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I have never heard a critical text proponent care about the biblical and historical doctrine of preservation.  Most just ignore it.  It doesn’t matter to them.  Others attempt to explain it away, as if guilt exists over denying the obvious.  Professing theologians, pastors, and teachers deal with this doctrine differently than any other and in many varied ways.  Circumstances and experience should not engineer the interpretation of scripture.

Serious About Words of God, Plural

Many years ago, I listened to a sermon by John MacArthur, titled, “The Doctrine of Inspiration Explained.”  At one point, he took off against “thought inspiration” of scripture by saying:

This is a denial of verbal inspiration. If this is true, we’re really wasting our time doing exegesis of the text because the words aren’t the issue. Like the gentleman said to me on the Larry King Show the other night, which I mentioned, “You’re so caught up in the words you’re missing the message of the Bible.” That’s a convenient view. The idea that there’s some idea, concept, religious notion there that may or may not be connected to the words, but the Bible claims to be the very words of God.

First Corinthians 2:13, “We speak not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches.” Paul says when I give the revelation of God, when I write down that which God inspires in me, it is not words coming from man’s wisdom, but which the Spirit teaches.

In John 17:8 Jesus said, “I have given unto them the words which You gave Me and they have received them.” The message was in the words, there is no message apart from the words, there is no inspiration apart from the words. More than 3800 times in the Old Testament we have expressions like “Thus says the Lord,” “The Word of the Lord came,” “God said,” it’s about the words. There are no such things as wordless concepts anyway.

When Moses would excuse himself from serving the Lord, he said, “I need to do something else because I’m not eloquent.” God didn’t say, “I’ll give you a lot of great ideas, you’ll figure out how to communicate them.” God didn’t say, “I’ll be with your mind.” God said to him this, “I will be with your mouth and I will teach you what you shall say.” And that explains why 40 years later, according to Deuteronomy 4:2, Moses said to Israel, “You shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall you diminish ought from it that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you.” Don’t touch anything I command you because this is from God.

He continued later:

In fact, the opposite is true. Bible writers wrote down words they didn’t understand. In 1 Peter chapter 1 we are told there that the prophets wrote down the words and didn’t understand what they meant. The prophets, verse 10 of 1 Peter 1, who prophesied of the grace that would come made careful search and inquiry, seeking to know what person or time the Spirit of Christ within them was indicating as he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories to follow. Here they are writing about the sufferings of the coming Messiah, writing about the glory to follow the suffering of the Messiah, and then they’re searching what they wrote. They’re inquiring in the very words which they were inspired to write, to figure out what person and what time is in view. They couldn’t even interpret fully the meaning of the words they were actually writing. God did not give ideas without words but in some cases He gave words without complete ideas.

Taking Matthew 24:35 honestly, he says:

In Matthew 24:35 the Scripture is very clear, “Heaven and earth shall pass away but My words…My words shall not pass away.” When God speaks, He speaks with words and the Bible are the…is the representation in writing of the words that came from God…the words that God spoke.

In the same sermon, he later preaches:

It was Jesus who emphasized the importance of every word…every word and every letter when He said, “Not a jot or tittle will ever fail.” He said in Luke 18:31, “All the things that are written through the prophets shall be accomplished.” He even based His interpretation of the Old Testament on a single word…a single word. The words do matter.

Jesus was answering the Sadducees in Matthew 22 and He said to them, “You are mistaken, not understanding the scriptures, or the power of God, for in the resurrection they neither marry…talking about the angels…nor are given in marriage but are like angels in heaven. But regarding the resurrection of the dead, have you not read that which was spoken to you by God saying, ’I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob?’” He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. And His proof is that God said, “I am…I am the eternal living one.” And furthermore, He is not only the eternal living one but all will live eternally as well. They didn’t believe in a resurrection and He proved His point or certainly to our satisfaction proved His point by talking about the eternality of God in the verb to be in the present tense.

MacArthur teaches like the very words are important, because they come from God.  As part of the emphasis, he stresses the vitality of the words to faith and obedience to God, down to the very letters.  He’s just taking these passages at face value, not thinking of how he might devalue or diminish them to smuggle in a critical text view that speaks of generic preservation of the singular Word of God and not the Words, plural.

History of Preservation of Words

The doctrine of inspiration comes entirely from scripture.  The doctrine of preservation should too.  We walk by faith, not by sight.  In his volume 2 of Post Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Holy Scripture: The Cognitive Foundation of Theology, Richard Muller writes concerning John Owen and Francis Turretin:

He (Owen) had not, it is true, predicated his doctrine of Scripture as Word on his ability to prove the perfection of the text. Rather, like Turretin and the other orthodox, he had done precisely the opposite: he assumed the authority, infallibility, and integrity of the text on doctrinal grounds.

