TEXTUAL CRITICISM IS DRAWN FROM THE WELLS OF INFIDELITY

Updated October 30, 2008 (updated May 19, 2002; first published April 16, 1999) (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) –

Through diligent and long research into the subject of Bible texts and versions, I have come to the conviction that modern textual criticism is infidelity. Most of the men who developed the theories of textual criticism in an attempt to overthrow that “tyrannous” Received Text (as some of them called it), were rationalists who denied the supernatural inspiration of Holy Scripture. Men like the Baptist A.T. Robertson and Presbyterian B.B. Warfield did not develop textual criticism, but merely rehashed and passed along that which they received from the rationalistic fathers in this field. The vast majority of the men who have written the influential works on textual criticism in the 19th and 20th centuries are rationalists. The Presbyterian leader Robert Dabney, who stood against theological modernism in the 1800s in America, warned that the evangelicals of his day had adopted textual criticism “from the mint of infidel rationalism.” The same is true today. The vast majority of the textual critics are Modernists or New Evangelicals at best (Fuller Theological Seminary, etc.). Some Bible-believing fundamentalists have adopted textual criticism, but they did not create it.

A wide variety of Bible-believing men from the past two centuries have made the same observation. Let me give some examples.

18TH- AND 19TH-CENTURY BRITISH BIBLE BELIEVERS UNDERSTOOD THE CONNECTION BETWEEN TEXTUAL CRITICISM AND MODERNISM

I will begin with men in 19th-century Britain. It was from these men that I first began to understand the rationalistic position of textual criticism. Several years ago, I dedicated myself for several months to researching the battle for the Bible in 19th-century Britain. Those men were much closer to the theological battles surrounding the origin of modern textual criticism. Large numbers of King James Bible defenders in 19th-century Britain understood the theological apostasy associated with the critical Greek texts. The fruit of my research into that era appeared in the book For Love of the Bible, which we published in 1995. The following is a brief summary, beginning at the start of the 19th century.

In 1819, HENRY JOHN TODD, chaplain to the king of England and keeper of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s records, published A Vindication of Our Authorized Translation and Translators of the Bible. This work was occasioned by the clamor of some that wanted to correct the Received Greek New Testament and the King James Bible by modern textual criticism. This clamoring gradually increased among a relatively small segment of influential scholars as the 19th century progressed and resulted, ultimately, in the Westcott-Hort Greek New Testament and the English Revised Version of 1881. Todd understood that modern textual criticism was intimately associated with theological heresy. I searched for a copy of Todd’s treatise for five years and finally located it in the British Library. Consider the following important excerpt:

“For when we see men of the most latitudinarian principles uniformly pressing forward this dangerous proposal; when we see the most unbounded panegyrics bestowed on those, who have converted the Mosaic history into allegory, and the New Testament into Socinianism; when we see these attempts studiously fostered, and applauded, by the advocates for this projected [Bible] revision; we must conjecture, that something more is meant than a correction of mistakes, or an improvement of diction. Those doctrines, the demolition of which we know to be, in late instances, the grand object of such innovators when they propose alterations in articles of faith, or correction of liturgical forms, are surely in still greater danger when attempted, by the same men, under the distant approaches of a revision of our English Bible (Todd, A Vindication of Our Authorized Translation and Translators of the Bible, 1819, pp. 79,80).

Todd and a vast number of other 18th- and 19th-century Christian scholars and preachers understood that the field of textual criticism was dominated by and was promoted by men who were infected with theological modernism. Twentieth-century textual criticism has merely built upon this skeptical foundation. James White, in his book The King James Only Controversy, claims this is the figment of a Ruckmanite’s imagination, but he can only say that by ignoring history. In the early part of the 19th century, the critical Greek text was successfully resisted precisely on the same basis upon which the King James Bible defender today resists the modern texts and versions, but by the end of that same century, it was accepted. Someone might ask, “Why did the Westcott-Hort text eventually prevail?” The answer is not hard to find. Theological rationalism spread like ivy. There is a saying about ivy that describes it growth stages: it sleeps; it creeps; it leaps. That is what happened with modernism. It was planted in the 18th century and slept for some time. It began to creep in the early 19th century; and from the middle to the end of the century, it was spreading like wildfire across the Christian landscape. By the end of the century, it was so well entrenched in high places of Christian scholarship in British Protestant and Baptist denominations that it was able to win the day. Not only were many scholars themselves afflicted with modernistic views of the Bible, but a vast number of others, not themselves modernistic in theology, were nonetheless too spiritually weak to resist modernism. Instead, they were willing to work hand-in-hand with the modernists, ignoring God’s warnings, “evil communications corrupt good manners” and “a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.” We see this in the Baptist Union of Spurgeon’s day. He took his stand and left the Union in 1887, but most of the men who claimed to hold the same view of the Bible that Spurgeon held refused to discipline the Modernists or to separate from them. In practice, they were forerunners of the New Evangelicals of our century. Spurgeon described the wretched situation in 1887 England with these powerful words:

“Believers in Christ’s atonement are now in declared union with those who make light of it; believers in Holy Scripture are in confederacy with those who deny plenary inspiration; those who hold evangelical doctrine are in open alliance with those who call the fall a fable, who deny the personality of the Holy Ghost, who call justification by faith immoral, and hold that there is another probation after death. … Yes, we have before us the wretched spectacle of professedly orthodox Christians publicly avowing their union with those who deny the faith, and scarcely concealing their contempt for those who cannot be guilty of such gross disloyalty to Christ. To be very plain, we are unable to call these things Christian Unions, they begin to look like Confederacies in Evil” (Sword and Trowel, November 1887).

Spurgeon’s battles against modernism within the Baptist Union occurred at precisely the same time that the English Revised Version and the Westcott-Hort Greek Text was being prepared, and the same battle was being fought (and lost) in other denominations, including Anglicanism, Congregationalism, Presbyterianism, and Methodism. (An excellent overview of this is found in The Forgotten Spurgeon by Iain Murray, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 2nd edition 1973). In other words, apostasy had effectively prepared the way for the modern text and versions. The men we describe in our book For Love of the Bible, who fought earnestly against the Westcott-Hort Greek text (and its predecessors) and the English Revised Version, understood these facts and were on the side of truth on those days.

The next example I will give is THE BIBLE LEAGUE of England. This organization was formed in 1892 to resist the tide of apostasy that was sweeping across the Protestant landscape in late 19th century Britain. In an article detailing the history of the Bible League, S.M. Houghton XE "Houghton, S.M." connects its origin with the “Downgrade Controversy” that C.H. Spurgeon fought in the 1880s and 1890s. Spurgeon’s death in 1892 galvanized the convictions of some in the battle against Rationalism. The Bible League was formed later that same year. The Bible League Quarterly XE "Bible League Quarterly" began to be published in 1912. They describe the spread of apostasy from the 1890s until now in these words:

“Spurgeon’s days saw apostasy as a trickle; by the time of the Bible League’s foundation [1892] it had become a stream; shortly it expanded to a river, and today it has become a veritable ocean of unbelief. For the most of men the ancient landmarks have disappeared from sight. Life upon earth has become a voyage on an uncharted ocean in a cockle-shell boat ‘tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine.’ Never before in human history has the ‘sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive’ (Eph. 4:14) been so greatly in evidence. ‘Evil men and seducers wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived’ (2 Tim. 3:13)” (S.M. Houghton XE "Houghton, S.M." , “The Bible League: Its Origin and Its Aims” 1971, Truth Unchanged, Unchanging, Abingdon: The Bible League, 1984).

Men associated with the Bible League understood that the stew of modern textual criticism was cooked up in this pot of end-time theological confusion.

“In the eighteenth century Religious Rationalism XE "Modernism" was begotten in Germany and began to spread in its Universities. It has influenced and debased the theological thought in almost the whole of Protestant Christendom. ... The Father of this new revolutionary attitude to the Word of the Lord and the Lord of the Word was J.S. Semler XE "Semler, J.S." (1725-91), Professor of Theology at Halle. One of his pupils, J.J. Griesbach XE "Griesbach, J.J." (1745-1812) was appointed Professor of the New Testament at Jena in 1775. ... It should not be surprising, nor should it be overlooked, that GRIESBACH, INFLUENCED FROM HIS UNDERGRADUATE DAYS BY THE RISING TIDE OF RATIONALISM SWEEPING OVER HIS COUNTRY, WAS A FOE OF ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY. HE ABANDONED THE TEXTUS RECEPTUS XE "Received Text" , AND CONSTRUCTED A NEW GREEK NEW TESTAMENT TEXT” (emphasis added) (D.A. Thompson, The Controversy Concerning the Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel according to Mark, Surrey: The Bible Christian Unity Fellowship, pp. 39-40; reprint of four articles which appeared in The Bible League Quarterly, London, 1973).

The Bible League recognized that the Received Text XE "Received Text" was first rejected not by a Bible-believing evangelical, but by a Modernist, by a foe of orthodox Christianity! John P. Thackway (1950- ), who has been Editor of the Quarterly since 1993, told us that since its inception the Bible League “has stood for the TR XE "Received Text" and AV position, and from time to time since the Quarterly was first published in 1912 articles relative to this would have appeared.”

Next, we quote from the TRINITARIAN BIBLE SOCIETY (TBS) XE "Trinitarian Bible Society" , which has examined these matters carefully since its formation in 1831. In fact, the TBS was formed in the midst of a battle against theological rationalism. The founders of the TBS were originally in the British & Foreign Bible Society (which was founded in 1804). They protested the presence of Unitarians within the BFBS, and when the majority of BFBS members supported the Unitarians, men of strong conviction obeyed the Bible and separated themselves from the BFBS. They founded the TBS as an alternative Bible society for the publication and distribution of sound Scriptures. The Trinitarian Bible Society warns that modern textual criticism is founded upon Rationalism XE "Modernism" .

“Textual Criticism, the evaluation of the actual manuscripts in the ancient languages, the preparation of printed editions of the Hebrew and Greek Text, and the modern translations now being made in English and many other languages, are very largely conducted under the direction or influence of scholars who by their adoption of these erroneous theories have betrayed the unreliability of their judgment in these vital matters. WE MUST NOT PERMIT OUR JUDGMENT TO BE OVERAWED BY GREAT NAMES IN THE REALM OF BIBLICAL ‘SCHOLARSHIP’ WHEN IT IS SO CLEARLY EVIDENT THAT THE DISTINGUISHED SCHOLARS OF THE PRESENT CENTURY ARE MERELY REPRODUCING THE CASE PRESENTED BY RATIONALISTS DURING THE LAST TWO HUNDRED YEARS. Nor should we fail to recognise that scholarship of this kind has degenerated into a skeptical crusade against the Bible, tending to lower it to the level of an ordinary book of merely human composition” (Terance Brown, If the Foundations Be Destroyed, T.B.S Article No. 14, p. 13).

Bible believers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were busy rejoicing in, preaching, and obeying the Scriptures, and carrying the Scriptures to the ends of the earth through missionary endeavors. Contrariwise, the textual critics were entertaining unbelieving theories of rationalism XE "Modernism" . Flying in the face of the doctrine of preservation, they XE "Preservation, Bible" rejected the Traditional Text XE "Received Text" that had been handed down to them by Bible-believing Christians. Instead of busying themselves with obeying the Lord’s Great Commission to carry the Gospel to the every creature, they groped around in dark monasteries and papal libraries trying to rediscover the Scriptures which they supposed had been corrupted through the transmission of time. Their ears were attuned to the vain philosophies emanating from Germany, and they were wickedly applying secular principles of textual criticism to the Holy Scriptures.

That old British war-horse JOHN BURGON (1813-1888), who held several high degrees from Oxford University and who was one of the foremost biblical scholars of his day, understood this perfectly well. Three false movements were eating at Britain XE "England" ’s spiritual foundation in the nineteenth century--Darwinism XE "Darwinism" , Modernism XE "Modernism" , and Romanism—and XE "Roman Catholic" Burgon XE "Burgon, John" stood decidedly against all three. One of the hallmarks of Burgon’s ministry XE "Goulburn, Edward" was his exalted view of Holy Scripture. It was his love for the Bible that produced his fierce opposition toward every form of rationalism. Burgon gave Modernism absolutely no quarter. He refused to be quiet about it. He refused to treat it kindly. He refused to be patient with it. When articles began to be published at Oxford in 1860 casting doubt upon the inerrancy of Scripture, Burgon XE "Burgon, John" , who had been appointed the same year as Select Preacher of the University, presented a series of messages in defense of the verbal, plenary inspiration XE "Inspiration" of the Bible. I certainly am not sympathetic with much that Anglicanism stands for, and Burgon was an Anglican, but there is no doubt in my mind that this man loved the Bible and had a passion to defend it against its enemies.

An excerpt from Sermon II illustrates Burgon’s zeal for the supernatural inspiration of the Bible and against modern biblical criticism:

DESTROY MY CONFIDENCE IN THE BIBLE AS AN HISTORICAL RECORD, AND YOU DESTROY MY CONFIDENCE IN IT ALTOGETHER; FOR BY FAR THE LARGEST PART OF THE BIBLE IS AN HISTORICAL RECORD. If the Creation of Man,—the longevity of the Patriarchs,—the account of the Deluge;—if these be not true histories, what is to be said of the lives of Abraham, of Jacob, of Joseph, of Moses XE "Moses" , of Joshua, of David,—of our Saviour Christ Himself? ... Will you then reject one miracle and retain another? Impossible! You can make no reservation, even in favour of the Incarnation of our Lord,—the most adorable of all miracles, as it is the very keystone of our Christian hope. EITHER, WITH THE BEST AND WISEST OF ALL AGES, YOU MUST BELIEVE THE WHOLE OF HOLY SCRIPTURE; OR, WITH THE NARROW-MINDED INFIDEL, YOU MUST DISBELIEVE THE WHOLE. THERE IS NO MIDDLE COURSE OPEN TO YOU (Burgon, Sermon II, p. 46).

What exactly did Burgon believe about the Bible’s inspiration? Consider this statement from Sermon III:

I am asked whether I believe the words of the Bible to be inspired,—I answer, To be sure I do,—every one of them: and every syllable likewise. Do not you?—Where,—(if it be a fair question,)—Where do you, in your wisdom, stop? The book, you allow, is inspired. How about the chapters? How about the verses? Do you stop at the verses, and not go on to the words? ... No, Sirs! THE BIBLE (BE PERSUADED) IS THE VERY UTTERANCE OF THE ETERNAL;—AS MUCH GOD’S WORD, AS IF HIGH HEAVEN WERE OPEN, AND WE HEARD GOD SPEAKING TO US WITH HUMAN VOICE. Every book of it, is inspired alike; and is inspired entirely. ... THE BIBLE IS NONE OTHER THAN THE VOICE OF HIM THAT SITTETH UPON THE THRONE! EVERY BOOK OF IT,—EVERY CHAPTER OF IT,—EVERY VERSE OF IT,—EVERY WORD OF IT,—EVERY SYLLABLE OF IT,—(WHERE ARE WE TO STOP?)—EVERY LETTER OF IT—IS THE DIRECT UTTERANCE OF THE MOST HIGH! ... ‘Well spake the Holy Ghost, by the mouth of’ the many blessed Men who wrote it.—The Bible is none other than the Word of God: not some part of it, more, some part of it, less; but all alike, the utterance of Him who sitteth upon the Throne;—absolute,—faultless,—unerring,—supreme! (Sermon III, pp. 75,76,89).

Oxford University was the most exalted institution of higher learning in all of Britain XE "England" . What we see in the previous excerpts is one of the most brilliant scholars of the nineteenth century boldly testifying of his faith in an infallible Bible before the student body of this august university. We can be sure that such an uncompromising testimony has not been heard at that university in this entire century. Burgon XE "Burgon, John" ’s views did not prevail. His earnest pleas were ignored. The soul-destroying gloom of rationalism XE "Modernism" settled over Oxford as it has over much of Christianity. This is the apostasy of the last hours. Modern textual criticism has worked hand-in-hand with rationalistic apostasy since its inception.

Burgon dedicated his brilliant scholarship to the task of defeating heretical views of the Bible. He made several tours of European libraries, examining and collating New Testament manuscripts wherever he went. He visited the Vatican Library in 1860 to examine the Vaticanus XE "Vaticanus" . In 1862, he traveled to Mt. Sinai to inspect manuscripts at St. Catherine’s XE "St. Catherine’s" . Edward Hills XE "Hills, Edward F." notes the purpose of these travels: “Being driven by the desire to get to the bottom of the false statements being made by the reigning Critics of his day, Burgon devoted the last 30 years of his life to disprove them. Believing firmly that God had providentially preserved the true text of the New Testament, he set out to discover how the depraved and corrupt readings developed. This required him to travel widely” (E.F. Hills, “A Biographical Sketch of the Life of Burgon,” Unholy Hands on the Bible: Vol. 1, Jay Green, ed., p. xix).

John Burgon observed a close kinship between biblical criticism and textual criticism. These are sometimes called higher and lower criticism. He said:

“That which distinguishes Sacred Science from every other Science which can be named is that it is Divine, and has to do with a Book which is inspired; that is, whose true Author is God. ... It is chiefly from inattention to this circumstance that misconception prevails in that department of Sacred Science known as ‘Textual Criticism’” (Burgon XE "Burgon, John" and Miller, The Traditional Text XE "Received Text" , p. 9).

Burgon understood that modern textual criticism is not built upon a foundation of faith in the Bible as God’s supernatural, infallible Word. He was right. Burgon understood something about modern textual criticism that the defenders of the eclectic textual approach cannot see.

I realize that Burgon did not believe exactly in every detail what I believe about the KJV and its Received Text, but what he believed is vastly closer to the “King James Only” position than to the eclectic textual criticism position. John Burgon XE "Burgon, John" exalted the King James Bible above all other English versions, and he maintained that the Received Text XE "Received Text" was, apart from minor improvements he felt could be made, the preserved Word of God. In describing the King James Bible, Burgon spoke of “the living freshness, and elastic freedom, and HABITUAL FIDELITY of the Grand Old Version which we inherited from our Fathers, and which has sustained the spiritual life of the Church of England XE "Anglican" XE "England" , and of all English-speaking Christians, for 350 years” (Revision Revised, p. 225). He encouraged his readers to “cling the closer to THE PRICELESS TREASURE WHICH WAS BEQUEATHED TO THEM BY THE PIETY AND WISDOM OF THEIR FATHERS” (Revision Revised XE "Revision Revised" , p. 232).

In my book For Love of the Bible, I have given many other examples of men in 19th century Britain who understood the rationalistic nature of modern textual criticism.

BIBLE BELIEVERS IN NORTH AMERICA UNDERSTOOD THAT TEXTUAL CRITICISM IS CONNECTED WITH MODERNISM

Crossing the ocean to North America, we find that the same battle was raging. Rationalism was sweeping into seminaries and Bible colleges, and many staunch defenders of biblical inspiration saw an affinity between biblical criticism and textual criticism. ROBERT L. DABNEY (1820-1898) was a XE "Dabney, R.L." noted American Presbyterian scholar who boldly opposed modernistic views of the Bible XE "Received Text" in the nineteenth century. He also stood for the Received Text and understood the rationalistic background of modern textual criticism. Dabney warned that Evangelicals who accepted the modern text were adopting it “FROM THE MINT OF INFIDEL RATIONALISM XE "Modernism" ” (Dabney, “The Doctrinal Various Readings of the New Testament Greek,” Discussions Evangelical and Theological, pp. 361; this first appeared in the Southern Presbyterian Review, April 1871). I know for a fact that the Evangelicals of that day who were following textual criticism took great offense at Dabney’s charge, just like men like James Boice or James White do today when charged with adopting textual criticism from “the mint of infidel rationalism.” I praise the Lord for men like Dabney who are willing to take a stand for the truth even when it offends people. Dabney understood that the fathers of textual criticism lacked the common sense to be able to properly use the knowledge they were gaining.

“We call these the opinions now fashionable; for those who watch the course of this art are aware that there is as truly a fashion in it, infecting its votaries, as in ladies’ bonnets, medicines or cravats [neck scarves]. ... The minds for which criticism retains its fascination are usually of that peculiar and ‘crotchety’ type found among antiquarians. The intelligent reader is, therefore, not surprised to find, along with much labor and learning, a ‘plentiful lack’ of sober and convincing common sense. ... We shall find them continually varying, each one obnoxious to grave objections, and the question still unsettled. ... Their common traits may be said to be an almost contemptuous dismissal of the received text, as unworthy not only of confidence, but almost of notice” (emphasis added) (Dabney XE "Dabney, R.L." , pp. 350,52,54).

DR. EDWARD F. HILLS (1912-1981) XE "Hills, Edward F." , who had a Th.D. from Harvard in textual criticism, also recognized the rationalism XE "Modernism" and unbelief inherent in this system. Most modern versions are built upon this rationalistic foundation. In his books, Hills carefully documents the modernistic influences which led to the development of textual criticism, and he contrasts unbelieving textual scholarship with a Christ-honoring, Bible-believing approach. Consider the testimony of this brilliant, yet humble scholar:

“Has the text of the New Testament, like those of other ancient books, been damaged during its voyage over the seas of time? Ought the same methods of textual criticism to be applied to it that are applied to the texts of other ancient books? These are questions which the following pages will endeavor to answer. An earnest effort will be made to convince the Christian reader that this is a matter to which he must attend. FOR IN THE REALM OF NEW TESTAMENT TEXTUAL CRITICISM AS WELL AS IN OTHER FIELDS THE PRESUPPOSITIONS OF MODERN THOUGHT ARE HOSTILE TO THE HISTORIC CHRISTIAN FAITH AND WILL DESTROY IT IF THEIR FATAL OPERATION IS NOT CHECKED. If faithful Christians, therefore, would defend their sacred religion against this danger, THEY MUST FORSAKE THE FOUNDATIONS OF UNBELIEVING THOUGHT AND BUILD UPON THEIR FAITH, a faith that rests entirely on the solid rock of holy Scripture. And when they do this in the sphere of New Testament textual criticism, they will find themselves led back step by step (perhaps, at first, against their wills) to the text of the Protestant Reformation, namely, that form of New Testament text which underlies the King James Version and the other early Protestant translations” (Edward F. Hills XE "Hills, Edward F." , The King James Bible Defended, Introduction, 3rd ed., 1979, p. 1).

“... the Bible version which you use ... has already been decided for you by the workings of God’s special providence. IF YOU IGNORE THIS PROVIDENCE AND CHOOSE TO ADOPT ONE OF THESE MODERN VERSIONS, YOU WILL BE TAKING THE FIRST STEP IN THE LOGIC OF UNBELIEF. FOR THE ARGUMENTS WHICH YOU MUST USE TO JUSTIFY YOUR CHOICE ARE THE SAME ARGUMENTS WHICH UNBELIEVERS USE TO JUSTIFY THEIRS, THE SAME METHOD. If you adopt one of these modern versions, you must adopt the naturalistic New Testament textual criticism upon which it rests. This naturalistic textual criticism requires us to study the New Testament text in the same way in which we study the texts of secular books which have not been preserved by God’s special providence” (Hills XE "Hills, Edward F." , Believing Bible Study, Des Moines, Iowa: Christian Research Press, 1967, pp. 226,27).

