Schism as Divine Judgment:
The Fragmentation of the Bible-Presbyterian Church of Singapore
as a Theological Mirror of the Divided Kingdom
A Theological Essay
By a Servant of the Word
ABSTRACT: This essay argues that the progressive fracturing of the Bible-Presbyterian (B-P) Church of Singapore into competing and irreconcilable factions is not merely an ecclesiastical or administrative accident, but is, in its deepest theological dimension, a divine judgment upon the sin of spiritual adultery — most acutely expressed through the vices of pride and doctrinal innovation in the form of the Verbal Plenary Preservation (VPP) theory and its corollary, KJV-Onlyism. Drawing upon the biblical typology of King David's catastrophic sin and its consequence in the eventual division of the united kingdom of Israel into two hostile states — northern Israel and southern Judah — this essay contends that God's pattern of visiting the sins of ecclesial leadership upon the body of the church is consistent, predictable, and thoroughly grounded in Scripture. The division of the B-P Church is, in this reading, a solemn and providential warning to all who would place human tradition above the living Word of God.
Part I: The Historical Fracturing of the Bible-Presbyterian Church in
Singapore
1.1 Origins and Early Unity
The
Bible-Presbyterian Church of Singapore traces its genesis to the mid-twentieth
century, born from the fervent revivalist and separatist impulses of the
broader international Fundamentalist movement. Its founding was deeply
influenced by the theology and ecclesiastical politics of Dr. Carl McIntire of
the American Council of Christian Churches (ACCC) and the International Council
of Christian Churches (ICCC). The most prominent local architect of the
movement was the Reverend Timothy Tow Siang Hui, whose vision of a
confessionally Reformed, evangelistically zealous, and ecclesiastically
separate community gave the B-P Church its early identity.
In its
formative decades, the B-P Church represented a genuine attempt to plant a
theologically rigorous, Bible-centred Presbyterian witness in the heart of
Southeast Asia. The church held to the Westminster Confession of Faith,
practised Reformed worship, and maintained a commitment to world evangelism
through the Far Eastern Bible College (FEBC), founded to train pastors and
missionaries for Asia and beyond. This period, however idealised in retrospect,
was one of relative doctrinal coherence and institutional unity.
1.2 The Beginning of Factions
The seeds
of division were, however, present from the beginning — not merely in the
contentious personalities of its leaders, but in a deeper structural problem:
the conflation of personal doctrinal preferences with ecclesiastical orthodoxy.
What began as admirable commitment to biblical inerrancy gradually, and
tragically, hardened into an authoritarian insistence upon specific textual
theories and a single English translation as the litmus test of true faith.
The B-P
movement in Singapore today presents a bewildering landscape of competing
assemblies, each claiming to be the authentic heir of the founding vision.
These include but are not limited to: the B-P Church of Singapore (the
institutional Synod), Life B-P Church (founded by Rev. Timothy Tow), Calvary
B-P Church, Gethsemane B-P Church, Zion B-P Church, True Life B-P Church, and
numerous other independent congregations that use the B-P name while
maintaining no formal connection to one another. The fracture lines run deep,
and they are theological, not merely personal.
1.3 The Central Controversy: VPP and KJV-Onlyism
The
decisive fracturing event that tore the B-P family apart in the early
twenty-first century was the propagation, by the Far Eastern Bible College
under Jeffrey Khoo and with the blessing of Rev. Timothy Tow, of the
doctrine of Verbal Plenary Preservation (VPP). This teaching goes beyond the
classical Reformed doctrine of the providential preservation of Scripture.
Where the Westminster Confession (1.8) affirms that the original-language
manuscripts have been "kept pure in all ages" by God's singular care
and providence, the VPP doctrine makes the bolder — and exegetically
unwarranted — claim that the Masoretic Text of the Old Testament and the Textus
Receptus of the New Testament are the perfectly and miraculously preserved Word
of God, word for word and letter for letter, in their present received form.
From this
premise, its proponents drew the further conclusion that the King James Version
(KJV) of 1611 — being translated from these supposedly perfect texts — is
itself the uniquely authoritative and preserved English Bible. All other
translations, including the English Standard Version, the New American Standard
Bible, and the New International Version, were condemned as corrupt, perverted,
and even satanic in their corruption of God's Word. This is the KJV-Only
position.
