ANSWERING AGAIN THE “WHAT TR?” QUESTION

Part One     Part Two     Part Three     Part Four     Part Five

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.
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.
6.  God Declares a Settled Text of Scripture in His Word.

THE APPLICATION OF THE PRESUPPOSITIONS, PRINCIPLES, AND PROMISES OF AND FROM SCRIPTURE (Part Two)

In five parts of this series, I first declared the scriptural presuppositions, principles, and promises that buttress the historical and biblical position.  Then I stated the positive conclusion of the provided model, paradigm, or template that followed the six truthful premises.  The underlying original language text of the King James Version is, as Hills asserted, its own “independent variety of the Textus Receptus.”  It is essentially Beza 1598, but not identical to that printed edition.  This conclusion fulfills the model, the biblical premises.

The Other Side Does Not Follow Scriptural Presuppositions

The other side, the critical text and multiple modern version position, does not follow scriptural presuppositions.  It proceeds from naturalistic and relativistic ones.  This is especially seen in the hundreds of lines of Greek text for its New Testament with no manuscript evidence.  Critics pieced together lines of text that never existed in any copy anywhere and anytime.  On the other hand, they commonly still make the claim that the underlying text behind the King James comes from just a “handful of manuscripts available at the time.”

A very common attack, which I anticipate again on this series, will skip all the presuppositions, principles, and promises and go directly to and then quote the concluding statement out of context.  It would sound something like this:  “Kent Brandenburg says, The perfect preserved text of scripture is ‘the underlying original language text of the King James Version.'”  I took that from the above first paragraph of this post.

The opposition then treats that statement like it stood alone with no explanation.  The enemies of the scriptural and historical position will provide strawman arguments.  They won’t be the actual ones in these posts, and if they provide any of them, they’ll misrepresent them.  You can count on this.  I take this bow shot or preemptive strike as a warning.

Scripture reveals presuppositions, principles, and promises about God’s preservation of scripture.  I could faithlessly ignore those.  Instead, I could focus on the existence of textual variants and the relatively few variations between the printed editions of the textus receptus.  Also, I could obsess over a couple individual words that critics say have little manuscript evidence.  Those challenge the presuppositions, principles, and promises.  I consider those minor challenges outweighed again by the presuppositions, principles, and promises.

Faith and the Model of Canonicity

Two verses that mean a lot to me related to the perfect preservation of the Greek New Testament is Romans 4:20-21:

20 He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God; 21 And being fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform.

The same type of challenge occurs with the belief in twenty-seven books.  No verse says, “Twenty-seven books are in the New Testament,” just like no verse says that Noah’s ark is still on Mount Ararat.  Do I have faith that Noah’s ark is up there?  I believe it landed there and stayed.

Why the twenty-seven that we call the New Testament?  Some disagree.  Other opinions exist.  The presuppositions, principles, and promises are the same for twenty-seven New Testament books.  These were the ones the churches accepted, a testimony of the Holy Spirit through believers.

The Unacceptable Alternative

The alternative to this position I espouse here is unacceptable. It rejects these presuppositions, principles, and promises.  Also, it leaves the church without verbal, plenary perfection of scripture.  The position I take, as I see it and very strongly, is the best and really only position for a perfect scripture, what believers should expect.   Because of that, I take it.

Through the years, I have considered the arguments for the other side.  What I’ve seen is a regularly changing, morphing attack.  It’s as though they just throw anything and everything, the proverbial kitchen sink.  Their conclusion is the same:  uncertainty, doubt, the denial of scriptural and historical teaching, loss of authority, an ever changing and mutating scriptural text, and the ultimate apostasy that goes along with what they consider reality.

Certainty Versus “Confidence”

You can hear professing evangelicals attempt to fortify against the problem they create.  They can’t say “certainty,” and even mock “certainty.”  I hope you have a hard time even imagining this.  It does happen and is happening, but they ratchet down expectations with words like “confidence.”  It’s not even scriptural confidence, just confidence falsely so-called.  They create uncertainty and can’t be certain, so they adjust people’s mindset to a form of probability at a higher level of probability that they falsely label “confidence.”  It should be sued for false advertising.

From where does this confidence come for professing evangelicals who embrace confidence rather than certainty?  It comes from naturalism.  Yes, naturalism. They think they can give a high level of proof from naturalism and rationalism.  It’s like trying to convince people that the vaccination is safe.  Yes, they rushed it out, but look, they’re even vaccinating the president.  Evangelicals mock certainty in a nasty manner and then they focus on confidence.

Compare again confidence to a vaccination drive.  Can you get confidence from something at 95 percent?  We know God wants jot and tittle obedience.  Jesus said that in Matthew 5:17-20.  These evangelicals don’t offer jot and tittle certainty as the grounds for jot and tittle obedience.  This is also why they accompany their confidence with scaled down obedience.  Since their adherents can’t be sure of scripture, they emphasize non-essentials.  No one should separate over eschatology, ecclesiology, and a mounting stack of teachings.  Why?  No one can or should ensure certainty.  That’s not who we should roll with God’s Word.

What God Desires

The alternative to the truth also evinces the truth itself.  The truth stands.  Scripture teaches perfect preservation, availability, a settled text, and all the other of the six principles I listed in this series.  These form the basis for a sure, certain text of scripture that results in the kind of obedience God proposes and desires.

Is what God desires extremism and dangerous?  The side of uncertainty and doubt uses this kind of tactic, name-calling, labeling faith in scriptural teaching as extremist and dangerous.  Don’t worry.  That’s what they said about Jesus and the Apostles too.

I call on everyone reading to reject a critical, naturalistic text of scripture and the substandard probability, called “confidence,” that it engenders.  Those pushing that view are part of the downward trajectory, the steady decline, seen everywhere today.  They are part of what’s not getting better.