Plenary Verbal Inspiration, Inerrancy and Textual Criticism: Dr. Gordon H. Clark's Change of Mind?

“It is not the word God versus the word who that determines the sense; it is the phrase, ‘was manifested in the flesh.'"  Both texts identify Jesus with God.”   1 Timothy 3:16.  Dr. Gordon H. Clark

“Our only knowledge of redemption, regeneration, heaven and hell comes from the Bible. Give up the Bible and no Christianity remains, none at all. I hope my voice carries about 2000 miles.”  Dr. Gordon H. Clark. 

Plenary Verbal Inspiration, Inerrancy and Textual Criticism:  Dr. Gordon H. Clark’s Change of Mind?

I have been thinking much about the doctrine of plenary verbal inspiration lately and it has much to do with the debates over the inerrancy of Scripture, the infallibility of Scripture and the doctrine of plenary verbal inspiration of the Scriptures.  Almost no Evangelical would deny that the Bible is the God-breathed words of God.  But how that proposition is understood and defined varies among Evangelicals.  This also brings to mind the issue of defining the term Evangelical.  Evangelicalism is supposed to be composed of conservative Protestant churches and individuals in the visible churches all around the world, particularly here in the United States of America.  An even more difficult term to define is the term Reformed.  Many of the followers of the apologetics of the late Dr. Cornelius Van Til claim to own the term Reformed and there is even an internet page and a YouTube channel dedicated to the so-called Reformed Center.  I wonder if there is a moderating center to Reformed theology?  Or perhaps a more realistic definition of Reformed theology is one that is dedicated to the Holy Scriptures as the beginning axiom of theological truth?  But even here there is a problem if truth is not defined in terms of logic and a system of propositional truth which is exegeted from the Scripture.  Either Scripture is a logical and propositional revelation from God or it is merely a human document.  If the Creator/creature distinction is taken too far it would mean that there can be no revelation from God in actual words.  The neo-orthodox and existential encounter theologians have argued since the time of Kierkegaard that only God knows the truth and what we know is only a creaturely reflection of the truth.  For existentialists like Karl Barth and Emil Brunner revelation is a personal encounter or existential encounter with God, not the very words of Holy Scripture.  For the them the Bible only contains the Word of God but is not the Word of God itself.

The problem of textual criticism can be summarized in a few statements.  The main problem is the same whether you take the reasoned eclectic and critical text point of view as espoused by James White and Daniel Wallace and others or the majority text point of view as espoused by Gary Crampton, Maurice Robinson, Zane Hodge, Gordon H. Clark and others.  We do not have the original autographs.  If only the original autographs were the inspired, infallible, inerrant and plenary words of God in every jot and tittle (Matthew 5:18), then it logically and necessarily follows that none of the translations we have are inerrant.  The problem of translations being imperfect is not overwhelming because no one except the King James Only camp has said that translations are inerrant, not even the translators of the King James Version which was based on the Textus Receptus.  The real problem is that none of the 6,000 Greek manuscripts and fragments we have of the New Testament are inerrant since all of them at best have spelling errors, missing or transposed words, and other problems.  The evidence for the Old Testament  is even worse since the only copies we have of the Old Testament are the Masoretic texts that date to the 7^th century after Christ and the Dead Sea Scrolls that date to a couple of hundred years before Christ.  It is a tendency of Evangelical scholars and pastors to gloss over these glaring discrepancies between their doctrinal axioms and the actual situation we face as Bible believing Christians. 

Do we or do we not have the autographs preserved in the extant manuscript evidence?  If we do that is still a problem because in doing translations of the original text we must have a standardized text of the New Testament Greek and the Old Testament Hebrew.  Since we do not have the original autographs, the establishing of a standard text of the original languages is itself a rational process and a controversial one at best.  There is a range of opinions on the reliability of the Greek New Testament manuscripts we have today.  Bart Ehrman became a skeptic after studying textual criticism at Princeton Theological Seminary under the guidance of Bruce Metzger.  Ehrman lost his faith and became a agnostic after studying Mark 2:26 where he claims that Jesus made a mistake. 

