Jim West’s “fatwa” against IVP

Although Jim West did not actually condemn IVP,he did rate citing anything published by IVP as worse than citing Matthew Henry’s Commentary and as opening “the door to the dank and dark halls of fundamentalism. ”

Now, IVP have been defended here , and here . I have never received a free book from IVP ( note to any IVP people reading this…a freebie might lead to a 1000 word eulogy) and therefore can see nothing to gain in defending them. Rather, I have sort to sympathise with the plight of Dr. West’s poor students, who have a difficult task of trying to produce material without quoting anything published by IVP when:

1) These people from IVP are terribly sneaky and here in the UK they publish books under the name Apollos. To make matters worse, fundamentalists published by Apollos have PhDs from famous universities, even some in Germany! Very easy for a student to be misled.

2) Another cruel strategy is to publish books through one publisher in the UK and by IVP in the US, or vice-versa. Hence a student might pick up a book edited by one M. Goodacre and seeing it is published by SPCK believe that he or she is safe to cite from it, especially as Dr. Goodacre is a professor at Duke. But, alas, he is also a closet fundamentalist for in the US he is published by IVP

3) Finally, there is this devious trick of including in IVP books chapters which have previously appeared in journals elsewhere. Hence, the unwitting student is in danger of citing the article, innocent to the fact that this is “dark and dank” fundamentalist material.

What is the student to do?

My suggestion, only cite works published prior to 1943-1944 (the year IVP published its first book, according to the inerrant and infallible wikepedia ) that have been written in German. Then you should be safe. [And if you are daft enough to cite something written by Matthäus Heinrich then you deserve to fail!)

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