Robert Truelove

"To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them."

Bible

Impartiality is a Biblical corollary to justice. “Class struggle” is not.

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For the Lord your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward: he doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment. Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.

—Deuteronomy 10:17-19

Justice for the downtrodden means not despising the weak and not favoring the powerful nor bribes at the bar of justice (court of law).

Also note, God gives the foreigner food and clothing. That is not a reference to the “redistribution of wealth”. It is not something the state should do. It is what God does. The point is that since God loves the foreigner as is demonstrated by the fact that HE feeds and clothes him, we should love him as well.

To say this means the state should take by force from some to feed and cloth the downtrodden is to put the state in the place of God. On the other hand, since God is generous to the downtrodden, the Christian should be as well, but as an act of lovingkindness—not compulsion. Mercy is not justice.

Ideological “class struggle” is the antithesis of Biblical justice.

They that sow in tears shall reap in joy

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Psalm 126:5 in the glory of the inspired writ speaks from the context of God’s judgement in the captivity of the people. We do indeed “sow in tears” at times but this Psalm causes me to consider what sort of tears I sow when I weep?

Do I weep tears of bitterness and envy or do I weep over my sin? Do I weep tears of covetousness over that which I have lost in the world or do I weep tears of woe over the loss of the sensible presence of Christ in my life?

Not all tears are sown to produce joy in the end. There are many tears shed in this world that do not end in the joys of Christ. Judas was greatly grieved in the end, yet our Lord said, “it had been good for that man if he had not been born.” (Matthew 26:24)

May we weep gospel tears, that we may reap gospel joy.

“I guess the Bible is not quite what I thought it was…”

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I think the vast majority of Bible believing Christians intuitively believe just as I do concerning the text of the Scripture. That is, we actually possess the infallible word of God, not in theory, but in fact. The rub doesn’t come until they turn a corner and run into lower criticism.

Once, when I was an advocate of contemporary textual criticism, I was explaining it to a man and he looked down dejectedly and said, “I guess the Bible is not quite what I thought it was.”

It makes me think of a similar instance in a lecture I heard by Michael Kruger where he was telling his students a story about how he went to a Presbyterian church to speak on the text of Scripture. He taught them that the long ending of Mark containing the resurrection account was not Scripture. The pastor’s wife approached him in tears afterwards about this and Kruger commented that she was influenced by tradition.

In reality, she had a view of the Bible as the infallible word of God and this renowned, trusted professor turned her understanding of the nature of the Biblical text up on its head. You’d cry too if it were you!

How can an infallible text contain a complete narrative, indeed a resurrection account!, for centuries and believers accepted it as authentic Scripture only now to be told it’s a fake? The implications of that are not well understood by believing proponents of lower criticism.

She thought she could approach the Bible with the same confidence as Jesus…

Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.

This is going to be jarring because it presents a different epistemology than that which the typical Bible believer holds to from upon their own reading of the Bible. “I can no longer just go to my Bible as the ultimate authority, I must always check it by the critics…for what my Bible says may or may not actually be the Bible. Furthermore, the critics are often not in agreement and what they affirm today they may deny tomorrow.”

Such is the mess you get when you disconnect the concept of Biblical canon from the text of the canon.

Is the Received Text of the Protestant Reformation “Infallible”?

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Chapter 1, Section 8 of the  Westminster Confession declares the Biblical text the framers possessed is the infallible word of God. This is what is meant by “authentic”. We only have to look back to the Council of Trent to see that this is a counterclaim to Rome for Rome used the same language regarding the Latin Vulgate. Rome was declaring the original language texts to be corrupt. The Roman church being the authenticating authority declared the Latin Vulgate to be “authentic”. Protestants declared the original language texts to be “authentic”—authoritative and infallible. Protestants made this claim not based upon the authority of the church, but the Holy Spirit Himself as the authenticating authority (See Westminster Confession, Chapter 1, Sections 4-5).

Put another way, God inspired the text in a verbal plenary fashion. In His providence he preserved it in “essential purity” so that the full power and authority of the text remains. Whatever scribal issues may have been allowed to creep in (which are all debatable), God has so preserved the text that what we have in the corpus of the Received Texts of the Protestant Reformation is “infallible” (it does not err because it cannot).

On the other hand, if we say it merely represents the original, we are claiming no more authority for our Greek text than we do for a reliable translation of it. This is “mediate inspiration” and means it is only infallible to the degree it is in accords with the original autographs which we do not have. This would mean there is no edition of the New Testament that we may properly call “infallible” and no amount of critical studies will ever be able to make this claim.

This is both a teleological (misunderstanding the purpose of the Scripture) and epistemological (misunderstanding the authority of the Scripture) error of epic proportions if you believe the Bible is God’s infallible word. To claim the original language text as the ultimate, infallible authority but deny that we actually posses the full authority of that text creates a great inconsistency when it comes to our appeal to the Scripture as the ultimate authority for all faith and practice.

