Comments are off at By Faith We Understand, and I somewhat regret this. There were some good conversations here back in the olden days. I give a thank you now to both my readers—and to the Lord, who abundantly pardons, and who used this blog in truly profound ways in my life of service to Him.

I was asked recently by a pastors conference organizer to discuss good thinking and writing. Whether I myself think good, and whether I myself write well English, I cannot say. I had a book proposal turned down about two years ago, and I got the distinct sense it was because I just wasn’t up to the level of snuff desired by the well-trained brothers in charge of acquisitions at the publisher. It wasn’t a personal rejection; it was a meritocratic one. And I didn’t disagree with them. I didn’t truly feel I could tackle the topic they asked me to write a proposal for; I was relieved when they turned me down. So I don’t come to this topic as a conquering hero, but as a servant who, like Gehazi, has swindled some goods from richer writers and kept them in secret. And the conference organizer, like Elisha, found me out and threatened me with leprosy if I did not share what meager goods I have with the conference attendees. I did so, and now I want to share them with you. These goods will come spilling out in order, but I think you will find that my thoughts here are nonetheless bulging a bit. I’m tossing a lot of ideas into this video, and I’m talking kinda fast, because the algorithms have already determined that you are the kind of person who likes getting your intellectual money’s worth.

And who are you? Well, you’re some kind of nerd. You, presumably, have to write stuff on some kind of regular basis. You may even have to write Sunday school lessons and emails and devotionals and other things that matter to people, even eternally. And statistically speaking, at least one person watching this video is justified in writing social media posts on controversial issues. What can you do to think and write and think a little better next year than you did this year in all those venues? And what in the world am I, I who am not a writing teacher and certainly not a thinking teacher, going to be able to say in the next bunch of minutes that will help you think and write well?

I’d better just get to it with an opening illustration.

Young Christian intellectual Elizabeth Bruenig, now of the Atlantic, formerly of the New York Times, has devoted much of her writing career to covering the cases of death row inmates. It turns out that one of the premier moral themes that arises from this work is that of forgiveness. Bruenig has advanced theological training, an incisive pen, and two small children, all of which make her especially suited to discuss forgiveness. I want to give an illustration and an insight from Elizabeth Bruenig as I open this video on good thinking and writing. You’ll see why in 35 minutes, or your pizza is free.

Bruenig writes,

Suppose my children are playing together when my younger girl discovers a dress-up gown that she would like to put on. As she begins to shimmy it on, my older daughter notices it and decides that she would like to wear the dress-up gown, so she pulls it off my younger daughter and puts it on herself. In retaliation, my younger daughter pulls her big sister’s hair, demanding that her gown be given back. The scuffle summons me, and after hearing both of them recount roughly the same story, I lightly chastise my younger daughter for pulling her sister’s hair, but then direct my older daughter to give the dress-up gown back to her little sister and strongly chastise her for taking it in the first place. From my older daughter’s point of view, her little sister is having all the fun: not only did she get the gown in the end, she got to pull her sister’s hair and got little more than a gift for it!

But this is because my younger daughter was operating in a state of moral exception. She was behaving in a state where the normal rules of morality—such as the general prohibition on pulling her sister’s hair—did not apply. I would like her not to attack her sister generally, so I chastised her for it, but I clearly didn’t rule against her, and she wasn’t ultimately punished—in fact, she got what she wanted in the end. You can imagine how tantalizing a loophole like this is to a child—it represents the opportunity not only to get what one desires, but the opportunity to indulge a darker, typically repressed desire too, and the only precondition for doing so is being wronged in the first place. As you can imagine, “she hit me first!” is something of a prized status among small children for this reason.

I’m a father of multiple children myself, which makes me an RUF minister: Referee of Unwise Fights. And though I discovered that my wife and many other adults, and even certain children, do not like “the state of moral exception” idea, the idea that the victim of unprovoked aggression gets a pass, a free play from scrimmage, it resonates with me, I must admit. It resonates even though I reject it. I actually do not formally believe in taking or endorsing personal revenge. Ever. God said no. To take vengeance is to take something of his, to steal a prerogative that can be entrusted only to a perfectly just Person. No one else has a reliable scale for weighing out pounds of flesh. And the last person who can be trusted to do such weighing is the one whose dress-up clothes were just snatched.

I will observe, however, that what resonates with me in allowing for some revenge resonates with a lot of people. It isn’t right to grant moral exceptions like this, but we do it: we give each other passes on certain acts of vengeance. Liam Neeson has, I’m told, built a career on giving moviegoers the delicious feeling of living in a state of moral exception where it’s okay to root for revenge. Bruenig goes on to suggest that

these states of moral exception [are] equally attractive to adults[.] That is to say, knowing for a fact that we will hurt one another—nothing seems so clear-cut or obvious … as that fact—is it possible that adults, too, are attracted to states of moral exception, in which they can not only pursue projects of vengeance that would normally be socially proscribed, but also do so with full social sanction? I certainly think so.

And now we get to something of the point of my extended introduction:

Consider the state of social media, where people frequently go in order to find something to be angry about, so that they can express their anger in ways that would typically be forbidden but are permissible in cases only of having been wronged. Had the social media user not sought out an example of someone doing something offensive or outrageous, they wouldn’t have anger to discharge, but it seems to me that acquiring anger and the right to discharge it is precisely the point. (Cable TV also offers you lots of reasons to get pissed off at people and yell at them.)

I apologize for my King James language there, but it could not be helped. I needed that last sentence, because it is profoundly pastorally true.

When I heard Bruenig’s words in a talk she gave, I was busy cleaning up rusty metal with an angle grinder. I paused, took off my gloves, stopped the recording, and took down a note to help me find the words again: “acquiring anger and the right to discharge it is precisely the point” of so much social media usage.

Wow. That is profound. Who can withstand such delicious temptation? And it leads me to my thesis, which is an awfully fancy thing to have in a YouTube video, and which is buried awfully deep into the video already, but here we go nonetheless: if you want to write and think well, you must cultivate the most basic Christian virtues. I’m not preaching a sermon, so I can pick my points. I can name the virtues that occur to me—though I admit here to plagiarizing a writer I respect. Those virtues are faith, hope, and love, just these three. And the greatest of these we will save for last.

First …

Faith

Good thinking (and then writing) has faith in God and sees others’ faith in God-alternatives.

I find the role of faith in good thinking and writing to be absolutely essential. And let me give another illustration. The Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, has become infamous worldwide for its hateful, extreme rhetoric. One of the granddaughters of the founder, Fred Phelps, Megan, joined in the hatred and anger. She picketed funerals with her family and then, when Twitter came out, took her message onto social media.

But unlike at funerals, people you attack on Twitter tend to talk back with equal or greater volume. And Megan Phelps discovered that some of her opponents could be gracious and even persuasive. She began, quietly, to think about the questions her opponents asked her. She ultimately left her cultish group.

An excellent book on good thinking that I highly recommend, How to Think, by Alan Jacobs, comments,

I’d bet a large pile of cash money that thousands of people read Adrian Chen’s profile of Megan Phelps-Roper and said, to others or to themselves, “Ah, a wonderful account of what happens when a person stops believing what she’s told and learns to think for herself.” But here’s the really interesting and important thing: that’s not at all what happened. Megan Phelps … didn’t start “thinking for herself”—she started thinking with different people. To think independently of other human beings is impossible, and if it were possible it would be undesirable. Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social. Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said. Not to mention, when people commend someone for “thinking for herself” they usually mean “ceasing to sound like people I dislike and starting to sound more like people I approve of.”

This brings me back to faith. You’re never going to get away from the need for faith in specific people, that group of people you think with. It’s the same as the famous line from C.S. Lewis: a man who jibs at authority must be content to know nothing all his life. Most of what we know, Lewis says, we know because reliable people have told us so.

A Christian epistemology—a Christian theory of knowledge, of how we come to have justified, true beliefs—is unembarrassed about the faith that underlies all our knowing. There is, on the one hand, a group of people we think with, whom we trust as partners and even at times as authorities. That group extends beyond our time and place to other teachers whom Christ has given to his church. But, most importantly, we are all together unembarrassed by the faith in God that underlies our knowing. Somewhere near the bedrock of our knowing lies a simple faith that what he says is true is indeed true.