Dr. Hills XE "Hills, Edward F." understood this subject at the highest scholarly position. He was trained in textual criticism at the doctoral level at the University of Chicago and at Harvard. I agree completely with Dr. Hills that modern textual criticism is founded upon unbelieving principles. Interestingly, the proponents of the modern versions largely ignore this. Dr. Hills understood something about modern textual criticism that they do not understand.

Former Dallas Seminary Professor ZANE HODGES explored this in a 1971 article entitled “Rationalism and Contemporary New Testament Textual Criticism.”

“The acceptance of the newer critical editions of the New Testament does not rest on factual data which can be objectively verified, but rather upon a prevailing consensus of critical thought. IT WILL BE THE PURPOSE OF THIS DISCUSSION TO SHOW THAT CONTEMPORARY CRITICAL TEXTS ARE, IN FACT, THE FRUIT OF A RATIONALISTIC XE "Modernism" APPROACH TO NEW TESTAMENT TEXTUAL CRITICISM. ... Modern textual criticism is psychologically ‘addicted’ to Westcott XE "Westcott-Hort" and Hort. Westcott and Hort, in turn, were rationalists in their approach to the textual problem in the New Testament and employed techniques within which rationalism and every other kind of bias are free to operate. The result of it all is a methodological quagmire where objective controls on the conclusions of critics are nearly nonexistent. It goes without saying that no Bible-believing Christian who is willing to extend the implications of his faith to textual matters can have the slightest grounds for confidence in contemporary critical texts” (Zane C. Hodges, “Rationalism and Contemporary New Testament Textual Criticism,” Bibliotheca Sacra, January 1971, pp. 27-35).

This is a strong statement. Hodges recognized the vast influence of Westcott and Hort and states that Westcott and Hort were rationalists in their approach to the Bible text. That is precisely what I believe. (Yes, I know that Hodges does not believe exactly like I do in regard to the KJV-Received Text, but what he believes is much closer to what I hold than to what the textual critics hold. At least he believes the Received Text needs only a relatively minor modification, and he is bold to condemn the popular theories of textual criticism as rationalistic and dangerous to the Christian faith.) The Majority Text viewpoint aside, Hodges sees something about modern textual criticism that the defenders of the eclectic textual approach cannot see.

In his 1951 doctoral dissertation to the faculty of the Graduate School of Dallas Theological Seminary, ALFRED MARTIN, then Vice President of Moody Bible Institute, noted the connection between apostasy and the critical text:

“At precisely the time when liberalism was carrying the field in the English churches the theory of Westcott XE "Westcott-Hort" and Hort received wide acclaim. These are not isolated facts. RECENT CONTRIBUTIONS ON THE SUBJECT--THAT IS, IN THE PRESENT CENTURY--FOLLOWING MAINLY THE WESTCOTT-HORT PRINCIPLES AND METHOD, HAVE BEEN MADE LARGELY BY MEN WHO DENY THE INSPIRATION XE "Inspiration" OF THE BIBLE” (emphasis added) (Alfred Martin XE "Martin, Alfred" , “A Critical Examination of the Westcott-Hort Textual Theory.” Th.D. Thesis, Dallas Theological Seminary, May 1951, p. 70).

I could quote a variety of other scholarly men making the same point (and I have done so in my book For Love of the Bible).

THE FATHERS OF TEXTUAL CRITICISM WERE INFECTED BY RATIONALISTIC THINKING

We will now take a brief look at some of the leading names in nineteenth-century textual criticism. These are the men who laid the foundation for the modern versions.

As we describe the early history of textual criticism, we will also observe that the science of modern textual criticism was largely rejected by Bible-believing Christians throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Not only did Bible-believing people not accept the theories and texts produced by the early textual critics, they looked upon the same as heresy. One historian of textual criticism describes the early history of the same as “a period of strife between those who followed the so-called textus receptus blindly, and those who were determined to secure the most ancient witnesses they could and to trust them” (Alexander Souter, The Text and Canon of the New Testament, 1912, p. 100). Souter slanders the Received Text defenders by claiming they clung to it out of blindness and ignorance, but he does, in a backhanded manner, admit that a battle was waged by Bible-believing people against the critical textual theories throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.

RICHARD SIMON XE "Simon, Richard" (1638-1712), according to Bruce Metzger, laid “the scientific foundations of New Testament criticism” (Metzger, The Text of the New Testament, p. 155). Simon was a French Roman Catholic XE "Roman Catholic" who “disregarded the traditional and dogmatic presuppositions of his age” and “examined critically the text of the Bible as a piece of literature.” This means that Simon did not regard the Bible as the supernaturally inspired, divinely preserved Word of God, but as a mere book. From a biblical standpoint, this father of modern scientific textual criticism was an unbeliever and a heretic. Metzger shares Simon’s rationalism and unbelief (looking upon the Old Testament as a mixture of truth and myth, etc.), so it is not strange that he does not fear identifying this heretic as one of the fathers of modern textual criticism.

JOHN MILL XE "Mill, John" (1645-1707) is also commonly listed as one of the first modern textual critics. Though, for the most part, he did not attempt to correct the Received Text with his textual findings, he published a critical apparatus that listed thousands of variant readings from a wide variety of sources. Protestant and Baptist church leaders believed that Mill’s textual work was undermining the authority of the Scripture. Daniel Whitby XE "Whitby, Daniel" , pastor of St. Edmund’s, Salisbury, “argued that the authority of the holy Scriptures was in peril” (Metzger, The Text of the New Testament, p. 108). We believe old Whitby was correct. The authority of the Bible has been vastly undermined by modern textual criticism. It is not the gathering of textual data itself that imperils the Holy Scriptures, but the misuse of that data by textual critics who do not work from the principle of faith in divine preservation.

DANIEL MACE XE "Mace, Daniel" used Mills’ textual apparatus to produce a new Greek text with his own English translation. Metzger observes that “Mace’s edition was either vehemently attacked or quietly ignored.” Dr. Leonard Twells XE "Twells, Leonard" , pastor of St. Mary’s in Marlborough, condemned Mace’s work under the categories of a “corrupt text, false version, and fallacious notes” (Metzger, p. 111).

RICHARD BENTLEY XE "Bentley, Richard" (1662-1742) is another man commonly listed as one of the influential fathers of modern textual criticism. Though he planned a new edition of the Greek New Testament, it was not actually produced. What he did produce was a “canon of criticism that, in one form or other, has been approved by all textual critics since” (Metzger, The Text of the New Testament, p. 112). His goal, by the way, was not to attempt to publish a New Testament as it was given by the apostles but merely to “restore a Greek and Latin text to the state in which they were in the fourth century” (Souter, The Text of the New Testament, p. 98). One of Bentley’s principles of textual criticism was “the difficult is to be preferred to the easy reading.” This was based strictly upon a humanistic perspective of the biblical text, that “a scribe is more likely to make a difficult construction easier, than make more difficult what was already easy.” It does not take into account the fact that the Bible is the Word of God and has been subject, therefore, to processes different from that of other literature. Modern textual criticism completely ignores, for example, the Satanic attacks upon Scripture. How did Bentley know his principle is the proper method for discerning the preserved Word of God? He didn’t. Like many accepted principles of modern textual criticism, it is a mere theory. Since the original Old Testament and New Testament manuscripts do not exist, it is impossible to test the certainty of the textual theories. The only way the pure Scripture can be discerned is by the principle of faith in God’s promise of preservation.

Bentley was not a Bible scholar but a “classical scholar” who approached the Bible in the same manner that he approached ancient non-inspired writings, such as those of Horace. Souter observes that “the impulse [Bentley] gave to [his textual] studies was such, that but for him there would have been no Lachmann and no Hort.” Metzger admits that Bentley depended to a large degree upon his own “instinctive feeling as to what an author must have written” (Metzger, p. 182). This is called “conjectural emendation.” It describes an educated guess, and it is heresy. No scholar today can know by his intuitions and feelings what the preserved Word of God is. The house of modern textual criticism sits upon the sand. Even Metzger admits that Bentley’s bent for conjectural emendation led him to make many decisions that were “rash and indefensible.” We would describe practically the whole of modern textual criticism in those terms. Conjectural emendation did not die out with Bentley; Metzger admits that the 24th edition of Nestle’s Greek New Testament includes about 200 conjectures (p. 185).

JOHANN BENGEL XE "Bengel, Johann" (1687-1752) is another important link in the history of modern textual criticism. He adopted the principle of classifying manuscripts and “recognized that the witnesses to the text must not be counted but weighed” (Metzger, The Text of the New Testament, p. 112). In this manner, the textual critics have been able to ignore the overwhelming majority witness represented in the Received Text and to replace it with the minority witness of manuscripts such as the Sinaiticus and the Vaticanus. Though Bengel was orthodox in his Protestant faith and did not deny the infallibility of Scripture, the deity of Christ, etc., his textual work and principles were widely recognized as heretical by German churches and “he was treated as though he were an enemy of the holy Scriptures” (Metzger, p. 113). Modern version defenders look upon the Christians of old who fought against the early textual critics as ignorant people who were blindly holding onto tradition. We don’t accept this position. Bible-believers of that day understood that the principles of modern textual criticism deny biblical preservation. If the Bible has been preserved, it was preserved in the Received Text; and if it has been preserved, what are the textual critics doing? They are introducing corruption and heresy. I believe Bengel was wrong and those who treated him as an enemy of Holy Scripture were right.

JOHANN JAKOB WETTSTEIN XE "Wettstein, Johann" (1693-1754) was a textual scholar who collated manuscripts and published a Greek New Testament. When he first published a specimen of his textual criticism in 1718, he was charged with Arian and Socinian heresy (pertaining to the denial of the Trinity and the deity of Christ) and he was eventually expelled from the pastorate in Basle. After that, Wettstein taught philosophy and Hebrew at the Arminian college in Amsterdam, assuming the vacated seat of the modernistic Jean Leclerc XE "Leclerc, Jean" (Johannes Clericus XE "Clericus, Johannes" ), who “maintained that reason is an infallible guide in judging of all that man needs to know for salvation” (Schaff-Herzog). Leclerc suggested that Luke produced two editions of the book of Acts (Metzger, p. 163). Wettstein believed that all of the early Greek manuscripts have been contaminated by the Latin versions (Metzger, p. 114). It was obvious to most Bible believers of that day that the critical Greek text supported heretical doctrines, weakened the doctrine of Christ’s deity, and represented doctrinal corruptions introduced by heretics in the third and fourth centuries. Though rejected by Bible believers, Wettstein’s textual criticism was heartily approved by heretic. His critical notes were reprinted by the Christ-denying Modernist Johann Semler XE "Semler, J.S." in 1765.

JOHANN JAKOB GRIESBACH XE "Griesbach, J.J." (1745-1812) was one of the earliest fathers of modern textual criticism. Marvin R. Vincent says, “With Griesbach, really critical texts may be said to have begun” (A History of the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, 1899, p. 100). As noted earlier, Griesbach was a convinced student of one of the fathers of Modernism XE "Modernism" , JOHANN SALOMO SEMLER XE "Semler, J.S." (1725-91). Griesbach was influenced from his undergraduate days by the rising tide of Rationalism sweeping over Germany and “was a foe of orthodox Christianity” (D.A. Thompson, The Controversy Concerning the Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to Mark, p. 40). Both Semler and Griesbach rejected the deity of Jesus Christ and the supernatural infallibility of Holy Scripture. Semler was the father of the wicked accommodation theory, believing that Jesus Christ and the Apostles accommodated themselves to the prejudices, errors and superstitions of their time.

Bruce Metzger XE "Metzger, Bruce" makes a two-fold admission pertaining to Semler that sounds a loud warning to Bible believers (though Metzger does not mean it to be such). He says that Semler is “often regarded as the father of German rationalism” and at the same time “made noteworthy contributions to the science of textual criticism” (Metzger, The Text of the New Testament, p. 115). That there is a direct connection between German rationalism and modern textual criticism cannot be denied. Semler “was the leader of the reaction in Germany against the traditional views of the canon of Scripture” (Vincent, A History of the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, p. 92).

“It was said that Semler XE "Semler, J.S." ‘made use of his chair [as a professor at Halle] and his pen to undermine the very foundations of Christianity.’ According to Semler, the whole revelation must be brought to the bar of human reason and the cultured mind must relieve itself of any obligations to believe anything in the Bible that appears ‘unreasonable.’ Semler’s contribution to the destructive criticism of the Bible was his ‘accommodation theory,’ which declared that our Lord and His Apostles accommodated themselves to the prejudices, the errors and the superstitions of their time” (If the Foundations Be Destroyed. Trinitarian Bible Society XE "Trinitarian Bible Society" Article No. 14, p. 1).

Griesbach XE "Griesbach, J.J." was also associated with the Modernist W.M.L. de Wette and wrote the preface to de Wette’s Contributions to Old Testament Introduction (1806-07). In this work de Wette, another of the fathers of Old Testament criticism, denied the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and claimed that the book of Deuteronomy was not written until the reign of king Josiah.

Semler, who looked upon the Bible as a man-made book, provided Griesbach with some of his textual theories. Semler, for example, was the father of the recension theory that claims the Received text is an editorial recension created centuries after the Apostles. Another Griesbach theory adopted from Semler claimed that textual readings favoring theological orthodoxy should be suspect (because they denied biblical preservation and falsely believed the orthodox readings were created by textual editors during the early centuries). In other words, according to this principle, if there is a reading in the Received Text that plainly teaches the Godhead of Christ or some other foundational doctrine of the New Testament faith, that reading should be held suspect in favor of a variant in some old manuscript that lessens or does away with the doctrine. This, my friends, is topsy-turvy thinking! Griesbach also held that “the shorter reading (under most circumstances) is to be preferred to the more verbose.” It is not therefore surprising that the critical edition of the Greek New Testament is much shorter than the Received Text. Griesbach was the first to declare Mark 16:9-20 spurious and to omit it from the 1796 edition of his Greek text.

These theories were adopted by Griesbach and later by Westcott and Hort, who said they venerated the name of Griesbach “above that of every other textual critic of the New Testament” (Introduction, The New Testament in the Original Greek, p. 185). Metzger reminds us that Westcott and Hort did not collate any manuscripts or provide a critical apparatus; rather they “refined the critical methodology developed by Griesbach, Lachmann, and others, and applied it rigorously” (Metzger, p. 129). Griesbach XE "Griesbach, J.J." was the first to begin abandoning the Received Text XE "Received Text" to construct a new Greek text that contained many of the novelties later popularized by Westcott XE "Westcott-Hort" and Hort.

Griesbach’s textual theories were boldly rejected by most Protestants and Baptists. Kenyon acknowledges that even textual scholars such as Matthaei, Birch, and Scholz continued to adhere to the Received Text and “repudiated the doctrine of Griesbach” (Kenyon, The Text of the Greek Bible, p. 177). An example is Frederick Nolan, who, in 1815, published An Inquiry into the Integrity of the Greek Vulgate or Received Text of the New Testament, in which the Greek manuscripts are newly classed, the integrity of the Authorised Text vindicated, and the various readings traced to their origin was published in 1815. As the title suggests, this 576-page volume was a defense of the text underlying the Authorized Version. Nolan XE "Nolan, Frederick" said, “... it shall be my object to vindicate those important passages of the Received Text which have been rejected from the Scripture Canon, on the principles of the German XE "Germany" method of classification” (p. 43). Among the several passages that he thus vindicated are 1 Timothy 3:16 XE "First Timothy 3.16" XE "Christ’s deity" XE "God was manifest in the flesh" and 1 John 5:7 XE "First John 5.7" . Nolan XE "Nolan, Frederick" defended the Received Text on the basis of faith and theological purity. He opposed the critics of his day who were disparaging the work of Erasmus, Stephanus, and Beza in a manner mimicked by today’s modern version proponents.

Though Bible-believing men of the early 19th century rejected Griesbach and his textual theories, he was well received by the Christ-denying Unitarians. This is stated plainly in A History of Unitarianism in Transylvania, England and America.

“[Thomas] Belsham was busily occupied in his own field in London. As minister at Essex Street he was looked to as practically the leader and mouthpiece of the Unitarians. Thus in his sermons he not only powerfully maintained the Unitarian XE "Unitarian" cause, and expounded its doctrines, but also discussed in the light of liberal principles certain questions of national policy, or measures debated in Parliament … But HIS PREDOMINANT INTEREST AT THIS PERIOD WAS IN THE PREPARATION OF A NEW VERSION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT, BASED UPON A GREEK TEXT EMBODYING THE RESULTS OF RECENT CRITICISM. A project for a work of this sort had been proposed by [Joseph] Priestley in 1789, and was well advanced toward completion, when an important part of the manuscript was destroyed in the Birmingham Riots in 1791. Later in the same year, WHEN THE UNITARIAN BOOK SOCIETY WAS FORMED, THE TRANSLATION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT WAS MADE ONE OF ITS MAIN OBJECTS. After some five years’ delay it was decided not to make an independent version, but to adopt the excellent one [this was the opinion of the Unitarian author of this history] of Archbishop William Newcome, Primate of Ireland, as a basis, CHIEFLY BECAUSE IT FOLLOWED GRIESBACH XE "Griesbach, J.J." ‘S TEXT, and to accompany it with an introduction and notes. The plan was taken up with ardor, and the work was published in 1808, in three sizes, and later in several editions; and it was at once reprinted in America (Boston, 1909), where Unitarianism was already incubating. IT INCLUDED A VALUABLE INTRODUCTION ON THE PROGRESS AND PRINCIPLES OF TEXTUAL CRITICISM, ANTICIPATING MANY JUDGMENTS LATER ADOPTED IN THE REVISED VERSION XE "English Revised Version" OF 1881; BUT DREW THE FIRE OF THE ORTHODOX BY OMITTING AS LATE INTERPOLATIONS SEVERAL PASSAGES TRADITIONALLY CITED AS PILLARS OF TRINITARIAN DOCTRINE. [Examples of these omissions were the removal of the word “God” in 1 Timothy 3:16 XE "God was manifest in the flesh" XE "First Timothy 3.16" XE "Christ’s deity" and the deletion of 1 John 5:7.] Belsham had taken the leading part in the editing of the work, and he regarded it with great satisfaction. It was widely circulated in Unitarian quarters; but in spite of its presenting a much more correct text, many strictures upon it were passed even by Unitarians, while to the orthodox its notes gave much offence, and by them it was generally scorned as a sectarian work, ‘The Unitarian New Testament,’ though it was never officially adopted even by the Unitarians” (Earl Morse Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism in Transylvania, England, and America, Cambridge: Harvard XE "Harvard Divinity School" University Press, 1952, pp. 338,339).

Griesbach was also loved by Modernists. For example, Joseph Buckminster “persuaded the officials at Harvard College in 1809 to publish an American edition of Griesbach’s critical Greek New Testament, because he saw its value in promoting text criticism, in his opinion, ‘a most powerful weapon to be used against the supporters of verbal inspiration’” (Theodore Letis, The Ecclesiastical Text, p. 2).

Modern version defenders today often claim that there are no doctrinal issues at stake in the textual variances, but the Unitarians and Modernists in the 19th century understood plainly that this is not the case. They understood very well that the theories of modern textual criticism produce a New Testament text that supports their heresies better than the Received Text. In my new book Myths about Modern Bible Versions (currently at the printer) I trace the intimate connection between Unitarianism and the critical Greek text. The theories of modern textual criticism and the rejection of the Received Text were fathered in this demonic atmosphere.

Thus, at the beginning of the 19th century, Bible-believing Christians rejected the critical text as heretical, but the Unitarians and Modernists joyfully received the critical Greek text because it supported their doctrinal heresies pertaining to the Trinity and Christ’s deity, and also because the textual variety weakened the authority of Scripture. By the end of the 19th century, though, apostasy had so leavened many of the denominations that the Westcott XE "Westcott-Hort" -Hort Greek, which was built upon the Griesbach XE "Griesbach, J.J." text and which contained the same type of doctrinal corruptions (in fact, the Westcott-Hort text was more radical and was farther removed from the Received Text), found wide acceptance. Those today who deny that the critical Greek text is less doctrinally sound than the Received Text XE "Received Text" , are flying in the face of the facts. The old Unitarians understood the doctrinal differences between the texts. They rejected the Received Text because they understood that it defeated their heresies. They made the translation of a new Bible based upon the critical text a top priority. For those who have ears to hear, this speaks volumes.

KARL LACHMANN (1793-1851) XE "Lachmann, Karl" , Professor of Classical and German Philology at Berlin, has been described as a German rationalist (Charles Turner, Why the King James Version: The Preservation XE "Preservation, Bible" of the Word of God through the Faithful Churches, p. 7). Yet to “Lachmann XE "Lachmann, Karl" belongs the distinction of entirely casting aside the Textus Receptus XE "Received Text" ...” (Vincent, A History of Textual Criticism, p. 110). He produced editions of the N.T. in Berlin in 1842 and 1850, which carried Griesbach XE "Griesbach, J.J." ’s ideas still further afield from the preserved Text. Lachmann did not believe it was possible to reproduce the original text of the New Testament (Metzger XE "Metzger, Bruce" , The Text of the New Testament, p. 124). His goal was merely to “secure the text in widest use in Jerome’s time, leaving it to emendation and conjecture to get behind that” (Alexander Souter, The Text and Canon of the New Testament, 1912, p. 101). Aland tells us that Lachmann’s battle cry was “Down with the late text of the Textus Receptus, and back to the text of the early fourth-century church” (Aland, The Text of the New Testament, p. 11).

Like some of the other fathers of textual criticism, Lachmann was not a theologian, but a philologist “who had distinguished himself by critical editions of Latin and German classics” (Vincent, p. 110). Like Bentley before him, Lachmann was not studying the New Testament as the supernaturally-inspired and divinely preserved Word of God but as a mere book. He was a profane man who treated the Bible like any other book and his textual research was a mere scholarly venture; yet, his work was taken seriously by textual critics because he was furthering their objective of undermining the authority of the Received Text. Lachmann XE "Lachmann, Karl" “began to apply to the N.T. Greek text the same rules that he had used in editing texts of the Greek classics, which had been radically altered over the years. ... Lachmann had set up a series of several presuppositions and rules which he used for arriving at the original text of the Greek classics ... He now began with these same presuppositions and rules to correct the N.T. which he also presupposed was hopelessly corrupted. He had made a glaring mistake. The loving and reverent care given to the copying and preservation XE "Preservation, Bible" of the Scriptures by faithful churches was not matched by a similar process in the copying of the Greek classics” (Turner, pp. 7,8).

Lachmann XE "Lachmann, Karl" discarded the Received Text XE "Received Text" in favor of what he considered the oldest and best text represented in the Vaticanus and a few other similarly corrupt manuscripts. Enemies of the Received Text often falsely claim that it is based upon only a handful of manuscripts that Erasmus happened to have in his possession. In reality, the Received Text represents the text found in the vast majority of Greek manuscripts and versions, and it is the critical text that is more frequently based on scanty manuscript authority. Burgon XE "Burgon, John" reminds us that “Lachmann’s text seldom rests on more than four Greek codices, very often on three, not infrequently on two, sometimes on only one” (Revision Revised XE "Revision Revised" , p. 21). In his scholarly arrogance, Lachmann was willing to overthrow centuries of godly discernment purified in the fires of persecution in favor of modern novelties.