The B-P
Church of Singapore's Synod, after extensive deliberation, formally rejected
VPP as an unconfessional innovation at its 2008 General Assembly, stating that
it went beyond what the Westminster Confession of Faith teaches and what
Scripture itself warrants. The FEBC and Life B-P Church, however, remained
defiant. The result was a complete and seemingly irreversible rupture. Families
were divided. Pastors were expelled. Congregations fractured. Friendships of
decades were destroyed. What had been a community of Christian brothers became,
in the bitterness of the controversy, a field of mutual anathema.
Part II: The Sin of Spiritual Adultery — A Theological Diagnosis
2.1 Defining Spiritual Adultery
To
understand the root cause of the B-P Church's disintegration, we must first
establish what the Scripture means by the term "spiritual adultery."
In the Hebrew prophetic tradition, the covenant between God and Israel was
repeatedly described in the imagery of a marriage. Yahweh was the husband;
Israel was the wife. To pursue other gods, to trust in human schemes rather
than divine provision, to place one's ultimate confidence in anything other
than the living God and His revealed Word — this was spiritual adultery. The
prophets Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel all deployed this image with devastating
rhetorical power.
"For your husband
is your Maker, Whose name is the LORD of hosts; And your Redeemer is the Holy
One of Israel, Who is called the God of all the earth." — Isaiah 54:5 (KJV)
"Surely, as a wife
treacherously departeth from her husband, so have ye dealt treacherously with
me, O house of Israel, saith the LORD." — Jeremiah 3:20 (KJV)
In the
New Testament, this same metaphor is applied to the church. Christ is the
Bridegroom; the church is His bride (Ephesians 5:25-32; Revelation 19:7-9;
21:2). Spiritual adultery in the ecclesial context therefore means
unfaithfulness to Christ and to His truth. It occurs whenever a church or its
leaders place human tradition, ecclesiastical pride, or novel doctrinal
constructs above the clear and faithful teaching of Scripture as understood
through the historic confessional tradition.
2.2 Pride as the Root of Spiritual Adultery
The first
and most fundamental form of spiritual adultery manifested in the B-P
controversy is the sin of pride. Pride, as the theologians of the classical
tradition consistently taught from Augustine to the Westminster divines, is the
first of sins — the root from which all other sins grow. It is the disposition
of the creature to elevate itself, its own judgment, and its own tradition to
the level of divine authority.
"Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall." — Proverbs 16:18 (KJV)
The pride
that infected the VPP controversy manifested in a very specific and
identifiable form: the elevation of the judgments and preferences of particular
men — however sincerely held, however learned those men — to the level of
binding doctrinal orthodoxy. When a position that goes beyond the Westminster
Confession of Faith is taught as if to reject it is to reject the Bible itself,
something has gone deeply wrong. The VPP proponents did not merely hold a
minority exegetical position; they anathematised those who disagreed. They
conflated faithfulness to Christ with fidelity to their own doctrinal
innovation. This is pride of the most spiritually dangerous variety because it
wears the garments of piety.
Furthermore,
the insistence that one English translation — the KJV — is the uniquely
preserved Word of God for the English-speaking world carries within it an
astonishing degree of institutional pride. It privileges the scholarship of
seventeenth-century Anglican translators above all subsequent advances in
textual knowledge and linguistic understanding. It treats a particular moment
in the history of biblical translation as the culmination of providential
history. And it binds the consciences of believers to a position nowhere taught
in Scripture itself. This is precisely what the Westminster Confession warned
against when it stated that "God alone is Lord of the conscience, and hath
left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men" (WCF 20.2).
2.3 False Teaching as Spiritual Adultery
The
second form of spiritual adultery is false teaching — the introduction of
doctrines that are not warranted by Scripture, that contradict the historic
confessional standards of the church, and that divide the people of God without
cause. The Apostle Paul's warning to the Galatian church is sobering in this
connection:
"But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed." — Galatians 1:8 (KJV)
The VPP
doctrine, as this essay has outlined, is a theological novelty. No major
Reformed confession of faith — not the Westminster Confession, not the Belgic
Confession, not the Heidelberg Catechism, not the Second Helvetic Confession —
teaches that any specific manuscript tradition or received text is itself the
miraculously preserved, word-perfect deposit of Scripture. The classical
doctrine, carefully articulated in WCF 1.8, speaks of the "original
tongues" being "kept pure" by God's "singular care and providence,"
with the Church being called to have "access" to them. This is a
providential affirmation, not a claim of textual perfectionism about any
specific received tradition.
