Prominent secular conservative voices repudiated British singer-songwriter Harry Styles for appearing on the cover in Vogue magazine in a dress.  Both Candace Owens (also here and here) and Ben Shapiro confronted his masculinity.  MSNBC defended Styles with the exact or identical argument used by evangelicals and fundamentalists for unisex apparel:  “Jesus wore dresses.”   That I have seen, only secularists have renounced this fashion.  Zero of what we call the Christian public intellectuals say anything about it.  I don’t hear any public Christian voices.  A very low percentage of professing Christians mount any defense of designed gender distinction.  Very little makes evangelicals and even most fundamentalists more angry than a Christian who stands for unique female and unique male items of clothing.

The word “bowels” is used in the King James Version of the Bible, translating the Greek word, splankna, which is used eleven times in the New Testament.  Here are related ones (9 of the 11):

2 Corinthians 6:12, Ye are not straitened in us, but ye are straitened in your own bowels.

2 Corinthians 7:15 And his inward affection is more abundant toward you, whilst he remembereth the obedience of you all, how with fear and trembling ye received him.

Philippians 1:8 For God is my record, how greatly I long after you all in the bowels of Jesus Christ.

Philippians 2:1 If there be therefore any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any bowels and mercies,

Colossians 3:12 Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering;

Philemon 1:7 For we have great joy and consolation in thy love, because the bowels of the saints are refreshed by thee, brother.

Philemon 1:12 Whom I have sent again: thou therefore receive him, that is, mine own bowels:

Philemon 1:20 Yea, brother, let me have joy of thee in the Lord: refresh my bowels in the Lord.

1 John 3:17 But whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?

A modern reader is not usually familiar with that concept, bowels or affections, in scripture.  The reason is it is a premodern conception.  You can read it in writings from the pre-New Testament and New Testament era.  Predmodern theologians, like Jonathan Edwards, talked and wrote about it.  From the above usage, it is common, not remote.  It is also authoritative, a divine understanding, not just a cultural one, as some moderns might think or report.

The New Testament contrasts splankna with the word, “belly,” the Greek word koilia, which is used twenty-two times in the New Testament.  Here are the related ones (4 of these):

Mark 7:19 Because it entereth not into his heart, but into the belly, and goeth out into the draught, purging all meats?

Romans 16:18 For they that are such serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly; and by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple.

1 Corinthians 6:13 Meats for the belly, and the belly for meats: but God shall destroy both it and them. Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body.

Philippians 3:19 Whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.)

Let’s talk about the inspiration of scripture.  Consider this sentence:

There is simply no statement in the Bible telling me to expect a perfect set of sixty-six books in the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts.

Gotcha!  The Bible doesn’t have anything to say about that!  Of course, it does say, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God,” but is that the same thing as saying, “There was a perfect set of sixty-six books in the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts”?

People who do believe what scripture says about inspiration do, you know, jump to the application of a perfect set of sixty-six books in the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts.  They are willing to make that application even from something as simple as “holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.”  2 Timothy 3:16-17 and 2 Peter 1:20-21 just don’t make those exact types of statements, and yet believers through church history have taken assurance from them that there was a perfect set of sixty-six books in the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts.

We have a record of a faithful willingness to apply the Bible to its own inspiration.  The saints have been able to break down the minimal passages on this doctrine and come to perfect originals.  Every word was perfect, all sixty six books.  No verse says exactly those words, but the saints of God still believed that truth.

The original manuscripts are convenient for making, shall we say, tough applications of scripture.  No one has them, those papyrus, parchments, or tablets. Since we don’t have them, it’s easy to say they’re perfect.  No one can say we’re wrong.  No one can prove we’re wrong.  That’s not all though.

Without inspiration, all of the doctrines we take from scripture, all the Bible teachings, can fall like a house of cards (an overused metaphor that I lazily borrow).  Many people like justification by faith, for instance, and heaven that’s at the end of that, purpose in life and all that.  They’d like doctrines like those to stay intact.  Inspiration of the original manuscripts, all the words of the sixty-six books being perfect, that sustains all the teachings for theologians from which they make a living.  And that application of the inspiration passages is easy to grab on to, even though we don’t have “scientific proof” of it.

Then we get to the preservation of scripture.  Consider this statement:

There simply is no statement in the Bible telling me to expect a perfect set of Hebrew or Greek biblical manuscripts.

As much as scripture says, “all scripture is given by inspiration of God,” it says a lot more about its own preservation.  It’s much easier, if what we’re depending upon for our doctrine is scripture, to expect perfect preservation of scripture, that is, to expect God’s perfect words in our hands.  That sounds like it could be a book title:  God’s Perfect Words In Our Hands.

