The Baptist Pillar © Brandon Bible Baptist Church 1992-Present www.baptistpillar.com
"...The church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth."
I Timothy 3:15
The Word That Scares
Many Fundamentalists
Allen P. Dickerson
"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." (Psalm 12:6-7)
In the last several years a number of fundamentalists have developed a real phobia for the word "militant" and have stripped it from their vocabulary; it is probably considered to be "unsophisticated".
Another word that seems to have a scary connotation is the word "preservation". Fundamentalists believe that God gave His precious word by divine inspiration in the original manuscripts, but lots of fundamentalists do not believe that God can preserve what He gave.
When you see the word "preservation", you are immediately referring to the authorized King James Version which is a true translation. The revisers and the paraphrasers who have butchered up the Word of God in creating the RSV, the MV, the NASV, the NEV, Good News for Modern Man, the NKJV and scores of other revisions and paraphrases certainly could most assuredly not lay claim to "preservation".
Fundamentalists say we have the inerrant Word of God; inerrancy demands preservation. The reason we have the perfect revelation of God in the original manuscripts is that God moved upon holy men, turning their mind into His laboratory and superintending the recording of His Word, thus giving it to us by His sovereign action.
It was later translated out of the original languages by brilliant, godly men, but by no means sinless men. If the product of these men's labors is called by we fundamentalists, an inerrant Bible, then somehow God must have preserved its purity and inerrancy for us.
I am convinced that when I step into my pulpit and say to God's people, open the Word of God with me to book, chapter and verse, I believe I have in my hands the very inspired, inerrant, preserved Word of God. Translation does not destroy inspiration.
I do not believe that the Authorized King James is the closest thing we have to the Word of God. I believe it is the Word of God.