From: vek@allegra.att.com (Van Kelly)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Dr. Peter Ruckman and the KJV as divinely inspired
Date: 14 Aug 92 09:09:05 GMT

Dear Dan,

You wrote:

> The original argument offered a different set of explicitly stated
> presuppositions and arrived at a different conclusion than is now
> fashionable in scholarly circles.

> There were several responses that all ignored the question of their
> writer's presuppositions and pooh poohed the original argument's
> consequence because it is inconsistent with the unstated presuppositions
> of the person writing the response.

If that's what you thought I was doing in my (email) reply, then I
should have been clearer.  Now I will be. I objected to the
consequence because it didn't square with facts of history that could
be independently verified from the writings of Erasmus and others.

On presuppositional apologetics (PA) in general, I am unimpressed with
it as a general method, although it holds water in certain restricted
kinds of argumentation.  It takes almost Van Tilian subtlety to
understand its limits.  In novice hands, it's just too tempting to
focus on the theological content of others' presuppositions
(especially those conveniently "unstated" ones :-), ignoring both
flaws in your own logic and empirical counter-examples to your
conclusions.  When that happens, PA is just an eggheaded exercise in
nonsense, IMO.  The argument you quoted originally was such
off-the-wall PA that I had originally assumed it to be in jest.

> Go back to the root.  Tell me that "the God who made the world and all
> things in it" (what Paul called Him in the sermon in Athens, Acts 17)
> left His church with a counterfeit Word of God for the first eighteen
> hundred years of the church, or for some interim period such as 400 to
> 1850.

Of course I won't tell you that.  The real story is much, much worse.

Alternate Theological Presupposition: 

God deals with His church as He sees fit and always will -- wisely,
but often a wee bit beyond our grasp.  Whatever He does, He does, no
matter what you or I think about it.  He doesn't have to explain
Himself, nor is it our job to second-guess His performance or to
rewrite events to make theology easier.  Leave that to Job and friends.

Facts of History:

During the years of 400-1700, say, God saw fit to leave most believers
with extremely scant access to His Word *in any written form*, due to
illiteracy, scarcity of books, and sometimes ecclesiastical politics.
What little these folks understood of His Word came by oral preaching
only, yet many were converted in those conditions.  Of the luckier ones
with some access to written Scripture, most had only translations,
which varied greatly in completeness and quality.  Among the select
elite who could access a Greek text, only the tiniest fraction ever
actually read the *whole* NT in Greek in their lifetimes.

When you consider that, for a thousand years, the median Christian
was, with apparent permission of Divine Providence, deprived of well
over 50% of all Scripture, all discrepancies between the Textus
Receptus and the Nestle or UBS Texts, affecting at most 4% of the
verses in the New Testament in any non-trivial way, pale into
insignificance.  Even if *every single critical judgement* where UBS
differs from Receptus were dead wrong (yeah, that's the ticket), we'd
still be so much further ahead studying UBS than what most Christians
had to read through the centuries.  If God was content to reach
millions with so little available Scripture, why should I *presuppose*
God would turn obsessive-compulsive about a handful of scribal
variations?  What makes 96%+ accuracy "counterfeit", anyway?  Wanna
try 98%?  ;-)

God provided what was needful to disseminate Scripture in difficult
times, using human hands and eyes.  Some copyists were slow and
meticulous, some fast and prolific.  Lots of mistakes were caught, but
some got out and propagated themselves, even into TR (the spurious
gloss in I.  Jn 5 being one exquisitely documented case).  But if
every scribe had been as deliberate as the most careful ones, even
fewer people would have had Scripture in any form.  Would that have
been better?

Best wishes,

Van Kelly


P.S. By the way, Dan, your return address on this post:

ICCGCC..HERRICKD@cs.hh.ab.com

is a dead-end from some parts of netland.  I just happened to remember
a variant address from another post which seemed to work. You might
want to hack your news reader options a bit.