Dave Black linked to this post today for the Barth quote, but I will be visiting the site frequently, I think. To say that my theological German is rusty is an understatement, but I was surprised by how much I could get first pass. The word lists fill in.
This could help scrape off some of that rust!
Everybody is writing about this so I might as well get on the bandwagon. I’ll credit the hat tip to Better Bibles Blog. I’m pretty sure that’s where I read about it first. I’ll let you go there for the details.
To be honest, though I’m obviously pretty intensively interested in Bible translation, having written a book, and created a web site on the subject, I’m getting a bit weary of new translation projects. Zondervan has already done a rather poor job of supporting and marketing the TNIV, so what’s to say that this new version is going to do that much better?
More importantly, though I’m aware there are flaws in all English translations, that’s simply a symptom of the fact that there are, and always will be, flaws in any translation. I don’t see anything added to the process that will actually make more people satisfied with translations. Any time a committee does the work, individuals such as myself will find something to complain about.
It seems to me that there is a bit of excess in English Bible translation and marketing. I don’t want to target any translation committee for being the “excess,” but my question is how much better things will get with each new translation.
If the NIV revisers use gender neutral phrasing in their revision, they will become the target of the same folks who criticized the TNIV. If they don’t, the audience for which the TNIV was intended are unlikely to appreciate the new version.
So, folks, just how much further along will we be in Biblical scholarship when this new version is published? How much will the kingdom be advanced?
I think I need to add here a quote from Eddie Arthur on Kouya Chronicles:
So English, a language which already has more scholarly translations of the Bible than you can shake a stick at, is to get yet another translation. No doubt the publishers will also make a small fortune.
Meanwhile, there are still two thousand languages spoken by two hundred million people without a word of Scripture. Our priorities are all messed up!
I love Bible editions. I have a fair collection of them. But I am wondering more and more whether some portion of our Bible translation and marketing process is a symptom of some of the things that are wrong with the western church.
Alan Lenzi writes a post in response to John Hobbins in which he seems to find it surprising that more Biblical scholars don’t abandon faith, and that their failure to do so says something about their “unwillingness to think historically without being hamstrung to the implications of their work by the fear of divine judgment … or by the irrationality of mysticism.”
You really need to read that in its full context to get the flavor, but I don’t like quoting somebody’s whole post, so you’ll have to go to Alan’s site to see it. But here is the part to which I want to respond:
… The problem is this: when one takes a close look at the Bible in its original context, there is no evidence that the Bible is such a historically-situated divine revelation, that it is somehow ontologically different than other texts from antiquity and should be privileged or treated in a special way. …
Now don’t imagine that I have suddenly found a great answer to the question, but I don’t see anyone else finding one either. What exactly does a divine revelation look like and in what fashion should it be “ontologically different” from other texts? I’m not saying it shouldn’t be; I’m wondering how one identifies it. I have never seen an answer to this question that is at all satisfying.
For myself, I simply confess that my belief in inspiration is a faith confession, not one I can demonstrate. I do not look elsewhere in order to identify inspired texts. I look at the Bible as inspired and thus discover from it the shape of inspired texts. I fully accept that this is circular in the logical sense. A leap of faith is not rational in many ways, but it is nonetheless a leap that I have taken.
On the other hand, this leap of faith tells me little about what the Bible is supposed to be. That I must discover by studying it, and critical methodologies, pursued objectively to the best of my ability, are one of the ways in which I make that discovery. Of course, I also know that I am never totally objective.
Yet I do not believe my objectivity is hampered by a “fear of divine judgment.” It may well be altered by the “irrationality of mysticism” as I doubtless have some of the mystic in me.
I wonder, however, whether a militant anti-mystic will do better than I will at understanding the writings of people who had a great deal of mysticism in their makeup.
(John Hobbins provides an expanded discussion of his claim, which is well worth reading, though it uses more big words than mine does.)
… at The Golden Rule, Bible Theme Park edition. Lots of good stuff here, and despite my usual delinquency in submitting anything, I got a link in there.
Bruce Alderman has written a post that is making me think. That’s a good thing!
