Read Part 1.

Fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals believe God has preserved His word. The debate among them is mainly over the manner of preservation and the form the preserved word has taken. Some believe we have a God-preserved, word-perfect text we can identify with certainty. Others believe we do not.

Those who hold to identifiable, word-perfect preservation cite several passages in support of their doctrine. Part 1 of this series examined several of the strongest of these to see what they they actually teach.¹ I concluded that these passages lead us to believe God will preserve His word perfectly in a form that is at least potentially discoverable, but that they do not promise that God’s people will always be able to point to a particular manuscript or text and confidently claim it is the word-perfect, preserved text.

Others have examined these passages (and others) and come to very similar conclusions (Moritz, 86-88; Beacham and Bauder, 116-123; Williams and Shaylor, 83-111), and defenders of certainly-identifiable, word-perfect preservation have responded with counterarguments and accusations. Many of these obscure the real issues in the debate and attempt to frame it in a way that heavily favors their view.   read more»

Read Part 1.

The doctrine of perspicuity or clarity of Scripture can be stated this way: All things being accounted for, the Scriptures are understandable. The question is, however, what should be accounted for?

Luther grappled with the idea and admitted in The Bondage of the Will that the Scriptures were both clear and unclear. He, like many other reformers, attempted to balance the statements in the Scriptures themselves that tended to support the understandability of the Scriptures on the one hand and their difficulty on the other. Most significant among the passages that state the difficulty of the Scriptures is Peter’s declaration that in Paul’s epistles there “are some things hard to be understood” (2 Peter 3:16). The experience of reading and studying the Scriptures also proves that not all things in the Scriptures are readily understandable.

Seizing upon that statement and upon similar rationales, the religious establishment at the time of Luther declared that the Scriptures were inherently unclear and, hence, withheld them from the laity for fear that the lay people would misunderstand them. Granted, there “are some things hard to be understood” in the Scriptures, and they should be accounted for. They are, in essence, the type of difficulties Bible translators encounter. By virtue of the nature of the translation process, they are, for the most part, passed on to the readers of the translations.   read more»

The essential characteristics of the Scriptures may be summed up in these tenets: revelation because God has communicated His mind to men; inspiration because God has superintended the recording of what He communicated; canonicity because what is inspired is recognized; infallibility because what God intended to be written was recorded without error; authority because what is recorded is binding upon all men; necessity because man cannot do without what God says; sufficiency because what God has communicated needs no supplement; preservation because God has pledged for His Word to exist to all generations; and understandability because God communicated in order to be understood.

While all these characteristics of the Scriptures are essential and significant, two of them relate directly to the routine task of the Bible translator: preservation and understandability. The other characteristics may impress the translator with the sacredness and value of the biblical texts and shape his philosophy of Bible translation, but they do not directly affect the routine, technical work of translating. They are inherent qualities that are set and permanent but are not active, so to speak.

By contrast, whenever the Scriptures are translated into a new language, preservation is newly active. And whenever the Scriptures are studied, preached, or translated, understandability is also in operation. Both preservation and understandability of the Bible are acts of “fairness” from God. It would not be equitable that God would reveal His Word, render it binding upon all men, and then not make it available; or that He would make it available and not make it understandable.   read more»

The doctrine of preservation of the Scriptures has been hotly debated in recent years. Much has been written and said, but most of the rhetoric on the subject has been closely connected to defending or rejecting one view or another on the translation issue. The result has often been that important foundational questions have been overlooked in a rush to get to conclusion A or B in the translation debate.

Among the neglected questions are these: (1) what process did God say He would use to preserve His word and (2) what form did He say that preserved word would take? Both of these are subsets of another neglected question: What does Scripture actually claim (and not claim) about it’s own preservation?

The questions of process (“how”) and form (“what”) are at the heart of the controversy because nobody (among fundamentalists or conservative evangelicals) denies that the word has, and will, endure. The question of what Scripture actually claims is critical as well, for multiple reasons. For one, only a clear answer to that question can put us on the right track to answering the others.

Two general schools of thought exist regarding the how and what of preservation.   read more»

Compiled from Dr. Warren VanHetloo’s “Cogitations” October 13-21, 2009.

