His Reply to My Reply

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Originally Posted by dgscott4
I'm saying that many doctrines must be accepted by faith because they cannot be proven. Prove to me that Jesus saves. You can show me in the Bible, but you can't PROVE that your soul has been saved from Hell; you have to trust in Christ that He will do as He promised.

Yes, that is called faith in what the Scripture teaches. Scripture teaches that salvation is through Jesus Christ, and if I am in him, I will be saved. Can I empirically prove that I am in him? No, but such proof is irrelevant to faith.

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I can show you where God promised to preserve His Word in the Bible, and this is a doctrine, however I can't scientifically prove that He has done so (although there is much circumstantial evidence). I accept it by faith.

So far so good.

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You say that because there is no mention of the King James in God's Word, our belief that God has used the King James to preserve His Word in our age is not a Biblical doctrine. I don't believe that God spells out every detail in the Bible. We are told in James 1:2-3 "My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience." God doesn't give us the exhaustive list of trails we will face in life, but that doesn't change the doctrine that if we experience trials, it will work patience. If you said, "I'm experiencing a trial that is not listed in the Bible, therefore I don't believe it will produce patience," you would sound immature.

King James had nothing to do with preserving God's Word, but he had something to do with propagating it by authorizing a translation that he approved. Those are two different things.

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Likewise it's silly to expect that God would have spelled out the names of every version He would use to preserve His Word, but preservation is still a Biblical Doctrine so we can by faith believe that there must be the preserved Word of God available.

But the Word of God was not written in English, and the preserved Word therefore cannot be in English. God's Word was written down in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek -- to preserve it means to have it in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. An English translation is just that, a translation, and thus an essential modification to God's Word: the language was modified, and thus it is not a preservation of God's Word. A translation (if faithful) contains the same concepts and communicates the same thing as the original language Bible, but it has essentially changed on account of it being written in a new language. If it's in a new language, it goes without saying that it's not a preservation of the Bible. I'm not arguing that translations of the Bible are wrong; they are obviously necessary, but translations are for propagation, not preservation, as contemporary language inevitably changes.

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I don't understand why you are fighting this so hard, except that maybe you feel you would be looked down upon for accepting this Bible truth at face value. Let me assure you that you may lose some friends, but you will gain others and we all aren't as dumb as we look.

I do accept what the Bible says at face value, I just don't believe there is anything special regarding the King James Version as compared to any other faithful translation. A translation is a translation, and it's only as good as the translation is faithful to the original languages. Seeing as how I study the Bible in the original languages (and not in English), it's a moot point. Are you going to say that my Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek Bible isn't the preserved Word of God? Indeed, it's the only true preserved Word of God, because God didn't move men by the Holy Spirit to write in English -- English, of course, didn't even exist when the Bible was written. So, obviously, it would be impossible to claim that any English translation is a preservation of God's Word when God's Word was never originally written in English.