'Correct' Spelling and the 1611 AV

A recent news report on the BBC caught our attention. A university lecturer, fed up with having to correct spelling mistakes, has suggested that English might be relaxed to allow some variation in spelling. This immediately causes us to think of the 1611 Authorised Version of the Bible that we have. Not an actual 1611 printing, we hasten to add, but the 1911 reprint. Back in 1611, English spelling was quite fluid, and as long as a word sounded right, the spelling was fine. Would it really be so bad to go back to the 17th century in this respect?

We give some examples chosen at random:

Number 34. 21: "Sonne" for 'Son'

Numbers 35.7: "Fourty" for 'Forty'

Exodus 4.4: "And the LORD said unto Moses, Put Forth thine hand and take it by the taile: and he put foorth his hand, and caught it." Note two different spellings of 'forth', and the 'e' on the end of 'tail'

Exodus 4.8: "And it shall come to passe, if they will not beleeve thee, neither harken unto the voice of the first signe, that they will beleeve the voice of the latter signe." Note spellings of 'pass', 'believe' and 'sign'

Exodus 4.9: "Powre" for 'pour'

John 3.7: "Marveile" for 'marvel'

John 3.11: "Verely, verely I say unto thee, we speake that we doe know, and testifie that wee have seen; and yee receive not our witnesse." Note that the number of 'e's in 'we' is a matter of indifference, the same is true of 'ye', and of any word with a terminal letter 'e'. The letter 'e' can be added to the end of a word or not, depending on how the writer feels. Note also variant spelling of 'testify'.

John 4.25: "Commeth" for 'cometh'

John 4.30: "Citie" for 'city'

2 Corinthians 810: "Yeere" for 'year'

Our intention is not to make fun of the 1611 AV. No, we quote it to add to the debate on how strict spelling rules ought to be. Would it really hurt to allow all these wonderful 17th century spellings to be used in modern English?


For those Americans interested in our spelling, we advise popping over to the BBC website here.

Todd Bentley 'fire' cooling

It seems that false prophet Todd Bentley's attempts to spread his strange fire through America have fallen a little flat. We pray that these failures will lead to his planned visit to the United Kingdom being cancelled.

We first heard of Bentley when he was praised from the pulpit (well, not the pulpit, it wasn't being used) of a chapel that we have preached from. Rather than instantly condemning the 'healings' when we heard of them, we looked into the Lakeland 'revival', and held back until we had certain proof that the screaming tattooed man who likes to kick sick people is a false teacher and a false prophet. We fist heard of him in connection with an alleged healing of a pastor with throat cancer. Since the man has not been healed, Bentley has given him false hope. The destruction of that false hope will be terrible, and we pray that it will not destroy the man who was told that he had been healed.

It is God's will that all of His people, save those who will be alive at the Second Advent, die. The cause of death will vary, but we will all, unless the Lord comes back first, die. We will all suffer sicknesses. God does not want us to live a healthy and wealthy life, he wants us to live a life of faith. Men like Todd Bentley undermine that faith when they falsely claim to speak for God.

How to Criticize those we disagree with

Michael Haykin has written an excellent post over at the Andrew Fuller Centre on the subject of criticizing Andrew Fuller. A quotation used by Dr. Haykin in the post struck us as particularly apt:

“Once for all, we must enter our protest against that system of wholesale condemnation, that will admit of nothing good in a man, if some part of his divinity system happen to be open to question.”

This is excellent advice, especially as it comes from a critic of Fuller. We have begun serious study of John Calvin in preparation for a lecture that we shall be giving in Surrey, God willing, some time next year, and if ever there was a man concerning whom the wise words of this old book review whom Haykin quotes were often broken, it is the Reformer of Geneva. From Jerome Bolsec through every sort of silly Arminian and Romanist, to Dave Hunt and Nelson Price (from the ridiculous to.. the ridiculous), Calvin has been besieged by all sorts of men who have decided that, because they do not agree with Calvin's theology, he must have been the greatest monster who ever lived.

It was therefore refreshing to receive by post this morning Volume 2 of the Cambridge Modern History (first published in 1903), which contains a delightful essay on Calvin and the Reformed Church by Principal A.M. Fairbairn of Mansfield College, Oxford (pictured). A lifelong Arminian and forthright critic of Calvin's theology (let it never be said we only read biographies of Calvin by Calvinists!), Fairbairn nevertheless refused to ignore the good that Calvin had done. Of Fairbairn's essay, his biographer, W.B. Selbie, writes:

"In Calvin Fairbairn had a subject altogether to his mind, and his study of him is among the best things he ever wrote. He always distinguished between the man and his system. Of the latter he had been a convinced and determined critic from the earliest days of his ministry. But he always recognised the great part it had played in the development of Christendom, and he would never suffer the good that was in it to be forgotten. For the man he had a genuine admiration. In describing him as one whose mind was the mind of Erasmus, while his faith and conscience were those of Luther, he struck a point of affinity with himself that could not fail to win his sympathy." (The Life of Andrew Martin Fairbairn [Hodder and Stoughton, 1914] Pp. 403-4)

Like Arminius himself, he lauded Calvin's work as a commentator to the skies. Indeed, We doubt that any Calvinist has been so immoderate in praise of Calvin:

"His services to the cause of sacred learning must not be forgotten. These it is hardly possible to exaggerate; he is the sanest of commentators, the most skilled of exegetes, the most reasonable of critics. He knows how to use an age to interpret a man, a man to interpret an age. His exegesis is never forced or fantastic; he is less rash and subjective in his judgments than Luther; more reverent to Scripture, more faithful to history, more modern in spirit. His work on the Psalms has much to make our most advanced scholars ashamed of the small progress we have made either in method or in conclusions. And his work is inspired by a noble belief; he thought that the one way to realise Christianity was by knowing the mind of Christ; that this mind was to be found in the Scriptures; and that to make them living and credible was to make indefinitely more possible its incorporation in the thoughts and Institutions of man." (Cambridge Modern history, Vol. 2 P. 376)

And what Calvinist can disagree with this Arminian? It warmed our heart to know that Calvin's personality and skill as a commentator had won the sincere admiration and regard of the Oxford scholar.