The last above quote is verbatim from Mark Ward in a recent post he wrote, entitled:  “Answering a Question I Get All the Time: The Places to Start in Studying New Testament Textual Criticism”.  In that post, he wrote this paragraph:

I have indeed purposefully avoided the textual debate on my YouTube channel and in direct conversation with my KJV-Only brothers. I’ve done this because the Bible (it seems to me) is far clearer on the principle that “edification requires intelligibility” (1 Cor 14) than it is on the textual debate (I lay out portions of that case here). I want to lay importance on what the Bible says rather than speculating about matters I’ve (sic) convinced it doesn’t address. There simply is no statement in the Bible telling me to expect a perfect set of Hebrew or Greek biblical manuscripts.

I can appreciate Ward saying that he wants to lay importance on what the Bible says, since it says nothing about textual criticism, the subject of his post.  The one thing he will say that the Bible says is “edification requires intelligibility” (1 Cor 14), because that works for his argument against the King James Version of the Bible — straight line between 1 Corinthians 14 and rejection of the King James Version for him.  Ward is willing to make that application.  It’s apparently all he’s got from the Bible to apply to this issue.  I’m not going to call that faithful, even if that’s “pugilistic.” 

Mark Ward has his just one biblical point.  I don’t think it is a legitimate application of the Bible.  People really didn’t know a foreign language in 1 Corinthians 14, so tongues, unknown languages or mere gibberish, were legitimately unintelligible.  His application isn’t a historical one, like inspiration and preservation.  I’ve written before that I think he’s just making it up.  English speaking people know the King James.  The vast number of English speakers, who use the KJV, find it intelligible, not like a foreign language or gibberish.

Ward’s other biblical point, albeit what he says is absent  from the Bible, is that last sentence, the one I quoted above.  He won’t say that the Bible doesn’t promise its own preservation.  He won’t say that the Bible doesn’t promise perfect preservation.  He doesn’t say that the Bible doesn’t preserve every word perfectly.  What he says is a straw man.

Mark Ward writes:  “There is simply no statement in the Bible telling me to expect a perfect set of Hebrew or Greek manuscripts.”  This is an unfaithful unwillingness to apply the Bible to its own preservation.  It’s a dodge.  It’s a kind of Jesuit casuistry.  Someone calls me and asks if my dad is home.  I say, “He isn’t here,” and I point at my table.  My dad isn’t on the table.  It’s true he isn’t here.  I didn’t lie.  I’m telling the “truth.”

Let’s break the statement down.  The Bible doesn’t tell Mark Ward personally anything (“me”).  The Bible doesn’t tell someone to “expect” something.  The Bible doesn’t talk about a “set” of something.  The Bible doesn’t mention Hebrew and Greek.  The Bible doesn’t use the word “manuscripts.”  Of course the Bible doesn’t tell us those things.  To get the doctrine of scripture, we’ve got to apply scripture.  Men have, and through history men have declared, the doctrine of the perfect preservation of scripture.

The Bible teaches its own preservation.  God inspired every Word.  God preserved every Word to be available for every believer in every generation since its inspiration.  That’s what preservation is:  preservation.  Preservation isn’t partial spoilage.  You get the doctrine of preservation by a faithful, willing application of the Bible to its own preservation.  You take the combined multitude of verses about its own preservation and apply them to have a doctrine of preservation.  Mark Ward among many others now is unwilling to do that.

The Bible doesn’t make a point blank statement to describe the people easiest in the world to fool — “they are. . . .”  You can cull this information from a cumulative view of all of scripture though.  On top of that, it has been my observation.

With full disclaimer, from my childhood I recall Gilligan and the fearless crew on the uncharted desert isle.  Mr. Howell, the Professor, and Skipper are dressed as women in an attempt to fool some visiting natives looking for a “white goddess” to throw into their volcano.  Not expecting any of those three to pull it off, the Skipper orders first mate, Gilligan, to “dress up like a girl.”  The words since stuck in my brain Gilligan repeated again and again, “You can’t make me!  You can’t make me!  You can’t make me!”  Everyone knows how that ended.

The word “church” in the New Testament translates the Greek word ekklesia, which means “assembly” or “congregation,” how Tyndale translated it in his New Testament, which predates the King James Version.  He was right.  It means “congregation” or “assembly.”  “Congregate” and “assemble” are the same thing.

Now in this that I declare unto you I praise you not, that ye come together not for the better, but for the worse (v. 17).
For first of all, when ye come together in the church (Tyndale: “when ye come togedder in the cogregacion”), I hear that there be divisions among you; and I partly believe it (v. 18).
When ye come together therefore into one place, this is not to eat the Lord’s supper (v. 20).
Wherefore, my brethren, when ye come together to eat, tarry one for another (v. 33).

Jesus tells three parables in Luke 15, all of which reveal the love of God the Father for the lost, unlike the religious leaders in Israel.  He searches for them like a lost coin, first parable, lost sheep, second, and lost son, third.  That states the correct view of God the Father and, therefore, also the view of every true believer toward the lost.

