The Bible They Cannot Know, Part 4: The Borrowed Bible and the God Who Kept His Word

The critical-text position borrows what it cannot ground

The critical-text advocate usually does not wish to deny the Bible. He appeals to it constantly. He cites its teaching about inspiration, Christ, salvation, the church, and the Holy Spirit. He may appeal to the same promises of God which the confessional Christian cites. Yet those appeals create a problem which cannot be avoided.

How does he know that the words he cites are the words God gave? At an uncontested point, he may say that the evidence is overwhelming. At a contested point, he must say that the wording is a scholarly conclusion, perhaps a strong one, but still liable to revision. He therefore uses Scripture to establish the authority of the method, while the method reserves the right to determine which sentences of Scripture may be used. The argument is circular in the deepest sense: the court authenticates the law by which the court claims authority.

The confessional Christian also reasons from Scripture, but he does not pretend to stand outside it. He confesses openly that the Word of God is self-authenticating because God is self-authenticating; that the Spirit bears witness by and with that Word; that the church receives it; and that all secondary evidences are subordinate to it. This is not a vicious circle. It is the necessary acknowledgment that no higher court exists from which God may be judged.

By contrast, the critical-text position tries to retain a Bible while withholding the only sort of certainty that can make a Bible a final rule. It keeps the vocabulary of revelation but adopts the procedure of autonomous evidentialism. It has not refuted the confessional position. It has merely assumed that God has not preserved the very object which He commands the church to hear.

The promise the theory cannot keep

The central argument may be laid out with the needed precision:

1. The God revealed in Scripture cannot lie (Titus 1:2; Hebrews 6:18).
2. Christ teaches the abiding certainty of His words: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” (Matthew 24:35; see also John 10:35 and 1 Peter 1:25).
3. For written words to abide as the church's rule, they must remain available and identifiable for the church's use. A word that survives only in an inaccessible original or an indistinguishable mass of alternatives has not been preserved as a rule.
4. The critical-text position, insofar as it denies that the church has a known, continuously preserved text and makes the text an indefinite reconstruction, denies that availability and identity.
5. It therefore entails that Christ's promise has failed in the very respect in which it is needed by the church.
6. A speaker whose genuine promise fails is not the God who cannot lie.
7. Scripture reveals no true God besides the God who cannot lie and whose words endure.
8. Therefore, the critical-text position, joined to the biblical teaching it professes to accept, terminates in the denial of the only true God.

The conclusion is severe because the premise is severe. It must not be softened by accusing people of things they do not profess. Neither may it be escaped by redefining preservation until it means only that God allowed enough evidence to remain for scholars to conduct a permanent reconstruction. The issue is not whether God left clues. The issue is whether God kept His Word for His church.

If one says that the promise may be true although no generation can know the exact words to which it refers, he has emptied the promise of its covenantal purpose. Christ did not comfort His church with a hidden reality unrelated to her possession and use. He spoke of words that would not pass away. The apostles command the church to hold fast, read, preach, teach, hear, and obey those words. A promise of unidentifiable preservation is like a promise of bread which no child may find or eat.

The confessional answer: reception, not reconstruction

The church's task is not to re-create revelation. She receives it. Her history is not irrelevant: the public use, copying, preaching, and defense of the text are part of the providential means by which God has kept His Word before His people. But the church is not the author of Scripture, and a scholar is not its legislator. Both stand under the Scripture which God has given.

This is why Westminster 1.8 joins inspiration and preservation. The original-language Scriptures are authentic because God inspired them and, by His singular care and providence, kept them pure in all ages. The Confession does not say that the church possesses no more than a generally reliable approximation. It grounds the church's appeal to the Hebrew and Greek fountains in the faithfulness of God.

The Spirit's witness is not an excuse for private fancy. He bears witness by and with the Word. The church's testimony is not an invention of authority. It is the public witness of those who have heard the Shepherd's voice in Scripture. External evidence is not abolished. It is rightly ordered: it may serve, confirm, and defend the text, but it may not become the final court over the text.

This account gives every laborer his proper place. The pastor preaches the Word. The translator renders the Word. The scholar studies and defends the Word. The congregation hears and obeys the Word. None of them creates the Word; none of them may revise it by an authority superior to God. The same text that furnishes doctrine furnishes the standard by which doctrines, translations, scholars, and churches are judged.

A necessary challenge

The critical-text advocate must eventually choose between two claims.

He may say that God has preserved His words in a definite, public, and identifiable text for the church. If he means that in the confessional sense, he has surrendered the principle of perpetual reconstruction and must ask which received text bears that character.

Or he may say that the exact text remains at points unknown and that the church must accept the latest scholarly estimate. In that case he has surrendered the right to speak of Scripture as a final, self-attesting rule at those points. He has placed the Christian under a method which functions exactly as an unbeliever's method functions: man weighs the evidence and gives the final verdict about God.

There is no stable middle position in which God promises an abiding written Word while the church is denied the ability to know what that Word is. A God who cannot be known through His promised, identifiable Word is not the God of the Scriptures. And a Bible which only exists as an ever-revisable scholarly reconstruction is not a Bible able to serve as the supreme judge of all religious controversies.

The church should therefore reject both the despair of a lost autograph and the arrogance of a self-authorizing scholarly court. She should confess with the Reformers that God has spoken, that He has kept what He spoke, and that His people are bound to hear the authentic Hebrew and Greek Scriptures which He has preserved. That is not anti-intellectualism. It is the beginning of Christian knowledge: God is true, and every man is a liar.

Sources

• Holy Bible, Authorized Version: Matthew 24:35; John 10:35; Romans 3:4; 1 Peter 1:25; Titus 1:2; Hebrews 6:18.
• Westminster Confession of Faith, 1.5, 1.8, 1.10.
• James Ussher, A Body of Divinity, on God's self-revelation and the Scriptures as the church's certain testimony.
• William Whitaker, A Disputation on Holy Scripture, Questions II and III.