Translating the Bible

My friend Rick linked to an article by Kevin DeYoung about why his church switched to the English Standard Version (ESV) of the Bible. Throughout the article, he compared the ESV with the once-ubiquitous (in the evangelical world) NIV. As you may know, the ESV follows the translation philosophy called “formal equivalence,” the same as the King James, RSV, and NASB. In fact, the ESV is itself a revision of the RSV text. The goal is, as much as possible, to preserve the original order of words from the original manuscripts. The NIV uses the “dynamic equivalence” philosophy, which goes thought for thought.

DeYoung argued for the formal equivalence philosophy, arguing that it allowed the reader more access to the original. A comment on Rick’s post linked to an article by the commenter, which made some interesting points as well. One point that he made was that the ESV preserved “archaic words”:

When was the last time you heard anyone use any of the following words in everyday conversation: manslayer, beloved, behold, kindred, O, abhor, abide, abode, adjure, ascribe, chide, confute, convocation, counsel (as both a noun and a verb), entreat, exult, festal, haughty, invoke, kin, ordain, portent, rail (as a verb), rend, revile, sated, shall, smitten, sojourn, stripes, or swaddling?[16] The average person simply does not speak this way anymore. This is “Christianese.” If you have heard these words, chances are it was in a church setting or on Christian radio. Translations should make the meaning of God’s Word clear. God ordained that the NT would be written in Koine, i.e. common Greek. I submit that the ESV is not Koine English.

As Allan Chapple has written, “Something more substantial than style or taste is at stake here, therefore. In my judgment, unacceptable consequences flow from the ESV’s choice of language. In practice, it is an elitist translation. As such, it may well be ‘user-friendly’ for the highly literate. It may also be preferred by older Christians, for whom it will satisfy any lingering nostalgia for the RSV. But I doubt that it will be easily understood by believers under thirty-five or so, especially if they come from an unchurched background and have not already been enculturated into ‘church-speak’. If they have to use the ESV regularly, such people will need to learn two ‘languages’: the great words that speak of who God is and what he has done for us—and ‘high-English’ or ‘olde-English’. They will be glad to learn the first; they should not need to learn the second.”[17] I think Chapple overstates his case, but there is truth in his words.

This would seem to be an important consideration, but I’m not convinced by his point. To me, it would turn on what level of writing the koine was. Did it have difficult words as well? Would dropping the “church-speak” water down the translation too much?

I don’t know much about translation, so I’m curious to know what others think. Also, what philosophies do Catholic and Orthodox translations tend to take, or are there are diversity of those as well?

You can find links to DeYoung’s and the commenter’s articles at Rick’s blog post that I linked to above.

The internet is pretty awesome

You knew that already, but I just wanted to point to some examples:

• I can keep up with some friends who are writing about interesting things, like Rick’s “Credo-Baptist Apologies” and his look at Judges “Through Literary Eyes” and Joel’s series on “A Theology of Space Travel.”
• I and some friends have been able to interact with two authors on subjects that I’ve referred to: Frank Koller on Lincoln Electric’s remarkable treatment of its employees and Rick Richman on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

I’ve been reading Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows that describes how the Internet is changing the way that we think (which raises some important concerns), which I will post about soon. But for now I’m just going to celebrate the amazing opportunities that the Internet offers for learning and connection.

Not just political division: the economic component of our national problems

The midterm elections were almost two months ago, but that’s not going to stop me from posting this roundup of perceptive comments about them.

My friend Rick posted an article about evangelical turnout and shared some thoughts about the role of Christians in elections:

Christians voted in large measure because we are a nation that houses many Christians. When Christians are unmotivated, their voting turnout is mediocre and Liberals start to think we are a Middle-Left country. Liberals are guilty of overreading elections and proceed hard left, like in 2006 and 2008. When Christians are motivated and vote, we are reminded that we are a Middle-Right country, like 2000, 2004, and now in 2010. It’s true that a 30% voting block will hold a lot of sway over elections that are determined by 5 points or less. President Obama knew this and worked hard for the Evangelical vote in 2008. He was realistic and knew that if he could just flip even 5% of the Evangelical vote, it could lead to victories in some battleground states.