FRIEDRICH CONSTANTINE VON TISCHENDORF (1815-1874) was a German textual critic who traveled extensively in search of ancient documents. Tischendorf XE "Tischendorf, Constantine" had “a distinct respect for the conclusions of Griesbach XE "Griesbach, J.J." and Lachmann XE "Lachmann, Karl" (Thompson, p. 42). He was instrumental in bringing to light two of the manuscripts most influential in modern Bible translation work—Codex Sinaiticus XE "Sinaiticus" and Codex Vaticanus XE "Vaticanus" . Tischendorf looked upon his task as “the struggle to regain the original form of the New Testament” (Metzger, The Text of the New Testament, p. 126). His error, like that of other 19th century textual critics, was in failing to recognize God’s promise of preservation XE "Preservation, Bible" . Had he believed the Bible’s own testimony, he would have known by faith that the New Testament did not need to be recovered because it was not lost! Tischendorf’s work was so loved by the Unitarians, that two of them, Caspar Gregory and Ezra Abbot XE "Abbot, Ezra" , reissued the eighth edition of Tischendorf’s New Testament with critical notes after his death.

SAMUEL PRIDEAUX TREGELLES XE "Tregelles, Samuel" (1813-1875) was influential in the field of textual criticism in England. Though he was not committed to the modernistic rationalism that was beginning to permeate the Christian world of that day, he adopted the theories of textual criticism from the rationalists that preceded him. His critical principles “paralleled to a remarkable degree those of Lachmann” (Metzger, p. 127). From his youth, he had a peculiar zeal to go beyond even Griesbach in rejecting the Received Text, which he refused to give “any prescriptive rights.” Thus, regardless of what he believed about biblical inspiration, he did not work from a position of faith in divine preservation. He accepted the rationalistic position that the pure Word of God needed to be recovered.

B.F. WESTCOTT (1825-1901) and F.J.A. HORT (1828-1892), Anglican XE "Anglican" professors at Cambridge University, were responsible for taking the principles of Griesbach, Lachmann, and other fathers of modern textual criticism and fashioning them into a package of theories for the overthrow of the Received Text, which they labeled “vile.” They produced such a Greek Testament and secretly introduced it to the committee that was charged with revising the English Bible in Britain in the late 1800s. The resulting English Revised New Testament of 1881 followed (not in every detail, but in large part) the Westcott-Hort Greek New Testament. (The committee had not been charged with revising the Greek text but only with updating the English, and when their work was published, they came under widespread condemnation for exceeding the authority of their appointment.)

That XE "Modernism" Westcott and Hort were infected with the rationalistic approach to the Bible shared by other fathers of textual criticism has been observed by many scholarly men of God.

Zane Hodges noted Westcott XE "Westcott-Hort" and Hort’s apostasy: “The charge of rationalism XE "Modernism" is easily substantiated for Westcott and Hort and may be demonstrated from direct statements found in their introduction to The New Testament in the Original Greek. To begin with, Westcott and Hort are clearly unwilling to commit themselves to the inerrancy of the original Scriptures” (Hodges, “Rationalism and Contemporary New Testament Textual Criticism,” Bibliotheca Sacra, January 1971).

A precise, accurate description of Westcott XE "Westcott-Hort" -Hort’s theological position is given by the late Presbyterian bishop D.A. Thompson, who looked carefully into these matters: “Neither of these scholars had been evangelical and as the influence of the German neology increased they moved slowly and discreetly with the times.”

Dr. Edward Hills understood the rationalistic platform from which Westcott and Hort worked:

[I]n 1881 B.F. Westcott XE "Westcott-Hort" (1825-1901) and F.J.A. Hort (1828-1892) published their celebrated Introduction in which they endeavored to settle the New Testament text on the basis of this new information. They propounded the theory that the original New Testament text has survived in almost perfect condition in these two manuscripts, especially in the Vaticanus XE "Vaticanus" . This theory attained almost immediately a tremendous popularity, being accepted everywhere both by liberals and conservatives. Liberals liked it because it represented the latest thing in the science of N.T. textual criticism. Conservatives liked it because it seemed to grant them that security for which they were seeking. But since this security had no foundation in faith, it has not proved lasting. FOR IN THE WORKING OUT OF THEIR THEORY, WESTCOTT AND HORT FOLLOWED AN ESSENTIALLY NATURALISTIC METHOD. INDEED, THEY PRIDED THEMSELVES ON TREATING THE TEXT OF THE N.T. AS THEY WOULD THAT OF ANY OTHER BOOK, MAKING LITTLE OR NOTHING OF INSPIRATION XE "Inspiration" AND PROVIDENCE. ‘For ourselves,’ Hort wrote, ‘we dare not introduce considerations which could not reasonably be applied to other texts, supposing them to have documentary attestation of equal amount, variety, and antiquity.’ … LIKE GRIESBACH XE "Griesbach, J.J." THEY RULED OUT IN ADVANCE ANY POSSIBILITY OF THE PROVIDENTIAL PRESERVATION XE "Preservation, Bible" OF THE NEW TESTAMENT TEXT THROUGH THE USAGE OF BELIEVERS (Edward F. Hills XE "Hills, Edward F." , The King James Version Defended, pp. 65,66).

While some Evangelicals and even some Fundamentalists have come to the defense of Westcott XE "Westcott-Hort" and Hort and have contended that they were theologically sound, these (perhaps) fail to understand the nature of Westcott-Hort’s theological apostasy. Like many Neo-orthodox and Modernistic theologians, Westcott and Hort did not so much deny the doctrines of the Word of God directly; they undermined these doctrines with clever doubt, with subtle questioning. Dr. D.A. Waite XE "Waite, D.A." , who has examined the writings of Westcott and Hort in great detail, testifies: “Westcott’s attack on the bodily resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ is not by any means a direct clash of out-and-and denial, but rather an adroit, skillful, oblique undermining of the bodily resurrection of Christ by means of a re-definition of terms” (Waite, Westcott’s Denial of Bodily Resurrection, The Bible for Today, 1983, p. 8). Dr. Waite XE "Waite, D.A." ’s views on this matter are not based on a cursory look at Westcott XE "Westcott-Hort" and Hort’s theology. He has examined the writings of these men probably as exhaustively as anyone speaking on the subject today. As a background for his book Heresies of Westcott & Hort, Waite studied 1,291 pages of the writings of these men. Further, Dr. Waite brings to the table a vast knowledge of issues related to apostasy. He has researched Modernism XE "Modernism" , New Evangelicalism XE "New Evangelicalism" , and other erroneous movements for many decades. See Dr. Waite XE "Waite, D.A." ’s The Theological Heresies of Westcott and Hort: As Seen in Their Own Writings (The Bible for Today, 900 Park Ave., Collingswood, NJ 08108).

The apostasy of Westcott XE "Westcott-Hort" and Hort is also evident in their attitude toward a Christ-denying Unitarian XE "Unitarian" who was invited to participate. George Vance Smith XE "Smith, George Vance" , minister of St. Saviour’s Gate Unitarian Chapel, York, had equal vote along with the other committee members, although he had plainly and publicly denied the deity of Jesus Christ XE "Christ’s deity" . After he participated in a communion service with the other revisers, a letter was published in The Times (July 11, 1870) in which he proudly declared that though he had received communion, he had refused to recite the Creed since he would not compromise his “principles” as one who denied the deity of Jesus Christ. A public outcry ensued, but Westcott and Hort and some of the other revisers threatened to resign if Smith was not allowed to participate! Unitarian XE "Unitarian" Smith later gloried in the fact that many changes made in the English Revision XE "English Revised Version" better reflected his own wicked views on Jesus Christ. He understood that the critical text and the modern versions support doctrinal heresy better than the Received Text XE "Received Text" .

The theories of modern textual criticism and the rejection of the Received Text were fathered in this rationalistic atmosphere.

THE INFLUENTIAL TEXTUAL CRITICS OF THE 20TH CENTURY ARE ALSO INFECTED BY THEOLOGICAL RATIONALISM

Nothing has changed in the 20th century. The field is still dominated by unbelievers who deny the supernatural infallibility of the Bible. Consider, for example, the editors of the United Bible Societies Greek New Testament. CARLO MARTINI, who joined the UBS Greek N.T. editorial committee in 1967, is the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Milan. He was a professor at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, which, in addition to Roman Catholic heresies, promotes the theory of evolution and the heretical documentary views of biblical inspiration, etc. He is past president of the Council of European Bishop’s Conferences. A Time magazine article reported that Martini brought together a syncretistic convocation of over 100 religious leaders from around the world to promote a new age, one-world religion. In addressing this meeting, Mikhail Gorbachev said, “We need to synthesize a new religion for thinking men that will universalize that religion for the world and lead us into a new age.” Martini is a radical ecumenist and syncretist who is striving to bring all denominations and religions into a “Catholic” unity. The Bible calls this “Mystery Babylon.”

EUGENE NIDA is the father of the heretical dynamic equivalency XE "Dynamic Equivalency" theory of Bible translation. He believes God’s revelation in the Bible “involved limitations” and “is not absolute” and that the words of the Bible “are in a sense nothing in and of themselves” (Nida, Message and Mission, 1960, pp. 222-228). He does not believe the Bible is written “in a Holy Ghost language.” He believes the record of Jacob wrestling with the Angel was not a literal event. He denies the substitutionary blood atonement of Christ (Nida, Theory and Practice, 1969, p. 53). He denies that Christ died to satisfy God’s justice. He believes the blood of the cross was merely symbolic of Christ’s death and is never used in the Bible “in the sense of propitiation.”

BRUCE METZGER believed Moses did not write the Pentateuch, Deuteronomy was not written until 700 years before Christ, the Old Testament is a mixture of “myth, legend, and history,” the record of the worldwide flood of Noah’s day is exaggerated, the book of Job is a folktale, the miracle accounts about Elijah and Elisha contain “legendary elements,” Isaiah was written by Isaiah plus two or three unknown men who wrote centuries later, the record of Jonah is a “legend,” Daniel does not contain supernatural prophecy, Paul did not write the Pastoral Epistles, Peter did not write 2 Peter, etc. All of these unbelieving lies can be found in the notes to the Reader’s Digest Condensed Bible, which were written by Metzger, and in the New Oxford Annotated Bible, of which Metzger is a co-editor.

KURT ALAND denied the verbal inspiration of the Bible and wanted to see all denominations united into one “body” by the acceptance of a new ecumenical canon of Scripture which would take into account the Catholic apocryphal books (The Problem of the New Testament Canon, pp. 6,7,30-33).

MATTHEW BLACK XE "Black, Matthew" is another modernistic editor of the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament. Black co-edited an edition of Peake’s Commentary in 1982. Peake’s was originally published in 1919 and boldly opposed fundamentalist doctrine. The editors openly reject the doctrine of the infallible inspiration and preservation of Holy Scripture. Note the following excerpt: “It is well known that the primitive Christian Gospel was initially transmitted by word of mouth and that this oral tradition resulted in variant reporting of word and deed. It is equally true that when the Christian record was committed to writing it continued to be the subject of verbal variation, involuntary and intentional, at the hands of scribes and editors” (Peake’s Commentary on the Bible, p. 633). Peake’s Commentary also casts doubt upon Trinitarian baptism: “This mission is described in the language of the church and most commentators doubt that the Trinitarian formula was original at this point in Matthew’s Gospel, since the NT elsewhere does not know of such a formula and describes baptism as being performed in the name of the Lord Jesus (e.g. Acts 2:38, 8:16, etc.).”

(In my book The Modern Bible Hall of Shame, I have given lengthy quotes from the writings of these and many other men who are influential in textual criticism and the modern translations in this century, including George Vance Smith, Philip Schaff, Ezra Abbot, Joseph Thayer, Caspar Rene Gregory, Walter Bowie, Edgar Goodspeed, James Moffatt, C.H. Dodd, Eugene Nida, Robert Bratcher, William Barclay, F.F. Bruce, Fredric Kenyon, Ernest Colwell, Frederick Conybeare, Samuel Driver, Gerhard Kittel, Kirsopp Lake, J.B. Phillips, Henry Wheeler Robinson, and Hermann von Soden.)

It is true that some theologically orthodox men have adopted the theories of modern textual criticism, but they did not develop them. When a man goes to an Evangelical or Fundamentalist seminary and studies textual criticism, what textbooks does he normally use? He will use books by Bruce Metzger, Frederic Kenyon, Kurt Aland, F.F. Bruce, etc. I have visited Bible colleges and seminaries all over the country and these are the books that are commonly sold in the bookstores. All of these men, and the overwhelming majority of the other men who have developed the theories of modern textual criticism, are rationalists who deny the infallibility of the Scriptures, who hold the heretical documentary views of the Old Testament, etc. Evangelicals and Baptists who have promoted textual criticism did not develop it themselves, but merely received it from the hands of the Griesbachs, Kenyons, Metzgers, and Alands, and have passed it along as the most up-to-date scientific thought. This does not really surprise me. Sadly, most men, even preachers, do not carefully and prayerfully analyze what they are taught in a Bible institution. And most theologically educated men today would prefer to remain ignorant of the Received Text-KJV position than bear the reproach of being in that “obscurantist” camp.

This reminds us that most colleges and seminaries do not teach anything about the defense of the Received Text (apart from a false caricature of it). Thus most men who graduate from these institutions, while assuming they know both sides of the textual debate, only know one side. Most Bible college and seminary graduates today have never read the works of John Burgon, Edward Miller, Edward Hills, Terance Brown, Donald Waite, or other scholarly defenders of the King James Bible and its Received Text. Dozens of men have shared their testimony with me that they were not exposed to both sides of the issue of Bible texts and versions during their Bible training. Only later did they come into appreciation of a sound defense of the KJV-TR when they studied the aforementioned men (and many others) for themselves instead of depending upon the caricatures of them provided by their Bible college or seminary teachers.

[Distributed by Way of Life Literature's Fundamental Baptist Information Service, an e-mail listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. OUR GOAL IN THIS PARTICULAR ASPECT OF OUR MINISTRY IS NOT DEVOTIONAL BUT IS TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR. This material is sent only to those who personally subscribe to the list. If somehow you have subscribed unintentionally, following are the instructions for removal. The Fundamental Baptist Information Service mailing list is automated. To SUBSCRIBE or to UNSUBSCRIBE or to CHANGE ADDRESSES or to RE-SUBSCRIBE UNDER A NEW ADDRESS, go to http://www.wayoflife.org/fbis/subscribe.html. If you have any trouble with this, please let us know. And please be patient with us. We do not ignore any unsubscribe request, but we cannot always get to your request immediately as each person involved with maintaining the Way of Life web site does this only on a very part time basis and is busy with many other major activities, such as pastoring and missionary work. We take up a quarterly offering to fund this ministry, and those who use the materials are expected to participate (Galatians 6:6) if they can. Some of the articles are from O Timothy magazine, which is in its 25th year of publication. Way of Life publishes many helpful books. The catalog is located at the web site: http://wayoflife.org/catalog/catalog.htm Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061. 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org. We do not solicit funds from those who do not agree with our preaching and who are not helped by these publications, but from those who are. OFFERINGS can be made at http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/offering.html. PAYPAL offerings can be made to https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=dcloud%40wayoflife.org]

CONTEMPLATIVE SPIRITUALITY AND THE NEW AGE

October 28, 2008 (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) -

The following is excerpted from our new book Contemplative Mysticism: A Powerful Ecumenical Bond, which is available from Way of Life Literature. If it is not yet available through the online catalog, it can be ordered by phone or e-mail with a credit card.
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The contemplative mysticism that is permeating evangelicalism is a bridge to the New Age. It has been called the “Western bridge to Far Eastern spirituality” (Tilden Edwards, Spiritual Friends, p. 18).

In a 2005 interview Tony Campolo said:

“I got to meet the head of the Franciscan order. I met him in Washington. He said let me tell you an interesting story. He told me about one of their gatherings, where they bring the brothers of the Franciscan order together for a time of fellowship. About eight years ago they held it in Thailand and out of courtesy, they really felt they needed to show some graciousness to the Buddhists, because they were in a Buddhist country. So they got Buddhist theologians together and Franciscan theologians together and sent them off for three days to talk and see if they could find common ground. They also took Buddhist and Franciscan monastics and sent them off together to pray with each other. On the fourth day they all reassembled. The theologians were fighting with each other, arguing with each other, contending there was no common ground between them. The monastics that had gone off praying together, came back hugging each other. IN A MYSTICAL RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD, THERE IS A COMING TOGETHER OF PEOPLE WHERE THEOLOGY IS LEFT BEHIND AND IN THIS SPIRITUALITY THEY FOUND A COMMONALITY” (“On Evangelicals and Interfaith Cooperation,” Cross Currents, Spring 2005).

Mystical experience is exalted over doctrine and is seen as a key to radical ecumenical and interfaith unity. But if you turn your back to Bible doctrine and try to reach beyond it through mysticism, you are entering the realm of spiritual delusion with no sure light to lighten your path.

Thomas Keating, one of the most influential voices in the contemplative movement, is past president of the Temple of Understanding, a New Age organization founded in 1960 by Juliet Hollister. The mission of this organization is to “create a more just and peaceful world” and its tools are New Age instruments such as interfaith dialogue, visualization, and community building.

Thomas Merton spoke at a Temple of Understanding conference in Calcutta, India, in 1968. He praised the interfaith atmosphere and his fellow pagan religionists.

Shambhala Publications, a publisher that specializes in Occultic, Jungian, New Age, Buddhist, and Hindu writings, also publishes the writings of Catholic mystics, including The Wisdom of the Desert by Thomas Merton, The Writings of Hildegard of Bingen, and The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence.

The Monastic Interreligious Dialogue, which is sponsored by the Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries of North America, is associated with the North American Board for East-West Dialogue (NABEWD). At the NABEWD’s first meeting in January 1978 at a monastery in Clyde, Missouri, Robert Muller, a New Age leader at the United Nations, was selected as the organization’s advisor. Muller believes in the divinity of all men.

New Ager Caroline Myss (pronounced mace) has written a book based on Teresa of Avila’s visions. It is entitled Entering the Castle: Finding the Inner Path to God and Your Soul’s Purpose. Myss says, “For me, the spirit is the vessel of divinity” (“Caroline Myss’ Journey,” Conscious Choice, September 2003).

Mary Coelho, a third generation Quaker, pursued contemplative mysticism from the Quaker inner light through Catholic contemplative practices all the way to the New Age. Today she believes that man is a product of billions of years of evolution, a process that is reaching a new stage in our day. She denies the Bible’s teaching on creation, the fall of man, and salvation only through faith in the substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ.

On April 15, 2008, emerging church leaders and contemplatives Rob Bell and Doug Pagitt joined the Dalai Lama for the New Agey Seeds of Compassion InterSpiritual Event in Seattle. It brought together Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, Buddhists, Sikhs, Muslims, and others. The event featured a dialogue on “the themes common to all spiritual traditions.” The Dalai Lama said, “I think everyone, ultimately, deep inside [has] some kind of goodness” (“Emergent Church Leaders’ InterSpirituality,” Christian Post, April 17, 2008).

New Ager Ken Wilber, who believes that man is divinity, is intimately associated with the contemplative movement.

In his book Velvet Elvis, Rob Bell recommends that his readers sit at Wilber’s feet for three months!

“For a mind-blowing introduction to emergence theory and divine creativity, set aside three months and read Ken Wilber’s A Brief History of Everything” (Velvet Elvis, p. 192).

Wilber was invited to write the foreword to The Common Heart, a book that describes the interfaith dialogues conducted at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, under the direction of Thomas Keating.

Wilber also conducted a Mystic Heart seminar series with Catholic contemplative monk Wayne Teasdale. In the first seminar in this series Teasdale said, “You are God; I am God; they are God; it is God” (“The Mystic Heart: The Supreme Identity,” http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7652038071112490301&q=ken+Wilber).

In Up from Eden: A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution (1981, 2004), Ken Wilber calls the Garden of Eden a fable” and the biblical view of history “amusing” (pp. xix, 3). He describes his “perennial philosophy” as follows:

“... it is true that there is some sort of Infinite, some type of Absolute Godhead, but it cannot properly be conceived as a colossal Being, a great Daddy, or a big Creator set apart from its creations, from things and events and human beings themselves. Rather, it is best conceived (metaphorically) as the ground or suchness or condition of all things and events. It is not a Big Thing set apart from finite things, but rather the reality or suchness or ground of all things. ... the perennial philosophy declares that the absolute is One, Whole, and Undivided” (p. 6).

Wilber says that this perennial philosophy “forms the esoteric core of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Sufism, AND CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM” (p. 5).

Thus, this New Ager recognizes that Roman Catholic mysticism, which spawned the contemplative movement within Protestantism, has the same esoteric core faith as pagan idolatry! And there is no doubt that this true. It is a blind leap into the dark.

Thomas Keating and Richard Foster are involved in the Living Spiritual Teachers Project, a group that associates together Christians of various stripes, Zen Buddhist monks and nuns, universalists, occultists, and New Agers. Members include the Dalai Lama, who claims to be the reincarnation of an advanced spiritual entity; Marianne Williamson, promoter of the occultic A Course in Miracles; Marcus Borg, who believes that Jesus was not virgin born and did not rise from the grave; Catholic nun Joan Chittister, who says we must become “in tune with the cosmic voice of God”; Andrew Harvey, who says that men need to “claim their divine humanity”; Matthew Fox, who believes there are many paths to God; Alan Jones, who calls the gospel of the cross a vile doctrine and says there is no absolute authority; and Desmond Tutu, who says, “... because everybody is a God-carrier, all are brothers and sisters.”

Rick Warren has yoked up with mystic Ken Blanchard on various occasions, and Blanchard is intimately associated with New Age paganism. Blanchard visited Saddleback in 2003 and Warren told the church that he had “signed on to help with the P.E.A.C.E. Plan, and he’s going to be helping train us in leadership and in how to train others to be leaders all around the world” (Ken Yungen, A Time of Departing, pp. 162, 163). Warren teamed up with Blanchard in the Lead Like Jesus conferences and audio series. Warren used Blanchard’s materials in a Preaching and Purpose Driven Life Training Workshop for Chaplains at Saddleback in 2004 (A Time of Departing, p. 167). Warren also endorsed Blanchard’s book Lead Like Jesus.

Blanchard, in turn, has strong New Age associations. He wrote the foreword to the 2007 edition of Ballard’s book Little Wave and Old Swell, which is inspired by Hindu guru Paramahansa Yogananda. This book is designed to teach children that God is all and man is one with God. In the foreword Blanchard makes the following amazing statement: “Yogananda loved Jesus, and Jesus would have loved Yogananda.” I was a disciple of Yogananda before I was saved, and there is no doubt that he did NOT love the Jesus of the Bible!

Blanchard’s recommendation appears on the back cover of Deepak Chopra’s The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success. He wrote the foreword to Ellen Ladd’s book Death and Letting God, which promotes clairvoyance. He endorsed the 2005 book Zen of Business Administration, which is subtitled “How Zen practice can transform your work and your life.”

Blanchard joined members of the New Age occultic project The Secret in January 2008 for a one-day seminar entitled “Your Best Year Ever” (“Ken Blanchard Joins ‘The Secret’ Team,” Lighthouse Trails, Jan. 14, 2008). Rhonda Byrne, the author of The Secret, thanked “Esther Hicks and the teachings of Abraham.” Abraham refers to a group of spirit guides that Hicks channels. The Secret teaches the New Age doctrines that man is god. “You are God in a physical body ... You are all power ... You are all intelligence ... You are the creator” (p. 164).

