I’m done addressing KJV-Onlyism at the popular level on December 31, 2024 (with a few little exceptions I mention in my wrap-up video), so I’m clearing out my files—and posting a few scripts that never made it to the channel.
One of my life’s long-term prayers is that someone of stature within KJV-Only circles will publicly apologize for promoting false doctrine.
A major difficulty, I find, is that everyone who comes out of KJV-Onlyism as an adult has already paid a price for their change of mind—and the last thing I want to do is add a burden to people who have lost ministry positions and strained and broken friendships. I have taken the risk of approaching several different ex-KJV-Onlyists to inquire whether or not they ought to issue any kind of public apology. Each had excellent reasons—and I mean this, excellent reasons—to politely decline.
Ultimately God only knows what moral culpability individuals bear for teaching things that aren’t true and thereby dividing the body of Christ. God only knows who is a victim and who is a perpetrator, or what proportions of perpetrator and victim a given person represents. But I just can’t imagine that all this untruth and division that’s been generated by KJV-Onlyism could occur without individual people sinning—sinning against the teaching of 1 Cor 14 that edification requires intelligibility, sinning against commands for unity and for sound doctrine, sinning against God’s providential opportunities for doing better study. And we’re Christians here: we know that the thing to do when we sin is confess and forsake. “Confess your faults one to another” probably doesn’t mean that we should go around telling everyone we know all the bad things we’ve done. No, I think that verse is most likely meant to encourage us as believers to confess our sins to those people whom our sins affected.
And that’s why large institutions issue public apologies. There’s no way they could possibly figure out the identities of all the individuals they harmed with their actions, so they put their apologies on websites or even on TV. One of my proudest days as a graduate of Bob Jones University was in 2008 when the administration apologized for being beholden to racist Southern culture instead of to the Bible in their now-long-dead interracial dating bans. In my experience, you don’t get a lot of kudos when an insitution or public person apologizes—but people do notice. The haters are gonna hate, and their hatred will go up as they laugh about their victory. But the silent majority will make a silent judgment: if the apologizer is clear and sincere, that majority will gain respect for the one who did wrong but is now admitting it.
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