where is the pure and perfect, inspired and preserved word of God?

[Steven Avery]

According to Homestead Heritage, the pure and perfect scriptures are nowhere to be found.

In fact, they even insist that there has to be errors in all the Bibles and versions today, in any language. In order to force a type of reliance on ministry (called 'relationship with God') directives and literature. And in order to foster confusion about the identity and integrity of the Bible. Please note that this is rather analogous to views of the Bible expressed in the Roman Catholic Church and in Mormonism.

The following book is printed under the faux byline of Blair Adams (the actual author and assistants are unmentioned) and used internally by Homestead Heritage as a Bible apologetic handbook. I do not know if it has ever been sold through the press to outsiders.

The Bible
Is it or Is It Not God’s Word and the Divine Measure of Truth for Human Lives? - 2006 Edition
Question 3

“ … copyist and similar errors may appear, but there are enough manuscripts to ensure that the Holy Spirit can lead us to the correct copy and why would God ever want to give us a Word so completely free of such minor errors that we could rely on it apart from relationship with God?” - p. 93

Homestead Heritage is saying there is no perfect word of God today. Homestead Heritage is de facto claiming that there is not, and cannot be, a pure, error-free infallible Bible, inspired and preserved. Ironically, and sadly, they are directly denying their own historical position that the Bible is our perfect plumb line of faith.

They are trying to partly mask this problem by using the tricky phrase "minor errors". However, Homestead Heritage in daily use simultaneously switches back and forth between alternate and contradictory English versions and Greek texts that include or omit over 40 full verses as scripture, or not! Many of critical importance. Thus, "minor errors" is obvious a smoke-screen. Once you open the door to such supposed "minor errors", you do not have a real Bibliology. And no verse is sure.

Better go the elders for all truth, as the various acceptable corruption versions we have are all contradicting one another.

And if Homestead Heritage does not like a verse or a word, they can now simply say ..

oh, we know that this is one of the minor errors, listen to us, do not trust your Authorized Version, do not trust your Greek New Testament, our anointed ministry will tell you what is error-free. And please, do not notice our errors in writing and speaking about the Bible, we really are anointed and our views should be received as perfect.

Is this Bible belief? I trow not.

In the Homestead Heritage economy the errors could be … anywhere. No verse is sure. And we have no plumb line, there is only a skewed line.

All this is false, the word of God today is 100% pure and perfect. The weak view they espouse of embracing errors is helpful if a ministry would like to have its members unsure of the word of God. And subject to the temporal textual and translational decisions of an eldership.

How did they get into this mess? The unlearned gentlemen who developed this vapid and erratic Bibliology were unlearned. They did not understand the nature of the Reformation Bible or the clarity and significance of the historic Confessions about the Bible. Instead they relied on the popular liberal views in seminarian scholarship. They followed liberal and errant Bible text philosophies and then tried to tweak those into Homestead Heritage literature. In so doing, they often made rather glaring blunders in scholarship as well.

 

[Steven Avery]

shoddy scholarship used for the Bible apologetic handbook

The Bible apologetic handbook about has huge scholarship problems. The salient section is full of meaningless and errant quotes, that try to work an idea that the Bible is not 100% pure, but some lesser number, like 95% or 98%. This position means that everything in the Bible is unsure.

Here is an example of Homestead Heritage making a simple blunder, one which shows that they were mining quotes and statistics, and had no real understanding of the topic.

Indeed, there is an ambiguity involved in saying that there are 150,000 variants. If one single word is misspelled in 3,000 different manuscripts, this was counted as 3,000 variants or readings.
ibid, Question 14, p. 34

Totally false! This claim is a well-known and quite embarrassing blunder, the came originally from Neil R. Lightfoot and the more public Norman Geisler and William Nix, starting in the 1960s. Later, it was parroted by others, like Josh McDowell, ignorant men on this topic, now referenced as scholars by Homestead Heritage. This situation was so bad that Daniel Wallace has even written a paper (helpful for correction yet itself uneven) about this specific blunder, this evangelical miscalculation. That phrase is sufficient to find the paper online, along with discussion.

Now I can understand men of no textual understanding,and weak on logic, hortian dupes like Lightfoot and Geisler, making the blunder. The fact that the blunder is parroted by Homestead Heritage is not good, and shows that the Bible textual agenda is multi-version pseudo-apologetics, as part of allowing the use by members of Alexandrian corruption versions. The agenda is not one of seeking to understand and expound the Bible as God's pure word.

Anybody with a little sense and background and understanding would never written up this blunder as a factoid.

That Question 13 section is a horrid scholarly mish-a-mosh. At one point I wrote up about 10 pages on how Homestead Heritage approaches the Bible in the internal book. And, depending on interest, I may place the writing online in a document at a later time. For now I just want people to be aware of how bad the scholarship is about the Bible that is written up by Homestead Heritage for internal consumption. And how errant and contradictory and weak are their overall positions.

These weak positions are then interconnected to other issues like the yahweh paganism, actually calling up on a demonic entity as if it were the God of Israel. And the imaginary and counterfeit yahshua. About this doctrinal interconnection:

Isaiah 28:10
For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept;
line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little:

Isaiah 28:13
But the word of the LORD was unto them precept upon precept, precept upon precept;
line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little;
that they might go, and fall backward, and be broken, and snared, and taken.

precept upon precept; line upon line can have a positive or negative usage. The deterioration of fundamental doctrine at Homestead Heritage (e.g. the introduction of yahshua and the centrality of yahweh) is an example of the negative.