[5] The number of B-P churches in Singapore grew to forty-three in 2020/21[6] but stands at forty as of 2024[7] BPC was noted for a belief in literal six-day creation and a preference for the King James Version ("KJV").
[52] The evangelical/new evangelical group is led mainly by SH Quek and David Wong; they headed the Zion-Carmel combination and played a significant role in the dissolution of the BP Synod or the BPCOS in 1988 because of their different views on Bible versions, tongues-speaking, and biblical separation.
[62][63] SH Quek and David Wong underline their role as the main spiritual leaders of the evangelical/new evangelical faction[53] with answering the questions posed by the Editors in the round-table discussion in Heritage & Legacy on the dissolution of the BP Synod.
Also the last statement (either the tenth or eleventh) of the Carmel group of churches omits the underlined words in statement (xii) (i.e., 4.2.12 of Life BPC's[67] or Shalom BPC's constitution[69]): "We believe in the real, spiritual unity in Christ of all redeemed by His precious blood and the necessity of faithfully maintaining the purity of the Church in doctrine and life according to the Word of God and the principle and practice of biblical separation from the apostasy of the day being spearheaded by the Ecumenical Movement (2 Cor 6:14–18, Rev 18:4)".
Chua also pointed to Timothy Tow not accusing the Chinese Presbyterian churches of being liberal or ecumenical, and Life BPC and Say Mia Tng maintaining a friendly relationship during their co-existence on the same premises.
[116] The Articles of Association drawn up at the inaugural meeting of the BPC of America in June 1937 shows the founding fathers (including McIntire) had intended to associate as militant fundamentalists in their fight against "modernism, compromise, indifferentism, and worldliness", and this militant separation stand was then passed as a heritage to the Singapore BPC as Timothy Tow studied at Faith Seminary in the 1940s (January 1948 to May 1950) when, one wintry morning in mid-January 1948, his heart was 'strangely warmed' by McIntire's message at the seminary's Chapel Hour challenging young men to join a Twentieth Century Reformation which Tow later did upon his return to Singapore in joining the Separatist Cause of the ICCC.
[127] In the early 1940s, after the dust of the fundamentalist-modernist controversies had settled, there arose a new generation of evangelicals and so-called fundamentalists who were repelled by the militant stance of their evangelical/fundamentalist forefathers in separating from those who denied many fundamental truths of the Bible such as its inspiration, inerrancy and infallibility, the deity and virgin birth of Christ, etc.
[128] The term "Neo Evangelicalism" was coined by Harold Ockenga in 1948 emphasizing the repudiation of separatism and a determination to engage in theological dialogue in a new emphasis to apply the gospel to sociological, political and economic issues.
[134] Other modernists or liberals lauded by Graham include Rudolph Bultmann, Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Robert J. McCracken and Norman Vincent Peale.
[135] The spirit of tolerance in neo-evangelicalism caused Graham to end up in universalism and liberalism as he believed that people can be saved without knowing Christ[136][137] and he also expressed uncertainty about a literal fire in hell as a place of eternal torment.
[152] Daniel Chua denies that the "moderates" – by which they call themselves – are neo-evangelicals, but Jeffrey Khoo disagrees as after the dissolution of the Synod in 1988 they have departed further from the original BP position by advancing their non-separatist stand in cooperating with those who have compromised the faith, by being open to charismatic tongues, by replacing the KJV with modern corrupt Bible versions and by introducing Contemporary Christian Music ("CCM" ) into their worship services.
[158] Timothy Tow praised McIntire's swift offensive against the RSV and although McIntire did not act as speedily when the NIV first appeared in 1978 due to fifth columnists within the ICCC ranks, Tow nonetheless commended him for reaching "the crowning of his life-long struggle against Satan's wiles to falsify God's Word" when the ICCC, at its birthplace in Amsterdam, in 1998 passed a resolution urging "all Bible-believing churches worldwide to use only the Authorized KING JAMES VERSION in their services and in their teaching ministry" amidst more than 150 so-called 'versions' of the Bible extant around the world.
[189] The paper (undated) currently on Life BPC's website[190] has apparently been amended as it refers (on p. 2) to Jeffrey Khoo's article A Plea for a Perfect Bible in the January 2003 issue of The Burning Bush defending the infallibility and inerrancy of the Greek Scriptures on which the KJV is based as a new view.