You can judge for yourself whether or not Jesus made an error from a suggested solution here:  Bart Ehrman the Problem of Mark 2:26.  Of course this is not an issue of textual criticism per se but rather a problem of whether or not there are errors in the Bible.  Another reason Ehrman gives for leaving the faith and becoming an agnostic is the problem of evil and human suffering:  Leaving the Faith.  Although Ehrman considers himself merely an agnostic and not an atheist, another well known philosopher who was raised in the Evangelical Lutheran church in Germany became an atheist after losing his father to illness and studying textual criticism.  His name was Friedrich Nietzsche.  (See:  Why Did Nietzsche Lose His Faith in God?)

Even Dr. Gordon H. Clark was inconsistent on the issue of textual criticism or else he changed his views after thinking through the issues more thoroughly.  Dr. Clark never claimed to be an expert in textual criticism, yet his knowledge of the topic was greater than most laypersons or pastors.  As he himself said, textual criticism of the New Testament is a very complex and complicated field of study:

Unfortunately for the communicant members, even for the pastor, and for most of those who have recently graduated from seminary, something far more difficult and complicated hides beneath the English versions. Not only should a translation be accurate, as many are not, but even more important, the Greek text to be translated should be accurate, or as accurate as possible. Toward the end of the last century, Westcott and Hort substituted a different Greek text, and this development has carried over to the present date. Nearly all the modern versions are based on a text that differs in a thousand ways from the Greek underlying the King James. This new development must be carefully considered.

Because of the vexations and innumerable complexities of the problem--did I say 1000 discrepancies? make it 3000 in the Gospels alone--textual criticism is a very difficult and delicate procedure, quite unsuited to the purposes of the present study and admittedly beyond the competence of the present writer. The scholar’s material includes five thousand New Testament manuscripts, several ancient versions, and hundreds of quotations in the early church fathers. Such a mass of complications, requiring knowledge of a half dozen or more ancient languages, is no playground for the ordinary church member--nor for the pastors, who are supposed to know both Greek and Hebrew. But even the church member, since the text of the Bible is so important, ought to know at least a little bit about the sources of the many Bibles now being published.

Dr. Gordon H. Clark, “Logical Criticisms of Textual Criticism,” in Trinity Review, January-August 1984.

Dr. Clark made remarks concerning textual critical issues in several of the commentaries that he produced.  One notable place where he comments on textual issues is whether 1 Timothy 3:16 says "God" was manifested in the flesh or whether the text says "who" was manifested in the flesh:

3:16b

Who appeared in the flesh, was justified by the Spirit, was seen by angels, was preached among the nations, was believed by the world, was received up into glory.

The first word of the phase  is “who.”  Some manuscripts have the word “God.”  In the manuscripts the two words, especially when God is abbreviated, look very much alike.  The modern critical texts are presumably correct in deciding for the relative pronoun.  Alford defends it with both enthusiasm and in detail.  However, the change in the sense is much less than some interpreters think.  These seem to say that who refers to Christ, while God would not.  But who cannot refer to Christ in any grammatical sense because the previous mention of Christ Jesus is too far back.  Who must refer to God, mentioned twice in the previous verse.  The sense, however, is the same, for if God was manifested in the flesh, this still refers to Jesus.  It must, because only Jesus, not the Father, came in the flesh.  Since who as a relative refers to God, once again God is Jesus for the same reason.  It is not the word God versus the word who that determines the sense; it is the phrase, “was manifested in the flesh.”  Both texts identify Jesus with God.  Incidentally, who cannot refer to mystery because mustērion is neuter, and who is masculine.

Dr. Gordon H. Clark.  The Pastoral Epistles: The Works of Gordon Haddon Clark. Volume 15.  1 Timothy.  1983.  (Trinity Foundation, 1998).  Pp. 46-47.

The problem is that Dr. Clark later wrote an article defending the Majority Text rather than the eclectic reasoned approach to textual criticism.  [See: Clark, "Logical Criticisms of Textual Criticism,"  Trinity Review January/August 1984].  B. B. Warfield, due to his exposure to the doctrine of common grace, opted for the evidentialist rather than the presuppositionalist approach to apologetics.  Because of that axiom of evidentialism, Warfield sought to prove by external and internal evidences what was in the original autographs.  Warfield adopted the Westcott and Hort theory of textual criticism which remains in place with few changes today even among many conservative scholars.  Dr. Clark seems to have earlier on accepted the approach of Warfield and then changed his mind.  The article on the logical problems with the principles of textual criticism was written presumably in 1984, a year after his remarks in the commentary on the pastoral epistles.

