A cold splash take on James White (and really all similar Critical Text scholars and defenders)

A Canadian correspondent's take on James White:

"My overall impression of White is that he has lost faith, he appears lost. His arguments are not rooted in a growing faith born from an inspired understanding of the scriptures. Rather they come across as arguments of a world-centred man. Contrast him to a Sproul or some of those that he mocks and this becomes clear."


W.

My correspondent is not saying White has ever mocked Sproul, he was making a one-to-one comparison between the two; then he went on to mention those White mocks, usually true believers, zealous for a Holy Spirit preserved, inerrant Bible; zealous to defend it against the mocking and scorn of the world, most notably the seminary indoctrinated and the various priesthood of scholars.

"His arguments are not rooted in a growing faith born from an inspired understanding of the scriptures."

This sentence is well put. He's talking of White's views on the manuscripts issues. Basically whether or not there is error in the word of God. You never want to question the work of the Holy Spirit in another person, but when a person is a public Christian teacher telling others there is error in the Bible and mocking and laughing and intimidating with scorn and other means anyone who holds a different view...that is a foundational area of the faith, the word of God...and that person, the one saying there is error in the Bible, is the one questioning the work of the Holy Spirit.

I left this comment on another blog:

People can't figure White out because he seems truly born again when he speaks on political and social issues, as when he speaks to doctrinal positions other than the foundational issues regarding the word of God itself.

This can be the flaw of Christians who take a solely academic approach to the faith, perhaps. I say solely.

It can also be due to a mental or emotional issue such as a narcissism disorder, and this would play into it this way: the Bible is something we *must* look up to and put ourselves under, in a no playing games about it way. A narcissist who by nature can't be taught anything can get around that regarding learning doctrine because there is room to satisfy vanity in seeing the true doctrine amidst a wildly overgrown field of ancient and modern error. Yeah, he learned from systematic theologians x, y, and z, but that is small compared to his own effort and ability to separate out the wheat from the tares regarding doctrinal truth. He *can't*, though, so easily dismiss the existence of the source and authority of that doctrine. The best he can do to *get above* that is to adopt the pose that it really is he that determines ultimately what the Bible says. To stand above the text and be a mediator between it and the ignorant masses. His narcissism is well taken care of now, and everything is right with his world.

Your posts are very on the mark. You're particularly good at pointing out White's unconscious adoption of postmodernist academic rhetoric and approach and attitude [comment was to Kent Brandenburg]. It's these elements - including the emoting, theatrical affectation of voice and body language (the eye rolling, etc.) that I find most curious regarding how seemingly approving his defenders are regarding it.

As for always bringing up so-called KJVOs, the Critical Text defenders first tactic is to get their opponents to *concede* error in the word of God. It's a very 16th century Counter-Reformation move on their part.

Biblical formula

This is how the word of God conforms us: accept the hard truth, against all the demands of your fallen nature, and allow it to change you internally.

Examples: the doctrines of grace, election, predestination, man being born with sin yet being responsible for that sin, God being sovereign in creation, providence, and grace, while man is still responsible for all thoughts, words, and deeds. On and on. Everything in the Bible, in biblical doctrine, that is hard to accept. See it, accept it, value it. When you do it changes you internally. It makes you God centered rather than man-centered.

You have to get above yourself. You have to be savvy to get above yourself. You can't do it by conforming everything to the level of your mind. If not doing that people will gladly conform themselves to a false teaching. Conform yourself to the actual word of God. The thing you most don't want to conform yourself to. Go against your demands and desires and preferences and opinions and attitudes and resentments, and do that.

And don't let the naysayers wave off mystery, as if mystery is some kind of weak out for a Bible-believing Christian. The Bible has a ceiling of mystery on various teachings and doctrines. Deut. 29:29 gets at this. Accepting mystery when the Bible leaves something at mystery is the same as accepting a hard truth doctrine.

Open note to Robert Truelove

This is an open note to Robert Truelove, Pastor of Christ Reformed Church in Lawrenceville, GA (which is how he signs himself at the Puritanboard forum).

Regarding your video answering James White's video... You don't have to spend 10 minutes at the beginning telling us you are lukewarm. We got it. You're lukewarm. Move the thing along. Maybe I should say I realize that you don't know that you are lukewarm, otherwise you wouldn't consider it to be such a sophisticated, threading of the needle position. No, it's a hand-wringing position of a person who fears being anything other than lukewarm (as I wrote that I recall you actually wring your hands in the video). Now look up the word lukewarm in the KJV.