We don’t just know stuff straight, with no mediation. No, the title of my rather moribund blog, drawn straight from Hebrews 11:3, is “By Faith We Understand.” That verse says,

By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible. (Hebrews 11:3 ESV)

The same truth that Paul says in Romans 1 that we can’t not know, the author of Hebrews says we know through faith. We understand through belief.

This is why I am a Young Earth Creationist. I can’t say that other Christians who don’t adopt my viewpoint on this matter lack faith. But I can say, positively, that I’m under no burden to think that I’m going to have form major elements of my knowledge independently of my creator—that I’m stuck with empirical methods of knowledge only when it comes to the origins of the cosmos. I expect to have to build a foundation for my knowledge out of cinderblocks he provides.

I could go on at great length about the role of faith in knowledge. Tim Keller has done this well in The Reason for God. There are even non-Christian writers who have done excellent work here, including Stanley Fish, who loves to talk about the role faith plays in so-called “secular” spaces, such as his home space, the academy:

What, after all, is the difference between a sectarian school which disallows challenges to the divinity of Christ and a so-called nonideological school which disallows discussion of the same question? In both contexts something goes without saying and something else cannot be said (Christ is not God or he is). There is of course a difference, not however between a closed environment and an open one but between environments that are differently closed. (The Trouble with Principle)

I find the role of faith in my knowledge to be so helpful for thinking and, therefore, for writing. Because a lot of my thinking—like yours, I bet—is done in dialogue with other people, whether they know we’re listening to them or not. And when I pastor people, one of my jobs is to help them think Christianly in their own dialogue with their surrounding culture. Those parts of our culture that still insist that science disproves Christian faith, that reason and faith are non-overlapping magisteria, that Athens and Jerusalem are actually on separate planets—I find that long attention to the role faith plays in human knowledge helps me see through their claims. What axioms are they assuming? In what or whom does their own faith lie? Knowledge is a moral category. All knowing is either faith-ful to God our maker or it is not. As my seminary teacher Layton Talbert has said, any decision to mistrust God’s words is a decision to trust someone else’s.

I’ve read many articles and books by Stanley Fish. He actually makes this same point over and over again in so many way. I’ll give one more.

The philosopher Thomas Nagel makes just that point when he observes that the assumption by anti-creationists that ID couldn’t possibly be true seems less a conclusion reached by scientific method than an article of faith. It might be said, he continues, “that both the mention of ID in a biology class and its exclusion would seem to depend on religious assumptions.” … It is easy to see why creation science or intelligent design doesn’t have a chance. Any attempt to present it in a state-funded classroom as a legitimate alternative to evolution will be blocked by the state’s unwillingness (given the establishment clause) to give its stamp of approval to a religious position. Any attempt to remove the label “religious” and replace it with “scientific” will be resisted by the arbiters of what science is, who have already made up their collective mind in advance. And any attempt to establish the truth of intelligent design by the usual academic routes of argument and experiment will not get off the ground because the academy, like the liberal state of which it is a mirror and an extension, defines itself by its difference from religion. (Winning Arguments)

I don’t think it’s possible to write clearly without thinking clearly first. So good thinking (and then writing) has faith in God and gains skill in seeing others’ faith in other things. In apologetics, with unbelievers and with your own people, you are often exposing when their faith is in resting in something other than God’s word—and then pointing them to it. To do this well is to think clearly and to at least pave the way for good writing.

Hope

Good thinking and writing means hoping all things for others, and maintaining a hope in Christ’s final, just judgment of sin.

It simply isn’t true that the word “hope” in the NT has a very specific Christian meaning, namely, “confident expectation,” the-opposite-of-I-hope-so. This is called theological lexicography; it’s reading a not-entirely-wrong-but-not-entirely-right theological idea into uses of a Greek word. This idea just doesn’t fit NT usage. Herod “hoped” to see Jesus perform a miracle in Luke 23. He didn’t have a confident expectation.

It’s usage in context that tells us whether a given instance of hope in the Bible is meant to be a confident expectation or a mere wish. And here’s a tip: when Paul talks about a given virtue in the abstract—like “faith” and “hope” and “love”—he’s probably assuming a Christian understanding of those abstract words.

There are languages in the world which don’t have abstract nouns; Bible translators there have to specify both the subject and the object of these things.

What if we had to supply a subject and a verb for “hope” in 1 Cor 13:13, the little verse I’ve used to structure this talk? You know the verse: faith, hope, and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love. Who hopes, and what do they hope in? Well, think of how context might change the meaning of that word for us: if I’m sitting watching the Super Bowl and my favorite team is playing, if I had one anymore, and my father, who has rooted for this team since before I was born, is sitting watching with me, and if it’s the 4th quarter, and if the other team is one touchdown ahead and sitting on our one yard line poised to score again, and my father says to me, “Do you think there’s any hope?” He’s implying that we fans of this team are the hopers, and the object of our hope is Super Bowl victory.

When Barack Obama made “Hope” a political slogan for his first presidential campaign, I think the implied subjects were all Americans and the implied object of the hope was a better economic and cultural future for our nation.

What is the implied context in 1 Cor 13:13? Who is the hoper, and what is the thing hoped for? Paul has just mentioned hope, when he said that “love hopes all things,” and we’ll talk about it in a second. But somehow I think he is speaking in 13:13 at a higher level of abstraction, from a 30,000-foot Christian viewpoint—because he picks out these three virtues—faith, hope, and love—as especially significant. I think the subject of the “hope” here has to be the Christian individually and therefore the Christian church generally. And the object has to be all the things Christians uniquely and ultimately hope for: final salvation, the redemption of our bodies, vindication on the last day, the complete eradication of the power of sin.

How can Christian hope improve your thinking and writing?

I want to draw from 1 Cor 13’s comments about hope to answer this question.

When Paul says that “love hopes all things,” I do think I generally took that as meaning that love believes the best. But I checked with some of our most trusted interpreters, and they felt differently.

I was struck by this paragraph from Gordon Fee in his NICNT volume:

Paul does not mean that love always believes the best about everything and everyone, but that love never ceases to trust God and thus leave justice in God’s hands; it is in this sense that it never loses hope—that God’s justice in the context of God’s goodness will yet prevail where there is human fallenness, even grotesque fallenness.

Then I checked Ciampa and Rosner in the Pillar NTC, and they just quoted that same paragraph from Fee.

So I think it would be a totally legitimate application of the virtue of hope to say this: Christian hope means we can’t take vengeance—that would be stealing something God alone owns.

What is driving the worst public thinking and writing in our culture? Or, to say exactly the same thing, What in the world is happening on Twitter/X?

I’ll say one thing: people are tweeting as those who have no hope. Specifically, they have no hope that their Christian opponents will ever get their comeuppance. So they get increasingly loud in their own efforts to give their theological opponents the vengeful retribution they so eminently deserve. Both sides do this in any dispute. All sides do this in every dispute. And we bite and devour one another like crazed piranhas who have consumed all the other fish in the river and so turn on their own kind.

One of the most disarming things you can do in online discourse is have eschatological hope, to act like the court of public opinion is not the supreme court, that God will get it all right in the end. It just calms you down. You don’t feel such pressure to get others to heel. You might do no less work to persuade them, because we have another hope: that the one who saved us can save anyone. But you don’t get agitated. You are already living by the laws of the future kingdom.

I have hope for true Christians, of course, that they’ll often repent of their errors before death—and be corrected, like me, when they finally know as also they are known.

I have hope for lost people, though of a different kind. I have hope that the righteous will be vindicated and the truth and glory of God displayed. I have hope that the wicked will be compelled to bow the knee to God.

And I have hope that in the end, Pilate will be compelled—along with my debate opponents and, yes, myself—to accept the answer to his question: “What is truth?”