I personally do not believe it is possible to hold to plenary verbal inspiration while rejecting the doctrine of the providential preservation of the text of the Scriptures throughout the ages as the Westminster Confession of Faith asserts.  It is equally impossible to believe in plenary verbal inspiration and hold to the doctrine of a reasoned eclecticism.  To hold to reasoned eclecticism would mean that no Protestant had an inerrant Bible until recent times when the modern liberal and Evangelical scholars discovered new manuscripts and fragments of manuscripts and then reconstructed the puzzle pieces together.  The problem is that science is ever changing and never arrives at the truth.  Every few years the critical editions of the Greek New Testament change the critical apparatuses in the Nestle Aland edition and the United Bible Societies edition of the Greek New Testament.  There is a strong push even among Evangelical textual critics to remove the longer ending to Mark 16 and the pericope adulterae in John 7:53-8:11.  The King James Version of the Bible may not be an inspired translation, but it was and still is the most popular and the most read translation of the Bible for over 400 years, not to mention that the Geneva Bible of 1599 is based on the same Textus Receptus as the KJV.  I am not a KJV only person, but I think it is hypocritical of James White and Daniel Wallace to accuse those who still read and use the KJV and those who agree more with the Majority Text of being KJV only just because they happen to disagree with the eclectic critical approach.

I think it matters very much if 1 Timothy 3:16 says God or who.  Who is not specific and God is very specific.  Most inerrantists and those who hold to plenary verbal inspiration point to the word seed in Galatians as a defense.  In that text it makes a huge difference whether the word is seed or seeds:  Now to Abraham and his Seed were the promises made. He does not say, "And to seeds," as of many, but as of one, "And to your Seed," who is Christ. (Galatians 3:16 NKJV).

Even if we can defend the incarnation from other passages in the Scripture or from the immediate context as Dr. Clark showed above, textual criticism still undermines the inerrancy of the Scriptures and plenary verbal inspiration because often even one little word can change the whole meaning of that passage and of the Bible as a whole.  Reasoned eclecticism undermines the doctrine of plenary verbal inspiration because it says that we can never reach any final conclusions about what the text says.  The Byzantine platform, on the other hand, says that aside from spelling errors and such we do have an established Greek textual platform and that platform is the Byzantine Majority Text.

Also, it is a bit hypocritical of James White and Daniel Wallace to criticize the Majority Text while at the same time bragging about the embarrassment of riches regarding the manuscript evidence since the majority of that evidence is from the Byzantine Majority Text, not the Alexandrian text-type.  Sometimes I think these Evangelicals should go all the way and emasculate their faith the way Bart Ehrman did.  As a youth most of the preachers I heard on television and radio used the King James Version.  I grew up reading the KJV, although at the time I knew little about Greek or Hebrew or textual criticism.  I still remember most of the verses I memorized from the KJV.  As a child in school we said the Lord’s prayer every morning.  The Gideons gave out pocket New Testaments with the Psalms in the KJV edition at the beginning of every school year from first grade to about the fourth grade.  That is no longer the case because the atheists and the secular humanists are on the aggressive and militant move to erase every vestige of biblical Christianity from the public realm.  As I see it the Evangelical movement is aiding and abetting the enemy by promoting modern translations based on the eclectic text platform.  That approach in fact undermines a history of over 400 years of reading and studying the translations based on the Textus Receptus and, by implication, the Byzantine Majority Text.  When James White, D. A. Carson, Daniel Wallace and others attack the Majority Text approach instead of admitting that their approach undermines plenary verbal inspiration they are in fact helping the left to weaken and undermine Evangelicalism as a whole and the Reformed churches in particular.  The English Standard Version is probably the worst modern translation out there.  The New American Standard Bible is much better yet the so-called Evangelical Reformed movement has adopted the ESV, a translation that is at best a revision of the liberal Revised Standard Version.

