The Bible They Cannot Know, Part 1: What Is Being Charged?

The difference between personal atheism and an atheistic epistemology

The phrase atheistic epistemology must not be used as a bludgeon. It is possible for a man sincerely to profess the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the resurrection, and the authority of Scripture, while adopting a method that cannot supply a coherent account of how he knows the words by which those truths are confessed. The question is not, first, what an advocate privately believes. The question is what his stated principle permits him to know.

Atheism is not only a bare sentence—“there is no God.” It is also a way of reasoning. The atheist must treat created things, human sense, historical evidence, and human inference as the highest court of appeal. He has no self-authenticating word from God by which to judge his reasoning, because he has ruled out such a word before the inquiry begins. He may speak of evidence, probability, consensus, and the progress of knowledge; but, in the final reckoning, man judges all things and is judged by no word above himself.

Christianity begins in the opposite direction. God is the Creator, not an item within His creation awaiting man's permission to exist. He knows all things exhaustively; man knows truly only because God has made him, reveals Himself to him, and gives him light by which to see. “In thy light shall we see light” (Psalm 36:9). The Word of God is therefore not a conclusion reached after a neutral investigation. It is the authority by which every investigation is judged.

That distinction reaches directly into the textual question. If a Christian says that the exact words of the Bible are available only after experts have weighed competing evidence, applied evolving canons, and issued their best present reconstruction, he has not merely described a technical procedure. He has identified a final authority. The final authority is no longer the Word speaking through the church's received text. It is the scholar's judgment about what the Word may once have said.

What is meant by the critical-text position?

The charge is not directed at every use of a concordance, manuscript collation, lexicon, or textual apparatus. The church has always compared copies, corrected obvious slips, and defended the authentic Hebrew and Greek against corrupt versions. William Whitaker himself argued vigorously for the authentic Hebrew text of the Old Testament and Greek text of the New, while using historical testimony and linguistic argument in their defense. Careful study is not the enemy.

The issue is the theory that makes such study constitutive of the text's authority. On that theory, the inspired text is located only in lost autographs; no received text is to be treated as the public, determinate form of the inspired words; and the church must wait upon an editorial reconstruction that can be altered whenever fresh evidence or a new method seems persuasive. The printed critical text is not received as a settled text, but as the latest scholarly approximation to an inaccessible original.

That theory has several necessary consequences.

First, the church cannot say simply, “Thus saith the Lord,” wherever the editor has marked the wording uncertain. At most she can say, “This is probably what the Lord said.” Second, the rule by which a reading is accepted is not itself a word of God. It is a fallible complex of judgments about manuscripts, scribes, transmission, style, genealogy, and probability. Third, the identity of Scripture is made dependent upon a continuing class of specialists rather than upon the providence of God in preserving a text for His people.

None of this is repaired by saying that most of the text is undisputed. A rule of faith is not defined by a percentage. If God has given a word, every word is His and every word has divine authority. A system which makes the identity of some of those words unknown does not merely create an academic inconvenience. It makes the exercise of divine authority conditional upon the conclusion of a human investigation.

The confessional alternative

The Westminster Confession does not speak of an inspired text locked forever in vanished pages. It identifies the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek as “immediately inspired by God,” and says that they have been “by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages,” and are therefore “authentical.” Its claim is not that every manuscript is free from copying error. Its claim is that God has preserved the authentic Scriptures in the original languages so that they can serve as the final rule of faith.

This is why the distinction from KJV-onlyism matters. Confessional Bibliology does not make the Authorized Version an inspired English original, nor does it deny the place of Hebrew and Greek. It holds that translations must be judged by the preserved Hebrew and Greek text—not that the Hebrew and Greek must be judged by an English translation. The question is textual and theological: Has God preserved an authoritative text that the church may identify and receive?

James Ussher expressed the larger principle with great simplicity. God is known only by the means by which He has manifested Himself. The works of creation leave men without excuse, but the saving knowledge of God is found perfectly in His holy Word. Ussher then asks where that Word is now certainly to be learned, and answers: only from the Book of God contained in the Holy Scriptures, “the only certain testimonies unto the Church of the Word of God.” A Bible which cannot be identified is not such a testimony. It is a hypothesis about a testimony.

The argument in brief

The argument of this series may be stated without heat:

1. The God of Scripture speaks truth and cannot lie.
2. He gave His Word to His church as a written rule of faith.
3. A written rule must be available and identifiable if it is to rule the church.
4. The critical-text position denies, at the very points it calls uncertain, that the church possesses an identifiable text rather than an editorial reconstruction.
5. Therefore it requires the church to reason about Scripture as though the God who gave it had not preserved it as a knowable rule.

That is an atheistic epistemology in operation. It may retain Christian conclusions for a time, but it reaches those conclusions by borrowing a Bible whose public identity its own premises cannot secure.

The next article considers the most important device by which this loss is hidden: the appeal to a lost autograph as the only place where inspiration and certainty can properly reside.

Sources

• Holy Bible, Authorized Version: Psalm 36:9; 2 Timothy 3:15-17.
• Westminster Confession of Faith, 1.5, 1.8, 1.10.
• James Ussher, A Body of Divinity, questions on the knowledge of God and the certainty of the written Word.
• William Whitaker, A Disputation on Holy Scripture, Questions II and III.
• “Confessional Bibliology vs. KJV-Onlyism,” especially its distinction between the preserved Hebrew and Greek text and an English-only standard.