A Testimony
By Kevin McGrane
(Mr McGrane is a contributor to our forthcoming volume “It is Written”, which we hope to publish later this year, God willing. What follows is one of the book’s “testimony” chapters, where he shares his experience of the Lord’s dealings, including how he came to convictions concerning the Authorised Version. Kevin McGrane is Ruling elder at Bury St Edmunds Presbyterian Church, a trustee of The Gospel Magazine, and a council member of the Protestant Truth Society – Ed.)
I was raised in a Roman Catholic family, my father having been born in Dublin of Roman Catholic ancestry. Baptism, Confession, Holy Communion and Confirmation followed in regular course. After junior education under Ursuline nuns, I moved to a boys’ grammar school established by Jesuits. Whilst education was of a high standard, no student could take an ‘O’ Level in Religion as every examination board required study of the Bible, which was not permitted. Instead, we were fed a diet of Roman dogma, the sacraments, sacerdotalism, history of the Jesuits, and the Church Fathers. Catechisms instructed us that doctrine was not always to be sought in the Bible, but in the infallible teaching of the Church.
We learned much about early Christological heresies, but at no time could we have explained why Christ had lived and died – we supposed that it was that we might have the Mass. Every week the whole school gathered for Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, where we worshipped what we were assured was the Lord Jesus Christ, in appearance as a consecrated wafer fixed into a golden sunburst-style monstrance, borne at arm’s length by a Jesuit priest amidst clouds of incense. This, we sang, was the “newer rite” that had superseded the former “types and shadows.”
From Romanism to Atheism
The great tragedy was that there was never anything more than crumbs of truth to be gathered – a starvation diet of Scripture alongside a surfeit of error. Even my father, who hardly accepted the Vatican II reforms promoting a more favourable view of the Bible, became critical of this policy of suppressing Scripture when I left the Roman fold. And leave I did. At sixteen, though convincingly devout, I knew this heritage was slipping like sand through my fingers. I had no safe grounds for believing this dogma, and would no longer do so. My parents referred me to the parish priest, who plied me with liquor but could not induce me to recant. For me, the pursuit of truth became an overriding aim, which included opposing error, superstition and hypocrisy.
I rapidly drifted into atheism, keenly pointing out to my classmates the unreasonableness of Roman dogma. I refused to attend Mass with my family, or the compulsory Masses at school. I was prepared to accept any sanctions that might be imposed. With regard to truth, I felt this would be found through the scientific enterprise, and thus it was that I became a physics undergraduate at the University of Oxford.
It was easier to be a radical atheist at Oxford, away from Roman Catholic pressure, but I was also exposed to those of genuinely Christian convictions: one training for the ministry at Wycliffe Hall; another, John Hughes, a student at my college; and others. I spent many hours discussing theology with them, and also came into contact with the theologian Michael Green, then Rector of St Aldate’s. I read books given to me on Christian apologetics, but these, and all the discussions, merely served to help me sharpen my counter-arguments.
Unyielding Spiritual Blindness
Those who knew me as an atheist have spoken of my unyielding spiritual blindness. My response to evangelism was anything but indifference or apathy, more a reaction of fighting fire with fire. I distributed atheistic tracts, and had a determined zeal to promote atheist ideals. But my faith in science as a path to truth was severely shaken when I discovered at Oxford that the scientific enterprise embodied a fatal flaw: human nature. This was a devastating and life-changing experience – the second time the bottom had fallen out of my world.
After Oxford I started a job in radar engineering in Chelmsford, and six months later arrived in Southampton to pursue further studies in electronics. Three hours after moving to the city I was confronted by a Christian couple doing door-to-door evangelism. They asked me where I had studied previously. “Oxford University,” I replied. “That’s interesting,” said the woman, “Which college?” “Hertford College,” I answered. “Really? Did you know a student there called John Hughes?” “Yes,” I responded, “He often came to my room for discussions about Christianity.” “He’s my brother,” she replied. “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!” (Romans 11:33).
I was invited to attend a course of Bible studies, but the leaders were ill-prepared for my presentations of alternative persuasive answers to their questions. They eventually asked me to stop attending Bible studies – I mention this to their shame as well as mine, and as an example never to emulate – one of them stating that I was not interested in truth. Such a statement was quite unfair: was it not precisely because Saul of Tarsus understood the implications of Christian doctrine and had a passion for what he believed to be the truth that he was so zealous to extirpate the church? Likewise, I was far from apathetic about truth, and had made bold and difficult adjustments in my life in my search for it. Yet it was a zeal not according to knowledge.
I was angered and stung into reading more Christian apologetics. The arguments seemed no more persuasive than before, but now suddenly the Scripture verses underpinning them came to me as hammer blows. Why should those sentences leap off the page like a battering ram against the strongholds of my mind? How could these mere words land such devastating blows? Prayer was being made for me, and the Holy Spirit was convicting me of sin, righteousness and judgment, yet also showing me the way of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ – not through the lens of Roman Catholicism, but through the Word of God. The force of truth was irresistible, and I was granted repentance unto life. “Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions: according to thy mercy remember thou me for thy goodness’ sake, O LORD” (Psalm 25:7).