Lighthouse Trails wisely observes:

“Did Rick Warren know of Blanchard’s sympathies when he brought him in to help at Saddleback? Of course he did. And do you think that Rick Warren and Ken Blanchard are going to train their ‘billion’ soldiers for Christ how to practice New Age mysticism and learn how to go into altered states of consciousness? You bet. And that is definitely something to be concerned about” (“Rick Warren Teams up with New Age Guru,” Lighthouse Trails, April 19, 2005).

Warren is also closely associated with New Age mystic Leonard Sweet. He teamed up with Sweet in 1994 to produce the Tides of Change audio set published by Zondervan. A photo of Warren and Sweet are pictured on the cover. Warren endorsed Sweet’s book Soul Tsunami, the endorsement appearing on both the front and back covers. Warren invited Sweet to speak at the 2008 Saddleback Small Groups Conference called Wired.

Sweet promotes a New Age spirituality that he calls New Light and “the Christ consciousness.” He describes it in terms of “the union of the human with the divine” which is the “center feature of all the world’s religions” (Quantum Spirituality, p. 235). He says it was experienced by Mohammed, Moses, and Krishna. He says that some of the “New Light leaders” that have led him into this thinking are New Agers Matthew Fox, M. Scott Peck, Willis Harman, and Ken Wilber, plus the Catholic-Buddhist Thomas Merton. In his book Quantum Spirituality Sweet defines the New Light as “a structure of human becoming, a channeling of Christ energies through mindbody experience” (Quantum Spirituality, p. 70). He says humanity needs to learn the truth of the words of Thomas Merton, “We are already one” (Quantum Spirituality, p. 13). Sweet draws heavily from Catholic mysticism. He says:

“Mysticism, once cast to the sidelines of the Christian tradition, is now situated in postmodernist culture near the center. ... In the words of one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century, Jesuit philosopher of religion/dogmatist Karl Rahner, ‘The Christian of tomorrow will be a mystic, one who has experienced something, or he will be nothing’” (Quantum Spirituality, 1991, p. 11).

Observe, then, how close are the ties between contemplatives and the New Age! And contemplative spirituality is the bridge.

This is only a tiny glimpse into this frightful matter. Rick Warren does not believe that all religions worship the same God or that man is God, but his enthusiasm for contemplative practices and his lust for the newest thing have brought him and his followers into close association with those who do. He is promoting the same type of “spiritual” practices that are nurturing the New Age and his thinking is being corrupted by this illicit association.

Evangelicals who are reading and recommending books by mystics would be wise to take heed to this warning. If they delve into Catholic contemplative practices they are in great danger of being corrupted by this illicit endeavor.
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The previous is excerpted from our new book Contemplative Mysticism: A Powerful Ecumenical Bond, which is available from Way of Life Literature. If it is not yet available through the online catalog, it can be ordered by phone or e-mail with a credit card.

[Distributed by Way of Life Literature's Fundamental Baptist Information Service, an e-mail listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. OUR GOAL IN THIS PARTICULAR ASPECT OF OUR MINISTRY IS NOT DEVOTIONAL BUT IS TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR. This material is sent only to those who personally subscribe to the list. If somehow you have subscribed unintentionally, following are the instructions for removal. The Fundamental Baptist Information Service mailing list is automated. To SUBSCRIBE or to UNSUBSCRIBE or to CHANGE ADDRESSES or to RE-SUBSCRIBE UNDER A NEW ADDRESS, go to http://www.wayoflife.org/fbis/subscribe.html. If you have any trouble with this, please let us know. And please be patient with us. We do not ignore any unsubscribe request, but we cannot always get to your request immediately as each person involved with maintaining the Way of Life web site does this only on a very part time basis and is busy with many other major activities, such as pastoring and missionary work. We take up a quarterly offering to fund this ministry, and those who use the materials are expected to participate (Galatians 6:6) if they can. Some of the articles are from O Timothy magazine, which is in its 25th year of publication. Way of Life publishes many helpful books. The catalog is located at the web site: http://wayoflife.org/catalog/catalog.htm Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061. 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org. We do not solicit funds from those who do not agree with our preaching and who are not helped by these publications, but from those who are. OFFERINGS can be made at http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/offering.html. PAYPAL offerings can be made to https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=dcloud%40wayoflife.org]

I AM NOT YOUR PASTOR: AN EXHORTATION TO MY READERS TO ACT WISELY IN THE CHURCHES

September 24, 2008 (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) –

The following are some truths that I consider very important and that I would like for all of my readers to take to heart. Please keep in mind the fact that I am not your pastor. I hope to be a helper in Christ, but I am not your pastor. And I want to give an exhortation about how to act wisely in the churches.

Most of you know these things and live these things, but sometimes I hear things from pastors and others that cause me to realize that some of my readers need this exhortation. At the same time, I don’t have any particular case in mind, so there is no need to write and try to explain yourself to me. Rather, let us be doers of the word and not hearers only.

I DO NOT SUPPORT THOSE WHO SEPARATE FROM ALL CHURCHES TODAY.

Let me make this very clear: I do not support those who separate themselves from all churches today. While I believe that God’s people must be discerning and cautious and not overlook error, at the same time we are to be patient and faithful to God’s ordained institution, the church, and to God-ordained pastoral authority, and I believe we should strive as much as possible for unity and not disunity among true believers. Both things are emphasized in Scripture, though it is not always a simple matter to obey both of them at one time.

If you think that you are justified to separate from all churches today because of David Cloud’s writings, you are mistaken. I do not preach that and I am not pleased when people do that.

In some cases there might not be a sound, spiritually-healthy, Bible-believing church within commuting distance, and I do not expect God’s people to attend a church that would undermine their faith or hinder their spiritual lives or that of their children.

But my recommendation in such cases has always been to find a way either to help start a good church or to move to a place where there is one. It is said that “where there is a will there is a way,” and that is usually true. Paul said, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” (Phil. 4:13). When God tells us to do something, He provides a way, and the church is God’s program for this age. It is mentioned more than 100 times in Scripture. Most of the New Testament is written to churches. We are commanded not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together (Heb. 10:25) and to obey them that have the rule over us (Heb. 13:17). Those Scriptures take for granted that we will be in a church. The first believers continued steadfastly in the fellowship, prayers, and breaking of bread in the church (Acts 2:42). Paul commended Phebe to the church at Rome, and she was a servant of the church at Cenchrea (Rom. 16:1). That is the example that is put before us in Scripture.

I have been saved for 35 years and I have always found a way to be faithful to a sound New Testament church, and there have been times when I have had to attend a church that I wasn’t very excited about, to say the least, but in light of the Bible’s emphasis on the church, I am not going to neglect God’s program, and I exhort all of my readers to follow this example!

Folks, sheep need sheepfolds and shepherds, and that is what God has provided in the church.

BE WISE AND CAUTIOUS AND PATIENT IN DEALING WITH PROBLEMS AND ERRORS IN CHURCHES.

It grieves me when I hear that readers of Way of Life materials are causing trouble UNWISELY in good Bible-believing churches and are doing it in my name!

Please observe that I DID NOT say that it grieves me to hear that readers of Way of Life materials are causing trouble in churches. Sometimes trouble is godly. There are churches that urgently need some of the members to step up the plate and try to bring godly change. In no way do I want to discourage the hearts of God’s people who are trying to stand uncompromisingly for truth and righteousness in this evil generation, but there is a right and wrong way to do things.

One man wrote to me and said, “Your medicine is strong and needful; it just needs to be administered carefully.” I agree with that 100%.

That man told me about some people he has known who have tried to change the soul winning program in some churches to bring in an emphasis on repentance and to turn the churches away from what I call “quick prayerism” (quick to lead people in a sinner’s prayer whether there is any obvious conviction or even much interest, quick to pronounce people saved even when there is no evidence thereof, quick to announce “salvation” statistics even when a large percentage of them are bogus). This man claimed that these people just ended up causing trouble for the churches and not accomplishing anything good. Since I am not personally familiar with those situations, I don’t know if he is giving an accurate picture, but I asked him what exactly was wrong in those particular cases, in his estimation. He answered as follows:

“They were not working from the top down and were being too strong/dogmatic. I’m right; you’re wrong. One can be right and not be righteous about it and thus make of none effect the desired change.  This one talks to that one and causes a division prior to the matter getting to the pastor. Now he has a compounded problem with division in the church. We need to work from the top down with humility and grace, knowing that it takes time to change the course of a ship. With the strong medicine we need to also teach the tact to administer it so that it gives the greatest benefit and least harm. Hopefully we won’t look back and say, ‘The operation was a success; we cut out all the cancer; too bad the patient died’! Your well done biblical work has shaped many of the things I do and believe. It is profitable and needful. We just need it at the right dosages to be the most effective.”

I agree with these thoughts and I have written about this type of thing many times. The articles “Keys to Fruitful Church Membership” and “The Pastor’s Authority and the Church Member’s Responsibility” deal with this, for example. I have written a lot about the importance of the church and how to conduct oneself as a member.

One suggestion I would make is this: it is important that we not just criticize what is in place in the church, but that we have a positive plan for something better. Consider, again, the soul winning issue. I believe an example of the right way to try to bring this type of change to a church is contained in the following e-mail:

“Right now, my wife and I are in a church where we have seen a pastor shift his thinking on this important issue. A good friend and I are regulars on Thursday night, and just through gentle conversation and asking innocent questions, there’s been a total turnaround in soulwinning methodology here.

“Instead of merely inviting lost people to ‘worship’ with us, our entire Thursday night soulwinning is Gospel-focused. It has been a singular joy to see everyone come to life on the doorstep! We now seek to present the Gospel at every door, and plow the soil on sin, judgment, and repentance. Instead of slammed doors, we find that a compassionate explanation of sin in concrete terms makes judgment seem reasonable, opening the door for the Gospel. Following with repentance and faith just feels biblical and powerful. Number of ‘prayers’ is down, but we can all see that we're reaching a much deeper sense of clarity with each contact.

“No longer are we stuck with nowhere to go when someone says, ‘Oh, I asked Jesus into my heart when I was little.’ Many have, but never repented. With that person, it is so important to have an understanding of biblical soteriology -- that it’s not enough to pray the prayer. They may still be lost, and we find it’s typically easy to uncover that with only a few more questions. By our unscientific numbers, maybe 60% of people have made some commitment to Jesus, but 90% of those have no convincing evidence that the Author of faith is finishing anything in them. The easy-prayerist checks these off their list and implicitly endorses false conversions!

“Thanks for advancing these very biblical ideas in our fundamental Baptist culture. We are nearly overrun with people who say, ‘Well, at least they’ll be in heaven, even if they won't have any fruit.’ Enough of that!”

To that I say amen! In this case the problem was approached in a wise manner and the fruit has been good.

There is no simple one-two-three list of suggestions I could give that would solve the problem of how to correct errors in churches. It is never easy, and it is largely a matter of spiritual maturity and attaining and applying godly wisdom under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Paul said to the church at Rome: “And I myself also am persuaded of you, my brethren, that ye also are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, able also to admonish one another” (Rom. 15:14).

Thus, to be able to admonish others in a fruitful manner requires that we be filled with goodness and filled with knowledge. This refers to spiritual maturity and a solid foundation of Bible knowledge. If I try to “straighten out a church” without these two things, I will not only fail, I will cause more harm than good!

New Christians, in particular, must be very cautious about trying to exhort others, especially his spiritual leaders. New Christians are often very zealous, and I don’t want to dampen that zeal, but zeal must be tempered with godly wisdom and new Christians simply don’t have much of that. They are called babes in Christ in God’s Word, and they are exhorted to drink milk and grow to maturity (1 Pet. 2:2). That is what a babe in Christ needs to focus his attention on, rather than trying to straighten out other people!

Once I almost split a church, and it is one of the things that I regret the most in my Christian life. It was a long time ago, and I was young in the Lord. I was zealous, as I have always been by God’s grace, but I was lacking in experience and maturity. I got it into my mind that my pastor at the time was unqualified, because he didn’t study enough, to my way of thinking, and his preaching ministry wasn’t strong and solid enough, to my way of thinking. I was measuring him by myself. My strong suit is study, so why shouldn’t every preacher be just like me! The church wasn’t very old and the dear pastor was a personal friend who had done a lot for me, but I unwisely talked to a couple of the key church members about the matter. I talked to him, too, but I was dead wrong in trying to stir up the people against him. He was deeply offended at my action, of course, and though I was sorrowful and realized that I had been wrong, the damage was done. Our friendship was ruined (he wasn’t very forgiving!) and I moved my membership to another church. The problem was that I was just too young and immature and inexperienced in the Lord to have tried to bring change to that particular situation. It’s true that the pastor wasn’t a great student, but he had other important pastoral qualifications that I was overlooking.

Again, I want to emphasize that I am not trying to discourage God’s people who are trying to take a stand against error in a godly manner. I know many people who have tried to do this in the right manner and they were wrongly branded as trouble-makers and treated with a great lack of respect by the pastors and churches in question. It is never an easy matter to challenge the church leaders, and it is a sad fact that leaders who have chosen a path of error rarely turn back from it.

There is a great problem among fundamental Baptist and fundamentalist Bible churches today, in that so many that were once sound are moving in the direction of New Evangelicalism and the contemporary church growth philosophies. They are bringing in the modern Bibles and modern music and modern dress standards. They are allowing women to lead in ways the Bible forbids. They are creating worldly youth ministries that pamper and entertain the flesh rather than challenge the young people to true biblical discipleship. When God’s people rise up against these things, more often than not they are despised and discarded.

So please do not misunderstand what I am trying to say in this article. I DO NOT want to discourage or hinder God’s people in taking a scriptural and wise stand for truth in this wicked day. I am just trying to urge wisdom.

IT IS SCRIPTURAL AND RIGHT TO QUESTION ONE’S PASTOR ABOUT ISSUES IN THE CHURCH, BUT THERE IS ALSO A RIGHT WAY TO DO IT.

If the pastor won’t listen and doesn’t want to be challenged about things, and if he requires “unquestioning loyalty,” I would strongly suggest that you leave that church. Such a man is a Diotrephes, and staying in that church will cripple your spiritual life and turn you into something like a cult member. (At the Way of Life web site see the articles “Unquestioning Loyalty to Pastoral Leadership the Mark of a Cult” and “Another Warning about Unquestioning Loyalty.”)

If, on the other hand, you have godly, humble pastor(s) who are qualified by God’s standards and open to challenges from their people, be very patient with them. You must always remember that you are not the pastor. He, not you, will be held accountable for the church before God. He, not you, has to bear the burden of the ministry, and I can assure you that there is probably not a more difficult job in the world than leading a church and dealing with PEOPLE! He, not you, has the call of God to make the major decisions about the church’s ministry.

I advise that you always give pastors the benefit of the doubt. Not every issue that comes up in the church is as black and white as we might think. God gives pastors wisdom. They understand the overall picture of the condition and needs of the church in a way that you do not. At the same time, pastors are just sinners saved (hopefully) by grace. They are learning and growing like the rest of God’s people. God lets us make mistakes to teach us lessons; shouldn’t we give the same freedom to pastors to some wise degree? I am not talking here about clear biblical error and heresy or the type of sin that calls for church discipline. I am talking about things like allowing music that you think might be borderline, and perhaps being too “patient” with new converts about cleaning up their lives, and not dealing with issues as much as I think he should, and bringing in preachers that I don’t like, and having or not having a youth ministry, and assigning people to jobs that I don’t think they should be assigned to, and not having the soul winning program exactly to my suiting, and doing things at Christmas that I wish the church would not do, and not emphasizing enough about the King James Bible and maybe even giving a better or different rendering once in a while, etc.

A qualification for the pastor is that he not be self-willed (Titus 1:7). This means that he is to rule the church by God’s will and not his own will, by God’s Word not by his own thinking. The self-willed man wants to run over other people and control them. It is a matter of the heart’s attitude. It is a matter of pride and lack of compassion and godly patience.

At the same time, the church members also should not be self-willed. If God has not called me to be a pastor, I should not try to rule the church! I am not saying that the church member should not have complete liberty to express his opinion about things. I am not saying that the church is not a body and that each member should be treated with godly consideration. I am simply saying that the church member needs to check himself and make sure that he is not trying to be something in the church that God has not called him to be.

“For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith” (Romans 12:3).

Women must be doubly careful about this matter, because God’s Word forbids them to teach or to usurp authority over the man (1 Timothy 2:12). The woman might be more spiritual than the men and might know more, but God has not given her the liberty to teach men. She thus has to be patient and submissive and be a great prayer warrior in order to move the heart of God to intervene THROUGH THE MEN when there are errors and problems.

This does not mean that a woman cannot go to her pastor and other church leaders if she has questions and issues, but she simply is not allowed by God to become their teacher. She can recommend materials so that the men can learn from other men, if they are willing to look into the issue, but she cannot become their teacher.

I realize this is a very sensitive matter, and many women have written to exhort and teach and rebuke me, but they are out of bounds, regardless of how much they think they know and how right and how close to God they think they are.

What I am trying to say here, and what I am trying to exhort my readers to do, is to be very wise and godly and patient in dealing with church leaders.

“For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another. This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh” (Galatians 5:14-16).

God has given pastors authority (Heb. 13:7, 17). Some of them have abused their authority, but pastoral authority is God-ordained, nonetheless. Not everyone in the church has the same authority. This does not mean that we overlook things that we believe are wrong. Pastors are not popes and do not have unlimited authority; their authority is limited by the Bible; and churches must not follow pastors into error. But as a church member, I must always remember that the pastor has authority that I do not have and that he, not me, will give an answer to God for pastoral decisions.

THERE IS A TIME TO LEAVE A CHURCH WHEN IT IS COMMITTED TO A PATH OF SERIOUS ERROR, BUT THERE IS ALSO A RIGHT WAY TO LEAVE.

There is a proper time to leave a church, if it is not following God’s Word, but there is a proper way to leave and many times people leave churches for carnal reasons and in a carnal manner.

If someone leaves a church for biblical and spiritual reasons, the fruit will be characterized by the description in James 3:17-18--purity, peaceableness, gentleness, easy to be entreated, mercy, without partiality, without hypocrisy. Someone leaving in this mode will speak the truth in love. He leaves because he is convinced it is God’s will, but he does so in a peaceable and godly manner. He is respectful of the leaders even if he doesn’t agree with them, and he harbors no ill will toward the leaders or the church.

But if someone leaves a church for carnal reasons the fruit will be characterized by the description in James 3:14-16--bitterness, envy, strife, confusion, and other evil works. This is not of God! Many times I have observed this. People get upset at something and they leave a church, but they do not do so in a godly manner. They cause all sorts of trouble and try to hurt the church, both before they leave and after. Many times they won’t even talk about the matter with the leaders in a gracious, open manner. They are not “easy to be entreated.” All of the love they once had for the church and its leaders disappears. They deal deceitfully. They go behind the pastor’s back and despise his position.

I realize that compromised Christians can be quite vicious and can tell lies about men and women who try to correct error. They have told lies about me countless times, but we must be careful that we do not give occasion to the flesh and fight error in an unspiritual and unwise manner.

If you have to leave a church, do so in a godly manner and leave a good testimony “as much as lieth in you.” And if you feel that you have to leave, do your best to find a better church. It makes no sense when people claim they are leaving a church because of error, but they join a worse church.

DO NOT THINK THAT THE CHURCH SHOULD BE LIKE WAY OF LIFE LITERATURE.

A part of my ministry, the warning part, is somewhat unbalanced of necessity. That is the nature of the Fundamental Baptist Information Service and of O Timothy magazine. I have no intention of trying to be completely “balanced” with that part of my ministry. Those are voices of warning and exhortation. There are plenty of “positive, encouraging” ministries out there. That part of the equation is very well taken care of today. But there is little by way of serious and pointed warning.

As I say in the footer to each Fundamental Baptist Information Service article: “Our goal in this particular aspect of our ministry is not devotional but is to provide information to assist preachers in the protection of the churches in this apostate hour.”

O Timothy magazine, which we began publishing 25 years ago, has exactly the same objective. The magazine’s title, taken from 1 Timothy 6:20, describes the burden of the magazine, which is urging men in these last days to keep the faith once delivered to the saints and to avoid the error which is on every hand. “O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called.” Paul’s burden for Timothy was that he keep the old paths and avoid error. That is our burden through O Timothy magazine. The aim is to help protect churches from end-time apostasy through doctrinal preaching and carefully researched and well-documented reports.

Therefore, the Fundamental Baptist Information Service and O Timothy magazine are geared for PREACHERS and for WARNING. These are not Christian family publications. They are not devotionals. They are not general interest materials. They are geared to providing information that preachers can use to protect their churches in an hour of deep apostasy and subtle compromise.

The name of Way of Life Literature came from my Bible reading one day about 31 years ago, when I read the words in Proverbs 6:23: “For the commandment is a lamp; and the law is light; and reproofs of instruction are the way of life.” I thought, that is what we need more of today; we need more reproofs of instruction, and, praise God, such reproofs are the way of life. If done in a godly manner, reproof is not destructive but is edifying and life giving. To warn people of danger is to help them, if they will receive it.

Thus, a part of my ministry is quite “negative” and focuses on pointing out error, exhorting to separation, and such things.

At the same time, I would not want to be in a church that focused on these things. And I would not want to see anyone try to make the Fundamental Baptist Information Service their “church.” Please understand, I am not your pastor! In fact, I am not anybody’s pastor. I am a missionary church planter, but I am not a pastor.

A church should most definitely preach against error plainly and warn about things, and most churches today fall short of doing what they should in this area. I am convinced that each church should make literature such as O Timothy and the Way of Life books available to their people so they will be properly educated and protected. But dealing with such things is certainly not all that a church should be doing or even mostly what it should be doing. Ecclesiastical separation is a necessity, but separation in and of itself is nothing. Separation is merely the wall of protection that we put around the Lord’s work, but having separated, we must busy ourselves with that work itself, which is described particularly in Matthew 28:18-20; Mark 16:15; Luke 24:46-48; Acts 1:8, but also in all the rest of the New Testament Scriptures!

When I preach in the churches we have started in South Asia, I don’t preach very often on the type of things that appear in the Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Only rarely do I preach on “issue” type things, such as the charismatic movement or contemporary Christian music or the ecumenical movement or Roman Catholicism or the emerging church or contemplative mysticism or the New Age movement, though I do intermingle brief warnings about some of these things into the messages by way of application.

The overwhelming majority of my week-by-week preaching in our churches involves exegesis of books of the Bible. I am just finishing up a series of about 30 messages from the book of Ephesians, for example. And the topical messages are about such things as prayer, love for Christ, communion with Christ, holiness, separation from the world, evangelism, church planting, faithfulness to the Lord’s work, and sound Bible doctrine.

Even in my writing ministry, I do not focus exclusively on warning. The Way of Life Encyclopedia of the Bible & Christianity and Things Hard to Be Understood and the Way of Life Advanced Bible Studies Series, for example, took more time to produce than probably all of the other things I have written combined, and they are tools for Bible study and general Christian living. Thus, even my writing ministry is by no means strictly a warning ministry.

The 19 Advanced Bible Studies Series courses deal with such things as “How to Study the Bible,” “Bible Prophecy,” “Bible Doctrine,” “Church History,” and “The History and Geography of the Bible.” These courses have been written over the past five years and total over 5,200 pages.

It should be obvious that as a preacher a large percentage of my time is spent on things other than exposing and warning of error.