I hold that the full power of immediate inspiration is found within the Received Text. Not because God inspired scribes, but because He preserved the full power of the text by special providence. What I mean by the words “full power” is that the text has been so preserved in the Received Text as to contain all the force and authority of the original autographs (warning: a barbarian will miss the nuance in what I am saying).

A precedent for this is found in canon 2 of the Helvetic Consensus Formula (1675) which was chiefly framed by Francis Turretin. There we find…

“But, in particular, The Hebrew original of the OT which we have received and to this day do retain as handed down by the Hebrew Church, “who had been given the oracles of God” (Rom 3:2), is, not only in its consonants, but in its vowels either the vowel points themselves, or at least the power of the points not only in its matter, but in its words, inspired by God.”

The issue there is very similar to the one regarding the preservation of the Greek text in the Received Text of the Reformation. For the Old Testament Hebrew text, the question was whether or not the vowel points were originally inspired or if they were added later.

The Helvetic Consensus Formula declared “in its vowels either the vowel points themselves, OR AT LEAST THE POWER OF THE POINTS” were “inspired by God””. That is, if the vowel points were added later by scribes, God so directed it as to actually be a part of the preservation of the original since the vowel points are important for a proper understanding of the text (and especially so as Hebrew would be a dead language).

In like fashion, God has so preserved the Greek New Testament as to render the full power of the originals in the Received Text of the Reformation.

Take up a sound translation of our Received Text and read, for there you read a translation of the covenant of the King of Kings, God Almighty!

Communal Bible Reading

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“Till I come, give attendance to reading [public],
to exhortation, to doctrine.”
1 Timothy 4:13

If the Biblical epistles originally written to churches are to be a guide as to what Biblical teaching and preaching should look like (and they should), they presuppose the hearer have a fairly extensive knowledge of the Bible as a whole. Consider how the many citations of Scripture in Hebrews and Romans are used to make the point of the author. If the hearer didn’t know those texts and their original context, the point being made would be lost on him. As these epistles were read aloud to the church, a person ignorant of Scripture would have a hard time understanding and following the arguments being presented.

This brings up an interesting question. Just how did these early Christians gain such a vast understanding of the Scripture? This question is even more compelling when we consider that over 90% of them couldn’t read and, of those that could, very few had their own, personal copy of the Scriptures.

The answer to the question can first be found among the Jews from which ancient Christianity initially came forth and then the actual example of Christian practice in antiquity. What we find are daily, communal readings of the Scriptures. As Jews and proselytes would gather in the synagogues to hear the Scriptures read, Christians were gathering “from house to house” (Acts 2:46).

The antithesis of this thoroughly Word based faith and experience could be found in the pagan temples. In paganism there were no protracted meetings for the purpose of listening to the readings of their sacred texts. Indeed, their sacred texts tended to be exceedingly short and paltry compared to the books of the Bible. Gatherings in pagan temples were all about performance, experience, and the stirring up of the emotions. To the typical pagan, apostolic Christianity looked far more like the philosophers forum than it did the pagan temple.

Fast forwarding to today…If you read your Bible hours every single week, you only have a taste of what our ancient fathers had. I say a “taste” because they not only heard the Scripture, but had the added benefit of the fellowship and conversations sparked by these communal, Bible readings. They were a people thoroughly baptized in the Word of God.

We live in a time when everyone has multiple copies of the entire Bible. Access to literally hundreds of translations online, and can study the original Greek and Hebrew with fancy, free, browser based tools that have everything thoroughly indexed and linked (blueletterbible.com). One would think that we are the most Biblically literate Christians to have ever lived. In reality, there has never been a generation that had ready access to the Scriptures (though it may have only been in public readings) that was as Biblically illiterate as this generation.

We have traded the excellence and splendor of Holy Spirit lead, Word-based Christianity, for the entertainment of praise bands and feel good sermons so shallow and lacking that there is almost nothing for the non-elect to reject in them. We have traded the life transforming power of a thoroughly word-based faith, for the fleshly delights in things that merely engage our raw, fleshly emotions. This is why the testimony of the typical, contemporary evangelical is not only one of Biblical ignorance, but worldliness. Contemporary Christianity looks more like Paganism than it does the faith of our fathers.

Faithful ministers have pled or centuries with the flock to be diligent students of the Scriptures, but Biblical literacy gets worse with each generation. Biblical preaching and teaching, is very difficult to find today as ministers dumb down their sermons for an audience that is not only ignorant, but accustomed to that which delights the flesh. In the end, what we have is the ongoing apostasy of the church.

All this to say, I wonder if we should not return to the communal reading of the Scriptures? What if we got together with brothers and sisters throughout the week to spend an hour simply reading through books of the Bible? What would be the effect if instead of pleading with people to read their Bibles, I plead with them to join us for the communal fellowship of communal readings? Somehow I don’t think that those who avail themselves of it would let their Bibles collect dust either.

While this may not be practical in our day for a number of reasons, the consideration makes me want to go read my Bible. I think I’ll do that now…

Here is an interesting video on communal Bible reading.