A certain man had two sons.

Many fathers are genuinely surprised to discover their children hate them.  They worked hard to pay the bills, bought the essentials, provided gifts, and paid tuition, and yet, after all their effort and willing contributions, their young adult hates them.

Sooner or later, they will demand the freedom to be themselves. If they resent the restrictions you placed on them year after year—refusing to allow them to make their own decisions, pursue their interests, and have the power to reject the sports or school subjects they had no interest in but you insisted they pursue—don’t be surprised if they hate you.

Philip Paul Bliss was a revivalist hymn writer in the mid 19th century, who in 1875 penned among others the well-known, “Hallelujah, What a Savior!”, the first line of which reads:

Man of Sorrows! what a name for the Son of God, who came ruined sinners to reclaim.

“Man of sorrows” originates from Isaiah 53:3 in the King James Version, which says:

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

I wouldn’t argue against those who say Isaiah 52:13-53:12 is the greatest passage in the entire Bible.  That text is the account of the future saving confession of a repentant Israel.  Six hundred years before Christ, Isaiah prophesies of an event at least two thousands years after Christ.  In Romans 11:26, Paul predicts, “All Israel shall be saved.”  Zechariah 12:10 makes the the same prophecy:

I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications: and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son.

This moment we know is during the time of tribulation on earth, a period described in the book of Revelation (6-16), when large numbers of the twelve tribes of Israel will be saved (Revelation 7).  Before all of that is said, Isaiah 53 prophesies it.  Isaiah 52-53 is a prophecy of a people repenting for something they had done, which itself would not occur for another 600 years.

What we see described in Isaiah 52-53 is a mournful confession of Israel, where they finally, disconsolately, and fully admit they had not received their Messiah.  It should serve as the pattern henceforth for any saving confession.  An important part of it is the Jews’ explanation of why they did not acknowledge Jesus Christ.  They are not saying there were legitimate reasons.  They are saying their “reasons” were monumentally faulty.  They bewail them. They agonized over their sinful pride, their fatuousness, and their thick incomprehension.  Isaiah 53:3 is part of that admission and a model of poverty of spirit and true mourning after sin.  They are really, truly sorry for what they did and repentant over it.

One of Israel’s future admissions was that they rejected their Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ, because he was “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.”  Their imagined Messiah was not “a man of sorrows,” hence their rejection of the real One.  They didn’t want a sorrowful Messiah.  Instead, they would anticipate and desire an upbeat, victorious, and supremely confident Messiah.  He would have a skip to his step and look as though he owned the world and was on the very top of it with everyone else beneath Him.  Israel saw herself in that same category, their Messiah mirroring what they thought of themselves.  In their minds, this was the one they deserved.

I see society today the same in their envisioning of the person to follow, their leader, and their Jesus.  He is nice.  He is positive.  He offers admiring glances.  He gives only thumbs up.

Israel thought of herself as to be appreciated. Their Messiah would come and approve of them.  They were looking for a Messiah, who would be glad about them, not be sad when He saw them close up.  They were not looking for a doleful Messiah.  They wanted One Who came to endorse them and fight the Romans.  He wouldn’t be angry with his enemies long, because He would do away with them so quickly.

What I’m writing relates to feelings.  I’m saying having the right feelings are important.  When Jesus first entered the temple as an adult in John 2, the disciples saw his zeal in cleansing it in a violent act against Israel, and they were reminded of the Psalm 69 prophecy of the future Messiah.  The feeling of Jesus cued Andrew toward his reception of Him, reinforcing that this was Jesus.  Others ascertained these as inappropriate.  Those feelings meant they did not want Him as theirs.

The Jesus people want to accept is a party style Jesus, who smiles and smiles, emoji-like, with likes and hearts and kisses, acceptance and approval.  Why was Jesus sorrowful?  He was someplace in complete contradiction to His nature.  Nowhere in scripture does Jesus laugh.  The sins all around weighed on Him, not just their hostility to His righteousness, but His compassion for those bound in them and His knowledge of their future consequence.   The sin brought present ruination and eternal damnation.  The Lord Jesus knew this to the furthest extent.

Israel confessed they rejected their Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ, because He was the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.   They would have none of Him.  When they make this confession, they understand.  He didn’t die for sins He committed.  He died for theirs.  He was sorrowful over theirs.  He grieved over theirs.

Still today no one wants any sorrow over a sinful condition, no grieving over any wrong attitude or anything they’ve done.  Only celebration.  Only fun.  Only approval of the drunkenness, fornication, disobedience to parents, worldliness, and despicable dead apathy.   The man of sorrows continues to be rejected.