Do you see what I am saying? Every church should warn plainly about error, but a church is not merely a warning station. Please don’t measure your church by the Fundamental Baptist Information Service or O Timothy magazine in the sense of thinking that your pastor should be like Brother Cloud. In that particular aspect of my ministry I am not a pastor; rather, I am exercising, I believe, a “prophetic” type ministry (not referring to prophecy as fore-telling, of course, but as forth-telling).

My aim and desire is to be a help and blessing to pastors in providing them well-researched information to assist their ministries, knowing at the same time that there is much more to their ministries than warning about error.

LASTLY, I DO NOT WANT MY READERS TO THINK THAT I AM ANYTHING.

I have no desire to create a following of any sort. I hope there are no Cloudites! I do not consider myself better than anyone. In fact, I am confident that some of the people that I warn about are better Christians than I am in some areas of their lives and ministries. I am a big failure in many ways. I own no Christian perfection of any sort. I am just a man who was saved by God’s undeserving grace and called to preach His Word.

When some people from Africa wrote to me years ago and said they were going to start a David Cloud church, I was not impressed, to say the least!

I am convinced that God called me to this difficult ministry and I intend to accomplish it by His grace and I do think that I have exercised some zeal for it and am biblically qualified for it, but I was a nothing when God called me and I am a nothing today apart from His grace.

I do not preach myself and I have no intention of doing so; I preach God’s Word. I do not measure things by my puny standard, but by that of God’s Word. At least that is my desire and intention. I want to measure myself by the same standard, and I invite my readers to measure me and other men by that same rule. “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thess. 5:21). John the Baptist was wise and godly when he said, “I must decrease.” That is what every preacher needs to say and mean from the bottom of his heart.

The apostle Paul said, “Follow me as I also follow Christ,” and we can and should say that; but we must also acknowledge that we are not apostles today. The only infallible authority is the Scriptures. There is no infallible preacher.

[Distributed by Way of Life Literature's Fundamental Baptist Information Service, an e-mail listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. OUR GOAL IN THIS PARTICULAR ASPECT OF OUR MINISTRY IS NOT DEVOTIONAL BUT IS TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR. This material is sent only to those who personally subscribe to the list. If somehow you have subscribed unintentionally, following are the instructions for removal. The Fundamental Baptist Information Service mailing list is automated. To SUBSCRIBE or to UNSUBSCRIBE or to CHANGE ADDRESSES or to RE-SUBSCRIBE UNDER A NEW ADDRESS, go to http://www.wayoflife.org/fbis/subscribe.html. If you have any trouble with this, please let us know. And please be patient with us. We do not ignore any unsubscribe request, but we cannot always get to your request immediately as each person involved with maintaining the Way of Life web site does this only on a very part time basis and is busy with many other major activities, such as pastoring and missionary work. We take up a quarterly offering to fund this ministry, and those who use the materials are expected to participate (Galatians 6:6) if they can. Some of the articles are from O Timothy magazine, which is in its 23rd year of publication. Way of Life publishes many helpful books. The catalog is located at the web site: http://www.wayoflife.org/catalog/catalog.htm Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061. 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org. We do not solicit funds from those who do not agree with our preaching and who are not helped by these publications, but from those who are. OFFERINGS can be made at http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/offering.html. PAYPAL offerings can be made to https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=dcloud%40wayoflife.org ]

MODERN TEXTUAL CRITICISM’S ROLE IN THE BREAKDOWN OF MORALITY

October 23, 2008 (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) -

In our book For Love of the Bible we document the defense of the King James Bible and the opposition to modern textual criticism for the past 200 years.

One of the men that defended the KJV in the late nineteenth century was George Sayles Bishop, the pastor of the First Reformed Church of Orange, New Jersey. A brilliant preacher and a mighty defender of the Protestant faith, he fought valiantly against the Higher Criticism that was permeating Christianity in his day. Like John Burgon XE "Burgon, John" and many others, Dr. Bishop plainly understood the intimate association between Higher Criticism and Textual Criticism.

In a discourse preached on June 7, 1885, “The Principle and Tendency of the Revision XE "English Revised Version" Examined,” Bishop issued a devastating charge against the Westcott-Hort critical Greek text and the new English version that was founded thereupon (the English Revised Version).

In this address he observed that most Christians did not understand the true character of modern textual criticism and its role in the revision of the English Bible. He warned that textual criticism appeals to scholarly pride. He considered the principles of modern textual criticism to be “twaddle.” He refused to accept the witness the Vaticanus manuscript because of Rome’s utter apostasy.

Bishop stated that the objective of the prominent Unitarian and Modernistic textual critics was to undermine the divine inspiration of Scripture and to weaken the doctrine of Hell, and he observed that if this objective succeeded, it would result in the complete moral breakdown of society. He understood that modern textual criticism’s tendency to break down the authority of God’s Word has devastating consequences.

Events have proven Bishop correct in every point.

Consider the following excerpts from this 120-year-old sermon, which is as relevant today as when it was first preached:

“I have set before myself a simple straight-forward task—to translate into the language of the common people and in lines of clear, logical light the principles involved in the new version of the Bible and just in what direction it tends. This thing is needed. Nothing at the present time is more needed nor so needed, for I am convinced that the principle at the root of the revision movement has not been fairly understood, not even by many of the revisers themselves, who, charmed by the siren-like voices addressed to their scholarly feeling, have yielded themselves to give way, in unconscious unanimous movement, along with the wave on which the ship of inspiration XE "Inspiration" floats with easy and accelerating motion, toward rebound and crash upon the rocks” (p. 60).

“That a few changes might be made in both Testaments, for the better, no man pretends to deny; but that all the learned twaddle about ‘intrinsic and transcriptional probability,’ ‘conflation,’ ‘neutral texts,’ ‘the unique position of B’ (the Vatican manuscript) ... that all this theory is false and moonshine and, when applied to God’s Word, worse than that; I firmly believe” (p. 61).

“Because I am a minister of Christ ... BECAUSE MY BUSINESS IS TO PREACH AND TO DEFEND THIS BOOK, I CANNOT AND WILL NOT KEEP SILENCE. ‘If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?’” (p. 62).

“THE REVISED VERSION XE "English Revised Version" OF THE NEW TESTAMENT IS BASED UPON A NEW, UNCALLED FOR, AND UNSOUND GREEK XE "Greek" TEXT—that mainly of Drs. Westcott and Hort XE "Westcott-Hort" , which was printed simultaneously with the revision and never before had seen light and which is the most unreliable text perhaps ever printed—one English critic says, ‘the foulest and most vicious in existence’” (p. 66).

“I WILL OPPOSE B THE VATICAN MS. FIRST, FOREMOST, ALTOGETHER, SIMPLY BECAUSE IT IS THE VATICAN MS., BECAUSE I HAVE TO RECEIVE IT FROM ROME, BECAUSE I WILL HAVE NO BIBLE FROM ROME, NO HELP FROM ROME AND NO COMPLICITY WITH ROME; BECAUSE I BELIEVE ROME TO BE AN APOSTATE. A worshipper of Bread for God; a remover of the sovereign mediatorship of Christ; a destroyer of the true gospel, she teaches a system which, if any man believes or follows as she teaches it, he will infallibly be lost—he must be. ... I will not take my Bible—not the bulk of it—from her apostate, foul, deceitful, cruel hands. ‘Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes’—I fear the Latins bearing presents in their hands” (p. 69).

“I have been confirmed in what had before been A GROWING CONVICTION—THAT THE REVISION MOVEMENT, DATING FROM THE FINDING OF TISCHENDORF’S [Aleph], unconsciously to most, but consciously to the Unitarian XE "Unitarian" —to the Messrs. Vance Smith XE "Smith, G. Vance" , Robertson Smith XE "Smith, W. Robertson" , etc.—liberal members of the New Testament Company, was RUNNING STEADILY IN ONE DIRECTION THROUGH THREE POINTS: 1ST. TO WEAKEN AND DESTROY THE BINDING FORCE OF INSPIRATION IN THE VERY WORDS. 2d. To weaken and destroy the five Points of Grace founded on ‘Free Will a Slave.’ 3d. To weaken and destroy the old-fashioned notion of Hell as a place and a state of immediate, everlasting and utterly indescribable torment into which impenitent men go at once the moment they die” (p. 74).

“The Revised Version XE "English Revised Version" weakens and removes the deity of Christ in many places—one I mention in particular. 1 Timothy 3:16 XE "First Timothy 3.16" XE "Christ’s deity" XE "God was manifest in the flesh" , ‘Great is the mystery of godliness, God was manifest in the flesh.’ The Revised Version [as do all modern versions] leaves out Theos, God ... Dr. Scrivener XE "Scrivener, F.H.A." , the foremost English critic, says it is Theos. ... That conviction of Dr. Scrivener is my conviction and on the very same grounds—A CONVICTION SO DEEP THAT I WILL NEVER YIELD IT, NOR ADMIT AS A TEXT OF MY FAITH A BOOK PRETENDING TO BE A REVELATION FROM GOD WHICH LEAVES THAT WORD OUT. THE HOLY GHOST HAS WRITTEN IT—LET NO MAN DARE TOUCH IT—GREAT IS THE MYSTERY OF GODLINESS, GOD WAS MANIFEST IN THE FLESH” (pp. 78-80).

“WHAT THEN IS THE GRAND SUMMING UP OF THIS ... AS TO THE TENDENCY OF THE REVISION?

“1. A general weakening all along the line toward Rome XE "Roman Catholic" . This must be, if Rome is to furnish the basal document which is to determine our Bible. ... No wonder I say that men have gone up valiantly to Church Courts to overturn if possible, the declaration of the Old School Assembly of 1845 by a vote of 173 to 8, that Rome is apostate and her baptism as a baptism into an apostate system is utterly invalid.

“2. A second Tendency of the Revision XE "English Revised Version" is to loosen the Revelation of God from the letter, and to cast it floating out upon the winds. How can God inspire thoughts, ideas, but by words? Did you ever have a thought in your mind, an idea that was not in words? Never. If Inspiration is not verbal, in the very words, it is nowhere.

“3. The tendency is to remove from men that fear of penalty, which, say what we please, is the kingbolt of the Divine Government over the world. TAKE AWAY THE DOCTRINE OF HELL-FIRE AND THE WORLD WOULD BECOME ONE GREAT SODOM. ...

“The time has not come for a New Translation of the Holy Scriptures. The Church is not spiritual enough. The Principle has not been settled, and the Data are not all in” (George Sayles Bishop XE "Bishop, George" , “Sheol: The Principle and Tendency of the Revision XE "English Revised Version" Examined,” The Doctrines of Grace and Kindred Themes, 1910, pp. 60-87).

[Distributed by Way of Life Literature's Fundamental Baptist Information Service, an e-mail listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. OUR GOAL IN THIS PARTICULAR ASPECT OF OUR MINISTRY IS NOT DEVOTIONAL BUT IS TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR. This material is sent only to those who personally subscribe to the list. If somehow you have subscribed unintentionally, following are the instructions for removal. The Fundamental Baptist Information Service mailing list is automated. To SUBSCRIBE or to UNSUBSCRIBE or to CHANGE ADDRESSES or to RE-SUBSCRIBE UNDER A NEW ADDRESS, go to http://www.wayoflife.org/fbis/subscribe.html. If you have any trouble with this, please let us know. And please be patient with us. We do not ignore any unsubscribe request, but we cannot always get to your request immediately as each person involved with maintaining the Way of Life web site does this only on a very part time basis and is busy with many other major activities, such as pastoring and missionary work. We take up a quarterly offering to fund this ministry, and those who use the materials are expected to participate (Galatians 6:6) if they can. Some of the articles are from O Timothy magazine, which is in its 25th year of publication. Way of Life publishes many helpful books. The catalog is located at the web site: http://wayoflife.org/catalog/catalog.htm Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061. 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org. We do not solicit funds from those who do not agree with our preaching and who are not helped by these publications, but from those who are. OFFERINGS can be made at http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/offering.html. PAYPAL offerings can be made to https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=dcloud%40wayoflife.org]

DID FULLER GET HIS VIEWS ON THE KJV FROM A CULTIST?

Updated October 22, 2008 (first published December 30, 2000) (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) -

Some of the men fundamentalists are promoting modern textual criticism, such as Bob Ross, Gary Hudson, Doug Kutilek, James Price, and the editor of “From the Mind of God to the Mind of Man,” have made the amazing charge that the current King James Bible defense is based upon the views of Benjamin Wilkinson, a Seventh-day Adventist professor. They claim that Wilkinson authored the view that the Received Text is the preserved Word of God that can be traced through history, and that J.J. Ray and David Otis Fuller picked up this teaching and promoted it to the “KJV Only” crowd.

In his 1930 book, “Our Authorized Bible Vindicated,” Wilkinson defended the text of the King James Bible and gave some evidence of its textual primacy among Bible believers through the centuries. Large portions of Wilkinson’s book were republished in David Otis Fuller’s 1970 book, Which Bible.

That much is fact. Whether Fuller was right or wrong in reprinting some of Wilkinson’s writings (and hiding the fact that Wilkinson was an Adventist) is something each reader will have to decide for himself.

I believe that he was wrong. Wilkinson’s writings added nothing of substance to the debate and by using Wilkinson’s book Dr. Fuller gave his enemies something to use against him and his position on the Bible.

Further, Wilkinson was wrong in some of his facts, having leaned heavily upon the writings of Adventist “prophetess” Ellen G. White. (I have obtained the vast majority of the books cited by Wilkinson for my own library with the objective of checking his documentation.) It is not true, for instance, that the Waldenses had a perfect Bible that is exactly like the King James. While the Waldensian New Testaments were much closer to the King James than to the modern versions, they were not exactly like the KJV. I have had the privilege of examining two of the seven extant Waldensian Bibles--the one at Trinity College, Dublin, and the one at Cambridge University. Both are based on Latin and have the textual corruptions that pertain to Latin. For example both omit “God” in 1 Timothy 3:16. Wilkinson claimed that the Waldensian Bibles were based on an “old Latin” rather than the Latin vulgate and were textually perfect, but this is not true (if we believe that the Greek Received Text is pure).

At the same time, to claim that Fuller’s views on the Bible version issue were derived from Wilkinson and to make Wilkinson the father of King James Bible defense is pure unadulterated nonsense.

Further, I am convinced that it is MALICIOUS nonsense, because even though this silly little myth has been refuted (such as in my book For Love of the Bible, first edition 1995 and second edition 1999, as well as in this article, which was first published in 2000) the aforementioned men continued to perpetuate it. As of September 8, 2008, their articles purporting this myth are still on the web.

THE DEFENSE OF THE KJV PRE-DATED BENJAMIN WILKINSON

First of all, long before Benjamin Wilkinson wrote on the Bible version issue, there were pastors and Christian leaders defending the King James Bible in the same way that Dr. Fuller defended it. I have carefully and extensively documented this in my 440-page book For Love of the Bible: The Defense of the KJV and the Received Text from 1800 to Present.

One example is the Trinitarian Bible Society (TBS) of England. The Society was formed in 1831 from a conflict within the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) over the doctrine of the Trinity and the deity of Jesus Christ. The BFBS refused to take a stand against Unitarianism, and those men who were concerned for doctrinal purity left to form the TBS. In the early years of the TBS, the matter of different Bible texts and versions was not a serious issue in the sense it was to become at the end of the nineteenth century. Though there were textual critics in the first half of that century, they did not exercise wide influence in ordinary Christian circles. The battles faced by Trinitarian in its earlier years were in other directions.

With the publication of the English Revised Version New Testament and the Westcott-Hort Greek text of 1881, the TBS began to take a more active position on texts and versions. A number of articles were published in the TBS Quarterly Record at the turn of the century critiquing the ERV and supporting the Received Text. Some of these drew heavily upon John Burgon’s Revision Revised, as well as the research of F.C. Cook and F.H.A. Scrivener. From that time to this, Trinitarian has stood solidly behind the Received Text and the King James Bible. Their published writings have promoted all of the major points commonly given in defense of the KJV. Consider a couple of selections:

“The architects and advocates of the modern English translations of the Holy Scriptures often assure us that their numerous alterations, omissions and additions do not affect any vital doctrine. While this may be true of hundreds of minute variations there is nevertheless a substantial number of important doctrinal passages which the modern versions present in an altered and invariably weakened form” (God Was Manifest in the Flesh, TBS Article No. 10).

“For too long the ‘science’ of Textual Criticism has been in bondage to the authority of a small class of ancient manuscripts, with the Sinai and Vatican copies at their head, which are in thousands of instances at variance with the Greek Text preserved in the great majority of the documents now available for ascertaining the true text. ... The result has been that even in the ‘evangelical’ seminaries generations of theological students have been encouraged to accept without question theories which involve the rejection of the historical text and the adoption of an abbreviated and defective text cast in the mold of the Vatican and Sinai copies” (Many Things, TBS Article No. 33).

“No evangelical Christian, learned or unlearned, would wish to follow [modernistic] writers along the perilous paths of infidelity in which they strode with such presumption. There is another danger, no less serious, in that Textual Criticism, the evaluation of the actual manuscripts in the ancient languages, the preparation of printed editions of the Hebrew and Greek Text, and the modern translations now being made in English and many other languages, are very largely conducted under the direction or influence of scholars who by their adoption of these erroneous theories have betrayed the unreliability of their judgment in these vital matters. WE MUST NOT PERMIT OUR JUDGMENT TO BE OVERAWED BY GREAT NAMES IN THE REALM OF BIBLICAL ‘SCHOLARSHIP’ WHEN IT IS SO CLEARLY EVIDENT THAT THE DISTINGUISHED SCHOLARS OF THE PRESENT CENTURY ARE MERELY REPRODUCING THE CASE PRESENTED BY RATIONALISTS DURING THE LAST TWO HUNDRED YEARS. Nor should we fail to recognise that scholarship of this kind has degenerated into a skeptical crusade against the Bible, tending to lower it to the level of an ordinary book of merely human composition” (If the Foundations Be Destroyed, TBS Article No. 14).

It is obvious that defense of the King James Bible and its underlying text predated Benjamin Wilkinson in the Trinitarian Bible Society.

Another example was fundamentalist leader William Aberhart (1878-1943), who stood for the Received Text and the King James Bible in western Canada during the first half of the twentieth century. Aberhart was a pastor, Bible school dean, radio Bible teacher, and a greatly beloved political leader. He was Premier of Alberta from 1935-43. In the late 1920s Aberhart separated from the Regular Baptists over issues such as Bible inspiration and prophecy, and in 1924 he established the Calgary Prophetic Bible Institute. The first student enrolled in this Bible Institute was Ernest Charles Manning, who eventually became the premier of Alberta, holding that position from 1943 until 1968. Aberhart also founded the 1,250-seat Bible Institute Baptist Church, which often featured the preaching of well-known fundamentalist leaders such as William B. Riley and Harry Rimmer.

Aberhart trained his people and his students to have confidence in the divine preservation of the Bible. He defended the King James Bible as the preserved Word of God. A summary of Aberhart’s teaching was given to me personally by Pastor Mark Buch (1910-1995), who was educated by Aberhart in the 1930s. Buch was the founder and pastor of the People’s Fellowship Tabernacle in Vancouver, British Columbia. This church was a stronghold for biblical fundamentalism in western Canada from the time it was founded in 1939. Buch knew and preached with many of the well-known Fundamentalist leaders of the last century, including J. Frank Norris, G. Beauchamp Vick, and Bob Jones Sr.

When I was doing research for my book For Love of the Bible, I had the pleasure of interviewing Pastor Buch on a number of occasions. Buch had taken the second year Apologetics course Aberhart taught on the subject of inspiration and preservation at the Prophetic Bible Institute. Note how Pastor Buch described Aberhart’s position on Bible preservation:

“Mr. Aberhart was one of the greatest Bible teachers in Canada. He was the first person I came in contact with WHO KNEW THE TRUE STORY OF THE DIVINE INSPIRATION AND PRESERVATION OF GOD’S HOLY WORD. He explained how it came down from the first apostolic faultless autograph, its safe keeping through the Byzantine church, the majority reformation copy by Erasmus of Rotterdam, William Tyndale’s translation, the Authorized committee of mental and spiritual giants, and the resultant glorious treasure—the Authorized Version” (Mark Buch, In Defence of the Authorized Version, People’s Fellowship Tabernacle, Vancouver, British Columbia, p. 25).

The position William Aberhart held on the Bible version issue in the 1920s is exactly the position that David Otis Fuller taught, and Aberhart was writing and teaching this several years before the publication of Wilkinson’s book. In the course of my research, I looked into the sources of Aberhart’s position. One of his sources was the writings of John William Burgon, whose book The Revision Revised was first published in 1881 and was reprinted many times. Mark Buch testified to me that Aberhard used Burgon’s material in his Bible institute classes.

TO SAY THAT FULLER WAS BRAINWASHED BY ANY ONE CERTAIN MAN OR BOOK IS TO IGNORE THE FACTS

While it is true that David Otis Fuller published some of Wilkinson’s writings, he also published the writings of a wide variety of men on the Bible version issue, and to focus on Wilkinson as the basis for Fuller’s views is something that is done to demagogue Fuller and other defenders of the KJV.

By his enemies, David Otis Fuller (called “Duke” by his friends) is made out to be some sort of scheming madman, and an ignorant one at that! The fact is that he was a graduate of Princeton Seminary and a noted pastor, author, and Baptist associational leader. He obtained the Master of Divinity degree at Princeton and was honored with a Doctor of Divinity degree by Dallas Theological Seminary. He pastored the prominent Wealthy Street Baptist Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for 40 years (1934-74). While there, he founded the Grand Rapids Baptist Institute, which later became the Grand Rapids Baptist Bible College (today called Cornerstone). Fuller co-founded the Children’s Bible Hour radio program in 1942 and for 33 years was its chairman. For 52 years Fuller was on the board of the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism. He was on the Council of 14 in the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches. Fuller published between fifteen to twenty books.

When he first began investigating the Bible version issue for himself in the 1960s, Fuller came across not only Wilkinson’s work, but also Philip Mauro’s Which Version, John Burgon’s Revision Revised, and Alfred Martin’s doctoral dissertation against the Westcott-Hort Text. Martin was Vice President of Moody Bible Institute and refuted modern textual criticism in his doctoral dissertation to the faculty of the Dallas Theological Seminary graduate school. Martin corresponded with Fuller on the Bible text issue and allowed Fuller to publish a condensation of his dissertation in Which Bible.

To say that Fuller was brainwashed by any one certain man or book is to ignore the facts. Whatever Fuller accepted from Ray or Wilkinson or anyone else he accepted because he felt that it was affirmed by other reputable sources.

Fuller was only a man, with the faults and weaknesses of a man. I respect him but I do not idolize him. The eternal treasure is held in “earthen vessels” (2 Cor. 4:7) and those who preach the Word of God are “subject to like passions as we are” (Jam. 5:17). But there can be no doubt that Fuller was a scholarly individual who studied the Bible Version issue from many angles. He even visited the British Library to seek out John Burgon’s unpublished works. “It was the privilege of this compiler, after struggling through several rounds of red tape, to see for myself three of the sixteen folio volumes Burgon had written in his own hand, a compilation of eighty-seven thousand quotations from the early Church Fathers. I make bold to say there is no other collection like this in existence” (Fuller, Counterfeit or Genuine, introduction, p. 11). (I examined two of those massive volumes myself on a visit to the British Library in March 2003.)