To teach
VPP as if it were the confessional position is to misrepresent the Confession.
To teach KJV-Onlyism is to bind the conscience of every believer to a single
English translation produced in a specific cultural and ecclesiastical context.
Both teachings exceed and contradict what Scripture itself plainly teaches on
the matter of textual transmission. They are therefore, in the precise
theological sense of the term, false teachings — not heresies that deny the
Trinity or the atonement, but serious doctrinal errors that, when insisted upon
as tests of fellowship and orthodoxy, become instruments of division and
destruction in the body of Christ, heresy!
2.4 The Whoredom of Tradition-Worship
There is
a deeper spiritual dynamic at work in KJV-Onlyism that deserves specific
theological attention: the phenomenon of tradition-worship, or what we might
theologically call textual idolatry. When a particular text or translation is
elevated above all critical examination, when questioning it is treated as
equivalent to doubting God, when its defenders employ the language of sacrilege
and apostasy against those who use other reliable translations — they have,
functionally, placed a human artefact in the position that belongs to God
alone.
"Thus have ye made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition. Ye hypocrites, well did Esaias prophesy of you, saying, This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men." — Matthew 15:6b-9 (KJV)
Our
Lord's rebuke of the Pharisees strikes directly at the heart of textual
traditionalism run amok. The Pharisees did not deny Scripture; they were
devoted to it. But they surrounded it with a tradition that had, over time,
acquired the authority of Scripture itself — and when forced to choose, they
chose the tradition over the commandment of God. KJV-Onlyism, in demanding
fealty to a seventeenth-century translation as if it were itself the inspired
original, commits a structurally identical error. It is not the devotion to
accuracy that is wrong — it is the elevation of a means of access to God's Word
to the level of God's Word itself. This is spiritual adultery: loving the gift
more than the Giver, the vessel more than the treasure within.
Part III: The Typology of David — Sin and Its Consequences in the Kingdom
3.1 David's Sin: The Fateful Transgression
The
scriptural account of King David's sin with Bathsheba and his murder of Uriah
the Hittite (2 Samuel 11) is one of the most theologically sobering narratives
in all of Holy Scripture. Here is a man described as "a man after God's
own heart" (1 Samuel 13:14; Acts 13:22) — the shepherd-king, the sweet
psalmist of Israel, the anointed servant of the Lord — who falls into
catastrophic sin. The sin is not merely moral failure in the abstract. It is a
complex sin of adultery, deception, abuse of royal power, and calculated
murder. And crucially, it occurs at a moment of idle self-indulgence: David is
at ease in Jerusalem when he should have been at war (2 Samuel 11:1).
The
prophet Nathan's confrontation of David in 2 Samuel 12 is the theological hinge
upon which the entire subsequent history of Israel turns. Nathan's parable of
the rich man who stole the poor man's beloved ewe lamb draws David into the
role of judge before he becomes the condemned. And then the devastating word of
God falls:
"Wherefore hast thou despised the commandment of the LORD, to do evil in his sight? thou hast killed Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and hast taken his wife to be thy wife, and hast slain him with the sword of the children of Ammon. Now therefore the sword shall never depart from thine house; because thou hast despised me, and hast taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be thy wife." — 2 Samuel 12:9-10 (KJV)
The word
"despised" is of supreme importance here. David did not merely sin in
weakness; he despised the commandment of the LORD. He treated the holy law of
God with contempt. He placed his own desire, his own will, his own agenda above
the revealed will of God. This is the essence of spiritual adultery in the life
of the individual — the substitution of self-will for obedience to the divine
Word.