It is my opinion that unless we adopt the axiom of Scripture as our beginning point or axiom there is no Christianity left.  In fact, Dr. Gordon H. Clark argued that very point in his lecture on biblical inerrancy where he said:

It would be possible also to quote the Belgic Confession of 1561, the Second Helvetic Confession, and numerous other documents. You may look them up yourselves. They all say the same thing. Therefore my final point is that verbal and plenary inspiration, that is the infallibility or inerrancy of the whole Bible, is an essential part and in fact the formal principle of Protestantism. One is not a Protestant or evangelical simply because he is not a Romanist. Obviously Hindus are not Protestants. Neither are Unitarians. A Protestant or evangelical is one who believes evangelical doctrine. Therefore no one who rejects the verbal and plenary inspiration of Scripture can properly and historically call himself a Protestant. Such a one may not assign all authority to the Pope. Such a one may belong to a non­-Roman church, but such a one locating the ultimate religious authority elsewhere than in the Scripture is not an evangelical Christian.

Dr. Gordon H. Clark, “The Inerrancy of the Bible,”  The Gordon H. Clark Foundation.  P. 10.   Audio transcript.

Earlier in the same lecture, Dr. Clark said with emphasis:

The fully developed liberal theologian could very well admit that Scripture itself asserts its own inerrancy. But then add that this is just another of the long list of Scriptural blunders. The theologian who has just begun to the edge away from the position of historic protestantism and still wishes to be known as an evangelical, is more cautious. He is not willing to speak of a long list of Scriptural blunders. He has only two or three difficulties, two or three insignificant places where the Bible has unfortunately missed the exact truth. But let me point out, with force, that the theological position is the same in both cases. Whether the list of blunders is long or short, both these theologians contradict Christ who said, “The Scripture cannot be broken.” The liberal and the pseudo-­evangelical both repudiate Christ as well as the Scripture. To answer the liberal would require a long treatise on archaeology covering each point in this list, in his list. Archaeology has done remarkably well in this regard. And I have no time now to recount the numerous instances in which archaeological discoveries have forced the liberals to retract their accusations. But to the pseudo­-evangelical who has just left the historic position of Protestantism, I wish to say this: If the Bible is in error in the hundreds of places where it speaks of its own inspiration, if the Bible is a hundred times mistaken about its own nature, what confidence can we have that it is not mistaken about the nature of God? If we cannot accept its view of itself, why should we accept its view on the atonement, the resurrection, justification, or anything else? Our only knowledge of redemption, regeneration, heaven and hell comes from the Bible. Give up the Bible and no Christianity remains, none at all. I hope my voice carries about 2000 miles. 

Ibid., p. 5-6.

If the Bible is our axiom, then we must also adopt an axiomatic view of textual criticism.  Either we can adopt the axioms of the liberal textual critics who did not believe the Bible is God’s inspired word—as many pseudo-Evangelicals have done today—or we can adopt the view that God has indeed inspired every single word of the Bible and that He has likewise providentially preserved the autographs in the Majority text platform or the Byzantine text-type.  There really is no room for error.  One of these two approaches is wrong and the other is right or both are wrong.  The eclectic approach submits the Bible to rationalism and modernist attacks through both higher and lower biblical criticism.  The reasoned eclectic approach rejects supernaturalism and even attacks the resurrection accounts in regards to the longer ending to Mark’s Gospel.  But my question is how do these critics know they are right unless they are claiming that they are infallible and that the axioms of textual criticism are infallibly correct?  Are these men omniscient?

Just as we do not have the ark of the covenant or relics of the cross or even the location of Noah’s ark, we do not need the original autographs to know what the autographs contained because the Majority Text—even with its shortcomings—is the most reliable basis for our modern translations available.  It is time for Evangelicals to wake up to the subversion by the eclectic textual criticism movement and the secular ownership of many Christian Bible publishers and see the deception that has crept into the Evangelical and Reformed movement.  To place our confidence anywhere other than the Bible is dangerous, even if that confidence is placed in Bible translation committees and Evangelical scholars who have been influenced by liberal approaches to Scripture.

As an anecdotal illustration of my point, when I was a Bible college graduate I wanted to continue on to earn my master of divinity.  I was Pentecostal at the time but wanted to go to an Evangelical and Wesleyan school which still believed in biblical inerrancy.  I chose Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky because the school catalog said that the seminary upheld the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.  To my chagrin I soon learned that this did not mean that the seminary believed in verbal plenary inspiration and inerrancy.  The official statement of faith of the seminary is deliberately misleading:

Scripture

In the divine inspiration, truthfulness and authority of both the Old and New Testaments, the only written Word of God, without error in all it affirms. The Scriptures are the only infallible rule of faith and practice. The Holy Spirit preserves God’s Word in the church today and by it speaks God’s truth to peoples of every age;  . . .