My friend Joel compares the elections of 2008 and 2010 in a way that makes a lot of sense to me:

The voters rejected the Republicans as hypocrites and took out their vengeance for bad economic times on them. What they did not do, by and large, was endorse the Democratic agenda of a large welfare state, unlimited abortion and other radical notions. Many GOP voters probably stayed home in 2008 out of anger or disgust.The Democrats, however, interpreted the results as a sweeping wave that affirmed their agenda and was ushering in a new Rooseveltian or Great Society vision of the country. As George Will wrote, all they were in 2008 was “not George Bush.” The Democrats assumptions of generational and demographic realignment were wrong.

Christopher Beam explores the back-and-forth swings between parties in Slate, and thinks that the prophecies of triumph for one party don’t make sense any more:

But the last few years should put predictions of permanent anything to rest. The key data point: Voters appear to have voted Democrats out for the same reasons they voted Republicans out before. And those reasons don’t appear to be going away. Foremost is the bad economy. (As we constantly reiterate but never seem to process, the economy is the No. 1 factor in electoral outcomes.) Voters didn’t examine Bush’s economic policies and dismiss them, only to examine Obama’s economic policies and dismiss them. They’re just responding to hard times. As long as times stay hard, voters will punish incumbents. The economy may recover in the short term, but the need to address the long-term national debt means that future presidents and Congresses will have to make much more difficult decisions than the current leaders—and will probably be punished for it.

Have we entered a new era of seesaw government, constantly switching back and forth between parties? It seems likely: The speed of the media makes voters impatient about how quickly politicians can get things done. The spike in partisanship—just look at filibuster usage over time—makes it harder for the party in power to pass legislation. Voters are therefore more likely than ever to dismiss a president as ineffectual and a Congress as “do-nothing”—even if they’ve done quite a bit.

What would that mean for how the parties behave? Two things, both bad. It means the party in power will be less ambitious, since it knows the opposition will misrepresent any accomplishments and a fickle public will punish them for it. (Exhibit A: Harry Reid saying he’s open to trimming back parts of health care reform.) And it means the minority party will resist cooperation so as to take advantage of voters’ discontent with the majority. (Exhibit B: John Boehner’s speech Tuesday night, in which he declined to name concrete goals.)

Walter Russell Mead had some good pre-election commentary here and offers his take on the Obama presidency thus far here.  From the first:

The presidential elections of 2004 and 2008 were both fought out over the same issue.  Think of America as a car: the Democrats offered a competent and smooth ride to Boston.  Under the accident-prone George W. Bush, the Republicans offered a bumpy ride towards Dallas.  In 2004 and 2008 Democrats attacked Republicans for crashing the car; Republicans attacked Democrats for wanting to take it in the wrong direction.  In 2004, the Democratic argument did not convince.  In 2008, with the economy melting down, it did.  Barack Obama ran as a competent, smooth driver who would make the ride so pleasant and easy that the country wouldn’t much care where he was going. Republicans keep driving off the road, the new President argued, because the roads to Dallas are bad.  Without a vigilant government to invest in infrastructure, superintend the road builders, subsidize ethanol, enforce speed limits and require safety belts, the road to Dallas is a series of disasters waiting to happen.  The road to Boston, on the other hand, has been built by intelligent, credentialed technocrats.  The tolls may be high, the renewable fuel has some problems, and the 35 mile an hour speed limit can be a little irksome, but the road is safe and the ride is smooth.

2010 is shaping up to be a terrible year for Democrats for two reasons: more people are aware of just where the administration wants to take the car, and the ride has turned out much bumpier than advertised.  Competent, professional, cool and cerebral doesn’t seem to be creating many jobs.  If the ride is going to be bumpy and crash prone and we are going to end up in the ditch whichever way we head, voters appear to have concluded that we might as well face Dallas while spinning our wheels….

The real problem for both parties is that the old roads and the old destinations don’t make that much sense anymore.  A global economic upheaval is changing the rules before our eyes.  This can play to America’s greatest strengths: our cultural dispositions favoring flexibility, innovation and hard work.  But we will have to reinvent some of our core institutions to do this, drastically reducing the size and cost of our government, legal, health and educational systems even as we find ways to make them much more productive than ever before.  The old progressive elite of Democrats’ dreams can’t lead us into the promised land — but while Republicans know this much, they haven’t figured out what comes next.