It can be so frustrating to pray to the same God, read the same Bible, and yet disagree with fellow believers. Insofar as much of our preaching and teaching—and therefore much of our writing—deals with matters of disagreement, it would sure help our writing and thinking to have the eschatological hope Paul describes in the love chapter. It would both cool us down and heat us up: our anger could dissipate, and our love for the Lord who is our exceeding great reward could grow. And that, in turn, has a way of helping us love the people to whom we speak and against whom we are compelled to disagree.

So, then: love.

Love

Two little exegetical-theological thoughts before I talk about love’s relationship to good thinking and writing:

First: love is the greatest virtue, right? That’s why love hopes all things but hope doesn’t love all things. Love underlies hope. And faith isn’t bedrock; it’s just close, I said earlier. What is bedrock inside us? Love is bedrock. Love underlies faith. Love is the ultimate virtue; on the two love commands hang all the law and the prophets. Love fulfills the law. Our loves drive our beliefs and our hopes. Who hopes for what he sees? No one. And who hopes for something he doesn’t desire, he doesn’t love? Also, no one.

Second: Gordon Fee suggests in his NICNT volume on 1 Cor that the reason Paul calls love “the greatest” of the triad of faith, hope, and love is that faith and hope will one day no longer be needed—but love will endure throughout eternity, just as it existed before time.

My dad used to speak at Christian writers conferences in the early to mid 1990s. He studied English at UVA. I did not. But, growing up in his home, I always cared about proper speech and writing. And I was most definitely a self-conscious prig about spelling. I won every spelling bee at my tiny Christian school, and this mattered to me a little too immensely. I can still remember how my second-grade crush misspelled “purse”—“P-U-R-S, purse!”—and unknowingly ended any possibility of a future with me.

There is obviously a massive, massive place for learning these mechanics: the rules. And I think we call it “school.” Going back to school is not realistic for most pastors; and DMin programs, to my knowledge, don’t have a rigorous writing component. They assume a certain amount of knowledge of those mechanics.

How can you grow in your skill as a written communicator after the age of 25? I think you really, really have to be driven by love.

What I learned about “the effective speaker” as a freshman in college is true of all effective communicators:

The Effective Speaker has a message to deliver, has a definite purpose in giving that message, and is consumed with the necessity of getting that message across and accomplishing that purpose. (from my freshman speech class notes at BJU)

What does “consumed” mean? It means love.

The Effective Speaker realizes that the primary purpose of speech is the communication of ideas and feelings in order to get a desired response. (from my freshman speech class notes at BJU)

What is “desire”? It’s love.

Do you love your people enough to work at the learning the tools of persuasion? Do you love the truth enough to use those tools without cheating, using rhetorical tricks that the truth would never need to use?

I didn’t understand the value of these tools when they were handed to me as a college freshman. How could I? I only came to see their value as I came to love certain truths—and certain people who needed to believe them.

Now, I’ve given very little practical advice in this video on good thinking and writing, but here are two advices: have you considered reading up on writing (I recommend Joseph Williams’ Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace), then using what you learn in whatever you write, and then—and this is key—finding an editor who might look over what you write before you submit it for some kind, any kind, of publication?

One of the best things that I think ever happened to my own writing was not only reading tons of edited prose but writing it—getting edited by competent people. I don’t mean grammar and spelling, although that’s certainly helpful. I mean structure and argument. My editor at BJU Press, Dennis, was and is a godly and diligent man who made countless helpful suggestions. And my main editor at Logos for something like 200 articles, Tyler, was exceptionally adept at catching structural weaknesses. He loved to cut out my first three paragraphs—and he was right every time. He taught me how to win and keep attention without cheating, which I take to be another way of saying “apt to teach.”

I have met a writer or two who resented being edited. This has never, ever made sense to me. I feel so much safer when I’ve been edited. I’ve been saved the embarrassment of making various errors. I love the truth; I love my readers; I want them to get that truth, and I don’t want my flubs to get in their way.

Why do I manuscript my videos? I am NOT saying that my way is better than others’ way, but here’s my thinking: in my college years, I sat through literally hundreds of sermons that felt to me like wastes of my time. The preachers, including some who were paid to fly across the country and stand before thousands, couldn’t be bothered to do any serious preparation. They subsequently failed at their most basic task—heralding what God said. And this frustrated, insulted, and angered me. I determined not to do unto others what they had done unto me.

To Bible teachers of any kind at all, even those who write a devotional for the tiny Christian school newsletter, I say this: if 100 sheep—or just one—who have come to feed all sit quietly in front of you with their mouths open, what is wrong with asking someone with sharp eyes to look over the grass you’re about to feed them, to weed out sticks or bugs? Feed Christ’s lambs.

Pre-editing a Sunday school lesson every week is a heavy burden. Perhaps you don’t have friends who can do this. Maybe find a friend in or out of the church who might do this for you just once. Or try doing what my respected friend Joe Tyrpak of Church Works Media does: he has frank discussions with his assistant pastors after (nearly) every sermon, where they go over what he could have done differently. He did this to me—and for me—when I spoke at his church, and it was bracing but wonderful. I have not forgotten his very trenchant criticisms.

If all the law and the prophets hang on love, then there is practically no end to the applications rightly ordered loves have to thinking and writing.

Let me give just one more, and I here I appeal again to Alan Jacobs’ book, * How to Think:

While we’re clearing away misconceptions about thinking, let’s tackle another pervasive one: that in order to think well, one must be strictly rational, and being rational requires the suppression of all feelings. … Just as we do not “think for ourselves” but rather think with others, so too we think in active feeling response to the world, and in constant relation to others. Or we should. Only something that complete—relational, engaged, honest—truly deserves to be called thinking.

The most important virtue for all of the Christian life, and therefore for all thinking and writing, is, arguably (and I did argue this) not cognitive but affective. It is, again, love. And it is notable that where we like to say, “That person let his emotions overrule his reason,” the Bible doesn’t talk this way. The Bible doesn’t treat us the way the “faculty psychology” does, as if there are three separable things called “mind,” “will,” and “emotion” inside us. The Bible treats us as psychosomatic unities, as body-soul persons. The Bible doesn’t command our emotions or our thinking or our wills (we do have these things; these are things persons have); the Bible commands us. I draw this from John Frame.

Ultimately, to think and write well, you must have rightly ordered loves. Many non-Christians think and write well. I do not deny this. But those places where they are serving truth and their neighbor are places were, by God’s common grace, God is allowing the publicans to love those who love them. They are suppressing the truth about God that is evident in creation while stealing from his creation truths whose ownership they won’t acknowledge. They ultimately end up serving false gods and stating untruths—and doing poor service for their neighbors—because they do not love the God who is Truth. In the final analysis, they are twisting the marvelous human tools of reason and writing in the service of something other than God.

This must not be us. If we want to think and write well, we have to love God and neighbor.

Conclusion

Let me end by picking up the theme of my opening illustration: forgiveness—and tying it into the greatest virtue in my little talk: love.

A number of friends over the years have highly praised The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, a famous nineteenth century novel whose great length is rivaled only by your expository sermon series, preachers. I picked it up with some expectation.

I really could be wrong, but I hated it, because it seemed to me to be composed mainly of cheap tricks for creating a state of moral exception, for making sure the protagonist could acquire an anger that would provide readers a vicarious gasp then a vicarious thrill.

The book was cool while it was an escape-from-prison story, but I couldn’t find any delight in it once it became a sprawling set of vendettas—and that was about half the huge tome. I just kept thinking…

You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord. (Leviticus 19:17–18 ESV)

Isn’t this so interesting? The specific context of the original love command is that of setting up a contrast between love and its opposite: vengeance, bearing a grudge. The opposite of this sin, the antidote to it, is the virtue of love.

In a day when you can acquire anger with a click literally moments after you awaken in the morning, we need love to carry us to good thinking and writing. Or else.

One of my life’s long-term prayers is that someone of stature within KJV-Only circles will publicly apologize for promoting false doctrine.

