The Cases (7 of 11)

The pro-choice position claims the ground of compassion — for the woman carrying an unwanted pregnancy, for the child who would be born into poverty or violence, for the victim of rape or incest. That compassion claim is not false in itself. The suffering it names is real. What it removes is the question of what is actually happening to the unborn. When the compassion frame displaces the personhood question — when the suffering of the woman becomes the only morally relevant consideration — the argument has performed an excision. The person whose life is being ended has been defined out of the moral frame. That is false compassion. But calling it false does not make the suffering it was responding to disappear.

What makes this practically difficult is that the Christian right has often led with law rather than with care. The person considering abortion frequently encounters first a political position — legislation, protest, condemnation — rather than the question: what do you need? The position is correct. The order of engagement has often been wrong. Jesus reached the person before He addressed the behavior. The church has frequently reversed this, and the reversal is what makes the correct position appear uncompassionate even when it is not. A correct position delivered without love is what 1 Corinthians 13:1 describes: a noisy gong. It makes sound. It does not help. And in this case it has cost credibility on the one question where the church's witness is most urgently needed.

The governance question on abortion does not have a clean resolution in a pluralistic democracy, because it depends on the underlying question of personhood — and the culture is genuinely divided on that question. Christians making the case for the unborn are making a legitimate and urgent moral argument. Making it credibly requires making it the way Scripture makes it: with care for both persons in the frame, with truthfulness about what is happening, and with the willingness to support the woman and the child rather than simply prohibiting the choice and moving on.

ECCLESIOLOGICAL AND CONFESSIONAL King James Only

The claim that the 1611 King James Version is the uniquely preserved word of God in English is a tradition about a translation. The translators themselves would have rejected it. They wrote in their preface that they were not making a new translation but revising an existing one, and they acknowledged their own imperfections in the work. The tradition claiming unique preservation for their output goes further than they did. It is not a biblical teaching.

The tradition has built a clever defense worth naming, because it holds up better than the simple preservation claim. The argument goes like this: use only the KJV, a concordance, and an English dictionary. Do not reach for Greek manuscripts, Hebrew word studies, other ancient copies, lexicons, or any scholarly work. Keep the system closed. As long as it stays closed, your readings stay steady, your certainty stays high, and the authority sits in the plain English text instead of in outside experts.

It holds together as an idea. It also falls apart at the root. The 47 scholars who made the KJV used the exact tools the closed-system argument tells you to avoid — Greek manuscripts, Hebrew word studies, other ancient copies, lexicons, careful scholarly work. So the tradition trusts what they produced while condemning how they produced it. If that kind of scholarship ruins certainty, then the KJV cannot be the certain text, because that scholarship made it. If the KJV is the certain text, then the scholarship that made it was sound — and Greek, Hebrew, and manuscript study are sound tools after all. The argument cannot have it both ways.

The early church also had no closed system. The believers in Acts had no English Bible, no concordance, no KJV. They turned the Roman Empire upside down. The tradition claiming the closed system is the necessary condition for sound Bible study has built a requirement the apostles never placed and that God has demonstrably worked around wherever He chose. John 17:3 defines eternal life as present-tense relational knowing. It does not name a translation method.

The closed system cannot survive the question it does not ask: settled as of which edition? The KJV has appeared in multiple editions — the 1611 original, the 1629 and 1638 Cambridge revisions, the 1762 Paris edition, and the 1769 Oxford text that most KJV readers hold today. Spelling, punctuation, and wording differences exist across these editions. When the question is which edition is the perfect word of God, by what method is the answer determined? Manuscript comparison. Textual scholarship. The system opens the moment you ask which KJV.

In June 2026, a public exchange laid this argument out in full. The closed system was presented as the only steady way to study the Bible, with seven specific reasons other translations fail the test — all of them coming down to one point: modern translations admit that ancient copies differ in places, and admitting that brings in uncertainty, which takes scholars to sort out, which hands authority to experts. The KJV, the argument said, presents itself as already settled and needs none of that. The exchange never addressed which KJV edition is the settled one, who decided that, or how. And underneath the argument, hear what the man making it is actually reaching for: certainty. A Bible that cannot shift under his feet. That longing is not wrong — it is the longing for a rock, and Scripture says there is one. But the rock is not an edition. It is a Person, and He does not shift.

The Institutional Exemption Claim

The argument runs like this. The Reformers were right to critique the Church of Rome. But the Protestant Reformers came out of Catholicism and carried Catholic errors with them. There exists, however, another lineage — true churches that were never part of Rome, never Protestant, that trace connection back to the apostles independent of the Catholic transmission chain entirely. If you stand in that line, the critique does not reach you.

This idea is most formally tied to Landmark Baptist teaching, though it shows up across many independent Baptist and non-denominational fundamentalist churches that have never heard the word Landmark. Its best-known form is J.M. Carroll's 1931 pamphlet The Trail of Blood, which traces an unbroken line of true churches from the New Testament to today. Most Baptist historians, including conservative ones, have looked at the evidence Carroll offers and found it too thin to hold the claim up.

The history problem is plain. For the roughly seven centuries between 300 and 1000 AD, the records you would need to prove an unbroken non-Catholic line mostly do not exist. The groups usually named as proof — Montanists, Novatians, Donatists, Paulicians, Waldensians — believed different things, lived centuries apart, and were never linked to one another as a single chain of churches. What they had in common was that they resisted Rome. Resisting Rome is not the same as being one continuous church.

The deeper problem is the canon — the list of books in the Bible itself. The person making this argument holds a New Testament of 27 books. That exact list came together through a specific history. Athanasius' 39th Festal Letter (367 AD) is the earliest list that matches the Protestant New Testament. The Council of Hippo (393 AD) and the Councils of Carthage (397 and 419 AD) are where it was formally affirmed. Jerome gathered the result into the Latin Vulgate. Every one of those steps was taken by men working inside what became the Roman Catholic Church. The Bible in this person's hands came through the very chain he says his churches never touched.