Continued from The King James Version: Part IV. The History of the Bible

The historians are fond of speaking about many reformations – Swiss, English, Scottish, Radical, Dutch, Romani. In truth, one Reformation changed the course of Christianity, when Martin Luther and his associates referred to themselves as the Evangelicals within the Church. Later, the term Protestant was associated with their positive witness to the truth (the meaning of Pro and Test) at the Second Speier Conference. Subsequent movements were not part of, but breaks from the Reformation, chiefly from Zwingli and Calvin – and from the Swiss radicals – called Anabaptists, Mennonites, Hutterites. Zwingli and Calvin sought to be associated with Luther but furtively broke from his leadership and established the sect (eventually called Calvinist or Reformed) from which the radicals rebelled.

The Reformation revived the Apostolic Church because of one man – Luther – and one invention, the printing press, proclaiming the Gospel Word in the midst of darkness, superstition, corruption, and slavery. The Word of God had more power than the armies of the Pope and his allies.

Luther was the son of a man who owned and managed mines, with training that promised an honorable and prosperous future. When a violent storm threatened his life, he prayed to the saint of miners that he would become a priest and a monk. Once inside the Augustinian order, he was trained in the Latin philosophies of the Middle Ages – Augustine, Aquinas, and many more. Like many denominations today, which honor the Scriptures with their lips, the Medieval theologians honored their own traditions and fortified them with centuries of tradition and Vatican support.

Luther determined to make himself into the best possible monk and priest, but circumstances molded him into a Doctor of the Bible. His supervisors saw in him the ability to become a professor in the Scriptures, and that meant extra study of the Bible, where his exceptional mind found endless contradictions. If the Bible was indeed the Word of God, then it was at war with the visible Church. If Holy Mother Church in Rome was the ultimate authority, then the Scriptures had to be ignored when enforcing edicts against the Gospel. He was as perfect a monk as any man could be, obsessively so, but that did not change the anguish he felt for his sins. Pleasing God with works only increased the pain. Looking for a way to perfect himself by works, he found forgiveness through faith in Jesus Christ alone.

Most authorities fill many pages about Luther’s conversion to Justification by Faith, but they give little attention to his Biblical approach to the Scriptures. The reason for this lack of foundational work is the weak doctrinal backgrounds of the Pietists, Rationalists, and Calvinists. Given this weak foundation, their conclusions often skirt the boundaries of mockery, caricature, and unbelief. One can argue, with plenty of support, that Luther’s view of the Bible was expressed in the Luther Bible, the Tyndale Bible, and the King James Version. The absence of this perspective has led the greedy printing establishments, denominations, and Bible societies into a nightmare of bad compromised translations based on a corrupt New Testament Greek text.*

* The Old Testament has suffered from similar translating abuse, but the original text is protected by the Masoretic tradition instead of the established monopolies of Hort, Westcost, Nestle, and Aland.

The Gutenberg Press dropped the price of Bibles and Christian literature, so no army could stop the Gospel, because everyone had enough money to learn from the
Good News.

Luther: The Holy Spirit and the Word

Luther had the ability to see the content of the entire Bible as a whole, which is the only proper way to read God’s Word. That perspective is in harmony with traditional Judaism, which is inherently Christian. This view can be discerned in two ways:

1. The Word is never without the Spirit.
2. The Spirit is never without the Word.*

* Adolph Hoenecke expressed this in his Dogmatics, largely ignored by WELS. He included, after those two statements a third – “That is sound doctrine.”

The denominations have fallen far away from #1. Nothing proves that more than the multiplication of programs, gimmicks, and sociological analysis employed by the blind, faithless, and confused leaders, whatever their label might be. The proof is easy to find, in the most powerful and Gospel-centered book of the Old Testament – Isaiah.

Verse 8 defeats the sociological statements of leaders, such as “All organizations are aging, changing, and losing members.” Verse 9 confirms that this passage is beyond our comprehension and only understood by the faith created in us by God. This introduces the Spirit/Word connection found throughout the Scriptures.

No one can dispute that the rain and snow come down and invariably change the soil on which they land. The effects are undebatable – rain and snow melt make the earth come alive, everything budding and growing. The inevitable results of rain and snow are seed for the sower and food for those who hunger.