A major difficulty, I find, is that everyone who comes out of KJV-Onlyism as an adult has already paid a price for their change of mind—and the last thing I want to do is add a burden to people who have lost ministry positions and strained and broken friendships. I have taken the risk of approaching several different ex-KJV-Onlyists to inquire whether or not they ought to issue any kind of public apology. Each had excellent reasons—and I mean this, excellent reasons—to politely decline.

Ultimately God only knows what moral culpability individuals bear for teaching things that aren’t true and thereby dividing the body of Christ. God only knows who is a victim and who is a perpetrator, or what proportions of perpetrator and victim a given person represents. But I just can’t imagine that all this untruth and division that’s been generated by KJV-Onlyism could occur without individual people sinning—sinning against the teaching of 1 Cor 14 that edification requires intelligibility, sinning against commands for unity and for sound doctrine, sinning against God’s providential opportunities for doing better study. And we’re Christians here: we know that the thing to do when we sin is confess and forsake. “Confess your faults one to another” probably doesn’t mean that we should go around telling everyone we know all the bad things we’ve done. No, I think that verse is most likely meant to encourage us as believers to confess our sins to those people whom our sins affected.

And that’s why large institutions issue public apologies. There’s no way they could possibly figure out the identities of all the individuals they harmed with their actions, so they put their apologies on websites or even on TV. One of my proudest days as a graduate of Bob Jones University was in 2008 when the administration apologized for being beholden to racist Southern culture instead of to the Bible in their now-long-dead interracial dating bans. In my experience, you don’t get a lot of kudos when an insitution or public person apologizes—but people do notice. The haters are gonna hate, and their hatred will go up as they laugh about their victory. But the silent majority will make a silent judgment: if the apologizer is clear and sincere, that majority will gain respect for the one who did wrong but is now admitting it.

I receive many touching letters like this:

I graduated from [a Christian college] in 2001. After the first semester of my sophomore year I decided [that that Christian college] might not be for me. I went back home to NC and studied at the local community college. That summer I was still on the hook to work at the Wilds [Christian camp]. Arriving and going through the initial training I realized something happened at PCC and it had everyone upset [editor’s note: he’s talking about PCC’s Leaven in Fundamentalism videos, a major push for KJV-Onlyism at the school]. I was confused but didn’t say much.

After the Wilds I went back to NC and decided to join the Army Reserves as a part-time gig. The following semester I went back to [that first Christian college] and finished it out in 2001. After my wife and I married I went on active duty and eventually ended up in [another country] for a little over a year. During that time I picked up a book by Bart Ehrman about Scripture discrepancies. My faith that was shaken that summer at the Wilds now was coming apart. I remember the fear of everything being a lie. I was angry and sad. Over time I found my way back but with a lingering doubt that the devil would often bring to mind.

Your work and careful study on the study of translation has breathed new confidence in God’s Word for me… I pleaded to God for answers…. you have indirectly helped me in my journey with tools that I did not have.

This subject is so sensitive that I suspect many are out there like me but without a voice or tools to deal with the problem.

Please forgive my broken sentences and misspelled words…maybe you will still understand.

By the way, my family and I are active in the local church and have every intent to serve Him well. I’m an officer in the [armed services] and hope to retire from active duty in [a few years].

Praying for you… if I were the enemy I would do everything I could to stop you. A good soldier knows his enemy. Please be careful!

May sound crazy but if I can help let me know.

**********[name]

I recently received this email:

Hi Mark,

I’m really thankful for your content, and you book Authorized. I appreciate your spirit, and the non-aggressive (but non-comprimising) way of addressing King James Onlyism.

To make a long story short, God has been gracious enough to openly eyes to the error that is King James Onlyism, which is one of the doctrinal statements of the church I’m currently a member of and teach Sunday School at. Their statement is as follows: “We believe that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the inspired Word of God and the only correct rule of faith and practice; that God preserved these writings down through the ages; and that the King James Version is the Word of God for the English speaking people (II Timothy 3:15–17; II Peter 1:21; Psalms 12:6–7).”

The church holds to KJV-Onlyism strongly. In a recent sermon, our assistant pastor decried the “evils” of textual criticism and in another recent sermon stated that it was “just stupid” to believe older biblical manuscripts were better. However, this is the church I have grown up in, and I have many dear friends and family who are in this body of believers. I love them very dearly (even the ones so vocal against modern Bibles), and Iwould not want to hurt them.

However, my conscience is bothering me for not “coming out” about my convictions. I’m afraid if I were to do so and remain in this dear church, I would cause division. For this reason, I have considered leaving for another conservative church in our area. Part of me would love to see God work in current church home, as He has done in my own heart. I’m not sure if I should stay and gently, lovingly challenge the leadership in private, or lovingly depart. I’m torn as to what needs to be done, and would greatly appreciate your advice, as you are the only non-KJVO brother I know. Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to read my message. May God bless you in all that you do!

Sincerely,

******

I replied:

Wow, brother. My heart breaks for you and for these poor, saved, sanctified, but sinning people that you rightly love. I feel zero triumph when I get these letters—which, as you might imagine, I get with some regularity. I simply feel sadness. I don’t like being the apparent cause of a rift between brothers. But that’s the thing: I’m not the cause. I’m the occasion (or one of them, usually not the only one). The cause was their adoption of divisive false teaching a long time ago. And you, too, need to feel no guilt if you do indeed have to leave. Though it is right to feel sorrow.

But given the clarity with which you write, and the love which you obviously have for these fellow sheep, I believe you owe them some testimony to the truth. I think that at some point, guided by the Spirit and resting on much prayer, you need to speak to the leadership of the church (pastor, or pastors and deacons, or pastors—whatever you think is best) and tell them that you cannot support KJV-Onlyism in good conscience anymore, because it is not taught in the word of God and is dividing God’s people, in opposition to God’s word. Here’s the next key: you’ve got, for their good, to parry every thrust that has anything to do with textual criticism, and speak only of what the Bible says clearly: edification requires intelligibility. Cite 1 Cor 14 over and over. And any time they say anything about corrupt manuscripts or wicked Westcott and Hort or omitted verses, say the same thing: “My friend, the New King James Version and the Modern English Version both use the same underlying Hebrew and Greek texts as the King James. And they translate those texts into fully intelligible contemporary English, which means they meet the principle of 1 Corinthians 14, edification requires intelligibility. I recommend the NKJV and MEV to you.” They will say, “Don’t dumb down the Bible! You can look up these words!” Just keep coming back with Scripture, 1 Cor 14, and then ask their patience to work through a few of my false friends. Ask them how people are supposed to look up words they don’t realize they’re misunderstanding. They will probably end up reviling you as the Jews did to Jesus when they had nothing else to say: “Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?” (John 8:48 ESV). I’ve thought of this so, so many times. You will probably have to suffer this, and you will have to bear it patiently without opening your mouth.

Once you leave, some people will write you off after hearing and trusting the words of their pastors. You can do nothing about this except live a faithful, loving, gracious Christian life in which you do not return railing for railing. This will heap coals of fire on the heads of anyone watching. Many will not watch, however, and you will suffer the loss of relationships and of standing with them. But a few, given your longevity at the church, will approach you privately with questions or with the plan of reconverting you. My own mentor, an incredibly gracious and wise pastor, told a relative of mine (who faced a similar situation years ago) to speak openly to those people who came privately. I saw this relative do that; I was physically present. The Lord blessed these hard conversations. If you seek out church people, you could be guilty of divisiveness, even though the doctrinal error is not your own. So don’t write a letter to the church or call people up. Don’t campaign. Don’t go on social media and make snide remarks about the kind of Christian you were yesterday (your email strongly suggests already that you will not do this). But if they come to you, you can tell them the same thing you told the pastors. Meet in person if at all possible and stick to the script: you want an understandable Bible, a Bible in your English. You want to know what God said and obey it. And God told you to want this in 1 Cor 14. Why aren’t the NKJV and MEV, or the Simplified KJV or the KJVer, acceptable? And work through a false friend or two with them.

