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New List of Reasons for Maximum Certainty for the New Testament Text (Part 3)
ANSWERING AGAIN THE “WHAT TR?” QUESTION
1. God Inspired Specific, Exact Words, and All of Them.
2. After God Inspired, Inscripturated, or Gave His Words, All of Them, to His People through His Institutions, He Kept Preserving Each of Them and All of Them According to His Promises of Preservation.
3. God Promised Preservation of the Words in the Language They Were Written, or In Other Words, He Preserved Exactly What He Gave.
4. God’s Promise of Keeping and Preserving His Words Means the Availability of His Words to Every Generation of Believers.
Introduction for Point 5, the Next Point
Long ago, I completed the answering of every question from opponents on the issue of preservation, versions, etc. Nothing new has arisen for many years. What keeps me writing is the accusation that our side does not answer questions. I have written long, very complete answers. The norm of the opposition focuses on one little piece of an answer and takes it out of context. This happens in a lot of debate situations, so I understand it.
This series of posts again tries to help someone understand, who still doesn’t. The writing through the years has helped some. They’ve testified of that. For most though, they don’t care. It seems like a waste of time to keep talking to them.
My Approach for this Series
My approach for this series of posts is presenting scriptural principles, presuppositions, or promises as premises to a conclusion. I could further show how that these points represent historical biblical doctrine, interpretation, or application, but I won’t for this series. I’ve done that many times. I want to keep it simple here.
What I’m writing for this series, I’ve never seen from the critical text and modern version side. I still have not read a work that attempts to lay out a doctrine or biblical defense of naturalistic textual criticism to prove it is the historical Christian position. None do that because it’s absent from scripture. I’m not a reconstructionist like him, but I agree with this statement by R. J. Rushdoony:
Consider what happens when the Received Text is set aside and scholars give us their reconstruction of the text. The truth of revelation has thereby passed from the hand of God into the hands of men. Scholars then establish the true reading in terms of their presuppositions…The denial of the Received Text enables the scholar to play god over God. The determination of the correct word is now a scholar’s province and task. The Holy Spirit is no longer the giver and preserver of the biblical text: it is the scholar, the textual scholar.
The critical text and modern version side just takes shots at our positions. They have written several books like this, among the notable by D. A. Carson, James White, faculty from notable Bob Jones University grads, and then the Central Baptist Theological Seminary faculty. They don’t show biblical presuppositions or a presence in historical theology, because they don’t exist.
Without further adieu, I continue.
5. God the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity, Used the Church to Accredit or Confirm What Is Scripture and What Is Not.
In 2017, I wrote the following:
Evangelicals and fundamentalists argue for the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit. This is important to them. With the qualities of canonical books present, how would the church recognize them? Because men are depraved, they couldn’t assess the divine qualities of canonical books except by the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit. This is not as private revelation, but to help people overcome the effects of sin so that they might distinguish actual scripture. Even evangelicals believe that the consensus of the church is a key indicator of which books are canonical.
Scripture has divine qualities characteristic of its author, the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit indwells believers. Believers respond to what the Holy Spirit wrote, because He knows what He wrote. That’s how the argument goes. The Holy Spirit was not only at work in the origination of the Bible, but He also is at work within the people who receive the Bible. Donald Bloesch writes (p. 150, Holy Scriptures):Scripture is a product of the inspiring work of the Spirit, who guided the writers to give a reliable testimony to God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Its canonizing is to be attributed to the illumining work of the Spirit, who led . . . . the church to assent to what the Spirit had already authorized.
Spiritually Discerned
Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come.
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 believer 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.
Historical Agreement
Related to the above, The Westminster Confession of Faith of 1646 reads:
V. We may be moved and induced by the testimony of the Church to an high and reverent esteem of the holy Scripture; and the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole (which is to give all glory to God), the full discovery it makes of the only way of man’s salvation, the many other incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection thereof, are arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God; yet, notwithstanding, our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts.
The Gallican Confession (1559) reads:
We know these books to be canonical, and the sure rule of our faith, not so much by the common accord and consent of the Church, as by the testimony and inward illumination of the Holy Spirit, which enables us to distinguish them from other ecclesiastical books.
Thiessen wrote in his Introduction to the New Testament:
The Holy Spirit, given to the Church, quickened holy instincts, aided discernment between the genuine and the spurious, and thus led to gradual, harmonious, and in the end unanimous conclusions. There was in the Church what a modern divine has happily termed an ‘inspiration of selection’.
All the above statements fall within the teaching of many different scriptures on the Holy Spirit and the Words of God. The Holy Spirit leads through the agreement of His people. This is a reason Paul tells Timothy that the church is the pillar and ground of the truth (1 Timothy 3:15).
How Does The Testimony of the Holy Spirit Work?
When believers recognize the work of the Holy Spirit, they attest to scriptural presuppositions, principles, and promises. Those will not contradict the Holy Spirit. This is the meaning of testing whether something is of the Holy Spirit. Naturalistic explanations don’t pass the test.
A true church is the temple of the Holy Spirit. The unity of Spirit is seen in the agreement of a true church. Churches received the received text (the textus receptus). At the end of an era, they agreed to stop publishing editions of the textus receptus. Was that the Holy Spirit testifying through the churches that believed and practiced the Bible? This fits the scriptural teaching and the model.
This principle, presupposition, or promise of the inward testimony of the Holy Spirit is not the only one of these. It is crucial though.
More to Come
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