This parable from God Himself, as Creator and Teacher, cannot be refuted. His Word goes forth from Him, not something to play with, a pointed phrase lifted simply as a secular lesson from an unbelieving speaker. This divine Word has three effects or Promises:

A. The Word will always have a divine effect.
B. The Word will never return to God without a divine effect.
C. The Word will prosper everything God intended.

Thus, the Holy Spirit always works with the Word, since the Word always has an effect, and that effect is always accomplished and prospered by God. These three promises are in complete harmony with God’s Word always being efficacious. These promises also confirm that the Spirit works only through the Word.

Although the Pentecostals and charismatics can be understood for leaving their mainline churches for churches that taught faith in Jesus Christ and His miracles, the emphasis of the Holy Spirit working apart from the Word has been harmful and abusive. Someone can claim that the Spirit spoke in a dream and Brother Johnson has to leave to start a mission in Guatemala. If dreams count as revelations from God, the turmoil will never end and the damage done can be worse than the corpse-cold rationalism of the liberal, rationalistic denominations. Are we to believe that a program sold for profit is “anointed by the Holy Spirit?” Are other programs “very anointed” in a similar sales pitch?

All false doctrine comes from separating the Spirit from the Word. For example, the pope simply declares something to be true and that becomes an infallible revelation of God, because “the Holy Spirit will not let him err.” Roman Catholic visions are often cited as proof for their dogma, even when they come from visions of dead saints. Chemnitz observed that meant expanding the Bible and enrolling vast numbers of the dead into the teaching office of the Church.

Luther called all false doctrine Enthusiasm, a term not often used or defined. However, it gathers everything into two categories – either in harmony with the Scriptures or declared apart from and against the Bible. World religions may be interesting to study from a historical or cultural viewpoint, but they do not have the standing and credibility of the Scriptures. That is the historic view of the Scriptures.

The inerrancy of the Scriptures has been targeted by the hot-headed apostates who formed the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). They claimed inerrancy was a new word and not appropriate for the Bible. Luther used the Latin words for inerrant and infallible in his Large Catechism, Holy Baptism. The actual reason for inerrant replacing infallible for God’s Word was the slithering of the compromisers who said the Bible was infallible, except for its historical and geographical passages. That is like saying the limousine is perfect, except for the smoking engine and the clanking transmission.

A professor at Concordia Seminary, Ft. Wayne, asked the class for a description of Karl Barth’s perspective. As a visitor, I said, “According to Barth, we should study with the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other.” The seminary professor smiled in agreement. I added, “Others would say Barth was more like – a newspaper in one hand and a Kalashnikov in the other, while standing on the Bible.” He frowned at the truth of those words.*

* The future Objective Justification advocate, Jay Webber, was furious with me for upsetting the apostate seminary professor.

Barth is now known to be a Marxist, a flagrant adulterer, and a mentor who used his live-in mistress to write most of his Dogmatics without giving her credit.*

* Barth’s living and traveling accommodations are well known – they included his mistress Charlotte Kirschbaum. Karl Barth and Radical Politics uncovers his early and late Marxism.

Figure 9 Karl Barth moved the younger, unmarried Charlotte Kirschbaum into his house, in spite of his wife and children.

Figure 10 Karl Barth’s writing stopped when Charlotte died.

Figure 11 I met the author and his first wife at Yale. This book reveals how Karl and Charlotte were Marxist activists. Hunsinger was the head of the Barth Institute at Princeton University.

The work of the Spirit and Word together – and never apart from one another – is Biblical and therefore basic to all of Luther’s efforts in writing and preaching. The visible Word of Holy Communion and Holy Baptism have the same divine power as the invisible Word of preaching and teaching. If the spoken Word has power to bestow God’s grace upon an entire congregation, how much more does the visible Word help the individual to understand and appreciate faith in Jesus Christ as the meeting place for His forgiveness and salvation.

Denying the efficacy of the Word has made people turn to plagiarized sermons, purchased programs, and spiritual lethargy from the clergy down to the synod administrators. Luther – trusting in God’s Word – changed Germany, Europe, and the world.