If your pastors are actively telling people in the church that their Christian cousins’ NIVs and ESVs are wicked and corrupt, a Bible verse comes into play: “These six things doth the Lord hate, yea, seven are an abomination unto him… He that soweth discord among brethren.” Your tithes will always go, ultimately, to support the work of fallen and finite humans. You don’t need to spend your life regretting the support you gave to this church. And you will not find a perfect church, no matter where you go. But moving forward, given the knowledge you’ve gained, you can’t support arrogant, ignorant, divisive false teaching. =( Apparently, this church is not your only conservative option. With regret, I must indeed encourage you to move on. Spend your departure wisely. Focus on just this issue, and hammer that one message home with as much grace and clarity as you can.

I pray this helps, brother! Please keep me in the loop!

mw

Two insights from a Substack writer I deeply appreciate, my former colleague at Crossway for a brief time, Samuel James. These insights might help someone out there who has been afflicted by KJV-Onlyism in their youth.

First

First, James writes,

I would like to pioneer a new genre of personal essay. I call it: “My Parents Did Their Best Raising Me and Of Course They Got Some Things Wrong But I Don’t Blame My Problems on Them Because I Don’t Want My Kids to Blame All Their Problems on the Mistakes I Will Inevitably Make.” Basically this kind of essay would follow all the familiar patterns of a typical piece wherein the author awakens from the cruel hypnosis inflicted upon them by their strict/overbearing/religious/nosy parents. But instead of ending with the author being enlightened and the family being exposed, it would end with a terrifying realization: that even my parents’ mistakes were valuable, that my grown-up problems were not reducible to them, and that the most mentally and spiritually healthy attitude I could have toward my childhood is gratitude for the many good things, and forgiveness for the bad.

 

The tragic irony for many people my age is that the kind of mental health that we desperately need is almost always predicated on decentering the self, which is precisely the very thing we have been educated not to do in the interest of mental health. Our windows to the world are mirrors. Many of the most popular “self-care” techniques are really just analog-era recreations, which suggests what we really need is just one hour where we’re not staring at our own psychological state. Decentering the self is not just implausible in the Age of the Mirror, it’s actually condemned as immoral through the way we articulate which personal narratives matter and which ones don’t. The narratives that don’t matter include:

• I realized how much I’d been given and how evil only living for myself would be.
• I was miserable trying to curate my own identity and this was cured when I gave myself completely to this spouse and these children.
• I thought me and my desires were the same thing, but then I realized that denying those desires gave me more joy.
• I was convinced people who disagreed with my core convictions were wicked, but I was wrong.

Thankfully, escapees from KJV-Onlyism typically, in my experience, do not usually stumble into atheism or secularism or self-helpism. The people who do that don’t want to talk to me anyway, because I’m clearly not there. I stand with their KJV-Only parents against their unbelief.

But those who must come to disagree with their own parents’ views on the KJV would do well to see what a fast-moving train their culture wants them to jump onto: the victim train, in which everybody is wholly virtuous and all their enemies are wholly evil. That’s just not Christianity.

Second

Of course, I could tell you stories about the evil done in the name of KJV-Onlyism that would make your blood boil.

But an insight from Samuel James is one reason I don’t do this. He talks about the way knowledge itself becomes tribalized in an online atmosphere. He has profound things to say about the way both right and left have committed epistemological sins. Here James describes (and does not endorse) the way the game is played:

To win the reality game, you must outlive, outflank, and out-virtue your opponent. The straightest way to do that is to make the bad stuff your opponent says or believes an intrinsic expression of their nature, and the bad stuff you or your tribe say or believe to be an aberration (or perhaps even not that bad at all). If the people you count as an enemy link to something, denounce it; if the people you count as an enemy have something on somebody else, back away.

One reason I don’t want to win by sob story is that it feels to me like naked tribalism. It feels so dirty to me when pro-LGBT pastors use this tactic: they tell of a boy who is persecuted or rejected by his ogre-like conservative Christian parents just for asking questions about his sexuality.

I won’t even deny that some Christian parents handle such questions poorly—just as I won’t deny that some KJV-Only leaders are truly wicked.

But I take an insight from a major favorite book of mine One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Author Alexander Solzhenitsyn helped take down the Soviet gulag through that book, and he did so not by describing its many terrible horrors in gruesome detail but by describing the very best day prisoner Ivan ever had in the gulag. That day was bad enough. The point was made.

I, too, wish to engage the very best KJV-Onlyists—like Dan Haifley and Chuck Surrett and many others I could name. I believe I have consistently done this on my channel. I have almost completely avoided the crazies. And even among the crazies, I have picked on only the very most influential ones (I did one video on Peter Ruckman and one on Brandon Peterson).

Another reason I don’t tell sob stories about the effects of KJV-Onlyism is that I truly believe that the fall affects my tribe, too, and I don’t want to start a sob story competition. I don’t think my side would lose, but it might. Surely wicked things have been done in the name of anti-KJV-Onlyism, too. My side is not perfectly virtuous. I think both sides lose when we go the sob-story route. I’d like to keep the focus on the merits of the case.

I get letters like the one below on a pretty regular basis. I always operate with a sense of holy fear when responding, because I know that times of transition bring temptations—temptations to bitterness, especially. But also temptations to swing the theological pendulum too far away from the people who, you’ve finally realized, have been insisting on dividing from other Christians over a King James Only “doctrine” that simply isn’t taught in Scripture.

I’m grateful to say that, up till now, the people who send me these letters have given me no evidence that they’re swinging into bitterness or into theological liberalism. So far, pretty uniformly, these are gracious people who write like this (this is a real letter):

Hello Mark,

I’m an acquaintance of *********, and he recommended your book, Authorized, which I just finished. I found it to be extremely well-written and most compelling.

I also found the podcasts that you and ******** did together. Those were good for me, as well.

My wife and I have been members of three different IFB churches over the course of the past eleven years. Each church family had different characteristics and charms. We love God’s people, and have even served in leadership positions with each church. I’m presently serving as a deacon, and I will always feel utterly under-qualified for that job. God is teaching me a lot as I serve His children.

So, that being said, I believe that God is working on my heart as a Christian, as a husband, and as a father of a sweet young boy. We may soon be added to the ranks of “recovering fundamentalists” (I don’t necessarily like that term, lol), and for a few other reasons than just changing convictions concerning translations. I am beginning to believe more and more in the need for vernacular translations in my home. (And, we do have some on the shelves… gathering dust at the moment.)

Being candid with you, whom I consider to be my brother (I feel like I know you a little after being in your mind for a few days), I would ask for your prayer for me as I ask God just what I should do. I’m asking you, because it’s all your fault since I read your book, haha! To be clear, I’ve pondered these issues in my head and heart for a great long while, and am not about to make any rash decisions. I’m also asking you because I believe this was your mission for this work, and I believe that God is using it.

I’ve spent more than a decade learning about, preaching, teaching, defending, reverencing, and loving God’s Word, specifically the KJV. Perhaps, God is telling us to start a new chapter. Or, perhaps He is telling us start an old chapter in a new way.

This change would undoubtedly mean a major shift in more than a few relationships with people whom we dearly love, and perhaps even places that we fondly cherish. That is scary for us.

I have more to learn before I’m ready. I have more praying to do. Again, I would ask you to join me in that.

I am keeping these thoughts in confidence with very few people, as of now.

Thank you, Mark.

Your Brother,

************

Here was my reply:

Wow, brother. Thank you for reaching out. You are an answer to prayer, and so is your gracious spirit. I really have encountered this spirit so many times now among people who send me this same letter. It just delights me; I praise the Lord with a full heart.

I so understand where you’re coming from. I will pray right now, and I will pray that the Lord will give you wisdom to know which of those two courses to take. I myself have tried to follow the practical wisdom of Bob Jones Sr: “Go as far as you can on the right road.” It feels like a way of applying Prov 11:3, “The integrity of a man’s heart will guide him.” If the Bible teaches what I say it teaches in 1 Cor 14, the path of integrity could indeed be either of the ones you’ve mentioned, but I’ve always privileged staying the course the Lord has given me until that becomes impossible.

