An Affordable Reissue of Letis’s The Ecclesiastical Text

If you’re interested in the intersection of theology and textual criticism, you might want to know about a recent reissue of Theodore Letis’s 1997 book The Ecclesiastical Text: Criticism, Biblical Authority & the Popular Mind. Among other things, Letis argues in this book that the inspired New Testament text is to be found in the apographs (copies) rather than in the autographs (originals), offering a direct critique of B. B. Warfield and others in the process. For the basic argument, you can also read his article in the Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology [PDF].

We’ve written about Letis before on the blog (here and here). While I don’t usually find his text-critical views convincing, I do enjoy reading him and often learn new things when I do. Although he died around 2005, some have taken up Letis’s mantle over at the website confessionalbibliology.com and their accompanying Facebook group. Sadly, the typesetting of this new edition is worse than the old one, but the $100-cheaper price tag means it’s actually affordable. There’s also a Kindle edition for $10.

The Appeal to the Autograph in Early Protestant Theology

Back when I had time for such things, I did a bit of digging into how early Protestant theologians viewed the role of the autographs in their doctrine of Scripture. For Evangelicals, the qualification that the Biblical text is inerrant in the autographs (or on them, if you prefer) is standard. But was it always so?

My interest in this question was piqued by reading Theodore Letis who claims that this appeal to the inspiration and inerrancy of the autographic text originates with Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield. For Letis, “one of the historical ironies of this development [by Hodge and Warfield] is the inescapable loss of awe and reverence for the existential Bible as sacred text in confessing communities and in the culture at large” (The Ecclesiastical Text, p. 58 n. 33). In other words, there is a loss in that the Sacred text lies in the past rather than right here in my hands.

Painting of the Westminster divines

Theodore Letis

Jim Leonard has drawn my attention to the page Theodore P. Letis in Memorium [sic], a tribute to an ecclesiastical historian who wrote controversially on matters relating to textual criticism. He died last year in a car accident returning from a gig. There seem to be varied interpretations of what his position was. He could be seen as KJVO, Majority Text, anti-inerrancy, Childsean—categories that do not usually appear alongside each other. He was highly idiosyncratic and it seems that during the last decade of his life he espoused views that he would not have held earlier. I met him in Tyndale House, Cambridge, a few years ago, and had been previously convinced that he was basically an up-market KJVO advocate. However, if I understood our conversation correctly—and he seemed to enjoy mystifying—he basically accepted a fairly standard history of the text during the first four centuries, but believed that what the text that the church had come to receive was the locus of authority. For instance, he thought that Mark 16:9-20 was secondary and inspired. He was aware that some of his conservative constituency did not realize that his position involved this.

The tribute is followed by comments from someone who knew him exclusively as a blues musician. It seems that he kept is identities somewhat separate. (“... we knew him as a swaggering front man who liked Muddy Waters and The Stones above all else in life.”)

Further links on Letis can be found on:
http://www.holywordcafe.com/bible/Letis.html

and

http://www.kuyper.org/thetext/

The second link in particular, which gives no indication of Letis’ death, suggests that there may be some work to do bringing Letis’ intellectual legacy into order.

I discovered the authoritative pronunciation of his name as Lee-tiss when I experienced his strong reaction as I tried to order a taxi for him using the pronunciation Lettuce.

I have not read widely in the Letis corpus; I tended to be disappointed by what I read. I should therefore be interested to know if anyone formed a more favourable opinion of what he had to say.

Update (3/13/18)

Here is video of Letis