This is the historic approach to the Bible, relying on scriptural presuppositions, and in contrast to modern textual criticism.  Later Muller writes:

The case for Scripture as an infallible rule of faith and practice . . . . rests on an examination of the apographa and does not seek the infinite regress of the lost autographa as a prop for textual infallibility.

He continued:

A rather sharp contrast must be drawn, therefore, between the Protestant orthodox arguments concerning the autographa and the views of Archibald Alexander Hodge and Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield. . . . Those who claim an errant text, against the orthodox consensus to the contrary, must prove their case. To claim errors in the scribal copies, the apographa, is hardly a proof. The claim must be proven true of the autographa. The point made by Hodge and Warfield is a logical leap, a rhetorical flourish, a conundrum designed to confound the critics—who can only prove their case for genuine errancy by recourse to a text they do not (and surely cannot) have.

The ease at making an honest interpretation of preservation passages, as relating them to the autographa, represents a new and faithless position.  Honesty should be shown all of the bibliological texts.  Instead of taking the logical leap, rhetorical flourish, to confound critics, like every evangelical modern textual critic, believers should believe what God says.

In the third of seven videos in The Textual Confidence Collective series, Mark Ward criticizes E. F. Hills and Theodore Letis for their attack on inerrancy.  He either assumes his audience is ignorant or he himself is ignorant.  Warfield and Hodge did what Muller says they did.  They invented inerrancy as a term to characterize an errant text.  This conformed to their naturalistic presuppositions on the doctrine of preservation against the doctrine passed to and from Owen and Turretin.  It is a careless smear on the part of Ward to discredit men believing the historical and scriptural doctrine of preservation.

Matthew 24:35

In Thou Shalt Keep Them, I wrote the chapter on Matthew 24:35.  Get the book and read it.  I cover the verse in the context of Matthew and the Olivet Discourse in which it appears.  It reads:

Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.

The Textual Confidence Collective said that Jesus here guaranteed the fulfillment of the promises He made in His discourse.  They also explained that Jesus isn’t talking about perfect textual transmission, when He said, “My words shall not pass away.”  You read earlier that John MacArthur preached concerning this text:  “When God speaks, He speaks with words and the Bible is the representation in writing of the words that came from God, the words that God spoke.”  How MacArthur explained Matthew 24:35 is how the believers in the churches have taken the verse too.

“Perfect textual transmission” is loaded language that serves as a kind of strawman argument.  The doctrine of preservation does not argue for perfect textual transmission.  It argues for the divine preservation of God’s words, like Jesus promised.

The plain reading of Matthew 24:35 compares the survival of heaven and earth to that of the words of God.  The former, which exude permanency from a human standpoint, will pass away, but His Words will not.  Words are not tangible and they’re relatively small, so they seem less enduring than heaven and earth with their sheer immensity.  However, God’s Words last.  This is what Jesus said.  The durability of them mean something.

At the end of 1 Corinthians 13 Paul elevates love above faith and hope because of its permanency.  This isn’t unusual in scripture.  This is also similar to Matthew 4:4.  Men survive not with bread, but with the Words of God.

Biblical eschatology foretells the destruction of heaven and earth.  Someone investing in heaven and earth will end with nothing.  Those trusting in God’s Words, which include what Jesus said in His Olivet discourse, invest in something eternal.  The eternality of God’s Words tethers them to the nature of God.  They are eternal because God is eternal, making the Words then as well different in nature than just any words.  One can count on their fulfillment.

Scripture teaches the perfect preservation of God’s Words.  Matthew 24:35 is another one of the verses that do so.  The existent of textual variants do not annul Christ’s teaching on the preservation of God’s Words.  We should trust what Christ promised.  It is more trustworthy than a group of men devoted to naturalistic textual criticism.

Changing Meaning to Conform to Naturalistic Observation or Experience

God’s Word is truth.  Whatever God says is true.  If He says His Words will not pass away, they will not pass away.  Someone responds, “But evidence shows His Words passed away.”

Hebrews 11:1 in God’s Word says, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”  There is that word, “evidence.”  Mark Ward may say, “Evidence is a false friend.”  The way we understand “evidence” today still fits what the King James Version says about faith.  What God says gives us the assurance to say His Words do not pass away.  In other words, they’re available to every generation of believer.  This is a principle from scripture for the preservation of God’s Words.

One of the worst actions for anyone is to change the Word of God based on circumstances or experience.  This accords greater with the beginning of cults than work to respect as believers.  Through centuries doctrines change based upon men conforming to conventional wisdom or popular norms.  Scripture doesn’t change, but doctrines to be derived from scripture can change when men adapt them to their own experience or circumstances.

Would men change the interpretation of scripture and the derived doctrines to fit a personal preference?  Men start new religions by doing this.  The proponents of modern versions have a lot at stake.  When men twist scripture to fit a presupposition, it corresponds to a motive.  They defy plain meaning.  They have a reason.