As you and I both know, “becomes impossible” more than likely means that you make your views clear—gently and privately with leadership, with deference and respect but with clear appeal to 1 Cor 14—and you are given a brief period of patience (your views will seem self-evidently ridiculous to them, and they might think they can regain you) but ultimately told in various ways that you’re not welcome. I’d encourage you as your brother to remember two things, one that will help you be persistently gracious and another that will help you not to feel guilty if and when things go awry.

1. This isn’t all their fault. Pastors in the KJV-Only world face a ton of pressure to conform, and the senior pastors face the most pressure: if they waver one jot or one tittle, their livelihood is threatened. And beyond this, they’ve been told by people who seem like they ought to know, their KJV-Only Bible college professors, that the TR and KJV are the hill to die on. It’s very, very hard (as you of all people know!) to push back against that pressure, or to even begin to do so. It’s hard to consider the possibility that people you know and trust have—it appears—told you things that aren’t true.
2. Nonetheless, Galatians 5:19–20 make contention, division, and strife over things the Bible doesn’t teach—like the idea that the KJV is the only truly trustworthy translation and everything else is a horrible counterfeit—a “work of the flesh.” If fellow Christians who know you love them and have seen your love for Christ divide from you over an insistence that the KJV is perfect/best/pure, sin is in there somewhere. When the division comes, that issue will get muddied. Conflict almost always gets confusing, mixed up. It’s almost never permitted to be clear: your sensitive conscience will be pricked by accusations about your own sins and shortcomings. Maybe some of these accusations will even bear some truth! But don’t take the blame here: KJV-Onlyism isn’t true. It isn’t right. It’s a work of the flesh.

Your play is a long play, a long play of love. You love them enough to let love cover a multitude of sins and to remember, always remember, that you have nothing that you did not receive (1 Cor 4:7). You see truth now you didn’t used to see: that’s grace. Keep receiving the grace of God, pursuing biblical truth, and remember that you are being watched on social media by KJV-Only friends who want to know if you’re becoming a liberal. There might be some liberties you give up for their sake. You will suffer yourself to be defrauded for them; you won’t return reviling for reviling; you will turn the other cheek. And the only way great injustices like KJV-Onlyism go away is through redemptive suffering. Ultimately, that’s one of the purposes of the suffering of Christ. But we must sometimes bear his marks, too.

If I’ve assumed too much about your story, please forgive me and correct me.

In Christ,

Mark

He wrote back and didn’t correct my assumptions. We’ve started a dialogue I pray will be helpful to us both, a means of the Lord protecting this man and his family from sinful division.

I’ve heard many people over the years say that KJV-Onlyism makes the pastor a sort of priest between the believers in his church and the Lord. They need him to tell them what the impenetrable language of the KJV means. So holding onto the KJV is just a way for him to hold on to a kind of priestly, autocratic power over them.

I think this common argument fails—for three reasons.

First fail

First reason: I’m just not that cynical. Love isn’t cynical. In my experience, KJV-Only pastors sincerely believe the things their Bible college professors told them about Greek New Testament manuscripts and about the quality of the KJV. That’s at the same time one of the most encouraging and most frustrating aspects of KJV-Onlyism: I find I just can’t blame most of its adherents for believing a lot of the arguments they’ve heard from Bible college professors who ought to have to known better.

In my experience, too, KJV-Only pastors encourage Bible reading. I’ve heard them say many times—at least my KJV-Only pastor in high school did—that their people should side with the Bible against them, that they would listen to any constructive criticism given from an open Bible. To this day, despite having moved out of the KJV-Only position I was in then as a teenager, I love what my pastor said and I believe that he was absolutely sincere. He really did and does want to follow the Bible. He lived a life of integrity and service; he still does.

A friend of mine who went to two KJV-Only Bible colleges, where he never even heard of a “systematic theology” book—until, later, someone gave him a Logos Bible Software base package and he started educating himself, grew up in the home of a Hyles-Anderson grad pastor from back in the day. I asked him, “Why aren’t you bitter against your dad, considering all the areas of theological and biblical ignorance you now see he has?” He answered, “Because my dad is true blue. He has served the Lord faithfully within the framework of what he was taught in KJV-Onlyism. Yes, that framework has significant flaws, but my dad was a Christian father with integrity.” I prefer to believe that my KJV-Only brothers are like this man until they give clear demonstrations to the contrary.

Second fail

Second reason that argument fails: If we expect our KJV-Only brothers to be gracious to us and to the living translators of evangelical English Bibles, we need to be gracious to them. It’s the Golden Rule. One of the rampant problems I do see among KJV-Only and Textus-Receptus-Only people of all stripes is that they are radically uncharitable to brothers in Christ who work on the ESV or NIV. They say that these translations exist only for money, which is pretty cynical—and which is never, ever buttressed with any arguments or appeals to evidence. It’s just stated as if it were an obvious fact. They say that these brothers who make new translations are either dupes or devils who are undercutting the sound doctrine found only in the KJV. One writer at the Trinitarian Bible Society wrote a 38,000-word piece absolutely pillorying the NKJV, accusing its translators of promoting annihilationism and of undercutting the Bible’s teaching that salvation produces a changed life. He exploded minor differences between the KJV and NKJV into massive, hidden theological shifts. He didn’t make any attempt to let the NKJV translators explain their reasoning by checking their commentaries or articles. That was uncharitable. It was wrong. It was sin. I have sufficient evidence from this man’s own words to condemn those words.

But the right response to sin is not more sin. The right response to someone’s malicious misreading of another brother’s motives is not a malicious misreading of the motives of everybody else in their tribe. Whenever possible, again, I want to assume the best about my brothers. That’s what love does. It believes all things. It covers a multitude of sins.

Third fail

Here’s the third reason I don’t believe that KJV-Only pastors are all secret tyrants: People who have only heard about my work and never actually encountered it might be surprised to hear me say this, but KJV English is not, by and large, impenetrable. Most of it is intelligible to a reasonably educated English speaker. And if you grow up with it, you really do learn to get past the great majority of the minor differences between KJV English and contemporary, spoken and written English. I did this as a kid myself. I refuse to overstate my case about the readability problems caused by the KJV. And I truly believe that someone can disagree with me over the gravity of those readability problems. We’re talking about the proper weighting of things we all value; we’re not talking about one side being capital-R RIGHT and the other being capital-R WRONG.

So here’s the first half of my case, put simply: if edification requires intelligibility, it ought to weigh a lot with us that, even according to KJV-Only folks who put out big archaic word lists, there are literally hundreds of dead words in the KJV. Besom, beeves, bolled, bewray. Every time I type out these words in my writing app, at least one of them gets corrected! Bolled became “boiled” this time around, for example, before I changed it back. And it’s still marked with a red line; that word isn’t in our English, and my computer knows it. And you and I know it. It isn’t okay, according to 1 Corinthians 14, that there are hundreds of dead words in the Bible I hand to my kid. How many of these words should be allowed to stack up before it’s time for a revision? Good people can differ over this, I think.

And here’s the second half of my case: if edification requires intelligibility, it ought to weigh a lot with us that there are also “false friends” in the KJV, almost 100 by my count so far. False friends are words we don’t know we don’t know, words that will trip up a noticeable percentage of readers. Truth be known, in my experience, KJV-Only pastors are just as tripped up by dead words and false friends as the rest of us are. So I kind of don’t blame them for not clearly seeing the phenomenon (unless they’ve read my book and watched my videos, in which case I do blame them a little!).

A study I’d love to see someone do: look at hundreds or even thousands of sermons to see how often KJV preachers are tripped up by false friends. It would be a way to add objective, empirical analysis to refine my lived experience: what I have seen is that most KJV-Only brothers are in the same boat as the rest of us when it comes to dead words and false friends.

Back to first

And that kind of brings me back to my first reason for rejecting the idea that KJV-Only preachers hold onto the KJV in order to maintain their autocratic power over their people. They sincerely don’t think they’re being tripped or impeded! They think it’s easy to look up dead words, and often it is with the right KJV edition—you just look at the footnotes.