In this uncomfortable, in-between time, voters are turning restlessly from one party to the other.  Right now, unless President Obama starts pulling some rabbits out of his hat (a possibility I do not discount), we are on course for two failed presidencies in a row.   The cycle of voter disenchantment is speeding up; the electorate gave Bush six years before tuning him out.  President Obama risks losing the country’s ear after only two.

In the second, he writes:

The American economy is passing through a painful transition; there is no simple path to rising wages, rising house prices and declining budget deficits from where we now stand.  The core strategies that have guided both political parties and the mainstream establishment since the fall of the Soviet Union are not working very well.  Globalization seems to be making too many Americans less well off and the international environment is becoming more contentious and unstable, not less.  Neither neo-conservatism, liberal internationalism, neo-liberalism nor the Third Way worked as advertised.  The ideas and the policies of American intellectuals left and right seem largely inadequate and even irrelevant to both our foreign and domestic problems.  President Obama is not the cause of this systemic crisis in the American Project, but the public judges him by how well he copes with it.

I’ve been saving these for a while, but I never got around to actually publishing it because there was something more that I wanted to say.  I think that there are two major reasons that we find ourselves with a political system that’s become a meat grinder for whatever party occupies the seats of power.  We see this as both of our major parties come into office, think that they have a mandate (see Joel and Rick’s comments above), and then wind up turning off the electorate pretty quickly.

I tried to detail the most obvious reason here, the political-cultural divide about what kind of country we want to be and the resulting political culture of ultra-politicization and denunciation.  One party’s victory is also an impetus for the other side to organize and pounce on the other side’s failings.

But I think that there is a second component that prevents either party from convincing the electorate of its competence: the fact that the American economy is no longer at the center of the world economy, as it was from the time after World War II until about 1970.  This means that neither party’s economic philosophy can result in the same golden prosperity of the postwar period.  Democrats think that the cooperation of big labor, big business, and big government (what Walter Russell Mead calls the “blue model”) can get us back there; think of how many times you hear Democratic politicians say it was Republican deregulation that destroyed our prosperity.  Republicans think that it’s all about reducing suffocating  government regulations and lowering taxes, and of course Reagan is their hero.  But with all of deregulation and tax cuts since 1981 we still have a lot of economic anxiety.  I’d say that this is because the postwar period was unique and with the global economy we aren’t going to be at the center of the world economy again in the foreseeable future.

It’s possible that this economic component is hidden by the high stakes of the culture war discourse.  After all, both sides promise a return to prosperity if we follow their formulas, and these formulas are bound up with the moral visions of both sides of the cultural divide.  Republicans trumpet individual responsibility and economic freedom as the foundations of prosperity, while the Democrats call for a state empowered to protect the vulnerable and blunt the less pleasant outcomes of capitalism.  Also, it’s possible that if we did return to a more permanent prosperity, we wouldn’t even agree that it was prosperity because of the divide in how to measure that.

There’s much more that I could write, but fortunately Walter Russell Mead has written the article that I would like to have written, but would only have been possible for me to write if I had way more knowledge and economic understanding.  Mead seems to be writing some really good stuff these days about the current political situation, and I imagine that I will be passing on more of his observations.

Do Christians participate in the secularization of Thanksgiving?

My friend Rick’s post pointed me to James K.A. Smith’s post called “The Secularization of Thanksgiving and the Sacralization of the Military.”  Smith writes that during the Thanksgiving football broadcasts he noticed “the incessant military references and images on the Thanksgiving broadcasts.”  Trying to think this out, he writes,

I know I’ve noted (complained!) about this before, but I think I’ve further crystallized the linkage. For some reason, broadcast television always feels compelled to secularize religious and quasi-religious holidays; this is, in some ways, part and parcel of other secularizing currents in commercial culture. But when Thanksgiving is secularized, what’s lost is precisely the Object to whom we would render gratitude. In other words, we end up being thankful for “gifts” without being able to recognize the Giver.

So we come up with a substitute Giver, which is something like the idea of “America”–the land of the free. And while there are alternative conceptual histories that would actually honor how much the United States was conceptually forged–that the U.S. is really the experimental product of ideas–our current anti-intellectual climate would rather think of “America” as the product of force and might (as the national anthem prefers). So if we are thankful for America, we’re thankful to the military who, proverbially, “protect our freedom, ” “keep us free,” “make the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom,” etc. Soldiers are thus revered as the warrior-priests of freedom.