He thinks that we are misusing the word “doubts” when we suggest that believers may have doubts. To quote:
Questions can and do lead to a more mature faith. Genuine doubts do not.
Hmm! I must say that I have few to no doubts about the basics. I have, in fact, attempted to truly doubt that God exists, a foolish effort if one actually believes, but I have doubts about many secondary things.
As I said, this one is making me think. If it’s making you think as well, head over to Bruce’s blog and comment.
That’s something every editor should have laminated and stuck on the wall. There is nothing to make me cringe like a friend or relative telling me that they have a manuscript they’ve been working on for a long time. Inevitably this leads to the question, “Would you be interested in looking at it?”
Depending on how good a friend, or if the relative is in the part of the family you’re speaking to, you really can’t say, “No, I suspect your manuscript stinks, and I really don’t want to have to make that opinion official.” On the other hand, once you have the manuscript in your possession, your only defense is your power of procrastination.
You see, when you have to pay the bills, you can’t accept the manuscript for publication just because the author is a friend. You can’t lie and say, “This is a wonderful manuscript, but I can’t publish it right now,” because the author will doubtless continue to hound you after receiving such encouraging news.
All this is my round about way of telling you that while I always look at manuscripts brought by family and friends, I do so with serious reservations. I don’t want to be the bearer of bad tidings, but I can’t afford to publish something I can’t sell.
So when I found out that Nick May, who was my son James’s best friend (without prejudice to several other best friends) was writing a book, I received the news with mixed emotions. “Sure,” I said, “I’ll be happy to look at it.” And really, truly, I was happy to do so. I just wasn’t happy at the possibility that I would have to say, “This just won’t do for us” much less “you need some more writing practice!”
But when I read the sample chapters he sent, I knew I was saved. His writing was excellent, his subject controversial. It was possible I would even lose some friends by choosing to publish his book, and such a book is always of interest. After all, if someone isn’t angry about a book, it’s probably not accomplishing anything.
So just what is Megabelt, and why did I choose to make it our first fiction title for Energion Publications? (Press release.)
Well, you can follow the links for details on the book itself. I can simply tell you this: I laughed hysterically at points while reading it. At the same time it held up a mirror to my life and ministry and made me think. A book that can make you laugh and think seriously at the same time has something important going for it. Laughing and thinking are excluded from church far too often.
Just try changing the order of service in the bulletin of many churches and listen to the complaints. People didn’t know what to do. They were confused! They couldn’t handle having another prayer before the scripture reading, or two songs at the beginning, or perhaps being asked to stand at a moment when they had been sitting. The problem for them is that church is a habit. It’s not that going to church is a habit. It’s that the elements of church itself are habitual. Heaven forbid they should be asked to participate!
But even more, we have many ministries that are also habits. Now some of these habits are good things. Visiting the sick or shut-ins. But what happens if the pastor asks some other members to visit someone who is sick or shut-in? Oh the misery! Oh the insult! They have been treated as lesser beings because they received a visit from the wrong person.
Youth ministry is another area of habit. There are certain things that you do, and if you don’t do them, you’re not really “reaching” the youth. If you try something new it will doubtless be dangerous, or you’ll find members of the church who remember a time long, long ago when someone tried that and it didn’t work.
My friend and pastor Geoffrey Lentz likes the following quote:
“Tradition is the living faith of dead people to which we must add our chapter while we have the gift of life. Traditionalism is the dead faith of living people who fear that if anything changes, the whole enterprise will crumble.” – Jaroslav Pelikan
While, as the description says, Megabelt doesn’t have an agenda, nor is it a story with a moral, it takes aim at our traditionalism by highlighting it in action. Like me, I suspect that you will find that the mirror shows you in a less than flattering light at some points. The question, of course, is what one does after one looks in the mirror.
23For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man looking at his natural face in a mirror; 24for he sees himself, and goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. 25But he who looks into the perfect law of freedom, and continues, not being a hearer who forgets, but a doer of the work, this man will be blessed in what he does. — James 1:23-25 (WEB)
So what about publishing a book without a moral? I told Nick that if he had written a story with a single moral, I would have been less likely to buy the manuscript. Since bedtime story days, when we had an endless supply of children’s stories with a moral, I have despised the story written with one single purpose in mind, that inevitably leads to that one moral.