James White, by the way, is Mr. By-Ends in Pilgrim's Progress. You're dealing with a person who uses religion to serve his needs. He needed to be called 'Dr.' so bad that he bought a PhD. from a diploma mill, for instance. In his defense PhD.'s are given out in seminaries these days like dentists give out lollypops; so his is as good as any other, for the most part. His needs, though, include his narcissism which he has to a disorder level. Somebody with narcissism to a disorder level can't be taught anything, including from Scripture. Everything has to be mentally manipulated to an angle where the narcissist can feel he is not being taught and has never been taught. Thus, he appropriates doctrine as having its genesis within the being of James White. I.e. true biblical doctrine is true because it is grounded in what James White "has always taught." And, his approach to Scripture is of the nature of: it needs him more than he needs it. He stands above it. Looks down on it. Actually constructs it. Decrees what it is and what it isn't. Not much different from the modern student of post-modernist critical theory...let's call her Humorless Emily...who stands above all texts her professor presents her with and inflicts deconstructionist violence on the text with a presupposition that she is inherently in possession of greater understanding than the (usually) dead white male author she has under her and in her power.

What Humorless Emily does to Shakespeare, James White does to the Holy Spirit and the Word of the Living God.

Meanwhile with the A. V. 1611, or even the Geneva, you have the real thing, pure and whole, you can hold in your hand, no scholar mediator, the pure and whole Word of God

James White is finally having to answer critics' accusations that he and the Critical Text industry are basically not just reviving the Counter-Reformation of the 16th century, but they are giving Muslims propaganda to feed to the world that the Holy Bible is full of errors and needs dopes like James White to construct it correctly and tell everybody what the Word of God actually is.

What White does in the video is what evolutionists do, a bait and switch. Evolutionists talk about micro evolution (which nobody disputes including dog breeders back in ancient Mesopotamia) as if they are talking about macro evolution (fish turning into race horses) which has never been observed or proven or gone beyond Kiplingesque 'Just So' stories; how the camel got its hump, how the elephant got its trunk.

White and his peers - shallow academic Christian Critical Text scholars - talk about the need to edit a manuscript, any manuscript, as if that is the same thing as *constructing* a manuscript from diverse sources, which is what the Critical Text industry is engaged in doing over and over with no end in sight. A manuscript received from a common stream of manuscripts still has to be edited, but that is not the same thing as *constructing* a manuscript from sources each being alien to the other. Not to mention sources that are cartoonishly corrupt in their readings, mutilated, and not in agreement with each other to the extent of being a bad joke (or an evil joke).

A common denominator among these Critical Text scholars is an obvious lack of belief in the supernatural. Notice White never mentions the Holy Spirit when discussing manuscripts and their preservation. He and his peers are also very shallow regarding literature in general. They've never spent time with world literature in a way where a person becomes initiated and is able to discern the difference between a work that seemed to come into existence through time and mystery, organically, like the Homeric epics vs. literary epics composed by known poets in a known time and place. The edge where a body of work such as Shakespeare bleeds into mystery school and sources unknown to academic research. C. S. Lewis famously said to the James White types, paraphrasing: Give me a notion that you know the difference between myth and folk tale before you lecture me about genres in the Bible. I.e. Lewis knew the academic types who lecture to people on things like the biblical manuscripts were shallow regarding literature and thus had little to no discernment for such things.

As stated, couple that with a mostly silent lack of belief in the supernatural and you see the spiritual deadness they sell and try to enforce on Christians and Christian institutions.

I won't get into how White emotes and pulls words like a cinematic bad guy priest/inquisitor ("Cerrrrtainly my oppooooonents would haaaave to conceeeeede that there are many textual variants in theeeey're so-call inerrent Biiibles..."

Meanwhile Muslims giddily use him as an 'authority' that the Christian Bible has error and cannot be trusted. At least without Mr. White telling us what the Christian Bible actually says. At least for today. Because it changes with each new arrival of their official Critical Text 'editions.'

Two real signs of the end

Here are two real, observable, quantifiable signs of the end:

1. The Devil and his spiritual children asserting dominion over the entire world. There is only a finite amount of real estate in this world. The Devil and his children are now making headway into lands historically protected from their presence.

2. In previous eras which were nadirs of degeneracy there was a receptivity to the truth. The ancient world wanted and accepted the truth of Christianity. During the Reformation there was a receptivity to the recovered truth of the word of God and apostolic doctrine. Yet in this current nadir of degeneracy we don't see that receptivity to the truth, let alone a desire for it. Yes, there has been tremendous satanic activity to bring people down, but opportunity to know the truth is also everywhere. We seem to be in a time when the births of God's elect are fewer and fewer. The mass lunacy and willful, trollish mocking and hatred of God make this world feel like hell itself. It doesn't have the feel of God's remnant being its usual small number vs. a world of the unregenerate that naturally has larger numbers. It feels like human jackals and hyenas and evil clowns and soul-dead jokers are being vomited out of vaginas in large numbers as a precursor to a final act of redemptive consummation.

