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.