I’ve turned this over in my mind a bit, trying to see if I agree.  Either the problem or profundity of his observation is that professing Christians, not secular people, seem that they would be the most likely to respond favorably to the imagery.  Observant American Christians tend to be conservative and support not only the military but also its role as protector of our freedoms through our international involvement and especially in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (I tried to probe a related topic a bit back in July).  On the other hand, they would also tend to be fairly vocal when a religious holiday is being secularized (for example, the controversies over public displays of Christmas imagery).

So if Smith and I are both right in reading the culture, then we have the secular (and, according to Smith, secularizing) media producing imagery that secularizes Thanksgiving in the interest producing a broadcast that can be consumed by the broadest possible audience without offense to too many.  This imagery is then accepted enthusiastically by many Christians, who unknowingly participate in the further secularization of the holiday.

If this is right, and I think that’s a big if, it would be more evidence that Christians need to be more aware of our relationship to American nationalism and power.

Opposing abortion across racial lines

Rick Hogaboam pointed out a series of posts by Thabiti Anyabwile that reacted Brian Kemper’s defense of comparing abortion to slavery and the Holocaust.  Kemper believes that we must make the comparison because of the horrible reality of abortion that parallels slavery and the Holocaust and the denial of personhood that has taken place in defense of all three.  He believes that people take offense to these comparisons because “we have elevated what they consider to be a blob of tissue to personhood status.”

Rick posted a good quote from the first three posts.  Anyabwile’s consideration of this issue spanned four posts:

• Reacting specifically to Kemper’s article
• Suggestions for a white man addressing a black audience about abortion
• How he might do the same thing as himself addressing a black audience
• An evaluation of John Piper’s well-known advocacy for the unborn, especially in the context of Piper’s exhortations to bridge the racial divides among Christians (includes a sermon video on abortion and racism)
  

I wanted to focus on his first post, and you can read his others for his opinions on those topics.  Here are Anyabwile’s central objections to Kemper’s article:

Okay, the argument is basically fine.  But read Mr. Kemper’s opinion piece and tell me how many times he seems to deeply affirm the human pain and suffering African Americans endured in slavery.  He seems quite aware of the Jewish holocaust, referring to monuments and observances dedicated to never forgetting that human tragedy.  But how many such monuments and museums exist in honor of African people treated as chattel?  How many institutions work to ensure there is a deep, abiding recollection of those centuries of torture?  Not many.  Kemper certainly doesn’t mention many.  Now, here’s why some of us say “how dare you?”  Without demonstrating any genuine empathy, any continuing affirmation of the humanity of African people, the comparison simply seems to lack authenticity, familiarity, and empathy.  It merely sounds expedient.  Those who use the argument don’t really sound like they care about black people as such, but only about exploiting the pain of black people as a political expedient….

There’s one more element to this I’d like to highlight.  When I say, “How dare you make this comparison?” I’m also identifying someone who hasn’t shown up to support a lot of other causes I care about.  Not only have you not shown up to support, you really haven’t shown up to dialogue, understand, or persuade.  Most of your political and social positions lie across the river from my own, and though you own a boat you’ve never tried to row across.  Now you show up saying how much I ought to support your cause.  And you tell me how much this cause ought to mean to me, how I ought to care about the death of black babies.  You tell me this as if I don’t already care about the death of black babies.  But when I talk about the death of black babies due to crime, or poverty, or drugs, or slow death from a sub-par education, you tell me that’s my problem.  When you do that, you seem to care more about your political issue than you care about my black life.  You need to know that’s how we see you.  Your comparison reminds us of all of this.

So, yes, how dare you compare abortion to slavery?!  I love you.  But I’m afraid you don’t love me… at least not long enough to hear how your comparison affects me.  I’m in the trenches with you–at least I want to be–but the shrapnel from your rapid fire makes it hard for me to fire with you.

I think that these two objections both deserve attention.  From everything that I know, Anyabwile is first and foremost an evangelical Christian who doesn’t have a vested interest in racial politics and doesn’t subscribe to Afrocentric theology.  He wants to proclaim the gospel to all people, and knows that God is creating a new, multiracial people in Christ.  If he is right about how many black Christians will react to Kemper’s defense, then what he is pointing to is a fundamental mistrust and disconnect between white and black Christians.  I think that’s largely the case in American Christianity today; white and black Christians have such separate institutions and cultures that we often don’t register on each other’s radar.  Anyabwile’s thoughts here highlight the perils of white tonedeafness, but I think that both circles share some of the blame.

