INTRODUCTION

We need to start from God’s work in history, and the Scripture received, message conveyed by preservation and doctrine understand.

Protestant Christianity confesses that Holy Scripture is the supreme authority for faith and doctrine, yet it has also insisted that Scripture is not self-interpreting in a mechanical sense. Rather, Scripture is given by God to be understood by His people, through the illumination of the Holy Ghost, within the life of the Church.

The King James Bible stands today as the providentially preserved, exact and settled form of Scripture in English, and that theology, doctrine and creedal understanding are now best and most safely expressed in English, as an act of faith in divine providence. This is an explicitly anti-Enlightenment position, rejecting the imposition of human thought over truth, but instead affirming the Word and Spirit as the governing principles of Christian truth.

After arguing that the Scripture is now being accessed by believers in an authoritative form in English, we must then see that interpretation should take place anchored in the English alone, rather than in any of the original language requirements of modernistic hermeneutics. And now, I am suggesting that doctrine, creed and the very fabric of our Christianity exist entirely in English, because the best forms of Christianity have arisen since the days of William Tyndale in English, and that this is built on a middle English foundation of the Lollards which in turn is built on an Anglo-Saxon reception of the truth from the Celtic world. I am going to argue that theology necessarily must exist in English.

The doctrine of the Trinity serves as a proving ground for this approach.

THE KING JAMES BIBLE AS PROVIDENTIALLY PERFECT SCRIPTURE

The Protestant doctrine of Scripture has never ended with inspiration alone. Inspiration without preservation leaves the Church perpetually uncertain. The Reformers understood this, even if they did not systematise it as later generations would.

The King James Bible represents not merely a successful translation, but the culmination of providential transmission. God, who inspired His Word, has also governed its history, ensuring that His Church possesses a stable, authoritative text.

Scripture itself affirms this principle in Psalm 12.

The claim is that God has chosen the English language as the final means of preservation for this stage of redemptive history. The existence of an exact, identifiable text, such as the Pure Cambridge Edition, is its logical outworking. A God who intends His people to know the truth is providing His words in a knowable form.

Without such finality, doctrine becomes provisional, theology unstable and authority endlessly deferred.

THE PROPER PROTESTANT INTERPRETATIVE METHOD

True Sola Scriptura has never meant Scripture isolated from the Spirit. The Reformers were explicit that illumination is necessary.

John Calvin stated, “The testimony of the Spirit is more excellent than all reason.”

Scripture is divine speech in written form. It is therefore understood as divine in origin, not merely analysed as mere human literature. Linguistic examination, genre awareness and comparison of Scripture with Scripture are necessary, as subject components of how to interpret, with deference to the divine will behind and revealed in Scripture.

The Holy Ghost stands above providential tradition, creeds, teachers and commentaries. These serve the Church because they are themselves fruits of the Spirit’s work across history, they are aids to Scripture, and the second way in which God communicates to His people after the primacy of Scripture itself.

After all, Christ promised, “Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth.” (John 16:13).

The Protestant confidence that truth is knowable rests not in human intellect, but in divine intention. God intends to be understood, sufficiently and savingly, by His people.

THEOLOGY AND CREED MUST BE EXPRESSED IN ENGLISH

Theology does not exist apart from language. Every doctrine must be spoken, taught and confessed. The Nicene and Athanasian formulations were not timeless abstractions; they were contextual expressions of biblical truth using the most serviceable language available at the time.

That language is no longer Greek.

The continued dependence on Greek technical terms is not a mark of fidelity, but often of intellectual inertia. These terms were never inspired; they were tools. English now fulfils that function more effectively, more universally and more safely.

The English-speaking Church has already proven this. The Book of Common Prayer, for example, demonstrates that creedal and Trinitarian doctrine can be expressed clearly, reverently and precisely in English without loss of substance.

The insistence that theology must remain tethered to Greek categories effectively privileges the academy over the Church and resurrects a clericalism the Reformation explicitly rejected.

THE TRINITY AS A TEST CASE

Scripture presents the raw data:

• One God
• The Father is God
• The Son is God
• The Holy Ghost is God
• The Father is not the Son
• The Son is not the Spirit

The doctrine of the Trinity is not an invention, but an interpretative articulation of what the Scripture shows. It is the only formulation that preserves all biblical testimony without subtraction.