Although the main difference between Charles Seet (Life BPC) and Jeffrey Khoo (FEBC) is in the latter holding to a present perfect Bible in the VPP doctrine compared to the former who does not, Tang Poh Geok ("PG Tang") – a B-P church member who held herself out as a lecturer in Law and Psychology with a PhD – wrote to Quek Suan Yew ("SY Quek"), the pastor of Calvary Pandan BPC, on 1 February 2008 to allege, inter alia, that he is "a modern heretic because he holds to a miraculous preservation as concocted by Rev Dr Jeffrey [Khoo]" and "is falsely accusing Rev Charles Seet and the BOE Life B-P Church that there are mistakes in the Word of God".
(p. 163) indicates that "[a] source for both the phrase 'the singular care and providence' of God and the proof text of Matt 5:18 in WCF 1:8 might well have been Johannes Buxtorf Sr. (1564–1629), Professor of Hebrew at Basel" and, if this is the case, "then this is further evidence that the divines had in mind the preservation of the words of the text and not only sense and doctrine when they wrote that both the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament were 'by His singular care and providence, kept pure in all ages, [and] are therefore authentical'" – Johannis Buxtorfi, Tiberias, sive Commentarius Masorethicus (Basileae: Rauracorum: Ludovic Konig, MDCXX).
says Warfield shows his confusion as he attempts in The Inerrancy of the Original Autographs (see "Theme Classic: The Inerrancy of the Original Autographs (1893)" in Midwestern Journal of Theology, 10.2 (Fall 2011): 55-61) to dismiss the criticisms of his opponents who had claimed he was appealing to the inerrancy of a non-existent 'autographic codex' to justify modern textual criticism which undermines the traditional text of Scripture [Warfield adopted lower criticism to save the Bible from higher criticism by relegating inspiration to the inscrutable autographs] and in spite of his countering that he was talking about "that genuine text of Scripture which is 'by the singular care and providence of God (WCF 1:8)' still preserved to us … [and] to it alone that authority and trustworthiness and utter truthfulness are to be ascribed", his countering is clearly untenable because while he acknowledges that the Westminster divines believed that God had preserved the Scriptures to which 'authority and trustworthiness and utter truthfulness are to be ascribed', he [Warfield] clearly teaches that the text of the Bible is still not settled, and indeed may never be, because of mistakes and missing words in the text requiring conjectural emendation – the view of Westcott and Hort.
44–46) remarks that Warfield was caught up in the excitement of the late nineteenth century – an age markedly different to that of the Puritan divines – when "there was much optimism that momentous discoveries through the new sciences were bringing powerful insights into how to understand both man's past and the contemporary world"; this led Warfield to enthusiastically embrace modern textual criticism and a theory of biological evolution – his wholehearted adoption of the former, including at least some of the views of critics like Westcott and Hort, by his apparent interpretation of the WCF 1:8 to comply with their views in adopting an inductive approach to reconstruct the New Testament, and his laying the groundwork for others to embrace theistic evolution in the latter – which turned Princeton Seminary ultimately to pure liberalism and its departure from the presupposition of Reformed orthodoxy that "the Scripture was the precipium cognoscendi, the first principle of religious knowledge".
SY said he would be happy to apologise and retract what he had written if "they all [Seet and BOE of Life BPC] believe we have a perfect Bible today" but if not, he hoped that PG would have the courtesy to withdraw her allegations with an apology in writing.
Writing apparently to respond to the same article and statement published in the Life BPC weekly of 27 January 2008 (no longer available on Life BPC's website at the cited url http://www.lifebpc.com/weekly/080127.htm Archived 28 August 2008 at the Wayback Machine), which was the subject of the exchange between SY Quek and PG Tang shortly thereafter, Jeffrey Khoo in Bearing True Witness pointed to Charles Seet's claim or allegation of scribal errors in the Bible and explained what VPP – which is not a new doctrine or heresy – is.
[217] PG Tang in her second letter pointed SY Quek to Doug Kutilek's article Why Psalm 12:6–7 is not a Promise of the Infallible Preservation of Scripture published on an anti-KJV website with a misleading or deceptive kjvonly.org domain name.
Sinai in February 1859 in a wastebasket) and the Codex Vaticanus (placed in the Vatican Library at an unknown date and left there for centuries before being made known in 1841), the foundations for the critical Greek Text of Wescott and Hort of 1881 which, collated with Weymouth's third edition and Tischendorf's eighth edition by Eberhard Nestle in 1898, became what is known as the Nestle's Greek New Testament – the text used in all "modern" translations that are opposed to certain doctrines of Scripture such as the virgin birth, the deity of Christ, the blood atonement, the Trinity, and others.