You may say that Jesus told such stories, but if so, I would suggest you read Jesus more closely. My wife borrowed a devotional from me today, The Work of Being a Disciple. I grew up with the notion that a parable had one meaning and you should ignore everything else in favor of that. I found later that parables have a multistage punch–the longer you go on thinking about them, the more they do to you.
I’m not calling Megabelt a parable, nor am I nominating Nick for the role of Jesus–I doubt he would thank me! But I am suggesting that sometimes we will hear in story what we would miss otherwise. In other words, while no moral is pushed in your face in this book, you may nonetheless get many morals from it–if you’re willing to think while you laugh, and after you laugh as well.
I can’t ask much more of a manuscript, even when borne by a friend!
John Piper has suggested that the tornado that struck Minneapolis was a judgment on the ELCA for the recent change in their statement on human sexuality. Piper is a great preacher, and despite some disagreements, I love to hear him present a good gospel message, but I find this, and other similar statements, quite disturbing.
I think it is biblical to hold that God can send judgment. But I also think it is Biblical, with Job as the showcase example, to think that disaster need not be judgment. Much damage can be done when Christians are told that all setbacks and hardships are somehow a sign of punishment from God. Suffering may come so that we can learn, it may come despite our best efforts, it may come to the best of us, it may come to the worst of us, and finally, it may come because that’s how things work.
After Hurricane Ivan I was very glad that our double wide trailer was undamaged. As I drove from the home where we had been guests to our home, I saw many similar structures completely gutted. In fact, I had little hope in my mind after the drive that I would find anything where we lived, but there was no damage at all.
So did God love us more than those other people? Was this salvation because we are praying people who put our trust in God? Even in normal circumstances, I would hardly think so. But in this case our 17 year old son was dying, and within a week of the storm he had gone on to be with the Lord. If we could have lost our home and kept our son, what might I have chosen?
So to reverse it, were we much more wicked than all those folks who did not lose children to cancer that day or that week?
It’s simply a dangerous game. If you feel strongly about what the ELCA has done, expressing that belief is appropriate, even expressing it vigorously. But I think it would be better to leave the tornadoes out of it.
I found the Internet Monk’s comments on this very helpful and well stated, though his were in response to a different post.
Update: I had intended to provide links here to my Hand of God series of three essays: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, as well as a story I wrote some time ago for the God-Talk Club series on my Jevlir Caravansary fiction blog, The God-Talk Club: Tornadoes.
I have, on occasion, been accused of being a “love preacher.” It’s not an accusation that frightens me, but it used to puzzle me. It doesn’t so much any more. There’s a difference between a casual “all you need is love” attitude and “love one another as I have loved you” (John 13:34), especially considering that the latter is a command given by someone who went on to die immediately afterward.
The problem is that we want “love” as a kind of general good feeling about people, a general desire to have nice things happen to them, but at the same time we don’t really want to get involved in the actual implementation. I think many of us want to help the homeless, but sincerely hope we can do so by giving some money to the soup kitchen, or voting for politicians who will implement policies to help them, but not getting our hands dirty in the process.
There’s nothing wrong with giving money to the soup kitchen, or with trying to implement policies that help the homeless, nor with voting for politicians who will support such policies. The problem is that too often we call this “loving one another as Jesus loved us” and that’s not how Jesus did it.
He starts in heaven, takes on a human body, lives with us, eats with us, sleeps with us, gets dirty with us, and finally dies on a cross, all the time being like us. If you take the incarnation seriously, that Jesus was God in the flesh, you have to also believe that Jesus could have done as many or more nice things for people around him whilst hanging out in heaven.
But the Jesus kind of love doesn’t allow that. It gets dirty. It suffers. It cares in a personal way. Read Philippians 2:5-11.
My friend Greg May is a contributor to our Energion.com Podcast, and I think he hit one out of the park with his podcast today–A Spiritual Tragedy. Please check it out!
