Faith Understands What Intellect Can't Grasp

It seems so simple -- you simply believe it. But if you aren't born again, if you don't have the Holy Spirit, it's apparently impossible.

I was just reading more in David Cloud's book, the Bible Versions Hall of Shame, and read through the information on the fourteen translators of the Revised Standard Version he presents, which is a compendium of modernist/rationalist doubt of the Bible, refusal to believe most of what it says, and every kind of speculative reinterpretation of whatever seemed too incredible for them. Complete destruction of everything the Bible is meant to be to us through simple faith. What a sad story. Infinitely sad.

It made me sad but it also made me SO grateful that God gave me faith in His word from the moment I believed. I just "knew" it was all true, every word of it, and I've never wavered an iota since that moment. I may not understand many things in the Bible but I believe it all and my understanding grows because of my belief. After reading the ugly sad destructive thoughts of these translators it comes home to me with extra force how faith really is a gift of God. I'm SO grateful.

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Later. June 29

Studying the Bible versions problems makes me aware that I believed implicitly in the inerrancy of the scripture before I knew anything about how it is all put together. I believed that the ENGLISH was inerrant I realize now, not merely the original autographs. But that didn't necessarily mean I believed every single word had to be the ONLY word to convey the point, I simply believed that what it SAID was the TRUTH. For that purpose it doesn't matter if some words might have been better chosen or some words change their meaning over time; still they convey the truth as they are. I didn't have the King James particularly in mind though, simply vaguely assumed ALL the English Bibles were inerrant in the same sense.

But now I have to rethink all that. How could all the modern versions, that have sprung up like so many suspect mushrooms from the fetid soil of Westcott and Hort's bogus Greek text and abominable English revision, also be the inerrant word of God? They are too different. I assumed they were inerrant TOO (except maybe some we were frequently told should be avoided), before I had any idea how gratuitous and inelegant were most of their changes in the English, how mutilated the Greek on which they were based.

How am I now to think about this? ARE they the inerrant word of God? Well, no they aren't. Not a single one of them is. Oh they may CONTAIN some of God's word, but in the sense the term is normally used, no, they are not the inerrant Word. I suppose it's a sort of poetic justice too (God's justice is always "poetic"), now that they dominate the field, that the Higher Criticism which presided over their birth also reigns over more and more churches, and more minds, and it tells us that of course the Bible is not inerrant anyway.

Another thing I recognized recently is that I have been aware of the follies of the Higher Criticism since soon after I became a Christian, but it never linked up in my mind with the Bible versions for some reason until now.

Much to mull.