Asbury Theological Seminary:  Statement of Faith

I was astonished to learn from several of my professors that the Bible does not affirm everything in the Bible.   Only the theological concepts of the Bible are without error and inspired, not every word in the Bible I was told by Dr. John Walters, professor of New Testament.  Another professor, Dr. Lawson Stone of the Old Testament department with a post graduate degree from Princeton, said that Genesis 1-11 is inspired saga, myth and legend.  His class utilized extensive photocopied articles from Gerhard Von Rad’s  Old Testament Theology, which advocated the neo-orthodox view of the Old Testament as well as the documentary theory of the Hexateuch and other higher critical views of the Old Testament.  Professor Robert Mulholland taught a class in which the students presented a paper that said that the sacraments were adopted from the Roman mystery religions including Mithraism.  In another class I had Dr. Jerry Walls for Christian philosophy.  After hearing Wolfhart Pannenberg lecture on the historical resurrection at the Asbury chapel, I approached Dr. Walls in his office to complain that Pannenberg did not really believe in the resurrection.  Dr. Walls assured me that Pannenberg did believe in the resurrection.  I was confused because in the lecture all Pannenberg talked about was the empty tomb as an historical event and he openly said that the apostle Paul did not see Jesus himself but only had a vision of Christ.  For Pannenberg the other Gospel accounts of a physical and bodily resurrection of Christ did not count.  Only the spiritual resurrection of Christ mattered and that resurrection was only witnessed by way of a vision, not a literal resurrection.  I was still in doubt so I bought Pannenberg’s book, Jesus—God and Man, and read it.  Sure enough Pannenberg did not believe in the physical and bodily resurrection, so his claim to believe in the historicity of the empty tomb and the resurrection was based on Paul’s vision, not a belief in the plenary verbal inspiration of Scripture:

The conclusion that one must reckon with appearances of the resurrected Jesus actually experienced by the apostles does not yet permit us to say anything about what sort of experiences these may have been.  At this point the greatest difficulties begin to arise.

First, the question about the content of the appearances must be posed.  Also, here one must begin with Paul, for, on the one hand, the reports of the Gospels with their tendency to underscore the corporeality of the encounters offer no firm basis for historical considerations, especially since in this tendency they stand in contrast to Paul.  On the other hand, Paul himself apparently presupposed in I Cor., ch. 15, that the appearance that happened to him had been of the same kind as those imparted to the other apostles.

For the question about the probable nature of the appearance of the resurrected Lord to Paul, the accounts in Acts (footnote #86) are usable only insofar as they are in agreement with Paul’s own statements in Gal. 1:12 and 16 f.  Here five elements can be set forth. First, the relation of the appearance to the man Jesus has been clear to Paul.  God has revealed his Son to him (Gal. 1:16); Paul has seen the Lord Jesus Christ ( I Cor. 9:1).  Second, we have already established that Paul must have seen a spiritual body, a sōma pneumatikon, on the road to Damascus, not a person with an earthly body. 

Wolfhart Pannenberg.  Jesus—God and Man.  1968. Second Edition.  Translated by Lewis L. Wilkins and Duane A. Priebe.  (Philadelphia:  Westminster Press, 1977).  P. 92.

I for one do not like being misled whether the misleading is being done by snake oil salesmen in the Pentecostal and Charismatic movement or by fake Evangelicals in a fake Evangelical seminary.  To say the least it was a bit disappointing to learn that Asbury did not believe what it said it believed in the catalog.   I matriculated at Asbury in 1992 and graduated in 1995.

As further indication of the compromises being made by Asbury I offer the following dispute between the proponent of reasoned eclectic textual criticism, Dr. D. A. Carson of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and Dr. Ben Witherington of Asbury Seminary during a meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in 2013:

In a panel discussion with Witherington, Donald Carson of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School challenged some of Witherington’s discomfort with the term inerrancy, advocating a “rigorous and sophisticated understanding” of it, rooted in church fathers such as Jerome and Augustine. He noted that some who don’t like the term are still “supernaturalists” and “de facto they are functioning on the inerrancy side.”