What I would say to the street sweeper

My response to that last post would be: we have to make ourselves *able* to not only be in communication with God (and His messengers) but also to be directed by His will. If we're sleepwalking through life we can't complain that God isn't giving us guidance, or guiding us.

How do we not sleepwalk through life? It's what no Christian leaders or educators talk about; certainly not at a truly practical level.

The command, or teaching, to be constantly watchful, and to pray without ceasing, give biblical warrant to the practice of being awake above the common waking-sleep level where all of humanity resides, street sweeper to surgeon.

There is no better explication of the practice than in the Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution. Ouspensky was one of the early debunkers of the Theory of Evolution, mocking the very idea of mechanical evolution, so don't be thrown by the word evolution in that title.

Personally I'm doing marathon efforts with this. Tired of the endless talk and reading and taking in of same old knowledge (can't pour new wine into an old bottle)...i.e. you have to increase *capacity* for understanding to increase understanding. Knowledge plus being equals understanding. Work merely on the knowledge side alone and you stagnate if not start going backward.

I have some experience with this. Been through initiation, through the trenches. This is partly why I come across as crazy to the mainstream environment. Some people think it puts you in the realm of demons. We're already in the realm of demons. Definitely it's a Pilgrim's Progress sort of activity and journey, and as Bunyan clearly presented it, not for everybody. The Homeric epics, Iliad and Odyssey, embody the practice and teaching as a whole as well. It can be dangerous, I have to say. Unfortunately on the spiritual battlefield we're naked or half-armed before we realize the necessity for the full armor of God, Ephesians 6:10-18.

Screed of a withered old street sweeper

Day after day, all this talk and words...talking out the same things, reading the same things... Once you get to a certain point the enthusiasm of discovery is no longer there, and you go over old ground over and over...and what is missing? What is missing is the missing element of moving up. I.e. we've attained to a new level of understanding, yet we stay in the same freaking level. We don't move up. And there is no guidance on that...no communication. OK, I heard the call, I read the Bible seven times, I learned doctrine, came to see it, accept it, value it, at the hard truth orthodox level... I can see evil in myself, in the world around me...I discern good and evil, I value good, I hate evil...I've developed in other ways...it all has separated me out from the world...I could no more be part of the world now than the world could be where I'm at. Now what? Where is the guidance now? We get ground down and smashed to see our own nothingness...we die, and then are born again...but we are in tatters. All our sin we'd blacked out we now see, so we hate ourselves. We can't fit back in with the world on its terms, which are the only terms it allows. Obviously this is not a father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister talking. You don't get to where I'm at being those things. This is a Jesus follower. Who is my mother? my brothers and sisters? Not these of the world. We don't move up. Maybe we're supposed to be killed by now. In any school there are levels...grades...or just graduation at least. In this school you are crushed, born again, given teaching, then seemingly set outside in a world that no longer matches what you've become. No churches aren't the answer, they're more worldly than the world...and shallow. No evangelism isn't the answer. God uses people who are still a little a part of the world to evangelize, who can still connect. I'm a toxic freaking monster compared to evangelists I see. I took the full drought. Show me where freaks like me who take the full draught are supposed to go. Let me rephrase that: I GOT the full draught. What is this...gum wrappers...

Addendum to that last post

This is why I've never had a problem with the term Calvinism. It's not just about a single man. That is the term though that captures the bigger vision. I even see symbolism of the mountains and high ground of Switzerland as significant as a counterpart to the seven hills of Rome, but also to Switzerland's history of being a natural fortress that produced effective soldiers and defenders of that realm. I also have seen the power of seeing Calvin and Calvinism as the prophet of the mountain in contra-distinction to the Islamic prophet of the desert. Calvin and Calvinism even matches the plain warrior ethos associated with early Islam. Calvinism, Puritanism, in the bigger vision these are the names of the true spiritual warfare approach of the living faith. The only thing that can stand against and transcend the forces of darkness and evil on this spiritual battlefield.

Something I've always seen comes more into focus

Quick point... Reading Abraham Kuyper really for the first time. I could always kind of sense when a writer or theologian was not sound, and I'd always had that impression of Kuyper; so never really read anything by him until now. Now I'm reading his Lectures on Calvinism, being directed to them by something I came across in a lot of worldview material I've been reading lately.