Tell the Minister!

Have you ever sat in a service and wanted to tell the minister afterwards that something he said confused you, or that you disagree with something he said? Probably. But have you actually done so? We do not mean in a mean-spirited, fault-finding way, but sincerely. If you have held back, we submit that you were wrong. Ministers need critics, not the nasty sort, but those who are genuinely concerned for the effectiveness of the Gospel ministry. We tend to develop bad habits over time, and it is only constructive criticism (we count personal remarks about the minister as out of court and unhelpful) that will allow us to spot these bad habits and correct them. So take care of your minister, and remember, unless he is completely self-centred and a fool, he will thank you for criticism. What he will not thank you for is holding back.

Despite rumours to the contrary, and claims by those who should know better, ministers are not pysychic. We do not know what you are thinking unless you tell us.

Servetus.

With the 500th anniversary of Calvin's birth approaching, we have been asked to give a lecture some time next year on John Calvin. In preparation for this we are searching out the facts of Calvin's life, not only in our own extensive library (more than 2'000 volumes, plus electronic versions of other works, including the complete works of Arminius and Calvin), but also online. An interesting article on Servetus is to be found here.

A word on Calvin sources

W while ago we wrote a series defending John Calvin from the attacks of Nelson Price in an abominably badly-written and researched piece on his website (our series is here). Although our list of sources contained some fifteen books, it has come to our attention that in a discussion on another blog, we were charged with relying heavily on Calvinist sources. First of all, we shall say that simply because a book is written by someone who is favourable to its subject does not mean that it is to be discarded as reliable history. Were we to do that, we should have to reject the four Gospels, since they were written by men who worshipped the subject as God!

One of the few gains of Postmodernism is the realisation that there is no such thing as an unbiassed writer. We all have our biases, and this is certainly true with John Calvin. Yet we must here show our hand. Our main source in the writing of our defence of John Calvin was none other than the biography by R.N. Carew Hunt (R.N. Carew Hunt, Calvin [London, the Centenary Press, 1933]). Of this book T.H.L. Parker noted:

"whatever qualifications must be made about its interpretation of Calvin's theology, [it] is reliable and well-written history."

Robert Reymond wrote of it:

"As a biography it is unsurpassed, but Hunt is somewhat hard at times on Calvin because of his doctrine of predestination." ('John Calvin: His LIfe and Influence [Christian Focus, 2004] P. 146)

In other words, far from being heavily dependent on Calvinist sources, our main source was a scholarly biography by a non-Calvinist writer!

Our other non-Calvinist sources were:
Hugh Y. Reyburn, John Calvin (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1914) [Modernist Church of Scotland pastor who rejected Calvinism]
Williston Walker, History of the Church (Edinburgh, T. and T. Clark, 1960) [Modernist Yale historian]
John Laurence Von Mosheim, Institutes of Ecclesiastical History. Trans. James Murdock (London, William Tegg, 1880) [Historic Lutheran]

In addition we quoted John Wesley, Richard Baxter and Jacobus Arminus himself to show that one need not agree theologically with Calvinism to speak well of Calvin as a man. We examined a number of the older and better non-Calvinist writers to see what they had to say about the man Nelson Price portrayed as an evil dictator. All of these men gave balanced and on the whole favourable accounts of Calvin. Why? Let us leave the last word to Carew Hunt:

"At this point what we may think of his doctrine or his system become of no importance. We are left in the presence of a man who followed what he believed to be the truth, and consecrated his life to its attainment, and for this he will be had in honour as long as courage and singleness of purpose are held as virtues among men."
R.N. Carew Hunt, Calvin (London, the Centenary Press, 1933) P. 316

How not to debate Theology. 1 -Begging the Question

Theological debate is a cut-and-thrust world. To get the best out of any debate, we have to understand some of the principles. Just as Don Carson's book 'Exegetical Fallacies' teaches good exegesis by bringing up examples of bad, so we shall make some remarks on how to conduct onesself in a debate by bringing up a few examples of how not to. We begin with the ever-popular fallacy of 'begging the question' consists in assuming one or more of the points to be proved in the debate. A wider application of this would be to attribute to your opponent a view that you hold, but that he does not.

In the debate with our Dispensational brothers in Christ:

1. Dispensationalist: "If you interpreted Genesis the way you interpret Revelation you would make the Bible into silly putty." (But we don't, because we don't believe that there is a single hermeneutic for all of Scripture, but different genres should be interpreted differently. So apocalyptic should NEVER be interpreted in the same way as history)

2. Dispensationalist: "You believe the Church has replaced Israel." (No, we believe that the Church is an enlarged and reformed Israel. The Dispensationalist, on the other hand, views the Church as an exclusively Gentile body.)

3. Dispensationalist: "You believe that the centre of history is God's redemption of man. We believe it to be His own glory." When the Covenant Theologian replies that he thinks nothing of the sort, the Dispensationalist will declare that he does so, though not in those words. Thus theological debate will be stifled.

4. Roman Catholic: "The early Church was Catholic. They believed what I believe." (No, the word 'Catholic' then did not mean what it means in western culture today. It meant universal, as opposed to heretical)

NOTE: We do not think that the errors of Dispensationalism are one tenth as bad as those of Rome.