The creeds do not explain how God is triune; they establish what must be affirmed and what must be denied. As Athanasius rightly insisted, denial of the Son’s full deity is denial of salvation itself.

English theological language is fully capable of expressing this reality:

God is one being, eternally existing as three distinct persons — Father, Son and Holy Ghost — each fully and truly God.

No Greek metaphysics is required to grasp this truth. What is required is submission to the totality of Scripture.

COUNTERING SCHOLARLY OBJECTIONS

1. Textual Criticism

Modern textual criticism assumes that Scripture exists only as a reconstructive hypothesis, never as a settled text. This assumption is philosophical, not biblical.

The Protestant position insists that God governs history, not merely inspiration. Endless textual fluidity undermines faith and contradicts Scripture’s own claims of preservation.

2. Historical objections

It is often claimed that Trinitarian doctrine developed under political pressure. This confuses clarification with invention. Heresy forced definition; it did not create truth.

The early Church did not impose doctrine on Scripture — it defended Scripture from reduction.

3. Philosophical objections

Enlightenment rationalism demands that doctrine be demonstrable prior to belief. Christianity reverses the order: faith receives revelation, and reason serves it.

“Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.” (Proverbs 3:5).

The Trinity is not irrational; it is supra-rational. It exceeds reason without violating it.

WHY GREEK DEPENDENCE IS NO LONGER DESIRABLE

Greek-based methods (translation, interpretation and theological definitional categories) once served the Church. They no longer do so universally or effectively. Continued dependence on them:

• restricts theology to specialists
• obscures rather than clarifies doctrine
• undermines the Protestant principle of accessibility

The Reformers themselves rejected linguistic tyranny. William Tyndale famously declared his desire that the ploughboy should know more Scripture than the cleric. That vision is fulfilled not by perpetual return to Greek, but by confidence in English theological speech.

The King James Bible stands as the providentially preserved Word of God in English. The Holy Ghost illuminates that Word, guiding the Church into truth. Theology and creed must therefore be articulated in English, as the living language of the Church, regardless of the attacks from Infidelity, and the many inroads Enlightenment-based thinking has made into the academic gatekeepers of modern day Christianity.

The doctrine of the Trinity demonstrates that this approach does not weaken theology but it strengthens it. It exalts Scripture, honours the Spirit, respects providential tradition, equips the Church and safeguards to communication of the very articulation of truth the future of mankind.

THE CHAINS OF PROVIDENCE

True doctrine passed from the Apostles to the Church of Constantine where the Creeds were made. This then informed the insular Latin tradition, as doctrine came up from Gaul, and was in the end of sub-Roman Britain (as it had been since Joseph of Arimathea, St Alban or St Helen had been there) and eventually was seen in Wales in the family of Arthur.

It also went to Ireland by Patrick, to Scotland by Columba and came to Northumbria by Aidan. Thus, we can be sure that there is a direct line through the Celtic church to the Anglo-Saxons that was parallel to the truth also being in the Eastern, Greek-speaking world. I will call this the York line.

The second Canterbury line among the Anglo-Saxons came from Rome, and also reinforced by the Normans, resisted by the Barons (Magna Carta) and the people (the anti-curial movement) and present in the Lollard movement under John Wycliffe. In this line the expression of the Trinity was primarily in Latin.

Thus the Reformation was from the outset taking Scripture from Greek, doctrinal expression from Nicaea that had been in Greek, but moved to English. The doctrine of the Trinity was therefore expressed in English in the Book of Common Prayer, besides it being made common by other means in English, like through the Westminster Confession.

Now by these was doctrine being expressed fully in English, and the successive rise of Evangelicalism, Pentecostalism and so on have all been in English. The best theological progress in the world has been in English.

Yet, many have joined with the lies of Infidelity to try to fight English by trying to make Greek rule over Christian truth.

We see this spiritually-based ideological war, whether in New Zealand, where evil forces have tried to subject English everywhere, and we see it throughout Calvinism where they willingly enslave themselves to Greek.

The opportunity is for people everywhere to burst these bonds and to come into the uplift of the Spirit into the heady clouds of clarity, wide expression and right understanding.