Hi Folks,
Thanks for the greetings and kind words, Tim and George. Now I'm going to give a round two on these issues.
There is no desire for me to take a pro-or-anti Peter Ruckman stance, and I do really generally appreciate David Cloud and some other folks who are adversarial to Ruckman. However I do agree that an anti-Ruckman tome is for a King James Bible defender a disservice to his own work. A person can express many disagreements with Peter Ruckman without trying to shout out day-after-day "I am not like Ruckman" in essence denying that Ruckman has really labored and helped in many realms of King James Bible understanding and defense. And obscuring the fact that Peter Ruckman more than any other person has made it acceptable to defend the King James Bible without apologies, without looking over your shoulder at other languages or scholars or theories. Today the ploughman, and even on rare occasion the seminarian, can fully defend the King James Bible. David Cloud and any other pure-KJB folks who make a big point of "I am not like Ruckman" would do well to consider rewriting any anti-Ruckman disassociation-and-attack pieces. Let differences in style and tone be apparent and noticed by others, and leave it at that. Simply announce your doctrinal differences and distance, write a couple of paragraphs, and move on. Personally, I really appreciated the tone of David Cloud and of Peter Ruckman both when I met them in person.
Overall, I have strong admiration for how Peter Ruckman historically helped change the attitude and tenor of the King James Bible debate. And I let most of the non-pure-Bible doctrinal and personal concerns about him to be only background.
Maybe on a forum like this such issues could be put on a separate threads .. "Peter Ruckman, non-Bible-version questions" and "Peter Ruckman, some brouhahas with other folks" . And those threads could even have their own spot.
My concern is that every thread gets embroiled in noise controversy so that the substance of what Peter Ruckman shares on the Bible version issues are basically ignored, drowned out by a dozen people attacking or defending. Not just here, but on any forum. So Ruckman's views on the English and Greek and textual lines and verses and the pure Bible and the alexandrian cult are nor discussed or examined. His studies of verses and textlines and church history and this or that are noised out.
Look at this thread, it is ostensibly about the Bible Believer's Bulletin, where there are tons of fascinating articles on the King James Bible and the alexandrian cult pretender versions, and virtually none of that gets discussed and then the thread is recommended to be closed.
(I can grant closing a thread that is long to start another on page 1 that is about the Bible version issues, but not just because of debate about the auxiliary issues that didn't really belong on this thread anyway.)
So please consider what I am requesting. Separate out Peter Ruckman discussions on this forum into two realms. One can be about brouhahas, qualifications for teaching, language and tone, marriages and divorces, disagreements and attacks, this at that.
The other, and I believe more important, threads will be only on his Bible version related articles and overall related issues.
Granted there will be some drift, since many questions span a couple of realms, like the realm of the papacy which is hisoorical and doctrinal and also Bible related, especially to those of us who see the W-H movement as the fabrication of the counter-reformation version. However Bible believers who attack Peter Ruckman don't generally attack him on such, or on his views on islam, or a number of other areas. Even his dispensational views can generally be seen as simply one of many doctrinal viewpoints, so they are generally not a point of great contention.
The main point is to keep the ad hominem arguments away from the pure-Bible discussions. (Incidentally, I am not using ad hominem here as a reference to a fallacy argument, simply a type of discussion that should be separated. It is a fallacy to think that all ad hominem points and references and arguments are fallacies.)
However, partly because I have always had a great respect for Brandon's website, the magic marker page being the best of the web (btw, sometime I think of possible enhancements or additions) maybe this forum could be the first forum where there is a section and threads that are Peter Ruckman related and Bible-version-issue pure. That is my suggestion, my request for consideration.
Oh, I thought of a possible objection. What if Peter Ruckman is quoted in the Bible version area where he is referencing D. A. Waite or David Cloud or this one or that unfavorably in terms of their views on Bible versions. Then let their views ** on the Bible versions ** be defended in the same realms. There really is a legitimate discussion about the differences in their views. And there is even a farily large difference between D. A. Waite and David Cloud. So where else to talk about such issues intelligently than here ?
Shalom,
Steven
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