The Perfect KJV (KJV-Onlyism, KJV Onlyism, or KJVO) heresy is an abandonment of the Historic Reformed Faith and the Westminster Confession of Faith and comes in two forms: –

·         Ruckmanism, which holds to an inspired 1611 translation (“double inspiration”) resulting in a perfect English Bible.  Where there is a discrepancy between the English and its underlying Hebrew Masoretic or Greek TR texts, the English is to be taken as more correct!?

·         Verbal Plenary Preservation, also known as KJV-VPP or VPP-KJV, which holds to an inspired perfect textual criticism or recognition in 1611 which restored the Hebrew and Greek text of the KJV to be jot and tittle identical to the Divine Original Autographs!?

Ruckmanism and KJV-VPP are estranged twin sons of Benjamin Wilkinson, a leading Seventh Day Adventist who wrote “Our AV Vindicated” in 1930.  Wherever it has gone, in whatever circles, Perfect KJV Onlyism has wrecked havoc and caused discord among brethren.

Far Eastern Bible College (FEBC) has sadly not only adopted, but now champions this false Charismatic post-canonical inspiration doctrine.  FEBC cannot prove KJV-VPP – they cannot even convincingly and consistently identify the Hebrew-Greek underlying texts – but they call all who do not hold their views, “Neo-Fundamentalists”, “Neo-Evangelicals” or lacking in saving faith.  In this website, the KJV-VPP heresy is exposed and refuted with clear evidential facts and sound biblical exegesis!  It is our humble, earnest prayer that the Lord would be pleased to deliver His people from this divisive “doctrine”, in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ.  Amen.

New Testament Text and Translation Commentary

When speaking of the deceitful the Apostle Paul said, “For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works.”
(2 Cor 11:13-15). So it is with those that spread heresies, they have to be subtle and deceitful like the serpent when it tempted Eve, otherwise they would be easily found out.

The Far Eastern Bible College (FEBC), under Jeffrey Khoo, has moved away from its historic reformed roots and embraced the cult of KJV-onlyism of Peter Ruckman, Gail Riplinger, D.A. Waite and David Cloud. They (FEBC) call it by a different name, “verbal plenary preservation” and try their best to pass it off as reformed doctrine espoused by Prof. J. Buswell, hoping that nobody would notice it.

Dr. James Price (OT Executive Editor and Chairman of the Executive Review Committee of the NKJV), author of “King James Onlyism, a New Sect”, reviewed Khoo’s new ‘Systematic Theology’ and found that (a) it misrepresented Prof. J. Buswell (b) portions of it were plagiarised from Buswell’s ‘A Systematic Theology of the Christian Religion’

“It does the readers and J. Oliver Buswell a grave injustice for the authors to give the impression that Buswell holds to this new VPP view…It also does them an injustice by giving the impression that the wording of this book is entirely the original work of the authors. The appendix that follows documents a few of the many places where the authors have essentially used the words of Buswell without documentation.”(Dr. James Price)

Timothy Tow and Jeffrey Khoo, Theology for Every Christian: A Systematic Theology in the Reformed and Premillennial Tradition of J. Oliver Buswell (Singapore: Far Eastern Bible College Press, 2007), pp. xv + 713.

Timothy Tow is the Principal of the Far Eastern Bible College in Singapore; he studied under J. Oliver Buswell at Faith Theological Seminary, graduating with the MDiv and STM degrees; he also has a DD from Shelton College. Jeffrey Khoo is the Academic Dean of the Far Eastern Bible College and librarian and lecturer in the New Testament; he holds the MDiv degree from Grace Theological Seminary, the STM degree from the Biblical Theological Seminary, and the PhD degree from Trinity Theological Seminary.

This review is limited to only Part I-Theism-(pp. 1-123) available in Adobe format on the website of the Far Eastern Bible College: www.febc.edu.sg/Theology4.htm. Based on the findings, a limited review is sufficient for the whole. The title of the book implies that it is a new approach to Reformed Theology with a Pro-Israel Premillennial eschatology patterned after Buswell's Systematic Theology of the Christian Religion (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1962). The authors acknowledge their dependence on John Calvin and Buswell in the Preface:

"There are many textbooks on Christian theology but J Oliver Buswell's Systematic Theology published in 1962 by Zondervan is, as far as we know, the only one that expresses a Reformed and yet Pro-Israel Premillennial system of theology. (p. v)

Besides Calvin and his Institutes, Buswell-our teacher and grand-teacher-has been our guide in the Reformed tradition, and we hereby acknowledge his contribution herein. (p. v)"

While the book is patterned after Buswell's Systematic Theology, it is organized differently. Buswell began with an Introduction, and organized the section on Theism into five chapters: (1) The Nature and Attributes of God; (2) Evidences for the Existence of God; (3) The Doctrine of the Trinity; (4) The Work of God: (Decrees), Creation; (5) The Decrees of God, Providence, Miracle; and (5) Revelation, the Inspiration of the Bible. Tow and Khoo lumped all these topics together in their Part I: Theism, in somewhat different order and without chapter divisions.