3.2 Immediate and Long-term Consequences
The
consequences of David's sin were both immediate and long-term, both personal
and national. In the immediate term, the child born of the adulterous union
died, despite David's anguished fasting and prayer. In the medium term, David's
household became a theatre of sexual violence, fratricide, and rebellion. His
son Amnon raped his daughter Tamar; his son Absalom murdered Amnon; Absalom
launched a full-scale rebellion against his own father, publicly violating
David's concubines on the rooftop — a grotesque echo of David's own sin, now
visited upon his household in public judgment (2 Samuel 16:20-22).
But the
long-term consequence — the one of greatest significance for our theological
argument — was the division of the kingdom itself. David's sin set in motion a
chain of dynastic weakness, moral compromise, and political instability that
found its ultimate consequence in the catastrophic reign of Rehoboam, David's
grandson through Solomon. Solomon, despite his extraordinary wisdom, fell into
the very sin of spiritual adultery in its literal and religious form: he took
foreign wives who turned his heart after other gods (1 Kings 11:1-8). And the
LORD said to Solomon:
"Wherefore the LORD said unto Solomon, Forasmuch as this is done of thee, and thou hast not kept my covenant and my statutes, which I have commanded thee, I will surely rend the kingdom from thee, and will give it to thy servant." — 1 Kings 11:11 (KJV)
When
Rehoboam succeeded Solomon, he rejected the counsel of the wise elders and
followed the advice of young men who urged him to increase the burden upon the
people. The ten northern tribes revolted under Jeroboam, and the united kingdom
was torn asunder — never to be reunited. Ten tribes went north; two (Judah and
Benjamin) remained in the south. The northern kingdom of Israel descended
almost immediately into apostasy under Jeroboam's golden calves. The southern
kingdom of Judah maintained a more ambiguous but ultimately also tragic
trajectory.
3.3 The Theological Mechanics of Generational Sin and Institutional Division
The
theological principle at work in the David narrative is one that runs
throughout Scripture: the sins of leaders have consequences that extend far
beyond the individual. David's adultery, pride, and abuse of power introduced a
principle of moral disorder into the royal house that expressed itself across
generations. The "sword" that "shall never depart" from
David's house (2 Samuel 12:10) is not merely a metaphor for family conflict; it
is the declaration of a principle of divine governance: that sin, especially
the sin of those in positions of spiritual authority and responsibility, has
systemic, generational, and institutional consequences.
"I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me." — Exodus 20:5b (KJV)
This is
not to be misread as a doctrine of arbitrary collective punishment. Rather, it
describes the organic reality of how sin works within communities, families,
and institutions. The pride of a leader breeds pride in those he disciples. The
doctrinal error of a founder shapes the thinking of those who follow. The
sectarian spirit of a movement creates a culture in which schism becomes
normal, even virtuous. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children
not through arbitrary divine wrath but through the natural, organic, and tragic
transmission of sinful patterns across generations and institutions.
Part IV: The Divided Kingdom and the Divided Church — A Type and Its
Antitype
4.1 The Structural Parallel
The
parallel between the division of ancient Israel and the fracturing of the B-P
Church of Singapore is not a forced or fanciful typological exercise. It is
grounded in the consistent biblical pattern of how God deals with His covenant
community when it departs from His truth. Consider the structural
correspondences:
In
Israel, a community called and constituted by divine covenant, enjoying
remarkable unity and spiritual vitality under a charismatic and anointed
leader, fell into catastrophic sin when that leader prioritised his own will
above the commandment of God. In the B-P Church, a community called and
constituted by Reformed confessional commitment, enjoying genuine zeal and
missionary fruitfulness in its early decades, began to fragment when its
founding leaders and their successors prioritised their own doctrinal
innovations above the boundaries of the historic confessional tradition.
In
Israel, the sin was described by God as despising His commandment. In the B-P
Church, the sin was, at its root, the elevation of human tradition — a
particular manuscript theory, a particular English translation — to the level
of divine command, and the anathematising of those who refused to submit to
this tradition. Both sins, at their theological core, share the same structure:
the substitution of human will and human tradition for the revealed will of
God.
4.2 Pride, the Rehoboam Spirit, and the Refusal to Hear
The most
striking correspondence between the ancient division and the modern one is the
role of pride in making the fracture irreversible. Rehoboam had the
opportunity, at the assembly at Shechem, to hear the grievances of the northern
tribes, to show wisdom and humility, and to hold the kingdom together. The
elders who had served his father gave him exactly the counsel he needed: serve
the people, speak good words to them, and they will serve you forever (1 Kings
12:7). But Rehoboam rejected this counsel.
