|
Far Eastern Bible College
31st Graduation Service
in Convocation at
Calvary Pandan Bible-Presbyterian Church
The Lord's Day, May 7, 2006, 6.00 pm
Photos of the FEBC's 31st Graduation Exercises
WORD FROM THE ACADEMIC DEAN
 The Bible warns in 1 Timothy 4:1-2, “Now the Spirit
speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the
faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; speaking
lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron.”
The Bible today is under attack like never before. The
modernists through The DaVinci Code tell us that the 27 books of the
New Testament Canon are false and must be replaced by newly discovered
Coptic manuscripts which speak of a more realistic down-to-earth Jesus
stripped of all His deity and moral purity. They claim that the Gospel of
Thomas, the Gospel of Judas, and other Gnostic Gospels are the true Gospels;
and that these Gospels must replace the Canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark,
Luke and John.
Many evangelical Bible Colleges and Seminaries today
teach that the Bible was only infallible and inerrant in the past, but no
longer infallible and inerrant today. According to popular theology, the
Bible today contains “insignificant mistakes,” “redundant words,” and
so-called “scribal errors.”
It is significant to note that the Bible under constant
attack by modernists and evangelicals is not the NIV, not the NASB, not the
RSV, not even the NKJV, or any of the modern versions but the good old
Authorised or the King James Version (AV/KJV). Why is the KJV under such
attack? The KJV is under such attack because it is the Bible of the 16th
century Protestant Reformation, and as the Reformation Bible, it stands
against the tide of unbelief, apostasy, and compromise today.
A new book written by Bart Ehrman entitled Misquoting
Jesus (HarperCollins, 2005) is fast becoming a bestseller. In his book,
Ehrman attacked the KJV and the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures behind the KJV.
According to Ehrman, “The King James Bible was based on corrupted and
inferior manuscripts that in many cases do not accurately represent the
meaning of the original text. The favorite Bible story of Jesus’ forgiving
the woman caught in adultery (John 8:3-11) doesn’t belong in the Bible.
Scribal errors were so common in antiquity that the author of the Book of
Revelation threatened damnation to anyone who ‘adds to’ or ‘takes away’
words from the text.” In other words, in Ehrman’s mind, the Bible
contains many “scribal errors,” and if you quote from the KJV or its
underlying texts, you are misquoting Jesus.
Bart Ehrman began as a fundamentalist at Moody Bible
Institute but finally lost his faith at Princeton Seminary where he got his
PhD. How did he lose his faith? Let me read Ehrman’s tragic testimony on
page 11 of his book. He wrote, “If one wants to insist that God inspired the
very words of scripture, what would be the point if we don’t have the
very words of scripture? In some places, as we will see, we simply cannot be
sure that we have reconstructed the original text accurately. It’s a bit
hard to know what the words of the Bible mean if we don’t even know what the
words are!
“This became a problem for my view of inspiration, for I
came to realize that it would have been no more difficult for God to
preserve the words of scripture than it would have been for him to inspire
them in the first place. If he wanted his people to have his words, surely
he would have given them to them (and possibly even given them the words in
a language they could understand, rather than Greek and Hebrew). The fact
that we don’t have the words surely must show, I reasoned, that he did not
preserve them for us. And if he didn’t perform that miracle, there seemed to
be no reason to think that he performed the earlier miracle of inspiring
those words.
“In short, my study of the Greek New Testament, and my
investigations into the manuscripts that contain it, led to a radical
rethinking of my understanding of what the Bible is. This was a seismic
change for me. Before this—starting with my born-again experience in high
school, through my fundamentalist days at Moody, and on through my
evangelical days at Wheaton—my faith has been based completely on a certain
view of the Bible as the fully inspired, inerrant word of God. Now I no
longer saw the Bible that way.”
Let me just say this: If we do not believe
that God has verbally and plenarily preserved His words, that we have truly
the very words of God today—100% infallible and inerrant without any
mistake—and are against the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek words behind
the KJV, we might just end up like Ehrman—an agnostic and a modernist.
It goes without saying that it is not enough for true
Christianity to believe in the verbal plenary inspiration (VPI) of the
Scriptures; it is equally important to believe in the verbal plenary
preservation (VPP) of the Scriptures. “The words of the LORD are pure
words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou
shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for
ever” (Ps 12:6-7). The twin doctrines of VPI and VPP are our only sure
defence against the attacks on the Bible today.
The Faculty and Board will soon take the Dean Burgon Oath
as spelled out in the College Constitution which states:
4.1.1 We believe in the divine, Verbal Plenary
Inspiration (Autographs) and Verbal Plenary Preservation (Apographs) of the
Scriptures in the original languages, their consequent inerrancy and
infallibility, and as the perfect Word of God, the supreme and final
authority in faith and life (2 Tim 3:16, 2 Pet 1:20-21, Ps 12:6-7, Matt
5:18, 24:35).
4.1.1.1 We believe the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek
New Testament underlying the Authorised (King James) Version to be the very
Word of God, infallible and inerrant.
4.1.1.2 We uphold the Authorised (King James) Version to
be the Word of God—the best, most faithful, most accurate, most beautiful
translation of the Bible in the English language, and do employ it alone as
our primary scriptural text in the public reading, preaching, and teaching
of the English Bible.
4.1.1.3 The Board of Directors and Faculty shall affirm
their allegiance to the Word of God by taking the Dean Burgon Oath at every
annual convocation: “I swear in the Name of the Triune God: Father, Son and
Holy Spirit that I believe ‘the Bible is none other than the voice of Him
that sitteth upon the throne. Every book of it, every chapter of it, every
verse of it, every word of it, every syllable of it, every letter of it, is
the direct utterance of the Most High. The Bible is none other than the Word
of God, not some part of it more, some part of it less, but all alike the
utterance of Him that sitteth upon the throne, faultless, unerring,
supreme.’”
We have a fixed Canon and a fixed Text. We see no need
for textual criticism and we reject higher criticism altogether. May the
Lord protect and preserve FEBC as we stand fast on His forever infallible
and inerrant words until we see Him face to face. Amen.
|