One is frustrated by the incomplete, and mostly missing, in-text documentation that prevents checking the sources. While in a few places the authors do quote Buswell directly (pp. 16, 18, 19, 21)-without documentation-the book otherwise completely lacks footnotes and endnotes, which suggests that all undocumented text is the original work of the authors. However, the fact is that in many places the text is almost an exact quotation of Buswell's book with minor variation of wording here and there, without documentation! This is demonstrated in the Appendix at the end of this review.

In spite of the claim that this book reflects Buswell's theology, it sometimes significantly contradicts him without a disclaimer. For example, the authors hold to the young-earth, 24-hour-day view of creation (pp. 37, 38), whereas Buswell views the seven days of creation figuratively as indefinitely long periods of time:

"The interpretation of the creative days which I would urge, hinges upon two crucial points. (1) That the word "day" in reference to the seven days is used figuratively, and (2) that we are not to understand that the sun was created on the fourth day, but that on that day it became visible, due to the cooling of the earth and the clearing of the atmosphere. . . . When we say that the word "day" is used figuratively, we mean that it represents a period of time of undesignated length and unspecified boundaries, merging into other "days" or periods. (Buswell, p. I:144)

I have presented above (page 144ff) reasons for suggesting that the day in which God has ceased from the work of creation extends from the conclusion of the sixth day-that is, from the time when man was created-through the entire course of human history on this earth, until the new heavens and the new earth. (Buswell, p. I:155) "

The authors discuss at length the seven-fold will of God (pp. 42-50) which seems totally absent from Buswell, at least the will of God and its seven subdivisions do not occur in Buswell's table of contents or in his subject index. The authors discuss at length the inspiration of the Bible, covering 62 pages (pp. 62-123)-half the space for the entire section on Theism-as compared with Buswell's 31 pages (pp. 183-213). In this section the authors develop their defense of the new doctrine of King James Onlyism for which they coin the abbreviation "VPP" which stands for "Verbal, Plenary, Preservation" of Scripture. They argue for the historical view that the Word of God is divinely inspired, infallible, and inerrant as written by the prophets and apostles in the original autographs (autographa). Thus far they agree with Buswell. However, they add to this historic doctrine the view that the autographic text has been flawlessly preserved in the manuscript copies (apographa) as contained in the Masoretic Hebrew text of the Old Testament and in the Textus Receptus of the New Testament as reconstructed by F. H. A. Scrivener in 1894 as published by the Trinitarian Bible Society. They cite with approval the official position of the Trinitarian Bible Society:

The Society accepts as the best edition of the Hebrew Masoretic text the one prepared in 1524-25 by Jacob ben Chayyim and known, after David Bomberg the publisher, as the Bomberg text. This text underlies the Old Testament in the Authorised Version. (p. 118)

The Greek Received Text is the name given to a group of printed texts, the first of which was published by Desiderius Erasmus in 1516. The Society believes that the latest and best edition is the text reconstructed by F.H.A. Scrivener in 1894. This text was reconstructed from the Greek underlying the New Testament of the Authorised Version. (p. 118)

To this view of the authoritative text they add that the King James Bible is the only flawlessly accurate translation of the Bible, and thus the only one that should be used.

The KJV translators had all the various editions of the TR to refer to, and they made their decisions with the help of the Holy Spirit. The Lord providentially guided the King James translators to make the right textual decisions. As such, there is no need to improve on the TR underlying the KJV. No one should play textual critic, and be a judge of God's Word today. God is His own Textual Critic. (p. 90)

This new doctrine was unknown to Buswell, when he wrote his theology in 1962, and to Timothy Tow when he studied under Buswell. The terms "preservation," "Textus Receptus," King James," "version," "autograph," "apograph" do not occur in his subject index. Regarding the King James Bible and translations, the only modern translations available to him at the time were the ERV (1881), the ASV (1901), and the RSV (1952). Even though one might expect him to have rejected the RSV, none of these versions is listed in the subject index. Regarding his use of Scripture in his book, Buswell stated in the Preface:

