “If any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God.” Does God give wisdom? Yes. Is this mystical? Is wisdom imparting omniscience to someone? No and no.
The Apostle Paul says that the things of the Spirit of God are spiritually discerned (1 Corinthians 2:14). God gives something to believers through the indwelling Holy Spirit to discern spiritual things. This is not mysticism. How does it show up? They understand the Word of God. Then they know how to apply scripture in given situations, the Holy Spirit providing insight.
Agreement of the Saints or Unity of the Spirit
Saints of the first century knew the books the Holy Spirit inspired and the ones He didn’t. They copied the ones He inspired. They received those as the Word of God. The saints agreed on what the books and the words were. They copied and distributed them.
The agreement of the saints or of true churches resulted in a multitude of almost identical copies. As history passed the printing press era, they agreed or settled on the text of the Bible. One could and should call the agreement, “the unity of the Spirit” (Ephesians 4:3). What is that?
Every true believers possesses the Holy Spirit in him. He guides, leads, reproves, teaches, etc. The Holy Spirit will not on the inside of a believer lead, guide, or teach in a different way. He won’t contradict Himself. He is One.
The same Holy Spirit, Who inspired the Words of God, knows those Words still. He does not need to reinspire Words. Instead, He can direct His people to the correct one, when a copyist errs. The churches for hundreds of years did not agree on the critical text. That text did not make its way to God’s people. They received the, well, received text. They thought that the work of the Holy Spirit.
What I just wrote above is not mysticism. It is what we read in scripture. It is how we see the Holy Spirit work. Providence and the inward testimony of the Holy Spirit fulfilled God’s promise of preservation.
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