Witherington responded that too often he doesn’t hear inerrancy presented with Carson’s sophistication. “I don’t object to the term of inerrancy,” Witherington stressed, saying he “happily” had signed faith statements at Asbury and Gordon Conwell Seminaries stipulating to it. “I prefer truth. This book tells us the truth.”

In a postmodern and “biblically illiterate age,” Witherington said there is widespread misunderstanding about the definition of “error,” which requires explanation and possible death by a “1000 qualifications.” So he prefers to speak of the Bible’s “truthfulness and trustworthiness.”

Wary of post modernity’s “radical subjectivity” and “denial of the importance of history,” Witherington said, “If Jesus did not rise from the dead on Easter Sunday morning then we should all go home.” Witherington emphasized that Scripture teaches theology, ethics and history, “interwoven” together, and readers “can’t parse them out.”

Preferring to speak of “defending the faith,” rather than defending the Bible, Witherington still affirmed the need for upholding the “truth claims of Scripture,” such as the “virginal birth” of Jesus’ mother. Understanding the historical context strengthens the truth claims, he said, pointing out that the Apostles knew their story was potentially problematic because it provoked “claims of illegitimacy” by skeptics, yet still they proclaimed its truth.

Mark Tooley, “Methodist Addresses Evangelical Scholars on Biblical Inerrancy.”  Juicy Ecumenism:  The Institute on Religion & Democracy’s Blog.

I seriously doubt Dr. Witherington’s commitment to the plenary verbal inspiration of Scripture due to the anecdotal evidence I cite above during my seminary training at Asbury.  His hedging remarks on inerrancy are fairly obvious, since he could legitimately reject the Gospel accounts of a physical and bodily resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, while at the same time accepting the neo-orthodox account of Pannenberg’s theory that the resurrection is an inspired saga and that the apostle Paul and the other witnesses merely experienced a visionary encounter with a “spiritual body” -- although Pannenberg also says that Paul also had auditory experiences.  Dr. Gordon H. Clark gives a serious critique of neo-orthodoxy in his book, Karl Barth’s Theological Method, which I highly recommend.  I could give numerous other anecdotal accounts of things I heard at Asbury Seminary that made me doubt the seminary’s legitimate claim to be Evangelical so I will move on.  

The irony, however, is that Dr. Gordon H. Clark helped found the Evangelical Theological Society on the basis of biblical inerrancy, and yet we have apparently neo-orthodox “Evangelicals”—an oxymoron—speaking there.  By the standards of the Evangelical Theological Society neither Ben Witherington nor Asbury Theological Seminary meets the doctrinal requirement for membership in the Evangelical Theological Society, which requires commitment to the following:

"The Bible alone and the Bible in its entirety is the word of God written, and therefore inerrant in the autographs."    

Quoted from:  Dr. Gordon H. Clark, "Hamilton's Theory of Language and Inspiration,"  Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 15.  1 (Winter 1972): 39-51. 

I said all this to lead up to my last point.  Does James White and Daniel Wallace believe in plenary verbal inspiration of the Bible or are they hedging?  That is a legitimate question to ask.   James White at least does profess to believe in the plenary verbal inspiration of Scripture when commenting on the Chicago Statement of Biblical Inerrancy:

. . . we need not abandon our belief in the inspiration of the very words of Scripture. The same God who created all things, who upholds all things by the word of His power, who made the mind and tongue of man, and who works all things after the counsel of His will, is able to decree both the ends (the final form of Scripture, to its very text) and the means (the experiences and contexts and languages of the men He used). Can we record this divine process on film, chart it, demonstrate it through some kind of electronic instrument? Surely not, but a God who by speaking can create light itself is not beyond using His creation in such a fashion.

James R. White.  Scripture Alone (Kindle Locations 1097-1101). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

I will not go any further here; however, I will confess that James White is light years better than Ben Witherington.  Logically speaking, though, I think it is an outright contradiction to affirm that the autographs are inspired and plenarily and verbally inerrant while at the same time advocating for a reasoned eclecticism that is constantly changing with the shifting sands of higher and lower biblical criticism.  The reasoned eclecticism view of the Bible undermines the doctrine of plenary verbal inspiration and inerrancy whether or not its advocates acknowledge it to be so or not.  An ever changing science of textual criticism that is based on irrational axiomatic presuppositions undermines the authority and inspiration of Holy Scripture.  

 Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. (2 Tim. 3:7 KJV)

Charlie J. Ray, M. Div.