Quotations from the Bible, if not from the King James Version, are my own translations, unless designated as from other sources. There is a two-fold motive for the rather large amount of original translation: first, of course, is the desire to facilitate the understanding of the point under discussion by means of direct translation, thus saving a great amount of discussion and explanation. I trust that in every case the student who looks up the passage in the original language will find the translation thoroughly justified. Secondly, I have always tried to stimulate my students to study theology, insofar as possible, from the original text. I hope that the freshness and incisiveness of some of the translations in connection with the points of theology on which they bear, will move the students to a greater use of their Greek and Hebrew. (Buswell, p. I:6)

Obviously Buswell thought the King James Bible needed clarification in many places. Regarding the accuracy of the King James Bible and the Greek and Hebrew texts, he asserted:

"We know, for example, that there are errors in the translation of our ordinary English version-remarkably few, but the translation is not inerrant. We know also that there are variant readings in the text of the original languages as it has come down to us. The points in which we cannot be sure of the original words are microscopic in proportion to the bulk of the whole, 1/1000th part is the estimate of Westcott and Hort. Nevertheless we do not have an absolutely inerrant text in either the Old Testament or the New Testament. (p. I:185)"

Regarding the Greek text underlying the King James Bible, he declared:

The "twenty-four elders" are not necessarily representative of the ransomed in heaven, for the first person plural if the pronouns in Revelation 5:9, "Thou hast redeemed us . . . we shall reign upon the earth," is not well substantiated in good manuscripts. (Buswell, p. II: 429; italics his)

Regarding the views of B. B. Warfield, Tow and Khoo stated:

The tragedy in reformed scholarship was in Warfield's adoption of the Westcott and Hort textual-critical theory and his redefinition of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy to make it apply only to the autographs. Warfield's novel concept of Sola Autographa unfortunately caught on, and became the new paradigm in the textual-critical exercise of reconstructing (or rather deconstructing) the inspired text. (p. 100)

On the other hand, Buswell had nothing but praise for Warfield's doctrine of inspiration:

In my opinion, the greatest and clearest exponent of the true doctrine of the inspiration of the Scriptures we have ever had was the late Dr. Benjamin B. Warfield (1851-1921) of the old Princeton Seminary. Warfield's writings on the subject were collected in a volume entitled Revelation and Inspiration, published by Oxford Press, 1927. Unfortunately this volume is out of print, but most of these articles were reprinted in a volume entitled The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, published by the Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company in 1948.

Warfield stood uncompromisingly, with rugged logic, in the central historical position of the church. He was an Augustinian and a Calvinist. (Buswell, p. I:193)

Buswell was the third president of Wheaton College from 1926 to 1940; he was president of Shelton College in New Your City from 1941-1956. In 1956 he became Dean of Covenant Theological Seminary where he served until his retirement in 1970. Surely the institutions over which he was president or dean have statements of faith that agree with Buswell's views of Scripture and translations. The following is the statement of Faith Theological Seminary:

We believe in the divine inspiration and authority of the Scriptures. By this is meant a miraculous guidance of the Holy Spirit in their original writing, extending to all parts of the Scriptures equally, applying even to the choice of words, so the result is the very Word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice. Moreover, it is our conviction that God has exercised such singular care and providence through the ages in preserving the written Word, that the Scriptures as we now have them are essentially as originally given and contain all things necessary for salvation. (web site accessed Sept. 16, 2008)

The following is the statement of Covenant Theological Seminary:-

Biblical Authority: We believe that the Bible is the Word of God and thus it is our only infallible rule of faith and practice. We believe in the plenary, verbal inspiration of the Scriptures by the Holy Spirit and, thus, we affirm the inerrancy of the original manuscripts whose objective truth it is our responsibility to interpret in accord with the principles of Scripture and to proclaim in accord with the imperatives of the Gospel. (web site accessed Sept. 16, 2008)

I was not able to find a website for Shelton College. Timothy Tow also should acknowledge that, before Donald Waite visited Singapore in relatively recent times, the statement of faith of the Far Eastern Bible College was very similar to those above, saying nothing about the King James Version, the Textus Receptus, apographs, and the VPP theory.

It does the readers and J. Oliver Buswell a grave injustice for the authors to give the impression that Buswell holds to this new VPP view expressed by Tow and Khoo. It also does them an injustice by giving the impression that the wording of this book is entirely the original work of the authors. The appendix that follows documents a few of the many places where the authors have essentially used the words of Buswell without documentation. I gratefully acknowledge the gracious help of Jonathan Chua of Singapore for providing this list.

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