The Burning Bush - Far Eastern Bible College

The Burning Bush 16/1 (January 2010)God did not inspire other books not in the Protestant Canon if we acceptthe premise that all God did was inspire the Words, leaving the rest tohumanity to determine autonomously from God. With thispresuppositional approach, we lose any ability to determine what isinspired and what is not. Indeed, if we believe God was involved how dowe determine how much He was involved and if He stopped beinginvolved or was only imperfectly preserving, when did He stop beingfully involved? The Scriptures teach that God sovereignly works in timeto control revelation (Gal 4:4; Eph 1:10). The God of history andScripture is not an absentee landlord. He alone gets the glory forpreservation and no liberal scholar.With respect to an evidential approach, all McCune, at best, can becertain about is that his reconstruction of a text replicates the majorityopinion of a group of third century manuscript copies. Beyond that he isas uncertain and lost as anyone else. His supposed objective scientificapproach represents a serious mischaracterisation of reality. Neither theCT advocates, nor the TR advocates, have extant manuscripts that bridgethe first three to four hundred years of the Church. Unless McCune andhis colleagues at DBTS have dug up the originals in Michigan, they arealso left to adopt a faith-based presuppositional approach. The essentialdifference is that they base their bridging presuppositions on rationalisticones; independent of biblical promises. As Reformed writer, DouglasWilson opines,But when we consider the facts carefully, nothing is more apparent than thatthis is actually a battle of the paradigms. In some respects, this is very muchlike the reconstruction of the evolutionary fossil tree, 98 percent of which ismissing. When we consider all the manuscripts we possess, we must stillcompare them to the number of all the manuscripts ever written—which wedo not have. This is a scholarly task outside the competence of science, andany attempt to submit the task to scientific canons will only result inincreasing confusion. A process of scholarly reconstruction here makessense only when undergirded with faith in the living God who controls theflow of all historical events. If, in order to be “scientific,” we eliminate thisGod from our considerations, the end of the road will be no text at all, orradical confusion about the text. The autonomous text critic is someonewho believes that this problem of the original text is one which admits of ascientific solution. But the real solution to this problem is faith in God, andin His providential care for His Word. 350