That’s still a problem, in my book: why can’t the footnotes clarifying the text just be brought into the text, so when you memorize or recite, you and your hearers will understand? If the KJV isn’t perfect or inspired, what’s the problem with changing “besom” to “broom” or “chambering” to “immorality”?

And these pastors mostly don’t even know about “false friends.” Until they watch my channel or read my book, which I happen to know many of them are doing. If I treat these brothers in Christ with cynical distrust; if I go around questioning their motives; they will rightly smell a rat and stop listening to me.

Sure, there are autocratic pastors out there, and not a few of them exist in the KJV-Only world. But they exist outside it, too. And I’m appealing to the average, mainstream KJV-Only pastor—I’m appealing to common ground: you and I both want our church members to understand Scripture when they listen to it preached and, all-importantly, when they read it privately. If you want them to succeed in that effort, follow the principle of Scripture—edification requires intelligibility—and give them a translation of whatever Greek New Testament edition you prefer into the English they actually speak.

I stopped public engagement with proponents of Confessional Bibliology 1) because I achieved clarity on our major impasse—clarity that further discussion didn’t seem to increase¹; 2) because I dislike disliking Christian people, 3) because my opponents went to extremes that I found I could not in good conscience interact with. I find it embarrassing and truly dreadful, in the etymological sense of that word, to talk to educated and intelligent men who say truly bizarre and extreme things, and this happened to me multiple times with leading proponents of Confessional Bibliology. I mentioned a few examples in the video two years ago.

I said to these proponents in that final video, and I quote, “If I talk about the far larger group of traditional, mainstream, IFB KJV-Onlyists and you, my Confessional Bibliology brothers, think I’m subtweeting you, I’m telling you in advance that that’s not my fault.” To my knowledge, I did that one time, about a year ago—hence the asterisk* in my title. I came at least perilously close to engaging Confessional Bibliology in public by evaluating a Trinitarian Bible Society booklet. But here’s why I did what I did: I found out that a large KJV-Only college was assigning to students Christian McShaffrey’s TBS booklet, How the Bible Came to Be, which contains Gail-Riplinger-level arguments about KJV English. For example, it claims that the modern versions “remove” certain words like “devil” and “damnation” and “sodomite” and “effeminate.” The booklet claims that these and other words were removed because they were “politically incorrect.” This is misleading to the point of malpractice.

And it was also proof of the validity of one of the very few predictions I’ve ever made in my life: I said that IFB KJV-Onlyists were going to start using CB material, further blurring the already tiny lines between the bibliological views of the two groups. So I subjected Christian’s TBS booklet to critique—because my target audience, the IFB KJV-Onlyists, were using it. This booklet was assigned mere days ago to the son of a good friend of mine, a son who attends that KJV-Only college. Nothing I critiqued in that booklet was unique to Confessional Bibliology; it was all standard argumentation used by KJV-Onlyists in the IFB.

I chose to break my silence because Confessional Bibliology has taken their argument from the New Testament text to the Old through their recent Reformation Bible Society Conference. I felt the need to answer quickly by appeal to gifted OT scholars.

Since I have chosen to break my silence, I want to spend a little time demonstrating the overlap—and acknowledging the contrasts—between Confessional Bibliology and standard, mainstream IFB KJV-Onlyism. I’m doing this for the record, as it were, because I hope to be done talking to and about CB again soon. I’ll be done at the end of 2024 in all my popular-level engagement with KJV defense (I have some more academic work to do in the future). Leaders of Confessional Bibliology have insisted to me from the very beginning of my discussing with them that they are massively distinct from mainstream KJV-Onlyism. But it is my belief that the mainstream IFB KJV-Onlyism and Confessional Bibliology are 95% the same.

Contrast

I did publicly commit to Jeff Riddle that I would not call Confessional Bibliology “KJV-Onlyism.” I have not violated that promise publicly or privately. There are indeed key differences between mainstream, IFB KJV-Onlyism and Confessional Bibliology. There are two differences in substance in my estimation, and two in style:

Substance

1. The CB group cites Westminster Confession 1.8 as authoritative², which the IFB does not do.
2. The CB group appeals to figures who are not respected in the IFB such as (especially) John Owen, Francis Turretin, and the Protestant Scholastics.

Style

There are more differences in style, though not in substance:

1. CB folks are Calvinists, of course, and the IFB KJVOs almost never are. This doesn’t seem to me to have any bearing on their bibliology, however, aside from the two points above.
2. Another difference in style: CB proponents include some educated men with legitimate PhDs. There are almost no legitimate PhDs in IFB KJV-Onlyism (though that may be changing). That, too, is not a distinction in viewpoint. Several CB leaders can write academic papers and book reviews, and they do. This tends not to happen much, if ever, in the IFB KJV-Only world.

Those are the contrasts I see.

Comparison

And here are the similarities, 26 in substance and 1 in style.

Substance

1. Both groups use the same prooftexts (Mt 5:18; Ps 12:6-7; Ps 119:105; Mt 4:4; etc.). Both groups have figures who use Psalm 12:6–7 as a prooftext for perfect preservation (Brown, IFB; Van Kleeck Sr, CB) and those who don’t (Surrett and Ouellette, IFB; Riddle, CB)—but who don’t complain when others in their group do.
2. Both groups use the same key words to describe the TR/KJV: “preserved,” “pure,” “stable,” “settled,” “unchanging” (CB; IFB)
3. Both groups insist that inspiration demands perfect preservation, but they waver on the “perfect” part—generally making statements that assume perfection but occasionally (among the more knowledgeable folks) acknowledging that minor variants exist even among TR editions.
4. Both groups put “the Textus Receptus” or “the Received Text” in their church (and other institutional) doctrinal statements but fail to specify which TR they believe to be perfect or preserved.
5. Both groups produce more heat than light when asked, “Which TR?” They consistently claim to have a perfectly pure text but just as consistently evade the questions of which TR is perfect and why (IFB; IFB; CBish; CB; CB citing CB and IFB).
6. Both groups maximize the differences between the TR and the critical text. Jeff Riddle called the critical text a “completely different underlying text.” I have heard CB leaders and IFB KJV-Onlyists call the two “radically different” and “drastically different.”
7. Both groups call the critical text “corrupt” and argue that it undermines or attacks Christian doctrines.
8. Both groups call the practice of evangelical textual critics today “naturalistic” or “atheistic” textual criticism (IFB; CB; CB).
9. Both groups attack the character and credibility of Westcott and Hort (though I’d say this happens much less often in the CB world than in the IFB).
10. Both groups functionally resort to Scrivener’s TR. And that TR is, in a very real way, simply the KJV.
11. Both groups refuse to explain specific differences between TR editions.
12. Both groups adopt Scrivener’s TR. I am not aware of a single living, influential person in either group who has clearly adopted a reading that is at variance with Scrivener’s TR.
13. Both groups assume that omission equals denial: if a given statement or verse appears in the KJV and not in the NIV, someone “took it out” on purpose for doctrinal reasons—namely in order to deny or subvert whatever doctrine was contained therein.
14. Both groups spend zero time explaining all the meaningless textual variants in the New Testament manuscript tradition; their attention is focused on those which fit the narrative in the point above.
15. Both groups spend a great deal of time discussing the “big three” passages: John 7:53–8:11; Mark 16:9–20; 1 John 5:7.
16. Both groups cite the writings of Dean Burgon and E.F. Hills (CB; IFB).
17. Both groups insist that the KJV is a literal translation and therefore superior to others.
18. Both groups consistently turn articles and conferences talks that were slated to be about KJV readability into talks about textual criticism (IFB; IFB; CB). Even when a conference talk (for example) is explicitly dedicated to KJV readability, the speaker will talk about textual criticism for up to 90% of his allotted time.
19. Both groups take a) mention of archaisms and b) criticisms of KJV-Onlyism as attacks on the KJV itself. I am continually saying to both groups, “I love and trust the KJV; to mention its archaisms is not to denigrate in any way the work of the KJV translators.”
20. Both groups claim that the KJV uses something called “biblical English,” an especially accurate and timeless form of English that cannot be improved upon (CB; IFB).
21. Both groups dismiss and ignore my false friends argument. They say, ironically, that people should just study to show themselves approved (unaware of or refusing to acknowledge that “study” is a false friend). Perhaps two KJV defenders—one in each group—have publicly or privately acknowledged learning a specific false friend from me. And very, very few (Robert Truelove [CB] being a very notable exception, Bryan Ross [IFBish] being another) have acknowledged that there are any false friends in KJV English at all-even though their own TBS Westminster Reference Bible and Defined KJB list numbers of my false friends. I get many vague comments from both groups about how there are very few false friends, but almost no specific engagement with concrete examples. Almost no one ever looks up false friends in the OED and offers a different assessment of any one of them.
22. Both groups insist to me repeatedly that they (and their rural congregation and/or young children) can read the KJV just fine, that all they need is a dictionary, that updating the KJV is as foolish and needless an idea as updating Shakespeare (IFB; CB).
23. Both groups insist that the superior accuracy of the second-person pronouns in the KJV is an essential reason for insisting upon the primary and/or exclusive use of the KJV (CB; IFB).
24. Both groups have ignored or dismissed the KJB Study Project; I’m not aware of anyone from either group who has publicly acknowledged that the KJBSP is a strike against their viewpoint. Both have gone silent.
25. Both groups reject the NKJV, and for the same reasons: it capitalizes deity pronouns, it includes NU text readings in the margins, it uses quotation marks (!), it uses poetic indentation (CB; IFB). The translation decisions in the NKJV that they object to also have a great deal of overlap (CB; IFB). Neither group allows KJV archaisms to weigh anything in the balances when the KJV is compared to the NKJV.
26. Both groups repeatedly claim that money is the reason that modern English Bible translations exist (CB; IFB), and that the NKJV in particular is a bridge Bible. (The IFB—though not CB—commonly adds that it’s part of a conspiracy to move people away from the KJV.)