Question

Dr. Van, In looking at the history of the Bible as we know it today, there seems to have frequently been a distrust of the laity to handle (understand) the Word of God. Obviously, only the more wealthy people were able to provide enough education so they could read or teach their children to read. But beyond that, religious leaders seemed reluctant to open the door to the common person to use the Bible in a way to gain understanding about God’s Ways. We look back and say that there were issues of power, politics, etc. But even today in Bible believing churches, you can hear home study groups described as “shared ignorance.” Not too many decades ago, home Bible study groups were publicly discouraged, often from the pulpit. It is almost as if there is fear among the Bible believing pastors that the dangers far outweigh the benefits (or at least threaten their authority). Small groups have become a bit of fad recently, but to deny their potential in spiritual growth, in spite of some risk, seems to underestimate the ability of the Holy Spirit to work through the Word in the hearts of people. What is your evaluation?   read more»

My doctoral studies during the past several years have been quite a challenge, since I have been forced to study (with good comprehension) many ideas and disciplines that were somewhat new to me. The thinking and writing of lots of theologians and philosophers is anything but simple. Take, for example, this explanation of man’s existence by Paul Tillich:

Man experiences himself as having a world to which he belongs. The basic ontological structure is derived from an analysis of this complex dialectical relationship. Self-relatedness is implied in every experience. There is something that ‘has’ and something that is ‘had,’ and the two are one. (Systematic Theology, I, 168)

Students of theology and philosophy often forget that the terminology they deal with is just as complex as the integrals and algorithms of higher math. Philosophical and theological thinking itself is often highly nuanced. Thoughts are long and complicated. If you try to begin reading the work ten pages in, you will often be completely lost.

What a contrast, when I open my Bible and read it—whether in English, German, Greek, or Hebrew. Its truth seems so easy to grasp, unlike that of the philosophers, who expend energy defining terms, deliberate long at placing parameters, and wrestle even with how they are to pursue an idea. It matters little whether you are reading Plato, Locke, or Heidegger—on an ascending scale of difficulty, they all demand the same mental exercises of their readers. How different the words of Jesus are! Consider this statement in Matthew 12:33-37:    read more»

The church at Colosse apparently had come under the influence of the early stages of Gnosticism. Gnostics taught that certain individuals were privy to mystical sources of knowledge beyond the Scriptures. If one wanted to move on to maturity, according to the Gnostics, he had to tap into this extra-biblical knowledge through the methods that they taught. The Colossians, under this influence, were leaving behind the apostolic instruction concerning the Christian life (vv. 1-7) and were being deluded into adding at least five things to God’s Word.

Philosophy

Colossians 2:8-15 warns of the danger of being taken captive through philosophy and empty deception. “Philosophy” means the “love of wisdom” and the book of Proverbs tells us that the love of wisdom is a worthy pursuit (Proverbs 4:6). God does not oppose wisdom; He is against the wrong kind of wisdom. Paul warns of a pseudo-wisdom that can be identified by three characteristics:

• It is according to the traditions of men. That is, wisdom that comes from the mind of men, not the mind of God.

• It is according to the elementary principles of the world. This is likely a reference to the attempt to gain esoteric knowledge through mystical means, something the Gnostics loved (see v. 18).

• It is not according to Christ. True wisdom is found in Christ “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (v. 3). The Colossians were searching in the wrong place for wisdom. What they were looking for was found in Christ, through the Word, not in the philosophies of men.   read more»

Communication, in this modern age of communication, can be frustrating on many levels. Consider the common cell phone. Many nimbly leap from phone call to text message to taking a picture of a friend, all with the efficiency of a technological Jedi. Others, mortally fearful of missing a call, trot around with a “Bluetooth” attached to their ear (my regular jest to such people, that “you have a little something in your ear,” has so far failed to elicit a chuckle). Such people have mastered the art of modern communication, at least of this variety.

Then there are the technologically-challenged. Our one-year-old grandson has a better chance of activating the television through use of the remote than many middle-aged adults have. When it comes to the cell phone it gets worse. Everyone seems to have a cell phone these days but legions are totally perplexed as to how to go about retrieving messages. How frustrated they are to see the little screen indicating they have a message but have no concept of how to retrieve that message.   read more»

Many Christians have never heard the Latin term sola scriptura. It means simply “only Scripture” or “Scripture alone.” It was probably the main war cry of the Reformation. Replacing sola scriptura (in reference to all of Scripture) with the Great Commission has resulted in a movement called Neo-Evangelicalism. Once a mission is put ahead of authority, the mission becomes the authority.

Recent polls have revealed that fewer Americans claim to be Christian. And, although some forms of evangelicalism are growing in America, the cults (Mormonism and Jehovah’s Witnesses in particular) are growing at a fast rate. We hear of evangelicals converting to liturgical religions (Catholicism, Orthodoxy, the Episcopal Church) or other religions entirely. Why? Because the Scriptures became something less than the supreme authority.

The Authority Question

One of the big questions Christians must ask is, “What is the final, infallible authority to determine what I believe?” For some, the answer is “what my parents taught me.” For others, it is “what my church teaches.” For most evangelicals, it seems, the answer now is “what my heart tells me is true.” But for those of us who embrace sola scriptura, the answer is “our understanding of what the Scriptures clearly teach, fairly understood.”   read more»