Altogether Fuller edited three major volumes totaling 900 pages on the Bible version issue: Which Bible? (1970), True or False? (1973), and Counterfeit or Genuine? (1975). These volumes are evidence of Dr. Fuller’s diligent research on the subject of texts and versions. He located many books long out of print and made the contents available to his generation. Fuller’s three volumes on this subject contain the full or summarized works of many older authorities on the textual issue, including John Burgon, Herman Hoskier, Philip Mauro, Joseph Philpot, Samuel Zwemer, and George Sayles Bishop, as well as the works of a number of contemporary writers, including Edward Hills, Terence Brown, and Wilbur Pickering. Dr. Fuller was influential in obtaining and publishing several post-graduate theses that defended the TR and the KJV in opposition to the modern versions. These include the following:

A Critical Examination of the Westcott-Hort Textual Theory—Alfred Martin’s dissertation to the faculty of the Graduate School of Dallas Theological Seminary, May 1951.

The Preservation of the Scriptures—Donald Brake’s dissertation to the faculty of the Department of Systematic Theology at Dallas Theological Seminary in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Theology Degree, May 1970.

An Evaluation of the Contribution of John William Burgon to New Testament Textual Criticism—Wilbur Pickering’s thesis presented to the faculty of the Department of New Testament Literature and Exegesis at the Dallas Theological Seminary in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Theology Degree, May 1968.

Contrary to the wild-eyed caricature that many have drawn of him, Dr. Fuller did not claim that the King James Bible was given by inspiration or that it contains some type of advanced revelation or that it could not be improved or changed. He claimed simply that it is the only reliable English translation of the preserved Greek and Hebrew text of Scripture. He did not believe the KJV has errors, but he differentiated plainly between improvements and errors.

“We do not say that the KJV does not permit of changes. There are a number that could be AND SHOULD BE made, but there is a vast difference between a change and an error” (Fuller, Is the King James Version Nearest to the Original Autographs? nd., p. 1).

I don’t share Dr. Fuller’s position that the KJV should be changed; my objective here is to define his position as carefully as I can and to refute the many lies that have been told about him.

Fuller believed that versions other than the King James could be used in study, if used carefully:

“I do not say that you cannot profit from reading other versions. You can. But if they are based on the Westcott and Hort text, they are immediately suspect and you should be mighty careful that you check that version with the KJV as closely as possible” (Fuller, Which Bible Is Preserved of God, message preached in the 1970s).

Dr. Fuller’s position on Bible versions is given on pages 5 and 6 of his first book, Which Bible:

“The compiler of this book, and the able writers whom he quotes, all contend that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant and authoritative word of God and that there has been a gracious exercise of the divine providence in its preservation and transmission. They are also deeply convinced that the inspired text is more faithfully represented by the Majority Text—sometimes called the Byzantine Text, the Received Text or the Traditional Text—than by the modern critical editions which attach too much weight to the Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus and their allies. For this reason the reader is encouraged to maintain confidence in THE KING JAMES VERSION AS A FAITHFUL TRANSLATION BASED UPON A RELIABLE TEXT” (Fuller, Which Bible? pp. 5,6).

“A faithful translation based upon a reliable text.” That is what David Otis Fuller believed about the King James Bible. For various reasons, many have not been content to allow D.O. Fuller to state his own position. Instead they have caricatured him as a wild-eyed traditionalist who believed that every word of the KJV was penned by direct inspiration. One would think that Dr. Fuller went around saying, “If the KJV was good enough for Paul it was good enough for me.” This caricature is convenient as a straw man that those who despise the Authorized Version can pummel in a very grand and pompous manner.

A more honest evaluation of Fuller’s Which Bible? was given by Dr. John Holliday in the Gospel Witness:

“WHICH BIBLE? is not a repudiation of scholarship. It is not an argument for the inerrancy of a translation. It is not a defense of out-dated forms of speech. It is an exposure of the presence of enemies in the field of Bible translation. It is a warning against adulterated versions of the Scriptures, particularly versions which show evidence of having been deliberately corrupted in order to destroy belief in vital Biblical truths. It is a long-overdue defense of the worth of the old Authorized Version ... A DEFENSE THAT IS GROUNDED UPON THE TRUSTWORTHINESS OF ITS UNDERLYING TEXT AND THE FAITHFULNESS OF THE TRANSLATION.”

David Otis Fuller was powerfully conscious of the fact that he stood before God in his life and ministry. He was not an armchair theologian; he was a soul winner and a pastor. He died leading a little Sunday School girl to Jesus Christ. His chief concern was for the authority of God’s Word in the lives and hearts of people. He believed that the Bible text issue must be approached by faith and not by science falsely so-called. His wisdom was not ivory tower; it was down-to-earth. It was with D.O. Fuller as it was in the days of Jesus, in that the common man heard him gladly.

D.O. Fuller loved the blessed Word of God. It was not merely another book to him, and a great many men who think of themselves as scholarly today simply do not understand a genuine, heart-felt zeal for the Bible. As with the late Lester Roloff, to “Duke” Fuller the Bible Version issue was not merely about scholarship, about conflation, recension, inversion, eclecticism, conjectural emendation, intrinsic and transcriptional probability, interpolation, harmonistic assimilation, cognate groups, and genealogical methods. It was about the inspired, infallible, living Words of God. Roloff testified that he looked upon the King James Bible as he looked upon his mother (1 Pet. 1:23). It was a heart-felt issue with him. He was no more willing to look upon omissions and changes in the Bible text with scholarly calmness as he would look upon someone trying to cut a few “unnecessary” pieces off of his mother!

This is the way that David Otis Fuller felt about the King James Bible. Consider the following quotation:

“Please remember this. You and I are facing, as I have said before, the most vicious and malicious attack upon the Word of God that has ever been made since the Garden of Eden, and the modern attack began with the publication of the Revised Version of 1881. This is an unpopular cause at present in Christian circles. I have found this out again and again, and I am going to find it out in the future. But I can say as far as I am concerned it doesn’t make any difference what happens to me, but it makes a whale of a difference what happens to the cause of Jesus Christ. And someday you and I, my friend, will have to stand before a holy God and give an account to what we did or did not do in seeking to open the eyes of people to the facts that have been covered up for so long concerning His holy, indestructible, impregnable Word” (D.O. Fuller, letter to Dr. Paul Tassell, National Representative of the GARBC, Jan. 8, 1982).

Some have questioned Dr. Fuller’s motives in his stand for the King James Bible, but I had the privilege of corresponding with him before he died and of having a close relationship with some men who knew him well and of having diligently studied all of his writings on the Bible version issue; and I have seen no evidence that he was motivated by anything other than principle. He said he was motivated by love for the Bible. Those who knew him best believed this. I have looked at the evidence (including the statements by many of his critics), and I am convinced that for those who are not predisposed to vilify the man or to despise his position on the Bible, all of the evidence points to one conclusion: Dr. Fuller was a brave Christian gentleman who was motivated by his God-given conviction that the King James Bible is the preserved Word of God in English and that the modern versions are corruptions.

If he made some mistakes along the way, can that be surprising? Every book that has ever been written by a man has had to be revised, usually sooner than later and usually more often than less often. The only exception is the 66 books that make up the Holy Bible.

Fuller certainly did not gain anything, from an earthly perspective, for his stand for the King James Bible. He was a highly respected pastor and Christian leader BEFORE he published Which Bible, True or False, and Counterfeit or Genuine. He certainly did not gain in personal prestige or influence, speaking in a general sense. Rather, he was mocked, ridiculed, slandered, and ostracized, even by many of his own fundamentalist and Baptist brethren. He made no personal financial gain from the sell of his books, turning all of the profit back into the printing ministry.

Countless Christians today who have confidence in their Bibles, who have been delivered from the fog of critical textual theorizing and from the confusion of an unsettled text of Scripture, have David Otis Fuller to thank.

I close with the words of Pastor Robert Barnett, Calvary Baptist Church, Grayling, Michigan, who knew “Duke” Fuller well:

“One may not have understood the arguments and details Dr. Fuller was presenting, but when you left the room, you knew that God was real to Dr. Fuller, and the King James Bible was his infallible authority in every area in which it spoke. You also knew that Dr. Fuller had a genuine concern for both your soul and your life” (Pastor Robert Barnett, Calvary Baptist Church, Grayling, Michigan, March 1990).

Having studied the Bible Version issue diligently for 30 years and having built a library on this subject that contains most of the material that has been published on all sides of the issue for the past 200 years, I am convinced that David Otis Fuller’s enemies today have a spiritual disease. It is a disease that he identified and labeled. It is a disease that, as Princeton educated man, he had to fight in his own flesh. It is a disease called “scholarolatry.”

“Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” Proverbs 16:18

“Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? there is more hope of a fool than of him.” Proverbs 26:12

“Thus saith the LORD; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the LORD. ... Blessed is the man that trusteth in the LORD, and whose hope the LORD is.” Jeremiah 17:5, 7

“Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.” Proverbs 3:5

“Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.” Colossians 2:8

“O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called: Which some professing have erred concerning the faith. Grace be with thee. Amen.” 1 Timothy 6:20-21

For more information see the following articles (and many others) under the Bible Version section of the End Times Apostasy Database at the Way of Life web site:
http://www.wayoflife.org/

“Old-Time Fundamentalists Who Defended the King James Bible”
“Answer to Challenge on Preservation Article”
“Textual Criticism Is Drawn from the Wells of Infidelity”
“Examining James White’s ‘The King James Only Controversy’”
“Are Modern Versions Based on Westcott and Hort?”
“Can Evangelicals Be Trusted on Bible Versions?”
“Is the Received Text Based on a Few Late Manuscripts?”
“Which Edition of the Received Text Is the Preserved Word of God?”

[Distributed by Way of Life Literature's Fundamental Baptist Information Service, an e-mail listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. OUR GOAL IN THIS PARTICULAR ASPECT OF OUR MINISTRY IS NOT DEVOTIONAL BUT IS TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR. This material is sent only to those who personally subscribe to the list. If somehow you have subscribed unintentionally, following are the instructions for removal. The Fundamental Baptist Information Service mailing list is automated. To SUBSCRIBE or to UNSUBSCRIBE or to CHANGE ADDRESSES or to RE-SUBSCRIBE UNDER A NEW ADDRESS, go to http://www.wayoflife.org/fbis/subscribe.html. If you have any trouble with this, please let us know. And please be patient with us. We do not ignore any unsubscribe request, but we cannot always get to your request immediately as each person involved with maintaining the Way of Life web site does this only on a very part time basis and is busy with many other major activities, such as pastoring and missionary work. We take up a quarterly offering to fund this ministry, and those who use the materials are expected to participate (Galatians 6:6) if they can. Some of the articles are from O Timothy magazine, which is in its 25th year of publication. Way of Life publishes many helpful books. The catalog is located at the web site: http://wayoflife.org/catalog/catalog.htm Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061. 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org. We do not solicit funds from those who do not agree with our preaching and who are not helped by these publications, but from those who are. OFFERINGS can be made at http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/offering.html. PAYPAL offerings can be made to https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=dcloud%40wayoflife.org]

PETER VS. THE POPES

Updated October 21, 2008 (first published September 3, 1996) (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) -

The Roman Catholic Church claims that its popes have inherited the seat and authority of the apostle XE "Apostles" Peter. That this is a gross error is evident by a simple comparison of Peter’s life and teaching with the lives and teaching of the popes.

1. There is no evidence that Peter was the bishop at Rome XE "Rome" , and there is no evidence in the New Testament that there was anything special about the congregation at Rome, but the popes rule in Rome, claim that Peter was the first bishop at Rome, and claim that it is the “mother church.” Peter’s first epistle was written from Babylon, not from Rome, and the popes’ claim that “Babylon” stands for Rome is mere conjecture. The biblical evidence that Peter was not the pastor or bishop at Rome is overwhelming. Paul wrote TO the church at Rome in A.D. 58, but though he mentions 27 people by name, he does not mention Peter. That would have been an inexcusable affront if Peter had been the pope at Rome. Later, Paul writes FROM Rome to the churches of Galatia, the church of Ephesus, Philippi, and Colosse, as well as to Philemon, but not once does he mention that Peter is in Rome. In 2 Timothy 4:16 Paul said that no man stood with him and all forsook him when he answered his charges. Where was Pope XE "Pope" Peter? The fact is that Peter was not a pope and he was not the bishop at Rome.

2. Peter was married (Matthew 8:14), but the popes are forbidden to marry.

3. Peter said Holy Scripture is the sure Word of God and to this alone we are to give heed (2 Peter 1:19-21), but the popes say we are also to heed their uninspired traditions.

4. Peter warned of false teachers who would make merchandise of God's people (2 Peter 2:1-3), but the popes have made massive sums of money by selling their religion, by their masses and their prayers for the dead and their indulgences and their pilgrimage sites and countless other things.

5. Peter had neither silver nor gold (Acts 3:6), but the popes have massive amounts of both.

6. Peter said baptism XE "Baptism" is a figure, a symbol, and that it is not water that saves us, but the resurrection of Jesus Christ (1 Peter 3:21), but the popes say that baptism itself brings salvation and that it is not merely symbolic.

7. Peter refused to allow men to bow down to him (Acts 10:25-26), but the popes have accepted honor and bowings and kissings and have allowed themselves to be treated almost as gods.

8. There is no hint in the Bible that Peter had a throne, but the popes have at least two--one at St. Peter’s and one at the Lateran Palace.

9. Peter taught that salvation is strictly through the free righteousness of Jesus Christ (2 Peter 1:1), but the popes claim that their sacraments are also necessary for salvation.

10. Peter taught against hierarchicalism, warning the pastors against “being lords over God's heritage” (1 Peter 5:1-4), but the popes have set up a system of ecclesiastical lordship over the churches, and have added many offices that are never mentioned in the New Testament (e.g., cardinal, archdeacon).
11. Peter taught that the only priesthoods in the New Testament dispensation are the High priesthood of Jesus Christ and the general priesthood of all believers (1 Peter 2:9), but the popes say that their “church” has a special priesthood that is ordained to distribute sacraments.

12. Peter taught that Jesus Christ is the rock upon which the church is founded (1 Peter 2:4-8), but the popes say that Peter was the rock.

13. Peter taught that men are born again through the Word of God (1 Peter 1:23), but the popes say that men are born again through baptism XE "Baptism" .

14. Peter taught that Christ has “once suffered for sins” (1 Peter 3:18), and “bare our sins in his own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24); but the popes say that Christ is sacrificed anew in each mass and that having Jesus Christ and his cross is not enough, that a believer also needs the Roman Catholic Church and its sacraments and priesthood.

15. Peter taught that the believer has a living hope, that he has an inheritance reserved in heaven, and that he is kept by the power of God (1 Peter 1:2-5); but the popes say that a believer cannot know for sure that he has a home in heaven.

16. Peter taught that the believer is not to be a murderer, or a thief, or an evildoer, or a busybody in other men’s matters (1 Peter 4:15); but the popes have been all of these things.

[Distributed by Way of Life Literature's Fundamental Baptist Information Service, an e-mail listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. OUR GOAL IN THIS PARTICULAR ASPECT OF OUR MINISTRY IS NOT DEVOTIONAL BUT IS TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR. This material is sent only to those who personally subscribe to the list. If somehow you have subscribed unintentionally, following are the instructions for removal. The Fundamental Baptist Information Service mailing list is automated. To SUBSCRIBE or to UNSUBSCRIBE or to CHANGE ADDRESSES or to RE-SUBSCRIBE UNDER A NEW ADDRESS, go to http://www.wayoflife.org/fbis/subscribe.html. If you have any trouble with this, please let us know. And please be patient with us. We do not ignore any unsubscribe request, but we cannot always get to your request immediately as each person involved with maintaining the Way of Life web site does this only on a very part time basis and is busy with many other major activities, such as pastoring and missionary work. We take up a quarterly offering to fund this ministry, and those who use the materials are expected to participate (Galatians 6:6) if they can. Some of the articles are from O Timothy magazine, which is in its 25th year of publication. Way of Life publishes many helpful books. The catalog is located at the web site: http://wayoflife.org/catalog/catalog.htm Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061. 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org. We do not solicit funds from those who do not agree with our preaching and who are not helped by these publications, but from those who are. OFFERINGS can be made at http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/offering.html. PAYPAL offerings can be made to https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=dcloud%40wayoflife.org]

IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE SAVED THROUGH CHRIST WITHOUT BELIEVING IN CHRIST?

October 16, 2008 (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) -

A popular doctrine among evangelicals, emergents, and contemplatives today is the idea that a sinner can be saved through Christ without actually believing in him.

In January 2007 Tony Campolo told the Edmonton Journal (Alberta, Canada) that he is not sure who will go to heaven. Asked by the paper, “Do you believe non-Christians can go to heaven?” Campolo replied:

“That’s a good question to ask because the way we stand is we contend that trusting in Jesus is the way to heaven. However, we do not know who Jesus will bring into the kingdom and who He will not. We are very, very careful about pronouncing judgment on anybody. We leave judgment in the hands of God and we are saying Jesus is the way. We preach Jesus, but we have no way of knowing to whom the grace of God is extended” (“Canada’s Different Evangelicals,” Edmonton Journal, Jan. 27, 2007).

This is contradictory emerging church gobbly-gook! If we believe that “trusting Jesus is the way to heaven,” then we most definitely DO know who Jesus will bring into the kingdom. He will bring those that trust Him and He will not bring those that do not trust Him. As for pronouncing judgment on people, it is not our judgment; it is God’s.

Brian McLaren says, “I don’t think it’s our business to prognosticate the eternal destinies of anyone else” (A New Kind of Christian, p. 92) and offers a quote from a C.S. Lewis novel as his authority. In this novel Lewis’s character was a soldier who served a false god named Tash all his life, but he was accepted nonetheless by Aslan, who represents Christ.

“Alas, Lord, I am no son of Thine but the servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou has done to Tash, I account as service done to me. ... Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him.”

According to C.S. Lewis, who is deeply loved by all branches of the emerging church, an individual might be saved even if he follows a false religion in this life and makes no personal profession of faith in Jesus Christ.

Karen Ward XE "Ward, Karen" says:

“I affirm no other Savior than Jesus Christ, yet at the same time, I feel no need to know with certainty the final destination of those of other faiths who either have no knowledge of Christ or who do not accept the Christian claims of the atonement” (Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches, p. 46).

This is typical emerging church gibberish. Ward thinks she can hold these contradictions in perfect harmony, but it is impossible. If Jesus Christ is the only Saviour, then we CAN know with certainty the final destination of those who do not receive Him, and that destination is Hell! This is not our judgment; it is Almighty God’s as revealed plainly to us in Scripture!

Leonard Sweet XE "Sweet, Leonard" says:

“One can be a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ without denying the flickers of the sacred in followers of Yahweh, or Kali, or Krishna” (Quantum Spirituality, p. 130).

What does this mean? Have those “flickers of the sacred” put their adherents into saving relationship with Almighty God and take them to heaven?

Henri Nouwen XE "Nouwen, Henri" , whose writings are constantly referenced by the emerging church and the contemplative movement, said:

“Today I personally believe that while Jesus came to open the door to God’s house, ALL HUMAN BEINGS CAN WALK THROUGH THAT DOOR, WHETHER THEY KNOW ABOUT JESUS OR NOT. Today I see it as my call to help every person claim his or her own way to God” (Sabbatical Journey, New York: Crossroad, 1998, p. 51).

Dallas Willard also holds this heresy. In an interview he was presented with the following question:

“I still struggle with how I should view those who have other beliefs. I’m not sure I am ready to condemn them as wrong. I know some very good Buddhists. What is their destiny?”

To this he replied XE "Universalism" :

“I am not going to stand in the way of anyone whom God wants to save. I am not going to say he can’t save them. I am happy for God to save anyone he wants in any way he can. IT IS POSSIBLE FOR SOMEONE WHO DOES NOT KNOW JESUS TO BE SAVED. But anyone who is going to be saved is going to be saved by Jesus” (“Apologetics in Action,” Cutting Edge magazine, winter 2001, vol. 5 no. 1, Vineyard USA, http://www.dwillard.org/articles/artview.asp?artID=14).

REFUTATION OF THIS HERESY

The idea that someone might be saved who doesn’t know Jesus might sound wise and compassionate, but it is plainly refuted by Scripture and is therefore a fool’s dream.

Jesus said, “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). The new birth is a very real spiritual event, and it happens only when a sinner consciously puts his faith in Christ. In the same passage Jesus explained how to be born again. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). He plainly stated, “He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God” (John 3:18).

Therefore, if a person does not consciously believe in Jesus Christ he is condemned. Jesus concluded that sermon by saying, “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him” (John 3:36). Words could not be clearer.

Jesus said further:

“I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture” (John 10:9).

A man can enter in through Christ and find acceptance with God, but any other door leads to destruction. And to say that an individual could enter into salvation through Christ and not know it is as ridiculous as it is unscriptural.

John said:

“He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself: he that believeth not God hath made him a liar; because he believeth not the record that God gave of his Son. And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life” (1 John 5:10-12).

The person that “hath the Son” is the person who believes on him, and the person that “hath not the son” is the one that does not believe. There is no such thing as “unconscious saving faith.”

There is simply no other way of salvation than to put one’s faith in Jesus Christ and to receive Him in such a manner that one is born anew.

Beware of those who refuse to accept the plain teaching of God’s Word. They are heretics, regardless of how cleverly they cloak their unbelief.

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CONTEMPLATIVE SPIRITUALITY: DANCING WITH DEMONS

October 15, 2008 (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) -

The following is excerpted from our new book Contemplative Mysticism: A Powerful Ecumenical Bond, which is available from Way of Life Literature. If it is not yet available through the online catalog, it can be ordered by phone or e-mail with a credit card.
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The Bible repeatedly warns about the danger of spiritual delusion and exhorts believers to be very careful. Consider the following:

“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves” (Matthew 7:15).

“And Jesus answered and said unto them, Take heed that no man deceive you. For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many” (Matthew 24:4-5).

“For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect” (Matthew 24:24).

“But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received, or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might well bear with him” (2 Corinthians 11:3-4).
“For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works” (2 Corinthians 11:13-15).

“That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive” (Ephesians 4:14).

“Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ” (Colossians 2:8).

“Therefore let us not sleep, as do others; but let us watch and be sober” (1 Thessalonians 5:6).

“Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils” (1 Timothy 4:1).

“But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived” (2 Timothy 3:13).

“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5:8).

“Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1).

To be sober means to be in control of one’s mind, to be spiritually and mentally alert. It means to be on guard against danger. It is the opposite of emptying one’s mind and letting’s one’s imagination run wild and using a mantra to keep one’s thoughts at bay.

The Bible warns that demons transform themselves into angels of light (2 Cor. 11:13-15). It warns of false christs and false spirits (Mat. 24:4-5; 2 Cor. 11:3-4).

When emergents see “Jesus” in their contemplations, how can they be certain that it is the Jesus of the Bible and not a false christ or a demonic delusion? The only way to be certain is by making the Bible the central authority and carefully testing everything by it, but mysticism does not provide such certainty.

In Scripture, error is often referred to in terms of cunning deception. We are warned that wolves hide in sheep’s clothing (Mat. 7:15). See Matthew 24:11, 24; 2 Corinthians 4:2; 11:13; Ephesians 4:14; Colossians 2:4, 8; 2 Thessalonians 2:9-10; 2 Timothy 3:13.