Style

Both groups frequently employ the same angry, these-go-to-eleven tone, with frequent recourse to ad hominem and charges that their opponents are lying or disingenuous. This is admittedly a more subjective judgment than the previous points. And there are many definite exceptions in both groups (my friend Bryan Ross is one in the IFB; Robert Truelove and Dane Johannson are two such in the CB group). I don’t expect this comment to be persuasive to the skeptical, but for the cause of truth I must say it. All the mockery, nastiness, intractability, and tribalism visible in one group is visible in the other.

I won’t claim that my own crowd is free from these things, but I can only say what I’ve seen: both major groups of KJV defenders are notably marked by a divisive and malicious spirit, especially on social media, and especially among followers (leaders do tend to do better). Both groups move very quickly to ad hominem; I would actually say that the average proponent of CB is, if anything, more bitter and hateful than the average proponent of IFB KJV-Onlyism—if such things can be measured. I’m going to explicitly decline to give examples, because I’m their target and I don’t want to defend myself. Many things both groups have said to me are unprintable, and I rarely see leaders pushing back against the extremists.

Cross-Pollination

Naturally, the two groups have cross-pollinated. I have seen Jeff Riddle (CB) cite Chuck Surrett and other IFB KJV-Onlyists. I have seen them cite him—specifically, I have heard IFB KJVOs using the “kept pure in all ages” line and pointing directly, by name to the work of Jeff Riddle. Why shouldn’t they cite one another as authorities when they’re saying exactly the same things? As I said earlier, a major KJV-Only college is using a booklet by Christian McShaffrey (CB) to teach KJV-Onlyism to its students.

Pushback

When I have previously made some of the points above to Dr. Riddle, he has insisted that the proper definition of “KJV-Onlyism” is Ruckmanism, double inspiration—hence, he is not a KJV-Onlyist. And indeed, Confessional Bibliology is not Ruckmanism (well, most of the time).

In a way, I don’t care what label is used. It’s the substance that I see as similar. But in another way, I think I ought to know better than Dr. Riddle what counts as KJV-Onlyism, because I was a self-conscious, self-described KJV-Onlyist in a large, mainstream, IFB KJV-Only church in high school. I was given in that IFB church effectively all the same arguments Confessional Bibliology leaders give today (minus an appeal to WCF 1.8, and with no mention of Owen or Turretin), and we had no compunction calling ourselves “KJV-Only.”

I have made this clarification to Dr. Riddle on more than one occasion. Each time, he has gone back to insisting that KJV-Onlyism means Ruckmanism and therefore I shouldn’t call him that. I got tired of having what felt like a petty debate over labels; that is why I acquiesced to saying that I wouldn’t call his viewpoint “KJV-Onlyism.”

It’s also true that there is some fuzziness at the edges: Riddle did praise the MEV in a blog post a few years ago, and I suspect that CB pastors—who have often studied Hebrew and Greek—feel more free than most IFB pastors to check other translations in their study. The KJV-Onlyism I grew up with was not officially opposed to the idea that other translations might contain valid renderings, but in daily practice I gather that many IFB pastors refused literally to touch, let alone own, a corrupt modern English Bible translation. CB pastors don’t seem to be this superstitious.

I will also say that CB leaders tend to be better able to distinguish text from translation. Robert Truelove told me that he doesn’t think the IFB “cares one whit about the TR.” I think that is frequently true, and that it is far less true of my CB brothers.

Brett Mahlen, whom I’ve met personally in recent months and with whom I enjoyed conversation about evangelism and theology, is one CB figure who has taken my arguments above seriously. He pointed out to me recently that Ted Letis in chapter 8 of his Ecclesiastical Text pushes back explicitly against IFB views of Scripture. But I might point out where I “met” Ted Letis: in the infamous Leaven in Fundamentalism videos put out by IFB, KJV-Only Pensacola Christian College in the late 1990s. Overlap between the two groups is not new. And the notes Letis plays in that chapter do not at all fit with the rhetoric of leading CB figures today. Letis basically cites Dean Burgon’s eagerness to correct the TR against the contemporary Dean Burgon Society’s refusal to do so. It seems to me that Letis’ arguments apply equally well to modern Confessional Bibliology.

Jeff Riddle and Christian McShaffrey have both said to me after I’ve pointed out similarities and overlaps between CB and IFB KJV defense, “Well, good—the IFB KJVOs are getting taught the CB position.” No, this is not what’s happening: I can assure you that my KJV-Only pastor in my high school years was not reading Ted Letis or, certainly, listening to Jeff Riddle (who was not yet a KJV defender at the time!).

Confessional Bibliology and mainstream, IFB KJV-Onlyism are as similar as two TR editions.

Notes

Yes. Just as I think egalitarianism can be used to justify sin, including sexual sin. For example, the guy who really thinks his secretary is hot and knows he shouldn’t be traveling alone in a car with her may tell himself, “It’s sexist to obey the Billy Graham rule.” Likewise, guys like me who are complementarians can say to themselves, “I’m the man of the house, and I don’t care if my wife says she needs more help around here; I’m going to do what I want. I’ve delegated all housework to her.” Or complementarian pastors or ministry leaders can start to “lord it over” their followers as the Gentiles do. They can take their legitimate authority—authority without which there could be no institution providing roles of service and flourishing for others—and abuse it.

The question is not whether any complementarians or egalitarians commit abuses, but whether there is a logical or necessary connection between either view and subsequent abuse. Egalitarians like to say that complementarianism is already abuse, but I think the most fairminded of them don’t say that. Tish Harrison Warren, for example, said something that touched me profoundly: “As a female priest, I’ve been publicly mocked and privately humiliated by men who not only oppose women’s ordination (a view from Scripture one could reasonably hold) but who are sexist and just plain mean.” I can’t deny that she’s been treated badly by complementarians. Rings true to me, sadly. What touched me was her parenthetical acknowledgement that complementarianism can be plausibly derived from Scripture. If that’s so, then no abuses can be traced back to it. Abusus non tollit usum. The question is what the Bible teaches. Does it teach that the office of elder and the role “head of the home” is restricted to males? Yes, I believe it does. And if so, then the abuses are not the fault of the viewpoint.