"And the king answered the people roughly, and forsook the old men's counsel that they gave him; And spake to them after the counsel of the young men." — 1 Kings 12:13-14a (KJV)
In the
B-P controversy, a similar dynamic played out. The mainstream B-P Synod, after
years of deliberation, respectfully and carefully examined the VPP position and
found it wanting. Learned scholars, godly pastors, and experienced elders
raised substantive exegetical and confessional objections. The response of the
VPP proponents, rather than humble re-examination, was increasing entrenchment,
rhetorical escalation, and personal attack. The spirit of Rehoboam — proud,
dismissive, convinced of its own rightness and of the malice of all who
disagreed — drove the parties to the point of irreversible rupture.
This is
the Rehoboam Spirit: the spirit that, offered the counsel of wisdom and the
possibility of reconciliation, responds with force, accusation, and the
hardening of positions. And as in ancient Israel, once that spirit has done its
work, the division it produces takes on a life of its own, establishing new
loyalties, new institutions, and new traditions that make return to unity ever
more difficult.
4.3 Jeroboam's Golden Calves — Doctrinal Idolatry and Its Fruits
The
northern kingdom of Israel, having separated from the legitimate temple worship
in Jerusalem, faced an immediate practical problem: its people would journey
south to worship at Jerusalem and might return their allegiance to the Davidic
dynasty. Jeroboam's solution was to erect golden calves at Bethel and Dan,
saying:
"Behold thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt." — 1 Kings 12:28b (KJV)
This was
not outright paganism — it was syncretistic religion, a mixture of Yahwistic
faith with a human-devised institutional substitute. The calves were perhaps
intended to represent the footstool of the invisible God, as the ark's cherubim
did in Jerusalem. But they introduced a principle of human creativity into the
worship of God, substituting what men designed for what God had commanded. And
once introduced, this principle reproduced itself until the northern kingdom
had drifted far from the God who had delivered them from Egypt.
The
KJV-Only and VPP position functions, in a structurally analogous way, as a kind
of golden calf for the B-P tradition. It was introduced, ostensibly, to protect
the people of God and their reverence for Scripture. But in doing so, it
substituted a human construction — a textual theory and a particular
translation — for the living, self-interpreting Word of God in its original
languages. And having been introduced, it reproduced itself institutionally,
creating curricula, publications, and an entire subculture of doctrinal
enforcement that now perpetuates itself independently of any exegetical
justification. The irony is supreme: a movement dedicated to the defence of
God's Word introduced a teaching that, in effect, displaced the Word of God
with a tradition about the Word of God.
4.4 The Long Shadow of Schism
The
northern kingdom of Israel never recovered from Jeroboam's sin. It was
conquered by Assyria in 722 BC, its people scattered and lost to history. The
southern kingdom survived longer, but it too eventually fell — to Babylon in
586 BC — its temple destroyed, its people exiled. The united kingdom that once
stretched from Dan to Beersheba, the glory of Solomon's reign, was a memory.
The
Bible-Presbyterian movement in Singapore has not yet been extinguished, but the
trajectory of division suggests a community that has lost, perhaps permanently,
the capacity for the institutional unity it once enjoyed. Each new faction
claims to be the authentic heir of the founding vision. Each anathematises the
others. Each has its own institutions, its own leadership culture, its own
sacred texts and traditions. The spiritual energy that once went into
evangelism, church planting, and theological education now goes, in
considerable measure, into the maintenance of factional boundaries and the
defence of disputed doctrinal positions.
This is
the long shadow of schism. It is the sword that never departs from the house —
not because God is vengeful, but because sin, once institutionalised, is
remarkably difficult to repent of and remarkably faithful in reproducing
itself.
Part V: The Path Forward — Repentance, Humility, and Return
5.1 The Call to Repentance
The
Scripture does not leave us without hope. David, the architect of so much
disaster, was also the model of genuine repentance. Psalm 51 — his great
penitential psalm — remains a monument to the possibility of authentic
confession and restoration. The LORD did not abandon David; He disciplined him.
