In Protestant theology, verbal plenary preservation (VPP) is a doctrine concerning the nature of the Bible. While verbal plenary inspiration (VPI) 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 apographsapograph, an exact copy 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 (in the autographs), but also infallible and inerrant today (in the apographs)."
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 "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). 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 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 (words) and plenary (all, full, entire or complete) include the following:
Psalm 105:8: "He hath remembered his covenant for ever, the word which he commanded to a thousand generations." Ecclesiastes 3:14: "l know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever: nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it: and God doeth it, that men should fear before him." Matthew 4:4: "But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." (See also Luke 4:4 for similar verse.) Matthew 5:18: "For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Matthew 24:35: "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." (See also Mark 13:31 and Luke 21:33 for similar verses.) John 10:35: "If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken." 1 Peter 1:25: "But the word of the Lord endureth for ever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you."
Confessional statements The confessional statements supporting VPP include the following:
Westminster Confession of Faith (1643–1648)
The 1658 Savoy Declaration of Faith and Order, the 1677/1689 London Confession of Faith and the 1742 Philadelphia Confession of Faith all follow WCF 1:8.
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 Timothy Tow (Singapore) On VPI and VPP Timothy Tow, founding pastor of the Bible-Presbyterian Church and founding principal of Far Eastern Bible College ("FEBC"), 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."
Ian Paisley (Northern Ireland) On the same twin doctrines 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."
Edward F. Hills (U.S.) 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 copies, so that trustworthy representatives 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."
William Aberhart (Canada) William Aberhart, pastor, high school principal, Bible school dean, radio Bible teacher and Premier of Alberta from 1935 to 1943, wrote in 1925: "I can still believe the Lord Jesus Christ, when he said: ‘For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled’ (Matt. 5:18). ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away’ (Matt. 24:35). If these words mean anything, they inform us that the Lord Jesus intended to see to it that the Bible, His Word, would be preserved for us in a perfect, infallible state."
Others 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 (Dr) P. S. Ferguson. These views include those of English puritan Thomas Cartwright, 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 (1602–1671), 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.
Identification of the Preserved Text
Garnet Howard Milne (New Zealand) Garnet Howard Milne, who has served as pastor of two Reformed churches in Wainuiomata and Wanganui in New Zealand, in Has the Bible been kept pure? The Westminster Confession of Faith and the providential preservation of Scripture (2017) writes that Presbyterian William Jenkyn, who succeeded the distinguished Westminster divine William Gouge (1575–1653) at West Friars London, believed with Augustine and Whitaker that the “inspired words had been preserved and could be identified and that if they could not, they could have no assurance that they have the Word of God at all”.
Milne in the same book, after quoting Professor Whitaker at p. 328 Disputation on Holy Scripture (Cambridge: The University Press, 1849), says “the canon of Scriptures was confirmed and received individually throughout the centuries ever since God had dictated those Scriptures for the church” and this means “the common or received Greek text of the New Testament and the Masoretic text of the Old” which Whitaker sees as “the authentic texts of Scripture” and such a view precludes the possibility of discovering any ancient codex in the future that would recalibrate the Word of God with a fundamentally different text than the one “endorsed by the Holy Spirit in the multitude of believers”. Quoting pp. 165 & 117 Disputation on Holy Scripture, Milne says that Whitaker also believes in the very words of the text, and not merely the sense, to be important and “the church possessed the very words, and all the words of the Holy Spirit in the extant originals in his day”, i.e. the Hebrew and Greek texts or the apographa which “so closely reflected the autographs that ‘in one sense’ could be called ‘originals’”.
Milne goes on to say that the believing church has always taught God’s Word is locatable in the Masoretic text of the OT and the Greek common or majority text of the NT, which have not been hidden, and, where there are variants in the manuscripts, the church has not found it an onerous task to collate the texts and arrive at the authentic autographic text, the Holy Spirit confirming the divine authority of God’s Word in the hearts of His people down through the ages, while the lack of spiritual insight is possibly why those who are not or are less spiritually awakened have adopted without much thought or consideration translations based upon the critical texts and eclectic texts of Westcott and Hort and other modern textual critics.
Samuel Joseph (Singapore) Samuel Joseph in The Preservation of God’s Inspired Words in the Holy Scriptures says that if God has promised to preserve His Word, and has in fact preserved it down to every jot and tittle according to His promise, the crucial question is whether He has told us where to find His Word today as there would be little point in saying that the preserved words of God are "somewhere out there", if we did not know where and had no way to find out; he goes on to say that the application of the principles codified into seven "biblical axioms" by Dr Jeffrey Khoo (The Burning Bush, July 2011, pp. 74–95) leads unmistakably to the Hebrew Masoretic text of the Old Testament and the Greek Textus Receptus of the New Testament being the Preserved Text.
Bible Presbyterian Church and School The Bible Presbyterian Church of Collingswood, New Jersey state at 4. Bible Translations: “We believe that God literally and verbally inspired the text of the Bible in the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts (including certain passages in Daniel and elsewhere, in Aramaic). We also believe that God has faithfully and accurately preserved this original text in the Masoretic Text (Old Testament) and the ‘Textus Receptus’ (New Testament), the ‘majority text’ manuscripts used to translate the King James Version of the Bible”.
The Faith Christian School, also in Collingswood, leaves no room for doubt about the school’s belief in VPI and VPP and where the autographic text can be found today in the school’s Statement of Faith at Inspiration: “We believe that ... the 66 canonical books of the Bible are alone the inspired, "God breathed", Word of God ... We believe that the inspiration of the Bible is plenary (inspiration extends to all parts of the Bible equally), verbal (inspiration extends to the words, letters, tenses and other parts of speech used in Scripture), ... inerrant (contains no factual error), infallible (never teaches error as truth although it records the sins and folly of man and reveals it as such), authoritative (is the final authority for the believer in all areas of faith and practice) and preserved today in the Hebrew and Greek Texts underlying the King James Version of the Bible, not merely in the original manuscripts.”
Thomas Ross and Kent Brandenburg / Bethel Baptist Church