Luther’s Publications Mortally Wounded the Church of Rome

Luther and the printing press arrived so powerfully that the Church of Rome could not kill, torture, imprison, and enslave Evangelicals fast enough to stop the Reformation. The Beast of Revelation*d was mortally wounded and never recovered its full strength in promoting error in the name of Mary, Purgatory, the Mass, and the infallibility of the pope. One part of the Reformation miracle was the built-up hunger of people for God’s love, grace, and forgiveness through the Savior. The instrument of communication was the printing press, but the energy came from Luther’s writing. An expert in early publishing stated:

* Revelation 13:18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.

Gutenberg had produced an orthodox Latin Bible and he had taken advantage of a large market of printed indulgences. Luther launched the Reformation by an attack on indulgences and he dethroned the Latin Bible from the heart of Western Christendom, but he used the printing press as no one had ever done before. Over 3,700 separate editions of books and pamphlets by Martin Luther were published in his lifetime, not including Bible translations. This is an immense number for any one author, even by today’s standards. It is an average of almost two publications a week for most of his adult life. In his time, Luther was by far the most extensively published author who had ever lived. (Christopher De Hamel, The Book, A History of the Bible, p 236, 2001.)

Luther, Melanchthon, and the Concordists

Luther attracted and worked with brilliant men who wrote in harmony with him. Melanchthon was his younger associate from the beginning, an acclaimed scholar and editor/author of the Augsburg Confession and its defense – The Apology. Fifty years after Augsburg Confession, Martin Chemnitz and others collected doctrinal confessions in the Book of Concord, which included the Formula of Concord, 1580. Chemnitz was a student of Luther and Melanchthon, with the best qualities of most men. This second Reformation generation of Biblical scholars dealt with issues about false doctrine and defended clearly the Scriptural truths of the Reformation – Justification by Faith, the efficacy of the Word and Sacraments, and the inerrancy of the Scriptures. They began with the Three Ecumenical Creeds, included vital statements by Luther and Melanchthon, and created harmony (concordia in Latin) with a variety of issues in the 1580 Formula of Concord. However, the Reformation and the Book of Concord era have been neglected and supplanted by the insights of Zwingli, Calvin, and Robert Schuller.

Zwingli and Calvin, Alienation from the Word/Spirit Connection

Zwingli first – and Calvin later – appeared to agree with Luther, but they were not charter members of the Reformation, as many imagine. Chemnitz, in his Apology of the Book of Concord, compared the Calvinists humorously to tenants who claimed everything would be fine if only the landlords would agree to their demands. The Zwinglians and Calvinists eventually conceded their departure from the efficacy of the Word in the Means of Grace. Although they became bold in their disagreement with Luther, they became uncertain about forgiveness and salvation. For Calvin, God being sovereign meant that no one knew if the Spirit would be active in a given sermon, baptism, or Lord’s Supper. The emphasis shifted from the certainty of God’s Word in preaching, teaching, and the Sacraments (the Means of Grace) to hoping for results, shifting the responsibility to man.

Their dogma can be summed up as the rejection of the Holy Spirit and Word always at work together, not a small matter, but a breech. For instance, Zwingli mockingly stated that the Holy Spirit did not need a vehicle, like an oxcart, as his response to the Real Presence of Christ in Holy Communion. His rejection of the Sacraments of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion, making them merely symbolic, caused the Anabaptists to leave and become persecuted and drowned by the Zwinglians. Calvin openly mocked the presence of Christ in both natures in Holy Communion, and he placed human reason above the Scriptures. That magisterial use of human reason was employed to judge, explain, and make the Word of God appealing. The magisterial use of reason made it man’s job to get the work done, a tragic departure from “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.”

As The Other Side of Calvinism has shown so abundantly, all five categories of the five-points of Calvinism are disputed by its theologians, either one point or another. Ironically, when Lutherans abandon Scriptural certainty and clarity, they inevitably move toward Calvinism or allegiance to Rome.

The effect upon translations is immense and difficult to correct, once adopted and deployed in millions of Bibles, church textbooks, and devotional booklets.

Continued in Part VI.Tyndale Perfected in English What Luther Created in German

All sections of The King James Version: Precise Translation versus Fraudulent Texts and Heretical Translations

Download a PDF file of this article.

Please follow and like us: