Verbal plenary preservation


In Protestant theology, verbal plenary preservation is a doctrine concerning the nature of the Bible. While verbal plenary inspiration applies only to the original autographs of the Bible manuscript, VPP views that, "the whole of Scripture with all its words even to the jot and tittle is perfectly preserved by God in the apographs without any loss of the original words, prophecies, promises, commandments, doctrines, and truths, not only in the words of salvation, but also the words of history, geography and science; and every book, every chapter, every verse, every word, every syllable, every letter is infallibly preserved by the Lord Himself to the last iota so that the Bible is not only infallible and inerrant in the past, but also infallible and inerrant today."

Basis

The doctrine of VPP is founded on God's promise in the Scripture to perfectly preserve His words and this is affirmed in the historical confessional statements of the Christian faith.

Scripture

God's inspired words once given will be forever preserved: "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". Those who deny that the Bible teaches preservation say that verse 7 here refers to the preservation of God's people, not His words.
The late Dr Carl McIntire, the founding pastor of the historic Bible Presbyterian Church, understood verse 7 to mean preservation of the divinely inspired words of God as he had preached in 1992 a sermon entitled "Help, Lord!", from Psalm 12, saying:

Other Bible verses quoted to support divine preservation being verbal and plenary include the following:
The confessional statements supporting VPP include the following:

[Westminster Confession of Faith] (1643–1648)

[Helvetic Consensus] (1675)

Like the Helvetic Consensus Formula, the Westminster Confession of Faith cites Matthew 5:18 as proof text of the special providential preservation of the divinely inspired Holy Scripture. The late Rev Dr Carl McIntire also understood Chapter 1 of the Westminster Confession of Faith to be teaching the special providential preservation of God's words when continuing from what was quoted above in his 1992 sermon entitled "Help, Lord!", from Psalm 12, he said with regard to verses 6 and 7:

Views

On VPI and VPP the late Rev Dr Timothy Tow, founding pastor of the Bible-Presbyterian Church and founding principal of Far Eastern Bible College, wrote: "We believe the preservation of Holy Scripture and its Divine inspiration stand in the same position as providence and creation. If Deism teaches a Creator who goes to sleep after creating the world is absurd, to hold to the doctrine of inspiration without preservation is equally illogical. … Without preservation, all the inspiration, God-breathing into the Scriptures, would be lost. But we have a Bible so pure and powerful in every word and it is so because God has preserved it down through the ages."
On the same twin doctrines the late Rev Dr Ian Paisley, moderator of the Ulster Free Presbyterian Church for more than 57 years, said: "The verbal Inspiration of the Scriptures demands the verbal Preservation of the Scriptures. Those who would deny the need for verbal Preservation cannot be accepted as committed to verbal Inspiration. If there is no preserved Word of God today then the work of Divine Revelation and Divine Inspiration has perished."
The late Dr Edward F. Hills also penned: "If the doctrine of divine inspiration of the Old and New Testament Scriptures is a true doctrine, the doctrine of the providential preservation of these Scriptures must also be a true doctrine. It must be that down through the centuries God has exercised a special, providential control over the copying of the Scriptures and the preservation and use of the original text have been available to God's people in every age. God must have done this, for if He gave the Scriptures to His Church by inspiration as the perfect and final revelation of His will, then it is obvious that He would not allow this revelation to disappear or undergo any alteration of its fundamental character."
More views upholding the doctrine of perfect preservation or VPP can be found quoted in "The Historic Views of the Church Concerning Preservation" by Rev P. S. Ferguson. These views include those of English puritan Thomas Cartwright, Professor William Whitaker, Bishop and Divine John Jewel, Cambridge-educated puritan preacher Nicholas Gibbens, German Lutheran dogmatician Johannes Andreas Quenstedt, English Presbyterian clergyman John Flavel, English puritan and theologian Edward Leigh, Puritan Thomas Watson, Puritan John Owen, first regent and first principal of the University of Edinburgh Robert Rollock, Swiss-Italian Reformed scholastic theologian Francis Turretin, Westminster divine Richard Capel, original member of the Westminster assembly John Lightfoot, Pastor Dr Jack Moorman, Professor Albert J. Hembd and the Rev N. Pffeifer.

Dispute between Life BPC and FEBC over VPP

FEBC, which embraces the VPP doctrine based on the Westminster Confession of Faith which at Article 8 of Chapter 1 states that the inspired OT and NT Scriptures in the original languages are "by His singular care and providence, kept pure in all ages", teaches that God has supernaturally preserved each and every one of His inspired Hebrew/Aramaic OT words and Greek NT words to the last jot and tittle so that God's people will always have in their possession His infallible and inerrant Word kept intact without the loss of any word, and that the infallible and inerrant words of Scripture are found in the faithfully preserved Traditional/Byzantine/Majority manuscripts and fully represented in the Printed and Received Text that underlie the Reformation Bibles best represented by the KJV, and NOT in the corrupted and rejected texts of Westcott and Hort that underlie the many modern versions of the English Bible like the NIV, NASV, ESV, RSV, TEV, CEV, TLB, etc. The Board of Elders of Life BPC disagreed.
The Bible-Presbyterian churches, which had their Synod dissolved in 1988 because of disagreements, were again split with one group aligned with the founding pastor Timothy Tow embracing VPP, and another group not aligned with him taking the non- or anti-VPP position.
The church and the college had shared premises at 9, 9A and 10 Gilstead Road. In 2008, due to the disagreement on VPP, the church sued the college's directors, including Timothy Tow, in Suit 648 in the High Court over allegedly "deviant Bible teachings" in an attempt to force FEBC to leave the Premises. However the church failed as the Court of Appeal of Singapore, the apex court in Singapore's legal system, held, inter alia, on 26 April 2011 that:
  1. "the VPP doctrine is actually closely related to the VPI doctrine which both parties adhere to,” ";”
  2. "the College, in adopting the VPP doctrine, has not deviated from the fundamental principles which guide and inform the work of the College right from its inception, and as expressed in the Westminster Confession;"
  3. "t is not inconsistent for a Christian who believes fully in the principles contained within the Westminster Confession to also subscribe to the VPP doctrine;" and
  4. "n the absence of anything in the Westminster Confession that deals with the status of the apographs, we hesitate to find that the VPP doctrine is a deviation from the principles contained within the Westminster Confession."
However, even after the Court of Appeal of Singapore had ruled that the VPP doctrine is not deviant, Life BPC continues to regard VPP as heresy since the paper "Mark Them Which Cause Divisions" issued by its Pastor and Elders dated January 2008—rebutted by the Rev Dr Jeffrey Khoo in "Making the Word of God of None Effect"—is still on its website more than five years after the apex court's ruling.