Verbal Plenary Preservation is a false teaching

A controversial doctrine is at the centre of a legal dispute between a church and its affiliated Bible college, according to the New Paper.

Life Bible-Presbyterian Church has taken the board of directors of Far Eastern Bible College to court in its attempt to force the latter to relocate for spreading deviant teachings. The church issued a writ of summons against the board of the college in September and a pre-trial conference was held on November 12.

The teaching in question, the theory of Verbal Plenary Preservation (VPP), refers to the belief that the infallible and inerrant words of Scripture are found in the Traditional/Byzantine/Majority manuscripts and fully represented in the Printed and Received Text (Textus Receptus) that underlie the Reformation Bibles best represented by the King James Version and not in the 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. according to the FEBC website. Thus, proponents of VPP hold that only the KJV is to be used in the Church.

The roots of the dispute were planted when in 2002 Dr Jeffrey Khoo, one of the respondents in the writ and a lecturer at FEBC, started propagating an extreme view of the doctrine at the college, according to a Lianhe Zaobao report on November 11.

This view was unacceptable to Life BPC and some other lecturers who disagreed with the extreme version resigned. Another respondent to the writ, Rev Dr Timothy Tow, who founded the church in 1950, resigned in 2003 and went on to found another church called True Life Bible-Presbyterian Church.

In January 2004, True Life BPC registered the college as a charity organisation without Life BPC's knowledge. On 8 November 2005 the elders of Life BPC stated that they had earlier agreed to put up with doctrinal differences for the sake of church harmony and greater benefit of the Christian belief as long as the college agreed not to use the church's premises to push its agenda. If it did, the elders said they would ask the college to leave the Gilstead Road premises.

July last year, Life BPC stopped the college from having free use of its premises, saying it was no longer linked to it as it was now a charity organisation. In March this year, the church wrote to the college board telling it to leave the Gilstead Road site by the end of June. When the board did not move, the church took legal action, claiming that the college has deviated from the role the church originally planned for it because of its extreme view of the VPP doctrine.

The college board has appealed to the church to respect an agreement made between the two in 1970 which allowed both groups joint trusteeship of the site where the college building sits.

Edmond Chua

edmond@christianpost.com