In light of these warnings, we see the danger and folly of the contemplative practices.

Some of them, such as Centering Prayer, attempt to shut down the mind. The very title of the popular 14th century meditative book The Cloud of Unknowing refers to the practice of blotting out conscious thoughts in an attempt to enter into the depths of mindless meditation and transcendental communion with God.

“I urge you to dismiss every clever or subtle thought no matter how holy or valuable. Cover it with a thick cloud of forgetting because in this life only love can touch God as He is in Himself, never knowledge” (The Cloud of Unknowing, chapter 8).

The Cloud of Unknowing instructs the contemplative practitioner to choose a one-syllable word and to repeat it as a mantra to “beat down every kind of thought under the cloud of forgetting” (chapter 7, p. 56).

The practitioner is instructed NOT to focus his attention on the meaning of the word or to use “logic to examine or explain this word ... nor allow yourself to ponder its ramifications” (chapter 36, p. 94).

It also says, “Have no fear of the evil one, for he will not dare come near you” (chapter 34, p. 92).

Centering Prayer involves “moving beyond thinking into a place of utter stillness” (The Sacred Way, p. 71).

Note the following excerpts from Finding Grace at the Center by Basil Pennington and Thomas Keating, which emphasize the unthinking aspect of centering prayer:

“It is best when this word is wholly interior without a definite thought or actual sound” (p. 39).

“We are quite passive. We let it happen” (p. 39).

“As it goes beyond thought, beyond image, there is nothing left by which to judge it” (p. 43).

“By turning off the ordinary flow of thoughts ... one’s world begins to change” (p. 48).

“Go on with this nothing, moved only by your love for God” (p. 49).

“The important thing is not to pay any attention to them [thoughts]. They are like the noise in the street...” (p. 51).

“Any thought will bring you out [of the deep waters of silence]” (p. 52).

“[Centering prayer] leads you to a silence beyond thought and words...” (p. 53).

“Firmly reject all clear ideas, however pious or delightful” (p. 54).

“As soon as you start to reflect, the experience is over” (p. 56).

In light of the Bible’s warnings about the great potential for spiritual deception and the necessity of constant sobermindedness, I cannot imagine a more dangerous spiritual practice than centering prayer.

When asked if it is possible for meditation to be “inviting the devil in,” James Finley replies:

“Sometimes I will tell people who express that--well why not try it? Why not try to just quietly and sincerely and silently open your heart to God and see for yourself if you sense something dangerous or bad or dark. And you might discover that the opposite’s the case” (“Experiencing God through Meditation: Interview with James Finley,” Beliefnet.com).

This counsel is unbelievably dangerous and unscriptural. The Bible warns that the devil takes on the persona of an angel of light (2 Cor. 11:14-16). The only way to discern the difference between true and false spirits is to be born again and walking in the Spirit and to carefully test them by the Bible. Catholic mystics such as Finley, Thomas Merton, and William Johnston don’t do that and, in fact, don’t know how to do that.

Some of the contemplatives do give warnings about the potential for spiritual delusion, but their warnings are ineffectual.

Richard Foster warns that contemplative prayer is “entering deeply into the spiritual realm,” and he says that not everyone is ready and equipped to enter into the “all embracing silence” of contemplative prayer (p. 156). He admits that there is the possibility of meeting dark powers, but his suggested solution to this danger is exceedingly shallow and unscriptural. He recommends that practitioners ask “God to surround us with the light of His protection” (Celebration of Discipline, 1978, p. 23). He suggests the following prayer: “All dark and evil spirits must now leave” (Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home, 1992, p. 157).

It is not enough to pray that God will protect us from spiritual danger; we must obey His Word. If we pursue practices that are contrary to Scripture, all the prayer mantras in the world will not keep us from the evil that we will experience there! To pray for protection and then walk in disobedience is not faith but presumption. In such a situation, a prayer of protection is no more effective than holding a crucifix or fingering prayer beads.

Roger Oakland wisely observes:

“I wonder if all these Christians who now practice contemplative prayer are following Foster’s advice. Whether they are or not, they have put themselves in spiritual harm’s way. Nowhere in Scripture are we required to pray a prayer of protection before we pray. The fact that Foster recognizes contemplative prayer is dangerous and opens the door to the fallen spirit world is very revealing. What is this--praying to the God of the Bible but instead reaching demons? Maybe contemplative prayer should be renamed contemplative terror. ... Foster admits that contemplative prayer is dangerous and will possibly take the participant into demonic realms, but he gives a disclaimer saying not everyone is ready for it. My question is, who is ready, and how will they know they are ready? What about all the young people in the emerging church movement? Are they ready? Or are they going into demonic altered states of consciousness completely unaware?” (Faith Undone, pp. 99, 100).

The Roman Catholic contemplative monk John Michael Talbot gives an even stronger warning about the potential danger of contemplative prayer. He says:

“IT CAN BE MOST DESTRUCTIVE IF USED UNWISELY.  I CAN ALMOST PROMISE THAT THOSE WHO UNDERTAKE THIS STUDY ALONE WITHOUT PROPER GUIDANCE, AND GROUNDING IN CATHOLIC CHRISTIANITY, WILL FIND THEMSELVES QUESTIONING THEIR OWN FAITH TO THE POINT OF LOSING IT. SOME MAY FIND THEMSELVES SPIRITUALLY LOST. IT HAS HAPPENED TO MANY. For this reason, we do not take the newer members of The Brothers and Sisters of Charity through this material in any depth as part of their formation, but stick squarely to overt Catholic spirituality and prayer teachings. I would not recommend too much integration of these things without proper guidance for those newer to the Catholic or Christian faith” (Talbot, “Many Religions, One God,” Oct. 22, 1999, http://www.johnmichaeltalbot.com/Reflections/index.asp?id=135).

Talbot thus recognizes the extreme danger of contemplative practices, yet he thinks he is capable of using them without being harmed by them. He should listen to the words of Scripture: “Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners” (1 Corinthians 15:33).

I AM CONVINCED THAT THOSE WHO PARTICIPATE IN SUCH THINGS OPEN THEMSELVES UP TO DEMONIC INFLUENCE.

David Hunt sounds an important warning about visualizing prayer. He gives the example of a man who visualized Jesus and was surprised when “Jesus” began to interact with him.

“I began to visualize myself as a boy of eight. ‘Now see if you can imagine Jesus appearing,’ [the seminar leader] instructed. ‘Let Him walk toward you.’ Much to my amazement Jesus moved slowly toward me out of that dark playground. He began to extend His hands toward me in a loving, accepting manner. I NO LONGER WAS CREATING THE SCENE. The figure of Christ reached over and lifted the bundle from my back. And He did so with such forcefulness that I literally sprang from the pew” (Robert L. Wise, “Healing of the Memories: A Prayer Therapy for You,” Christian Life, July 1984, pp. 63-64, quoted from Hunt, The Occult Invasion).

Hunt observes:

“That this was more than imagination is clear. The one who originally visualized the image of ‘Jesus’ was surprised when it suddenly took on a character of its own and he realized that he was no longer creating the image. This ‘Jesus’ had its own life and personality. There can be no doubt that real contact had been made with the spirit world. We may be equally certain that this being was not the real Jesus Christ. No one can call Him from the right hand of the Father in heaven to put in a personal appearance. The entity could only have been a demonic spirit masquerading as ‘Jesus’” (The Occult Invasion, “Imagination and Visualization”).

Morton Kelsey taught the use of visualization and exhorted his readers not to fear when the visualizations took on a life of their own! He quoted from Carl Jung, who communicated with a spirit guide throughout his life:

“In the same way, when you concentrate on a mental picture, IT BEGINS TO STIR, the image becomes enriched by details, it moves and develops. Each time, naturally, you mistrust it and have the idea that you have just made it up, that it is merely your own invention” (Jung, Analytical Psychology, quoted in Kelsey, The Other Side of Silence, p. 226).

Kelsey then comments:

“It is usually not too difficult for most people to start the process by concentrating on something graphic. The hard part comes in realizing THAT SOMETHING COULD MOVE UNEXPECTEDLY INSIDE US WITHOUT OUR CONSCIOUS DIRECTION. That is why it is so vital in developing imagination, meditation, or contemplation TO REALIZE THAT OUR EGO IS NOT THE ONLY FORCE OPERATING WITHIN US” (The Other Side of Silence, p. 227).

Since Kelsey didn’t believe the Bible, viewing it largely as myth, he didn’t understand that when images “stir” and “move unexpectedly” and take on a life of their own it is became one has entered the realm of the demonic.

Consider the practice of guided visualization. A leader instructs the practitioners to get comfortable and then to do something like the following:

“Imagine yourself walking down a road. It’s the path of your life. Imagine what the path looks like. Is it curvy? Or straight? Hilly? Flat? Is it wide or narrow, surrounded by trees or by fields? You look down. Is the path rocky? Sandy? Is it dirt? Maybe it’s paved. What does it feel like under your feet? And up ahead, what’s in your path? Does it look clear or are there hurdles in your way? Something is in your hands. You’ve been carrying it a long time--it’s something you brought with you, in your spirit, up to camp. Look at it. What does it look like? What does it feel like in your hands? Is it hot? Cold? Warm? Is it smooth? Prickly? Sharp? Rough? Is it heavy or light?

“Now look up ahead. A figure is moving toward you. You can’t quite make out who it is, but he seems to know you and his pace quickens as he recognizes you. Now you can see--it’s Jesus! He’s coming closer. What’s the expression on his face as he walks toward you? How do you feel? He says a word of greeting to you. What does he say? How do you feel? Do you say anything back?

“Now Jesus is standing in front of you. What does he say? Now he’s holding his hands out--he wants you to put what’s in your hands into his hands. How does it feel as the object leaves your hands? Do you say anything to Jesus?

“Now you and Jesus start to walk together--he’s holding the object of yours. As the two of you walk along, what do you talk about? Imagine the conversation” (Tony Jones, The Sacred Way, pp. 83, 84).

This is either pure fantasy and therefore of no value, or it moves into the realm of the occult. Tony Jones describes how that Jesus allegedly appeared to him during one such episode and spoke to him face to face (The Sacred Way, p. 79).

Al Dager of Media Spotlight gives a discerning warning about the extreme danger of contemplative practices:

“Unfortunately, all these exercises serve to do is open the person up to demonic influences that assuage his or her conscience with a feeling of euphoria and even ‘love’ emanating from the presence that has invaded their consciousness. This euphoria is then believed to validate that the person is on the right spiritual path. It may result in visions, out-of body experiences, stigmata, levitation, even healings and other apparent miracles.”

The guided prayer techniques are exactly the same as the techniques I was taught by disciples of the Hindu guru Paramahansa Yogananda before I was converted. We were supposed to use these techniques to view events in our past lives. The yogic meditation led me into dark realms farther and farther from the holy God of the Bible, the God who is light and in whom “is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). I repented of it completely after I came to Christ. I wrote to the Self-Realization Fellowship Society, testified to them of my Christian conversion, and asked them to drop my name from their rolls.

Emergent leader Nanette Sawyer unwittingly gives a frightful testimony along this line. She said that she is a Christian (of the liberal brand) because she was taught meditation techniques by a Hindu. She said that while “sitting in meditation, in a technique similar to what Christians call Centering Prayer, I encountered love that is unconditional, yet it called me to responsible action in my life” (An Emergent Manifesto of Hope, p. 44). This occurred AFTER she had rejected biblical Christianity and the gospel that Jesus died for our sins (p. 43). She said that she found love and Jesus through Hindu meditation, but it was not the Jesus of the Bible nor was it the love of God as described in the Bible. It was another gospel, another Jesus, and another spirit (2 Cor. 11:4). John warned, “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1), and the only sure way to try the spirits is to test them by the Bible. As for true love, John defined that, too. “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous” (1 John 5:3).

THE FACT THAT ITS PRACTITIONERS CALL CONTEMPLATIVE SPIRITUALITY “DARKNESS” IS A LOUD WARNING TO THOSE WHO HAVE EARS TO HEAR.

Brennan Manning calls centering prayer a “GREAT DARKNESS” (The Signature of Jesus, p. 145) and an entire chapter of his book is devoted to “Celebrate the Darkness.” He claims that the darkness of centering prayer is caused by the human ego being broken and spiritual healing being achieved, but since the practice is not supported by Scripture that is presumption and not faith.

The sixth century Syrian monk called Dionysius the Areopagite said that asceticism and mystical practices can penetrate the mystery of God’s “DARK NO-THINGNESS.” This man has had a major influence on Catholic mysticism.

The Cloud of Unknowing uses the terms “BLIND” and “DARKNESS” and “NOTHING” repeatedly.

Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello calls centering prayer “DARK CONTEMPLATION” and descending “into THE DARKNESS” (Sadhana: A Way to God, pp. 32, 33). He says those who practice centering prayer “expose themselves, in BLIND FAITH, to THE EMPTINESS, the DARKNESS, the idleness, THE NOTHINGNESS” (p. 31).

Catholic monk William Johnston says that meditation is the art of passing from one layer to the next in an inner or downward journey to the core of the personality where dwells the great mystery called God ... WHO DWELLS IN THICK DARKNESS” (The Inner Eye of Love: Mysticism and Religion, 1981, p. 127).

God did hide Himself in thick darkness in the Old Testament era because of man’s sin and the fact that Christ’s atonement had not yet been made (Exodus 20:21), but in reality God is light and not darkness. “This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). It is sin that separates the sinner from God and His glorious light. The people in Moses’ day had to stand away from Mt. Sinai when God gave the Law and God wrapped Himself in darkness, because the Law of Moses can only reveal sin and cannot justify the sinner (Romans 3:19-20). The Old Testament temple signified this separation. God dwelt in the holy of holies, and no man could enter therein except the high priest and that only one time a year, on the Day of Atonement. There was a thick veil that barred the way into the holy of holies.

But when Jesus Christ came and died on the cross and shed His blood to make the perfect atonement for man’s sin, the veil in the temple was rent from top to bottom, signifying that man now has free entrance into God’s very presence if he comes through faith in Christ (Mat. 27:50-51).

If a contemplative encounters darkness in his mystical journey, that darkness is not God; it is sin and the devil. The darkness of this world is the devil’s domain, but God has turned the believer “from darkness to light, from the power of Satan unto God” (Acts 26:18). He has “delivered us from the power of darkness” (Col. 1:13) and called us “out of darkness into his marvellous light” (1 Pet. 2:9). Now we are “children of light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness” (1 Thess. 5:5).

Pierre Teilhard described his practice of meditation as “going down into my innermost self, to THE DEEP ABYSS” (The Divine Milieu, p. 76). He said: “At each step of the descent a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me.” At the end of the journey he found “a bottomless abyss at my feet.”

This is a loud warning to those who have ears to hear. Though the mystic believes that he is touching light and truth through contemplative practices, in reality he is fellowshipping with darkness and lies and demons. Who were these “persons” who were distinct from Teilhard himself and who did not obey him? From a biblical perspective, we have to conclude that the man was communicating with demons. This is why he taught such demonic doctrines as evolution and a “cosmic” christ that is something different than the person of Jesus.

John Michael Talbot, the popular Roman Catholic CCM musician and contemplative promoter, recommends the use of eastern religious practices such as yoga but, as we have seen, he admits that such experiences “can be most destructive if used unwisely.” He even says: “SOME MAY FIND THEMSELVES SPIRITUALLY LOST. IT HAS HAPPENED TO MANY” (Talbot, “Many Religions, One God,” Oct. 22, 1999, http://www.johnmichaeltalbot.com/Reflections/index.asp?id=135).

Anything with that type of power for evil and spiritual destruction should be avoided like the plague!

Philip St. Romain, the Catholic lay minister who wrote Kundalini Energy and Christian Spirituality (1990), has experienced many strange things while practicing centering prayer. After “centering down” into silence, gold lights would appear and swirl in his mind, forming themselves into captivating patterns. He felt prickly sensations that would continue for days. “Wise sayings” popped into his mind as if he were “receiving messages from another.” After studying eastern religions he came to the conclusion that he was dealing with kundalini energy, and we have no doubt that he was, because mindless centering prayer brings one into the same dark realm as Hinduism’s yoga. The “inner adviser” that one encounters through centering prayer is demonic.

Even the heathen practitioners of kundalini warn about its dangers. The Ayurveda Encyclopedia says, “Those who awaken their kundalini without a guru can lose their direction in life ... they can become confused or mentally imbalanced ... more harm than good can arise” (p. 336). The book Aghora II: Kundalini warns many times that “indiscriminate awakening of the Kundalini is very dangerous” (p. 61). It says, “Once aroused and unboxed Kundalini is not ‘derousable’; the genie will not fit back into the bottle. ‘After the awakening the devotee lives always at the mercy of Kundalini’” (p. 20). In fact, the book says that “some die of shock when Kundalini is awakened, and others become severely ill” (p. 61).

St. Romain is communing with demons and he got there, not through Hindu yoga, but through Catholic contemplative mysticism, the same kind of mysticism promoted by the Quaker Richard Foster and the Southern Baptist Rick Warren.

St. Romain has come to depend on the voice that he hears in contemplative prayer.

“I cannot make any decisions for myself without the approbation of THE INNER ADVISER, whose voice speaks so clearly in times of need” (Kundalini Energy, p. 39).

The Ayurveda Encyclopedia explains that one can encounter internal voices through yogic mediation, and the practitioner is instructed to listen to the voices and follow their counsel.

“Just as with all spiritual experiences that are out of the norm of supposed societal acceptance, THE HEARING OF INNER SOUNDS OR VOICES (nada) has generally been associated with mental illness. Spiritual counseling reassures a person that their experiences and feelings are spiritual--not abnormal. Understanding nada helps persons feel comfortable when hearing any inner sounds. ... If a sound is heard, listen to it. If many sounds exist, listen to those in the right ear. The first sound heard is to be followed. Then, the next sound heard is also to be followed” (p. 343).

I have never read a more effective formula for demon possession and spiritual delusion, and “contemplative” practices such as centering prayer and visualization and guided imagery are no different in character than Hindu yoga. In fact, many contemplative practitioners admit this.

John Michael Talbot says:

“For myself, after the moving meditations of Hinduism and Taoism, and the breath, bone-marrow, and organ-cleansing of Taoism, I move into a Buddhist seated meditation, including the Four Establishments of Mindfulness. I do all of this from my own Christian perspective...” (Come to the Quiet, p. 237).

Meditation practitioner W.E. Butler, in Lords of Light, says that mystical contemplation “brings with it a curious kind of knowing that there is somebody else there with you; you are not alone” (p. 164).

Indeed, but that “somebody else” that the unsaved meditation practitioner encounters is certainly not Almighty God.

Tony Jones admits that the practice of silence often results in spiritual oppression. He mentions “the dark night of the soul” which comes through meditation and says, “It seems one cannot pursue true silence without rather quickly coming to a place of deep, dark doubt” (The Sacred Way, pp. 41, 82). He quotes Thomas Merton as follows: “The hermit, all day and all night, beats his head against a wall of doubt. That is his contemplation” (p. 41).

We are reminded of Mother Teresa, who was called a living saint by Catholics and Protestants alike during her lifetime and is on a fast track for canonization in the Catholic Church. She practiced a very serious level of contemplative spirituality all her life, but she found only darkness. This is documented in the shocking book Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, the Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta (2007), which contains statements made by the nun to her Catholic confessors and superiors over a period of more than 65 years.

In March 1953 she wrote to her confessor: “... THERE IS SUCH TERRIBLE DARKNESS WITHIN ME, as if everything was dead. It has been like this more or less from the time I started ‘the work.’”

Over the years she had many confessors, and she continually referred to her spiritual condition as “my darkness” and to Jesus as “the Absent One.”

In 1962 she wrote: “IF I EVER BECOME A SAINT -- I WILL SURELY BE ONE OF ‘DARKNESS,’” and again, “How cold -- how empty -- how painful is my heart. -- Holy communion -- Holy Mass -- all the holy things of spiritual life -- of the life of Christ in me -- are all so empty -- so cold -- so un-wanted” (Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, p. 232).

In 1979 she wrote: “THE SILENCE AND THE EMPTINESS IS SO GREAT -- that I look and do not see, -- Listen and do not hear.”

Her private statements about the spiritual darkness she encountered in contemplative prayer continued in this vein until her death, and they are the loudest possible warning about the danger of contemplative mysticism.

Contemplative practices are vehicles to bring the practitioners into contact with demons.

CONTEMPLATIVE PRACTICES HAVE EVEN LED SOME TO GODDESS WORSHIP.

This is what happened to SUE MONK KIDD (b. 1948), and her experience is a loud warning about flirting with Catholic mysticism.

She was raised in a Southern Baptist congregation in southwest Georgia. Her grandfather and father were Baptist deacons. Her grandmother gave devotionals at the Women’s Missionary Union, and her mother was a Sunday School teacher. Her husband was a minister who taught religion and a chaplain at a Baptist college. She was very involved in church, teaching Sunday School and attending services Sunday morning and evening and Wednesday. She describes herself as the person who would have won a contest for “Least Likely to Become a Feminist.” She was even inducted into a group of women called the Gracious Ladies, the criterion for which was that “one needed to portray certain ideals of womanhood, which included being gracious and giving of oneself unselfishly.”

But for years she had felt a spiritual emptiness and lack of contentment. Prayer was “a fairly boring mental activity” (Kidd’s foreword to Henri Nouwen’s With Open Hands, 2006, p. 10). She says,

“I had been struggling to come to terms with my life as a woman--in my culture, my marriage, my faith, my church, and deep inside myself” (The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, p. 8).

She was thirty years old, had been married about 12 years, and had two children.

Instead of learning how to fill the emptiness and uncertainty with a know-so salvation and a sweet walk with Christ in the Spirit and a deeper knowledge of the Bible, she began dabbling in Catholic mysticism. A Sunday School co-worker gave her a book by the Roman Catholic monk Thomas Merton. She should have known better than to study such a book and should have been warned by the brethren, but the New Evangelical philosophy that controls the vast majority of Southern Baptist churches created an atmosphere in which the reading of a Catholic monk’s book by a Sunday School teacher was acceptable. Their thinking goes like this: Who are we to judge what other people read, and who is to say that a Roman Catholic priest might not love the Lord?

Kidd began to practice Catholic forms of contemplative spirituality and to visit Catholic retreat centers and monasteries.

“... beginning in my early thirties I’d become immersed in a journey that was rooted in contemplative spirituality. It was the spirituality of the ‘church fathers,’ of the monks I’d come to know as I made regular retreats in their monasteries. ... I thrived on solitude, routinely practicing silent meditation as taught by the monks Basil Pennington and Thomas Keating. ... For years, I’d studied Thomas Merton, John of the Cross, Augustine, Bernard, Bonaventure, Ignatius, Eckhart, Luther, Teilhard de Chardin, The Cloud of Unknowing, and others” (pp. 14, 15).

Of Merton’s autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, which she read in 1978 for the first of many times, she says,

“My experience of reading it initiated me into my first real awareness of the interior life, igniting an impulse toward being ... it caused something hidden at the core of me to flare up and become known” (Kidd’s introduction to New Seeds of Contemplation, 2007, pp. xiii, xi).

Merton communicated intimately with and was deeply affected by Mary veneration, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sufism, so it is not surprising that his writings would create an appetite that could lead to goddess worship.

