We’ve identified a crucial historical distinction that modern VPP advocates often obscure. The classical Reformed position—particularly Turretin’s—affirmed preservation while explicitly allowing for textual imperfection in transmission.
Turretin argued that God had providentially preserved the books of the canon so that they accurately reflected the original manuscripts, yet he acknowledged that errors in biblical manuscripts “crept into the books of particular editions through the negligence of copyists or printers,” though these “corruptions and errors” could be “restored and corrected by any collation of various copies, or of Scripture itself and of parallel passages.”[1] This represents a preservation doctrine that operates through human process, not despite it.
Critically, Turretin recognized that some scholars believed “a few very slight errors have crept into the Scriptures, and even now exist, which cannot be corrected by any collation of Manuscripts,” attributing these to “the injuries of time” and “the fault of copyists,” and while he defended the integrity of Scripture against apparent contradictions, he “recognized the former as orthodox.”[2] This theological generosity is absent from modern VPP.
The Princeton theologians, however, shifted the ground significantly. With advances in biblical scholarship demonstrating variance even in earliest manuscripts, inerrancy was claimed not for the Bible as we know it, but for the original autographs, and Warfield insisted that inerrancy did not apply to the preservation of biblical manuscripts, did not guard against copyists’ errors, and did not assure faithful translation.[3] Notably, this represents a clear contradiction to the Westminster Confession of Faith, which affirms that inspired texts are “kept pure in all ages” by God’s “singular care and providence.”[3]
The answer to our question is clear: God’s faithfulness requires sufficiency, not perfection. Turretin’s model—preservation through secondary causation with minor textual variation—honors both divine sovereignty and human instrumentality. Modern VPP collapses this distinction by demanding autographic perfection while claiming only providential preservation.
[1] Donald K. McKim, “Scriptural Authority: Biblical Authority and the Protestant Reformation,” in The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 5:1034.
[2] D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge, Scripture and Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1992), 241.
[3] Review and Expositor (1998), 95:4:540–541.
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