If there is no perfect Word of God for today, then God's Word would have failed to have been preserved for us today. For if there is no perfect Word today that is available to us, then we cannot be held to a certain standard. We would not be able to trust every Word of God. For who determines which words are in the Bible if there is no final word of authority? Does God determine it or does man determine that? For Jesus said we will be judged by his words on the last day if we reject them.The Word of God is where we derive our faith. However, If the foundations be destroyed then how are we able to stand, though?
Hi Jason. We've been on this rodeo together before
You make this point frequently, to which the only sensible response is: God's revelation of himself does not subsist in a word-by-word sense, and he has not promised, and indeed has not, preserved the original writings in the way you seem to think he has.
If he HAD, we would reasonablty expect to have either the originals (which could theoretically survived humanly speaking, and certainly could have survived had God wanted them to survive divinely speaking), or alternatively a single codex that incontrovertibly was a 1:1 copy of the original. We do not.
Instead, we have thousands of manuscripts that all disagree with each other, but from within which the authoritative text can be discerned to the earliest possible time. This is what modern textual critics do, that is what the KJV translators did, that is what Stephanus and Erasmus did. They did not transcribe from a single copy, but instead looked at various manuscripts in order to discern the original readings. Does a lack of a single authoritative manuscript square with what you expect God to have done re: preservation?
There is a troubling aspect of what you've said, though. To hide behind "
For if there is no perfect [by which I assume you mean verbatim accurate] Word today that is available to us, then we cannot be held to a certain standard. " is like telling your parents you weren't sure whether they said "Do not eat the cookies out of the jar" or "I am telling you to not permit yourself to eat the cookies in the glass container", so therefore you can't be held accountable for eating the cookies. The vast majorities of 'problems' in the text are of this sort. The few that are not do not effect how you should live, or even any doctrine, but simply what we can say Scripture affirmatively says. The foundations are not nearly as shaky as you seem to think they are, and doesn't have anything to do with what the original text said anyway.
How do we determine the true Word of God? Jesus said you will know a tree by it's fruit. The KJV is the only Bible that has the best kind of fruit. All other versions have some kind of problem in some way.
Completely subjective argument that has nothing to do with what the original texts actually said, and everything to do with what you personally think is 'good fruit'. Besides, Jesus saying has nothing to do with assessing the quality of a version of Scripture and everything to do with assessing actual people. Specious prooftexting, I'm afraid. And as I said to Andrew, you can only say something is a 'problem' if you are comparing it to something you have already decided is 'correct', and so it's nigh impossible to avoid putting the cart before the horse if you argue that way.
Yes, many will say that Modern Versions do not change the Word of God enough to effect one's faith, but I beg to differ big time. I have run into people who have denied certain words in the King James in favor of OSAS (Once Saved Always Saved). I have had people defend that there is no Trinity because of a denial of 1 John 5:7. They prefer what they hear in History rather than just believing in the Word of God.
You realise a great many people who translated and who used the KJV were Calvinists, right? George Abbot, who was Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Church of England shortly before the publishing of the AV, was a translator on the KJV and a Calvinist. John Whitgift, another. John Reynolds, a Puritan with a very Reformed soteriology, was one of the key people on the translation project. Miles Smith, Christopher Goodman, Coverdale, Knox, Samson, these were all Reformed theologians and clergy.
Post the reign of Mary I which ended in the mid 1500s, the Church of England was broadly speaking a Calvinist one following the English Reformation. Ironically, during this period one of the main ecclesiological struggles was actually between the Puritans and the Calvinist bishops, who were both Reformed theologically but had wildly varying ecclesiological ideas. Even today, you can find people who defend KJVO like positions precisely BECAUSE they see it as a Reformed text, rather than because it isn't. I've spoken to people who defend the KJV on the basis that "any person with a true Reformed theology and believes in eternal security SHOULD only read the KJV."
All of which is to say - it's not possible to make a case that the KJV is anti-eternal security, unless you read your own biases so far into the text that you're not actually reading the text anymore, but making the text parrot back your own ideas. I think your argument at this point has much more to do with one's own theological presuppositions than the text, because I can find people who are just as KJVO as you but have a completely Calvinist soteriology, while you don't.