From Darkness to Light
I was given a New International Version Bible as a gift that day, which I read avidly, and that same week I ventured into a Christian bookshop in Southampton. Here was a whole new world. The Lord, there and then, gave me a love of Reformed truth, and I was delighted to come away that day with Hodge on The Westminster Confession of Faith, Cunningham on The Reformers and the Theology of the Reformation, Berkhof’s Systematic Theology, and a Greek New Testament (I had spent four years at a Jesuit school learning Greek). Also that week I bought Bainton’s biography of Luther, Here I Stand, and translations of Luther’s famous treatises of 1520: To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and On the Freedom of a Christian.
When I was next visiting the parental home in London, the Romanist parish priest was predictably horrified to find me reading Luther’s treatises, yet the initial reaction of my parents to my testifying of the grace of God towards me was actually somewhat favourable: to be a Christian was surely better than to be an atheist, was it not? But once it began to dawn that this Christianity was decidedly Protestant and Calvinist, and that I wanted them to hear and believe the gospel, then a certain amount of antagonism crept in, as well as disbelief: my father quite genuinely enquired whether there were as many as twenty persons in the world who could possibly believe such things. Sadly, my father never left the Roman fold; but many years after his death my mother did so and worshipped with my family.
Unsatisfactory
I very quickly realised that the NIV was a most unsatisfactory translation of the Greek New Testament text I had recently purchased (United Bible Societies Third Edition, same text as the Nestle-Aland 26th edition). I was continually finding that the NIV took unacceptable liberties in translation, and that any alleged ease of understanding came at the price of accuracy and faithfulness to God’s Word. One could hardly embrace the doctrine of justification by faith alone, as I had done, and tolerate Romans 4:3, 5, 9 and 22 in the NIV, which states that a believer’s faith is credited to him “asrighteousness.” This suggests that faith is the ground rather than the instrument of justification, though the Greek preposition is quite unable to bear such a sense. The English Standard Version would later propagate the same translation and theological error.
I also found that the NIV frequently renders passives as actives and switches subjects and objects, e.g. 1 John 4:9, “This is how God showed his love among us.” It makes unwarranted interpolations that change the sense, e.g. John 12:44: “When a man believes in me, he does not believe in me only.” And it removes words and sometimes whole phrases, e.g. where Jesus, Philip and Peter opened their mouths to speak (Matthew 5:2 and Acts 8:35 and 10:34), the NIV merely records that they “began” to speak – yet, inconsistently, retaining the expression in Ephesians 6:19 where Paul sought prayer for when he would open his mouth to preach the gospel. None of the aforementioned examples are matters of textual variation: they are liberties in translation.
A few weeks later I switched to the Revised Version 1885, because I saw it as the most accurate translation of the Greek text I then owned — which a year or so later I came to realise was itself seriously defective. Decades later I would spend considerable research on the Codex Sinaiticus, confirming that it is a corrupt and hopeless witness to the inspired original. It beggars belief how it could be so tendentiously described as among “the most reliable early manuscripts” (NIV). Once I came to know and understand the arguments for the divine preservation of Scripture, I was irresistibly drawn to use the Authorised Version as being the finest English translation of the soundest text, which remains my persuasion and practice (wherever I can exercise the choice) more than 40 years on.
Bible League
Before I returned to Chelmsford to continue work on radar systems I had come to Presbyterian convictions, but there were no Presbyterian churches to be found. I worshipped for two and a half years in a Strict Baptist church where the Authorised Version was used, and where the present Bible League trustees Stephen Toms and David Butler were deacons, who introduced me to the Bible League Quarterly. At the same time, I regularly studied biblical truth within the framework of the Westminster Confession with Dennis Lewis and John Titcombe (who served as ruling elders in the London congregations of the Free Presbyterian and Free Church of Scotland respectively before their calls to be with the Lord), praying that God would again revive a commitment to full-orbed Reformed truth in England, and in Chelmsford in particular.
In 1986 I attended the London Presbyterian Conference, which took the first tentative steps towards a Presbyterian denomination, and I signed the declaration committing myself to work towards establishment of a Reformed Presbyterian church in England. I married and removed to Bury St Edmunds the following year without yet seeing an answer to those prayers for Chelmsford, but God surely answered them by raising up a Presbyterian church in that town and elsewhere within a few years. Indeed, in 1991 my family, with a number of others, were founder members of Bury St Edmunds Presbyterian Church. I continue to serve there as a ruling elder, and also as Clerk on the Sessions of Blackburn, Lincoln and Sheffield Presbyterian churches.
“Amen: Blessing, and glory, and wisdom, and thanksgiving, and honour, and power, and might, be unto our God for ever and ever. Amen” (Revelation 7:12).