I’d never heard the word, ghost, until a few days ago. Well, no.  I heard “Holy Ghost” in the King James Version, and Casper the friendly ghost.  I’ve heard the term, ghost, used in varied other ways, and I wouldn’t have made this up.  I went to RealClearPolitics, and read “The Conflict Avoidance Generation” by Noah Rothman at Commentary.  The subtitle is “Comfort First.”  Here are the first three paragraphs:

My two young children adored their babysitter. For about eight months, she watched them when my wife and I couldn’t, and she was good at her job. A recently enrolled student in a local community college, her schedule didn’t always include time to work for us. But when it did, she was punctual and professional, and her services were well compensated. And then one day, she disappeared. 

It occurred to us only after several weeks of radio silence that falling off the face of the earth might have been her way of severing our professional relationship. In retrospect, this maneuver was, perhaps, in character. Her preferred method of declining the opportunity to sit for our children when her schedule did not permit it was just not to take our call. So, resolved to find a new sitter, my wife and I conducted a handful of interviews and settled on a replacement relatively quickly. We introduced the new sitter to our children and established a prospective starting date in about two weeks. That was the last we saw or heard from her. Once again, we were “ghosted.” 

Our experience appears increasingly typical for employers seeking talent among young professionals entering the workforce. “Ghosting,” in the popular vernacular, is the practice of closing off all communication without any forewarning or explanation. This discourteous practice was once exclusive to the dating world, but it is now being applied to all sorts of interpersonal relationships, including those that are entirely professional.

“Ghosting” is defined as “the practice of closing off all communication without any forewarning or explanation” (this article lays out what it is too very well).  As you continue to read, you’ll see that “ghosting” has become a regular practice by a surprising high percentage of “Generation Z” (22 and below) — 43% just vanish when they don’t want the job anymore.  In addition, 25% of millennials (23-38) bail on their employers.  What is going on here?

Some have studied this new trend, and Rothman calls it “an ideological obsession with avoiding all forms of trauma and distress—even the emotional sort.”  He further describes:

The path of least resistance is to avoid potentially conflictual interpersonal engagements. Compulsive conflict avoidance is, however, not only rude but unproductive and unhealthy. “Ghosting” isn’t just ignoring a problem in the hope that it will go away or changing the subject; it’s a complete cognitive and emotional shutdown.

Rothman references an article in The Atlantic that turned into a book of the same title:  “The Coddling of the American Mind,” which has this sentence in the subheading:  “In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like.”  The article is worth reading.  I give both articles a full disclaimer, but I have both seen and experienced “ghosting” numerous times.

“Ghosting” disobeys the frequent biblical command to “love thy neighbor as thyself.”  No one wants someone with whom he relates to just “drop off the face of the earth” with almost no warning and with no opportunity at reconciliation or mediation.  If you do this to someone, you are wrong.  Jesus says this is as much as murdering someone (cf. Matt 5:21-26).

Social media provides the practice or pattern of ghosting.  Someone makes an even moderately negative comment, perhaps just unaccepting, and it is deleted immediately, the person blocked permanently.   A non-affirming relationship is rejected.  This is. not. Christian.  I see this as the norm in social networking and then it becomes a pattern for behavior in the real world.

Someone ghosting is practicing an unscriptural form of separation, separation in the worst, most harsh, hateful way.  It doesn’t try to keep a relationship going.  It doesn’t care about the person it ghosts.  I hear the generation Z and millennials talk about unity, especially since there is so much division in the country, but they do not understand unity.  Unity isn’t the absence of conflict.  Jesus did not come to bring peace, but a sword, and no one brings unity more than Jesus.  They practice this nuclear form of separation that scorches the earth all around its object, like Rome with Carthage.

“Freedom” isn’t the ability to say or do what you want without rejection.  Real freedom gives confidence to face adversity.  The truly free person can stand up to scrutiny.  It’s even part of being an adult, which is one reason I see this being the behavior of young people.  It’s also because they have been coddled, like the article says.

When a conflict arises in a relationship, scripture teaches reconciliation, and mediation if necessary.  Tough conversations must be had.  This is love.  Pushing the eject button isn’t love.  It is selfishness.  Ghosting is “vindictive” a word used four times in the Atlantic article.  He calls it “vindictive protectiveness,” followed by this sentence:  “It is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.”

Don’t get me wrong, generation Z and millennials don’t think they’ve been coddled (overly protected). They think they’ve been abused.  They’ve “had life very hard” — not.  This is the generation where dodge ball, the teeter totter, and the monkey bars went extinct.  Two words:  hand sanitizer.  Almost everyone in my generation of parents over served their children.  They gave them too much, protected them from too much. They had life too easy.  They don’t think so.  They think they had it hard, but no generation of people had it as easy as those 35 and younger.  More coddling isn’t the solution to their problem.  The future looks already very dim, but if this doesn’t stop, that trajectory downward will be even worse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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