Reading the first lecture I found it very impressive, for about three quarters of the way. Then I could see why Kuyper is kind of not fully in the main ranks of Reformed theologians. He just gets a little soft-headed, like a modern liberal type. 1. Islam was Christianity's teacher (he states); 2. Race mixing makes for strong culture and nations. Well, OK, I suppose in some ways, but it also seems to make for giving birth to a lot of demon-infested hybrids too (or maybe that's just where I live, or the news I read).

But in the first part of Lecture One he makes a very striking observation; a powerful one I could 'see' immediately upon reading it: he speaks of life systems (kind of his synonym for worldviews) and sees in our era (he was speaking at the turn of the 20th century, but it still applies to today) five strong types of life systems:

1. Paganism
2. Islamism
3. Romanism
4. Modernism

and,

5. Calvinism.

Yes, Calvinism. Not Protestantism, but specifically Calvinism. And he is very good at defining what he means by Calvinism, but you just have to read that.

What I saw in this was what I've always seen in specifically Calvinism. I've always seen it as like a suit of armor. Like a complete, real, enveloping body of armor that one goes through life with. And what further impressed me was how Kuyper set Calvinism in contra-distinction to Modernism, accurately setting the genesis of Modernism in the horrifically demoniacal and atheist (not to mention obnoxiously ignorant) French Revolution.

He also talks about the subject of how more than a few truly great historians of the past stated that John Calvin was really the Founding Father of the United States. I always understood that statement that could be so easily misunderstood, and Kuyper sees why historians have said that: it's why the American Revolution was so different from its contemporary revolution, the aforementioned French Revolution.

It's always amusing when atheists try and try and try to frame the American Revolution as Deist/Atheist all the while ignoring the big fact that *their* revolution, the atheistic French Revolution, happened almost contemporaneously. That is the atheist revolution par excellence, in all its stupendous idiocy and terroristic bloodletting ending in fully expected (by any observer with a three digit I.Q.) tyranny. In this case military control.

So Kuyper sets Modernism (which came from the French Revolution) against Calvinism showing the fruits of both in world history (not least in the American Revolution and system of government in the United States), and one can see how today both life systems are still present and in conflict (Modernism having the numbers of course).

This is why I would kind of see old books of Calvinist doctrine in imagery of chainmail. That could be mocked easily by anyone, an unintended metaphor, whatever, I mean it as seeing Calvinism as a complete armored position on the spiritual battlefield. And, oh, by the way, the fact that it was merely hard truth, on-the-mark, apostolic biblical doctrine was not just a bonus, but was kind of the point. Calvinism gives the complete armor of God, when armor is seen as doctrine; and it encompasses all of creation and culture.

This is a vision of Calvinism that the Calvinist churches don't have, by the way. This is a vision of Calvinism much bigger than what is taught in the Reformed seminaries today. It's something you have to feel in a battle sense and see in a culture sense. You have to have some real development to come into it. That Renaissance humanist element that the three great Protestant reformers (Luther, Zwingli, Calvin) exhibited and that is not mentioned much by modern day Reformed and Calvinist types.

In all my current worldview reading it becomes apparent that the two ground motives of any worldview are the Holy Spirit or the spirit of Satan. You can see that the Christian worldview writers kind of want to go off into philosophy play land but inevitably get pulled back to recognize that basic, foundational reality. If they are Christians. And if they are Christians to a spiritual battlefield level they will be Calvinists, and they too will see the basic types and how we are surrounded today by the soldiers dressed in the uniform of "No God Over Us!" Modernism.

Two hard facts

Christianity is reality, and here are two hard facts learned on the spiritual battlefield:

1. Doctrine is actual armor of God. A Christian will never see or understand or value this fact unless he or she sees it and experiences it on the actual spiritual battlefield. There is no arguing or constantly yearning for nuance and something new and beyond terminal understanding; i.e. you are on a battlefield and not only want but need real armor. Real hard truth biblical doctrine that offends your fallen nature. You don't care on the battlefield if your fallen nature is offended, you want and need real armor and a real weapon. Academic oriented Christians will never see or experience this. Especially ones who read that and respond: "So you're anti-intellectual?" You have to be spiritual warfare oriented in the faith. Regeneration effected by the Word and the Spirit puts you on the spiritual battlefield. Cleric and ritual does not.

2. No one will be in God's Kingdom - Heaven - who can't be trusted by God, and God knows what is in our hearts. We have to ask the question, "Can God trust me?" and be able to honestly (and with understanding) answer, "Yes, God can trust me." Christians who are still judging God; christians who still stand above the Word of God, affecting a stance that it needs them more than they need it; christians who give lip service to belief in the supernatural yet don't really believe in the supernatural; christians who really fear man and the world more than they fear God; these are not christians God can trust. These will not be in God's Kingdom. I.e. there's no screwing around at that point; God knows what's in your heart. You can't fake your way into the Kingdom.