In The New Seeds of Contemplation, Merton made the following frightening statement that shows the great danger of Catholic mysticism:

“In the end the contemplative suffers the anguish of realizing that HE NO LONGER KNOWS WHAT GOD IS” (p. 13).

What Catholic mysticism does is reject the Bible as the sole and sufficient and perfect revelation of God and tries to delve beyond the Bible, even beyond thought of any kind, and find God through mystical “intuition.” In other words, it is a rejection of the God of the Bible. It claims that God cannot be known by doctrine and cannot be described in words. He can only be experienced through mysticism. This is a blatant denial of the Bible’s claim to be the very Word of God.

This opens the practitioner to demonic delusion. He is left with no perfect objective revelation of God, no divinely-revealed authority by which he can test his mystical experiences and intuitions. He is left with an idol of his own vain imagination (Jeremiah 17:9) and a doctrine of devils.

Kidd’s own first two books were on contemplative spirituality--God’s Joyful Surprise (1988) and When the Heart Waits (1990).

The involvement in Catholic contemplative practices led her to the Mass and to other sacramental associations.

She learned dream analysis from a Jungian perspective and believed that her dreams were revelations. One recurring dream featured an old woman. Kidd concluded that this is “the Feminine Self or the voice of the feminine soul” and she was encouraged in her feminist studies by these visitations.

She rejected the doctrine that the Bible is the sole authority. In church one day the pastor proclaimed this truth, and she describes the frightful thing that happened in her heart at that moment:

“I remember a feeling rising up from a place about two inches below my navel. ... It was the purest inner knowing I had experienced, and it was shouting in me no, no, no! The ultimate authority of my life is not the Bible; it is not confined between the covers of a book. It is not something written by men and frozen in time. It is not from a source outside myself. My ultimate authority is the divine voice in my own soul. Period. ... That day sitting in church, I believed the voice in my belly. ... The voice in my belly was the voice of the wise old woman. It was my female soul talking. And it had challenged the assumption that the Baptist Church would get me where I needed to go” (The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, pp. 76, 77, 78).

She began to think that the Bible is wrong in its teaching about women and that women should not take the subordinate position described therein. She came to believe that Eve might have been a hero instead of a sinner, that eating the forbidden fruit had actually opened Eve’s eyes to her true self. Kidd came to the conclusion that the snake was not evil but “symbolized female wisdom, power, and regeneration” (p. 71). She was surprised and pleased to learn that the snake is depicted as the companion of ancient goddesses, concluding that this is evidence that the Bible is wrong.

She began to delve into the worship of ancient goddesses. She traveled with a group of women to Crete where they met in a cave and sang prayers to “the Goddess Skoteini, Goddess of the Dark.” She says, “... something inside me was calling on the Goddess of the Dark, even though I didn’t know her name” (The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, p. 93).

Soon she was praying to God as Mother.

“I ran my finger around the rim of the circle on the page and prayed my first prayer to a Divine Feminine presence. I said, ‘Mothergod, I have nothing to hold me. No place to be, inside or out. I need to find a container of support, a space where my journey can unfold’” (p. 94).

She came to the place where she believed that she is a goddess.

“Divine Feminine love came, wiping out all my puny ideas about love in one driving sweep. Today I remember that event for the radiant mystery it was, how I felt myself embraced by Goddess, how I felt myself in touch with the deepest thing I am. It was the moment when, as playwright and poet Ntozake Shange put it, ‘I found god in myself/ and I loved her/ I loved her fiercely’” (The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, p. 136).

“I came to know myself as an embodiment of Goddess” (The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, p. 163).

“When I woke, my thought was that I was finally being reunited with the snake in myself--that lost and defiled symbol of feminine instinct” (p. 107).

She came to believe in the New Age doctrine that God is in all things and is the sum total of all things, that God is the evolving universe and we are a part of God.

“I thought: Maybe the Divine One is like an old African woman, carving creation out of one vast, beautiful piece of Herself. She is making a universal totem spanning fifteen billion years, an extension of her life and being, an evolutionary carving of sacred art containing humans, animals, plants, indeed, everything that is. And all of it is joined, blended, and connected, its destiny intertwined. ... In other words, the Divine coinheres all that is. ... To coinhere means to exist together, to be included in the same thing or substance” (pp. 158, 159).

She built an altar in her study and populated it with statues of goddesses, of Jesus, of a Black Madonna -- and a mirror to reflect her own image.

“Over the altar in my study I hung a lovely mirror sculpted in the shape of a crescent moon. It reminded me to honor the Divine Feminine presence in myself, the wisdom in my own soul” (p. 181).
Her book ends with the words, “She is in us.”

Sue Monk Kidd is quoted by evangelicals such as David Jeremiah (Life Wide Open), Beth Moore (When Godly People Do Ungodly Things), and Richard Foster (Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home). Kidd’s endorsement is printed on the back of Dallas Willard’s book The Spirit of the Disciplines. She wrote the foreword to the 2006 edition of Henri Nouwen’s With Open Hands and the introduction to the 2007 edition of Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation.

Another example of how Catholic contemplative spirituality has led to goddess worship is the sad story of ALAN “BEDE” GRIFFITHS.

He was born in England and studied at Oxford under C.S. Lewis, who became a lifelong friend. In 1931, while at Oxford he converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism. The next year he joined the Benedictine monastery of Prinknash Abbey near Gloucester and was ordained a priest in 1940. The name Bede, meaning prayer, was given to him when he entered the Benedictine order.

He moved to India and became a Hindu monk (while remaining a Catholic priest), calling himself Swami Dayananda (bliss of compassion), going barefoot, wearing an orange-colored robe, practicing yoga, taking the tika, and refusing to eat meat.

He accepted the Hindu concept of the interrelatedness of everything and the unity of man with God.

“He loved to quote the Chandogya Upanishad (8,3) [Hindu scriptures] to show that while our body takes up only a small space on this planet, OUR MIND ENCOMPASSES THE WHOLE UNIVERSE: ‘There is this city of Brahman (the human body) and in it there is a small shrine in the form of a lotus, and within can be found a small space. This little space within the heart is as great as this vast universe. The heavens and the earth are there, and the sun and the moon and the stars; fire and lightening and wind are there, and all that now is and is not yet--all that is contained within it” (Pascaline Coff, “Man, Monk, Mystic,” http://www.bedegriffiths.com/bio.htm).

He rejected the Bible’s doctrine that there is good and evil:

“I saw God in the earth, in trees, in mountains. IT LED ME TO THE CONVICTION THAT THERE IS NO ABSOLUTE GOOD OR EVIL IN THIS WORLD. We have to let go of all concepts which divide the world into good and evil, right and wrong, and begin to see the complimentarity of opposites which Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa called the coincidentia oppositorum, the ‘coincidence of opposites’” (1991, http://www.bedegriffiths.com/bio.htm).

At the end of his life he came to believe in the validity of mother goddess worship. This was the fruit of his communion with idolatry through contemplative spirituality. In 1990, after a stroke, he began to speak of the awakening of his repressed feminine.

“When he first spoke about THE BLACK MADONNA, he said his experience of her was deeply connected to the Earth-Mother, to the forms of the ancient feminine found in rocks and caves and in the different forms in nature. HE LIKENED IT TO THE EXPERIENCE OF THE FEMININE EXPRESSED IN THE HINDU CONCEPT OF SHAKTI--THE POWER OF THE DIVINE FEMININE. Later Father wrote these reflections on the Black Madonna: ‘The Black Madonna symbolizes for me the Black Power in Nature and Life, the hidden power in the womb. ... I feel it was this Power which struck me. She is cruel and destructive, but also deeply loving and nourishing’” (http://www.bedegriffiths.com/bio.htm).

Griffiths had a large influence in promoting interfaith philosophy in Roman Catholic monasteries in America, England, Australia, and Germany through his books and lectures. He wrote 12 books on interfaith dialogue, the most popular being Marriage of East and West.

Griffiths’ love for the Black Madonna is interesting. Sue Monk Kidd, too, as she traveled from Catholic contemplative practices to goddess worship, experienced a great love for the Black Madonna. Thomas Merton did the same thing in his journey into Roman Catholic mysticism and beyond to Zen Buddhism.

This is not surprising because the Madonna was originally borrowed from pagan idolatry, from the ancient mother goddess mystery religions that stemmed from Babel.

Contemplative practices are encouraging the spread of such heresies, and this is a loud warning to those who have ears to hear.

I would urge my readers in the strongest possible way not to dabble in contemplative practices. There really is no telling where it might lead. It can lead to Rome or Buddha or even to Artemis.

(For more about Sue Monk Kidd and Alan Griffiths see the chapter “A Biographical Catalog of Contemplative Mystics.”)

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This article is excerpted from our new book Contemplative Mysticism: A Powerful Ecumenical Bond, which is available from Way of Life Literature. If it is not yet available through the online catalog, it can be ordered by phone or e-mail with a credit card.

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SOLOMON MALAN: AN EARLY DEFENDER OF THE KJV

October 9, 2008 (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) -

The defense of the King James Bible is not new. The following is excerpted from For Love of the Bible: The Battle for the King James Version and the Greek Received Text from 1800 to Present. The fifth edition (October 2008) is revised and updated and fully illustrated. This book is available from Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143 (toll free), www.wayoflife.org (online catalog), fbns@wayoflife.org (e-mail).
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Solomon Caesar Malan, D.D. (1812-1894), Vicar of Broadwindsor, published A Vindication of the Authorized Version, from Charges Brought against It by Recent Writers (1856), A Plea for the Received Text XE "Received Text" and for the Authorized Version of the New Testament (1869), and Seven Chapters of the Revision XE "English Revised Version" of 1881 Revised (1881). The first of these was Malan XE "Malan, Solomon" ’s reply to a call for revision that had come in 1856 through William Selwyn XE "Selwyn, William" and James Heywood XE "Heywood, James" . About that same time, five other Anglican XE "Anglican" ministers were lobbying for revision. These were Charles Ellicott XE "Ellicott, Charles" (later the New Testament Revision Committee chairman), Henry Alford XE "Alford, Henry" , W.H.G. Humphry XE "Humphry, W.H.G." , John Barrow XE "Barrow, John" , and G. Moberly XE "Moberly, G." . This group was brought together in 1856 by Ernest Hawkins XE "Hawkins, Ernest" , secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and between 1857 and 1863 they published several revised portions of the English Bible. These were issued under the title of Revision of the Authorized Version, by Five Clergymen. Malan wrote in opposition to this work, which has been called “the germ of the 1881 revision.”

Malan XE "Malan, Solomon" exhibited a learned grasp of the unique and glorious heritage of the Authorized English Version. He well understood the seriousness of any attempt to revise it. Let’s go back in time 150 years and listen in as this brilliant man gives a defense of the King James Bible:

“It [the KJV] stands as yet unrivalled among other modern versions for the devout spirit in which its authors rendered the original texts; for the simple beauty of its style; and for the dignified and easy flow of a language that was in a great degree formed from it, and that singles it out from among other translations of the Bible, even as a mere literary composition. It is free from the ruggedness and from the archaisms of the older English versions; and at the same time it possesses at least an equal merit with them, for its faithful rendering of the original. But it has this great advantage over some of them, that whereas they were the work of single individuals, this was made by a goodly company of nearly fifty of the most pious and learned men of that time; who, together, availed themselves of the labours of their predecessors in order to raise their own production to a higher degree of excellence. ...

“It may, indeed, be taken down; but, if so, never to be rebuilt as it was. It might, it is true, have a more modern appearance; but then, it would lose the solemn look of age. It might also possibly be better adapted to the fastidious taste of the present day; but then, unbroken associations of two centuries and a half, together with much of national individuality, would perish for ever; and those persons who think the Authorized Version antiquated XE "Archaic (words in the KJV)" , would be the first to regret the change. ... And they would lament the day when, for the sake of novelty, they had abandoned those sweet and solemn words of warning blended with their earliest recollections of childhood, by renouncing their trust of a national treasure, committed to them in the safe keeping of the Authorized English Version of the Bible. ...

“So much care, so much earnestness, in the due performance of this important task [the creation of the King James Bible], were not bestowed in vain. They have stamped the work with a character for excellence to which no modern version, and but one or two of the older ones, can lay claim. As regards the Old Testament, the Authorized Version is, generally speaking, less paraphrastic, and is therefore a more correct rendering of the Hebrew XE "Hebrew" , than the Septuagint and the versions that follow them wholly or in part; such as the Armenian, the Ethiopic, the Coptic, the Vulgate, the Arabic, and even the Syriac. ... And, as regards the New Testament, the English Bible agrees best with the old versions, which are of the highest value, on account of their faithfulness and accuracy. ...

“[I]t stands pre-eminent when side by side with more modern versions,—not only for its devout adherence to the original texts, but also for the beauty of its style. ... So true is this, that whereas neighbouring nations have had, within a short period, a succession of versions of the Bible in their respective languages, to the detriment of union and of uniformity among the readers of the Bible in those countries, the English Version has stood on its own merits, and has shone of its own lustre for nearly two centuries and a half. ...

“Thus it is that it has entered into the very substance of the nation. It is interwoven with its sinews, and forms more than any other book ever did—an unseen, by many perhaps, unacknowledged, or even neglected, but still a living, element in the prosperity of the people. ... THESE LASTING AND WHOLESOME EFFECTS ARE THE RESULT OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE BEING ONE AND THE SAME FOR ALL. IF, INSTEAD OF ONLY ONE BIBLE, ENGLAND HAD, LIKE SOME OTHER COUNTRIES, MANY BIBLES, THAT VARIETY ALONE WOULD BREED AND FOSTER ENDLESS DIVISION. ...

“Their reverence for the Sacred Scriptures induced them [KJV translators] to be as literal as they could, to avoid obscurity; and it must be acknowledged that they were extremely happy in the simplicity and dignity of their expressions. Their adherence to the Hebrew XE "Hebrew" idiom is supposed at once to have enriched and adorned our language; and, as they laboured for the general benefit of the learned and the unlearned, they avoided all words of Latin original when they could find words in their own language ...

“Thus, then, the English Bible has not only stood for centuries, and NOW STANDS, ON ITS OWN MERITS AS A TRUE WITNESS OF THE INSPIRED TEXT OF SCRIPTURE; but it is also strong of its own strength, in being, as the highest authorities tell us, ‘the best standard of the English language.’ ... For ‘our translators,’ says Dr. Adam Clarke, ‘not only made a standard translation, but they have made their translation the standard of our language. THE ENGLISH TONGUE, IN THEIR DAY, WAS NOT EQUAL TO SUCH A WORK; BUT GOD ENABLED THEM TO STAND AS UPON MOUNT SINAI, AND CRANE UP THEIR COUNTRY’S LANGUAGE TO THE DIGNITY OF THE ORIGINALS, so that after the lapse of two hundred [and fifty] years, the English Bible is, with very few exceptions, the standard of the purity and excellence of the English tongue. The original, from which it was taken, is alone superior to the Bible translated by the authority of King James.’...

“Such considerations, however, have no weight whatever with many who are willing to sacrifice much to the love of change; or at all events, who seem to take pleasure in aiming blows at everything that is not of yesterday. Everything now must keep pace with the age; even the word of God. ... And yet wisdom neither came with us, nor will die with us. As regards the Authorized Version then, and those who find fault with it, ‘let us not too hastily conclude,’ says Mr. Whittaker XE "Whittaker, J.W." , ‘that the translators have fallen on evil days and evil tongues, because it has occasionally happened that an individual, as inferior to them in erudition as in talents and integrity, is found questioning their motives, or denying their qualifications for the task which they so well performed. ... It [the KJV] may be compared with any translation in the world, without fear of inferiority; it has not shrunk from the most rigorous examination; it challenges investigation; and, in spite of numerous attempts to supersede it, it has hitherto remained unrivalled in the affections of the country.’

“And God grant it may long continue so, for the good of the people to which it belongs! ...

“I purpose therefore ... to look into the charges thus brought forward against the English Bible, with those who cling to it as they ought, affectionately and devoutly; in order to assist them in expelling from their mind all doubt on the subject. Meanwhile, they may rest assured that, hitherto, all attempts at improvement upon their Bible, have come far short of it in language, in style, in truthfulness, and above all, in a generally correct and devout rendering of the original texts” (Malan XE "Malan, Solomon" , A Vindication, pp. i-xvi, xxii-xxvi).
Malan XE "Malan, Solomon" answered the various arguments that were being put forth in advance of a revision of the Authorized Version. For example:

“... we now hear from many, that the English Bible is no longer suited to the exigencies of the present day, but that our advanced state of knowledge loudly calls for a new revision. An evil day that will be when it comes. However, Bishop Middleton holds out no encouragement to them, when he says: ‘The style of our present version is incomparably superior to anything which might be expected from the finical and perverted taste of our own age. It is simple, it is harmonious, it is energetic; and, which is of no small importance, use has made it familiar, and time has rendered it sacred.’ ... its words are ‘household words,’ ... its simple and hallowed language is understood and loved alike, by the poor peasant and by the august Sovereign, whom it binds to Her people. England XE "England" has not ‘a Bible,’ one of many to choose from, like her neighbours; but ‘the Bible’ is in every English home; and ‘my Bible,’ in English, means that one Book, the very words of which are the same for all” (Malan XE "Malan, Solomon" , A Vindication, pp. xviii, xix).

Malan XE "Malan, Solomon" plainly saw the danger of loosing from the ancient moorings of the Received Text XE "Received Text" and the Authorized Version.

“Who will be bold, or I might almost say hardened enough, if not perhaps to pull down, yet even to whitewash the stately edifice of the English Bible? ... It might possibly be better adapted to the fastidious taste of the age; but then, unbroken associations of two centuries and a half, together with much of national individuality, would perish for ever; and those persons who think the authorized version antiquated XE "Archaic (words in the KJV)" would be the first to regret the change. ... For independently of the words of the Bible being sacred in all languages, the language of the English Bible in particular is consecrated ... the vernacular translation of the Bible has formed and fixed the language of the country” (Malan XE "Malan, Solomon" , A Vindication of the Authorized Version, 1856, pp. iii, iv, xiv).

Malan XE "Malan, Solomon" pointed out the unsettled, ever-changing character of modern textual criticism, observing: “In other words, the translator chooses his own text, which he renders as he thinks fit; so that, in fact, he has it all his own way. ... Mill is thought by some to be antiquated XE "Archaic (words in the KJV)" , Griesbach XE "Griesbach, J.J." out of date, and Tischendorf XE "Tischendorf" even not exactly to their taste” (Malan, A Vindication of the Authorized Version, p. xxi).

Malan “takes exceptions even to the quite prevalent custom of ministers’ criticising the present translation before their congregations, on the ground that it ‘needlessly unsettles the mind of their hearers on a subject in which comparatively few of them can ever be fair judges’” (Bissell, The Historic Origin of the Bible, p. 350).

In the second book, Malan XE "Malan, Solomon" directed his remarks to a critique of Henry Alford XE "Alford, Henry" ’s sixth edition Greek XE "Greek" New Testament (published in 1868) which followed Tischendorf XE "Tischendorf" and gave heavy preference to the Vaticanus XE "Vaticanus" and Sinaiticus XE "Sinaiticus" manuscripts. Malan comments on some of Alford’s readings in the Gospels and the book of Titus. The following two examples illustrate the tone of the whole:

“[Matthew 1:25] ‘Till she had brought forth her first-born son,’ A.V. is changed by Dr. Alford XE "Alford, Henry" to ‘till she had brought forth a son’! His reasons for this change are, that the Vatican MS. and a very few others make it; whereas the reading of the Auth. Version, which is that of the Received Text XE "Received Text" , is far better supported, and by many more MSS. The English reader may refer to p. 37 for a discussion on this passage; but if he knows no Greek XE "Greek" , he may rest assured the Authorized Version is right and far better than the Dean’s alteration ‘till she brought forth a son’...” (Malan XE "Malan, Solomon" , A Plea for the Received Text and for the Authorized Version of the New Testament, p. 103).

“[Mark 13:14] ‘Spoken of by Daniel XE "Daniel" the prophet,’ A.V., ‘omit,’ Dr. Alford XE "Alford, Henry" . This clause is not, indeed, in the Vatican MS., but is found in others, as well as in the Syriac, Georgian, Slavonic, and Ethiopic versions. So that we need not obey Dr. Alford’s peremptory order to omit it” (Ibid., p. 142).
Malan XE "Malan, Solomon" ’s conclusion offers a window into the sympathies of a great many nineteenth-century preachers toward the attempts to undermine the Greek Received Text XE "Received Text" :

“A man who, like him [Henry Alford XE "Alford, Henry" ], sets to a work of this kind, apparently without the slightest hesitation or misgiving in his own powers, thinking it the easiest thing in the world to make wholesale changes in the Greek XE "Greek" text and in the joint labours of more than fifty learned men of old, instead of dealing with the utmost reverence and caution, not only forms an unworthy estimate of the work he undertakes—but he also recklessly wounds the feeling of deep respect and affection with which men, nowise his inferiors in judgment or scholarship, still continue to look upon the Received Text XE "Received Text" and the English Bible.

“Both these have, indeed, lasted more than two centuries; a long time, in truth, for those who think that wisdom, learning, and scholarship have only just dawned on the land, and that, until now, all was darkness and ignorance. Wise men, however, do not think so but rather take the long life of those two monuments of ancient piety and learning as a proof of their real merit and excellence. ...

“[A] better acquaintance with his [Alford XE "Alford, Henry" ’s] work only tends to deepen their reverence and to strengthen their affection for their old friends and companions, the Received Greek XE "Greek" Text of the New Testament and the Authorised Version of it—neither of which they ever intend to give up; not even at the Dean’s bidding” (Malan XE "Malan, Solomon" , A Plea for the Received Text XE "Received Text" and for the Authorized Version of the New Testament, pp. 210, 11).

When the 1881 English Revision XE "English Revised Version" appeared, Malan XE "Malan, Solomon" was not swayed from his earlier position. “The learned writer charged the Revisers with having ‘looked upon’ their work ‘in the light of a Greek XE "Greek" exercise,’ and with having ‘taken pleasure in making as many changes as they could, with little or no regard for cadence, rhythm, style, or even grammar.’ He pronounced the result to be ‘little short of a great failure’” (Samuel Hemphill XE "Hemphill, Samuel" , A History of the Revised Version of the New Testament, p. 96).

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This is excerpted from For Love of the Bible: The Battle for the King James Version and the Greek Received Text from 1800 to Present. The fifth edition (November 2008) is revised and updated and fully illustrated. This book is available from Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143 (toll free), www.wayoflife.org (online catalog), fbns@wayoflife.org (e-mail).

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RICHARD FOSTER: EVANGELICALISM’S MYSTICAL SPARKPLUG

October 8, 2008 (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) -

The following is excerpted from our new book Contemplative Mysticism: A Powerful Ecumenical Bond, which is available from Way of Life Literature. If it is not yet available through the online catalog, it can be ordered by phone or e-mail with a credit card.
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Richard Foster’s writings have been at the forefront of the contemplative movement since the 1970s. No one has done more than this man to spread contemplative mysticism throughout Protestant and Baptist churches XE "Foster, Richard" \b .

Foster’s book Celebration of Discipline, which has sold more than two and a half million copies, was selected by Christianity Today as one of the top ten books of the 20th century. (For this review I obtained multiple editions of Celebration of Discipline, plus three other books by Foster.)