The Scriptural Fidelity Standard
How we keep what we publish true.
A summary of the written standard in our Editorial Charter. It is the measure every title is held to before publication.
The object of review
Alignment to true principles
We publish material that is in line with the concepts and principles found in the Bible, and we take that measure at the source, read by a linguist in the original language.
The object of our review is alignment: do the concepts and principles a manuscript teaches hold true against Scripture? The original languages are our method of proof. Our editor searches out the relevant principles in the text itself, in its own language and context, so the evaluation cannot drift with the fashions of translation or commentary.
The purpose is not to audit citations. It is to prevent deviation from the core principles a book stands on. A manuscript advances when its teaching holds, or when it honestly discloses that faithful readings differ.
The framework
Two tiers, applied in writing
Principles are not all held with the same certainty, and the standard does not pretend otherwise. It separates what is settled from what is honestly contested, and keeps the line between them clear.
Tier one: settled commitments
Core principles we treat as fixed points. A manuscript that departs from a settled commitment does not advance, whatever its commercial promise.
Tier two: the defensible range
Where faithful, competent readings of the text genuinely differ, a teaching may publish if it passes three written tests.
Test oneThe text
The principle is genuinely supportable from the original-language text, not merely convenient. A claim that rests on a translation artifact or a word study the original cannot support fails here.
Test twoDisclosure
The book does not present a contested understanding as though it were settled.
Test threeWeight
A claim carries no more of the book's argument than its certainty can bear. An inference is never promoted to a certainty.
The six gates
Every title, six reviews, in order
Each gate has one owner, and it closes only with a dated written record of what was decided and why. Nothing is closed by default or by the calendar.
- 1
Acquisition review
Should the house publish this work at all, and does it fit what the house is for?
Executive Director - 2
Substantive edit
Does the work succeed as a work: its structure, pacing, argument and arc?
Assigned editor - 3
Scriptural fidelity review
Is every scriptural claim, allusion and application sound in the original-language text?
Lead Editor - 4
Adjudication
Only for passages the Lead Editor refers: where does the edge of a defensible reading fall?
Editorial Review Board - 5
Copyedit and proof
Is the text clean, is every citation exact, and was every required revision made?
Copyeditor - 6
Release sign-off
Are all gates closed in writing, and are the rights and registrations complete?
Executive Director
An editorial decision that leaves no record is treated as not yet made.
Fiction is held to the same standard, applied to what fiction does. Where a story keeps its scriptural echoes quiet and unexplained, it asserts no reading of its own. The review then asks whether any allusion depends on a misreading, and whether the story's moral shape claims more than the text supports.
The safeguards
Independence, by structure
A standard is only as strong as the pressure it can withstand. Ours is protected three ways.
Findings are independent
The Lead Editor's findings are protected by written agreement. No one at Poedy Press, including its leadership, may pressure a conclusion. The reviewer answers to the text, not to the schedule. Where author and editor disagree on principle, neither settles it alone: the matter goes to the Editorial Review Board.
Review is external
No decision of the Editorial Review Board is valid without an external reviewer who is independent of both the founding family and the company. That requirement is a quorum rule, not a courtesy.
Everything is written down
Decisions close on written records. When a teaching publishes under the defensible range, the reasoning that admitted it exists on paper, reviewable by the Board and answerable to readers who ask.
Tools and originality
Tools are welcome. Plagiarism is not.
We do not object to a writer using artificial intelligence. Many people carry a story for years and never publish it, not for lack of something to say, but for lack of the craft to carry it, or because the page goes blank at the wrong moment. We do not want to be the reason a story stays unwritten. Where a tool helps an author say what they already meant, we welcome it.
The one line is plagiarism, and it is narrower than it sounds. An author may quote another writer, draw on their work, build on it and argue with it, wherever the use is lawful and the credit is given. What does not publish here is work that passes off another's as the author's own, whatever produced the sentences.
So the question is asked, and answered in writing. Authors disclose how tools were used in making a manuscript, and that disclosure becomes part of the agreement. It changes nothing about the review: a book's concepts and principles are measured the same way, whichever hand set them down.