Removing the Landmark of Western Civilization

Proverbs 22:28: Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set.

Listening again to the Moorman-White debate, now thinking how odd it was for me to be so happy with Dr. Moorman's opening statements, because that contradicts my usual position here, which is that I don't want to get into the KJV-only arguments, I don't want to make the case from the qualities of the KJV at all.

Certainly I agree that the KJV should be regarded as the Standard. The KJV IS the standard. What needs to be criticized is the stupidities that have been put in its place. What happens when the KJV is made the subject of the debate instead is that it is set up as a target for the barbarian hordes to tear down.

As Martyn Lloyd-Jones said:

One of the greatest troubles today is that everything is being brought down to the same level, everything is cheapened. The common man is made the standard of authority; he decides everything, and everything has to be brought down to him...

Are we to do that with the Word of God? I say No! What has happened in the past has been this -- ignorant, illiterate people, in this country and in foreign countries, coming into salvation have been educated up to the Book and have begun to understand it, to glory in it, and to praise God for it, and I say that we need to the same at this present time. What we need is therefore, not to replace the Authorised Version ...we need rather to reach and train people up to the standard and the language, the dignity and the glory of the old Authorised Version.

Westcott and Hort dealt unconscionably and ignorantly with the KJV, charged against it like bulls in a china shop, like vandals laying waste to civilization. The King James Bible had taught the gospel to generations of Christians, had built up their minds from its phrases and rhythms, had shaped the language and the culture of an Empire, and is preserved still in countless references and quotations in its literature. Perfection? No, but a faithful rendering of God's word and a high point of Christian civilization that should have been treated with deference but wasn't, and continues to be battered by a thuggish mentality today as well.

Burgon in his Revision Revised says:

...[O]n examining the so-called 'Revision of the Authorized Version,' I speedily made the further discovery that the Revised English would have been in itself intolerable, even had the Greek been let alone. In the first place, to my surprise and annoyance, it proved to be a New Translation (rather than a Revision of the Old) which had been attempted. Painfully apparent were the tokens which met me on every side that the Revisionists had been supremely eager not so much to correct none but 'plain and clear errors,' -- as to introduce as many changes into the English of the New Testament Scriptures as they conveniently could. [footnote here to discussion later in the book of this violation of their commitment, pp 127-130, 154-164 and 400-403] A skittish impatience of the admirable work before them, and a strange inability to appreciate its manifold excellences: -- a singular imagination on the part of the promiscuous Company which met in the Jerusalem Chamber that they were competent to improve the Authorized Version in every part, and an unaccountable forgetfulness that the fundamental condition under which the task of Revision had been by themselves undertaken, was that they should abstain from all but 'necessary' changes: -- this proved to be only part of the offence which the Revisionists had committed. Preface pp. xii-xiii. My boldings.

This "strange inability" to appreciate its excellences certainly continues today, along with the same strange imagination that today's scholars are competent to judge it, just as Burgon says was the case with those on the revising committee in his day. The common man standard has won. The barbarians have won. The Trojan Horse is within the gates.

Western Christian civilization has been falling into ruin for a century or so already from many batterings from many directions. We can chalk it up to God's judgment I'm sure. Judgment begins at the house of God. God will no doubt pull a good out of all this as He always does but how can we not cry over such destruction?

The KJV IS the standard.

But I still think the task is not to make the KJV the focus, but to demonstrate the inferiorities of the usurpers that have been taking its place for the last century.