[240] Ong apparently takes a similar view to Warfield in that the absolute purity of the Word of God can only be found in the copies and not one copy (see also Life BPC making the same point by citing Warfield in their Preserving Our Godly Path in reference [1] on p. 13 with a quote attributed to a Scottish Commissioner at the Westminster Assembly, Samuel Rutherford (1600–1661), and claimed by them on p. 6 at point 4. to be the position of the Westminster divines as well as Life BPC's "old paths" position), but Milne in Has the Bible been kept pure?
(bold italics by Khoo); he also quotes p. 70 of Turretin's Institutes, "Finally, others defend the integrity of the Scriptures and say that these various contradictions are only apparent, not real and true; that certain passages are hard to be understood (dysnoeta), but not altogether inexplicable (alyta).
203–204 points to Turretin viewing the autographa as not corrupted in the extant apographa as seen in the Formula Consensus Helvetica prepared in 1675 in Zurich by John Henry Heidegger of Zurich, with the help of Turretin of Geneva and Lucas Gernler of Basel, affirming the providential preservation of Scripture thus: God, the supreme Judge, not only took care to have His Word, which is the 'power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth' (Rom 1:16), committed to writing by Moses, the prophets, and the apostles, but has also watched and cherished it with paternal care ever since it was written up to the present time, so that it could not be corrupted by craft of Satan or fraud of man.
Therefore, the church justly ascribes it to His singular grace and goodness that she has, and will have to the end of the world, a 'sure word of prophecy' (2 Pet 1:19) and 'holy Scriptures' (2 Tim 3:15), from which, though heaven and earth perish, 'one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass' (Matt 5:18).
[276][275] Paul Ferguson in footnote reference 2 of The Resolutions of the ICCC and SCCC on Bible Versions remarks that Joshua Lim had decried his own ability to give theological and doctrinal analyses in an earlier article Lim had styled An Open Letter to the redeemed of the Lamb of God, even our Saviour Jesus Christ and protested therein, "I am no theologian and I do not wish to delve with the VPP issue" while Philip Tang "in his own limited description in the Beacon article does not appear to be any more qualified to speak definitively on theology as his sole qualifications are that he has been a member of the Bible-Presbyterian Church since 1971".
In other words, the issue primarily addressed by the seventeenth-century orthodox in their discussion of the autographa is the continuity of the extant copies in Hebrew and in Greek with the originals both quoad res, with respect to the thing or subject of the text, and quoad verba, with respect to the words of the text.Unlike Timothy Tow, who was named in the obituary of Allan MacRae as among the scholars of calibre trained under MacRae[287] and who had written many theological books in Tow's own name,[288] Heng (who does not seem to have authored any book) is not known for the depth of theological knowledge but for his belief and practice of "exorcism".
[317] After quoting Whitaker – Professor of Divinity at Cambridge from 1575–1595 and regarded by Wayne Spear as the most significant influence on Chapter One of the WCF (The Westminster Confession of Faith and Holy Scripture, Carson and Hall (eds.
[326] Paul Ferguson joined in the debate with his paper also entitled Mark Them Which Cause Divisions to criticise Life BPC for misusing the word "heresy"; maligning godly men like the three Tow brothers (Timothy, SH and Siang Yeow) as "heretics"; displaying inconsistency and muddled up thinking on the VPP issue; stating that the words of God have indeed been perfectly preserved but teaching implicitly that no one can find them all at one time and place them in one Book so that a person can read from Genesis to Revelation every perfect word of God in the originals today; endorsing the different positions of institutions (BJU and Central Baptist Theological Seminary) in their claims of superior Alexandrian texts or disavowal of preservation as a doctrine of the ancient church and the beliefs of BP ministers (Tan Eng Boo and Colin Wong) who believe that there are "better" extant Greek texts than the "best" Greek texts underlying the KJV; totally misrepresenting the VPP position as a "new" concept; misunderstanding and misapplying Spurgeon's words of "nothing new in theology save that which is false"; and showing poor scholarship and research in plagiarising the views of anti-KJV and anti-Preservation writers while ignoring the many churches and persons who are pro-KJV and VPP.
based on 1 Cor 6:1-8 and published this as an article in the LBPC's weekly of 23 May 2004, shortly after the ACM on 25 April 2004 where the two Assistant Pastors and the non-VPP elders had presented their VPP-like Our Statement of Faith on the Preservation of God's Word to the congregation in their bid to oust en masse the VPP elders (who had refused to accept the resignation of Timothy Tow as Pastor) from continuing to rule the church (see "FEBC and Life BPC on VPP" above), to apparently urge those ousted to follow the example of the Lord Jesus Christ to absorb whatever grief or loss caused to them and not sue fellow Christians in secular courts.