LETTERS: SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTISTS SEEK BIBLICAL CLARITY

To the editor:

In your July 21 article, "King James movement drives wedge in U.S. fundamentalism," I was surprised to hear who supposedly started the King James Only movement: a theologian from my church.

Being a Seventh-day Adventist, I never once heard that we were only to read the King James Version of the Bible. I decided to check into this matter. I learned that Dr. Benjamin Wilkinson wrote a treatise in favor of the King James Bible, but his basis was suspect. Wilkinson's argument was so thin it cast a shadow on his scholarship. Even though he attracted a colony of devoted followers, his views were not accepted by the church at large. Some of the work he did has proved helpful, but in this area we have to live with a reality. He made some serious mistakes. Just as we would not judge all of Christ's ministry by Judas' last acts, so it is not safe to view a church through the eyes of one man.

In my own personal library I have a dozen or so different translations and paraphrases of the Bible. In my sermons, I use whichever translation I feel communicates the passage the most clearly.

Let me close with this interesting statement by the King James Bible translators themselves: "We are poor instruments to make God's holy Truth to be yet more and more known unto the people." They realized that God's word would need to be made "more and more" understandable to the people. God's thoughts must be just as relevant to us as they were to Moses, Daniel, John and all the other writers of the Bible.

LEE WHITMAN

Pastor

Seventh-day Adventist Church

Cape Girardeau