And through David's repentance, God preserved the Davidic line through which
the Messiah would come.
"Create in me a
clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from
thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me." — Psalm 51:10-11 (KJV)
The
theological prescription for the B-P community — indeed, for any ecclesiastical
community caught in the spiral of pride-driven schism — is the same as it has
always been: repentance. Not the repentance that says, "I am sorry if I
caused offence," but the repentance that says, "I have sinned against
the Lord and against my brethren. I have elevated my tradition above His Word.
I have broken the unity of the body of Christ over matters that do not warrant
such division. Lord, have mercy."
5.2 The Discipline of Doctrinal Humility
Alongside
repentance, the path forward requires the discipline of doctrinal humility —
the recognition that no single individual, no single institution, and no single
confessional tradition possesses the totality of biblical truth. This is not a
call to relativism or to the abandonment of confessional standards. The
Westminster Confession remains a remarkably faithful summary of biblical
teaching and is entirely adequate as a basis for Christian unity within the
Reformed tradition. But the Confession itself, rightly understood, calls the
church back to Scripture as its supreme authority — not to any human tradition,
however venerable, as the final word.
Doctrinal
humility means holding one's exegetical conclusions with appropriate
tentativeness, especially on matters — such as the precise theory of textual
transmission — that the church in its confessional wisdom has not found it
necessary to define with binding precision. It means distinguishing between the
fundamentals of the faith — the Trinity, the incarnation, the atonement,
justification by faith alone — and the secondary questions on which sincere,
learned, and godly Christians may differ without breaking fellowship.
5.3 The Healing of the Kingdom
The Old
Testament ends with a haunting hope: the prophet Malachi speaks of the coming
of Elijah, who will "turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and
the heart of the children to their fathers" (Malachi 4:6). This is the
hope of reconciliation, of the healing of generational fractures, of the return
from exile. The New Testament identifies this Elijah with John the Baptist,
whose ministry prepared the way for the One who would, through His own body
broken and blood shed, make peace between God and humanity — and between Jew
and Gentile, bond and free, male and female (Galatians 3:28; Ephesians
2:14-16).
The
church of Jesus Christ is called to embody this reconciliation — not a false
peace that ignores genuine doctrinal error, but a genuine peace that refuses to
elevate secondary questions to the level of first principles, that prioritises
the bond of the Spirit over the bonds of institutional loyalty, and that keeps
ever before it the prayer of the Lord Jesus:
"That they all may
be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in
us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me." — John 17:21 (KJV)
The
fragmentation of the B-P Church of Singapore is a wound to the body of Christ
and a reproach to the cause of the gospel in Southeast Asia. It need not be
permanent. But its healing will require what all healing from sin requires:
honest confession, genuine repentance, and the courageous willingness to
subordinate institutional pride to the lordship of Christ and the unity of His
body.
Conclusion: The God Who Judges and Restores
This
essay has argued that the fracturing of the Bible-Presbyterian Church of
Singapore into numerous competing factions is, at its theological root, the
consequence of the sin of spiritual adultery — manifested in the pride that
elevates human tradition to the level of divine command, and in the false
teaching of Verbal Plenary Preservation and KJV-Onlyism. Drawing upon the
scriptural typology of David's sin and its consequences in the division of the
united kingdom of Israel, we have seen that God's pattern of visiting the sins
of leaders upon the institutions they lead is consistent, tragic, and
thoroughly grounded in the biblical narrative of covenant faithfulness and
covenant breach.
The God
of Scripture is both a God who judges and a God who restores. He does not
delight in the death of the wicked (Ezekiel 33:11), and He does not delight in
the fragmentation of His church. But He is also a God of holiness, who will not
permit the sin of pride and doctrinal idolatry to go unjudged — especially when
that sin divides the very body that is called to display His reconciling love
to the watching world.
The call
of this essay is therefore not one of condemnation but of prophetic witness.
Let those who have ears to hear, hear. Let those who have divided the body of
Christ over the tradition of men repent and return to the Word of God in its
fullness and freedom. Let the divided kingdom be reunited — not under any human
authority, but under the sole lordship of Jesus Christ, the King of kings and
Lord of lords, the Head of the church, and the living Word of God.