I also want to note something in Anyabwile’s article that I’m not so sure about.  We may not have monuments and museums about slavery, but I think that our educational system and the public presentation of history do pretty well with making people aware of slavery and the civil rights movement.  I think that it’s necessary sometimes to point out that America didn’t invent slavery, but that societies across history have had different forms of it.  This is not, of course, meant as a justification, but context is important.  We’ve got a long way to go in having a really just society or even agreeing exactly what that would look like here.  But to me this criticism, while it is surely sincere, does not describe the cultural reality.

Perhaps the bigger problem is the perceptions that white and black Christians have about the other group’s racial attitudes.  Anyabwile thinks that white people aren’t meeting black people in their pain that’s rooted in American history and seems afraid that they don’t care unless they specifically connect with black history.  He even says, “If you have an African American audience with whom you’re using this analogy and you have 30 minutes to win their support, spend the first 20 minutes showing your familiarity with the brutality of suffering and affirming the humanity of the sufferer before you employ the suffering and the sufferer in your cause.  Otherwise, I’m guessing most of your audience is saying, ‘How dare you?!”

On the other hand, I think that white Christians can sometimes be afraid that black people simply want to make them feel guilty about the past.  I can give an example of this.  When I was preparing to go on the Justice Journey in the summer of 2009, a friend from church said that he couldn’t do it, because he wasn’t going to told for a whole week that he should feel guilty.  It seems, although I only have anecdotal evidence at this point, that some white people are afraid that they’re going to be subjected to black indignation and even black rage.  From my experience on the journey, my visits to a few different black churches, and my current involvement in my mostly black church in Kankakee, that doesn’t happen.  I have always felt welcomed and have begun to form good friendships rooted in Christ across racial lines.  Notice, too, that Anyabwile’s comments are not based in rage or the desire to make people feel guilty, but rather in wanting white people to cross a gulf created by the perception that white people don’t care about historical black suffering.

I think that the two perceptions also feed each other.  White people afraid of black indignation can appear uncaring about history, and black people who feel that whites don’t care can appear resentful.

I’m afraid that I’m getting too speculative, so I want to wrap up by saying that we probably need to have some idea of what healing is going to look like.   I hope that at some point black and white Christians will be able to come together without these suspicions.  Right now, it seems like we might need to reverse the attitudes if we want to move toward biblical reconciliation.  Reconciliation will be closer at hand when more white Christians don’t mind exposing themselves to indignation because it’s a part of the cost of healing, and more black Christians explicitly say “slavery and Jim Crow were horrible, but they are in the past — we’re trying to move on in forgiveness.”  Reconciliation would help us to better work together on tackling not only ongoing racism and discrimination (yes, they’re still around), but also abortion.

Children and conversion

My friend Rick Hogaboam quotes some good advice from Charles Spurgeon and adds his own reflections too.

Push-beck

After Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” event in DC last weekend, there have been some evangelicals concerned about the prospect of a Mormon wanting to lead an ecumenical spiritual revival:

• My friend Rick Hogaboam
• Russell Moore of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Hat tip: Rick)
• Doug Wilson
• Chuck Colson (referencing Moore’s column, which was quite good)
• Todd Friel and Brannon Howse

From a different perspective, William Saletan wrote that the rally showed conservatism’s unique way of incorporating previous liberal achievements into contemporary conservatism.

Justin Martyr on spiritual gifts

My friend Rick at Endued posted Justin’s explanation to his Jewish friend Trypho about why spiritual gifts were transferred from Jews to Christ to Christians.  I had never thought about spiritual gifts in the Old Covenant before, but Justin certainly had:

Now, that [you may know that] your prophets, each receiving some one or two powers from God, did and spoke the things which we have learned from the Scriptures, attend to the following remarks of mine. Solomon possessed the spirit of wisdom, Daniel that of understanding and counsel, Moses that of might and piety, Elijah that of fear, and Isaiah that of knowledge; and so with the others: each possessed one power, or one joined alternately with another; also Jeremiah, and the twelve [prophets], and David, and, in short, the rest who existed amongst you.

Rick cites Ronald Kydd’s argument that this is evidence that these charismatic gifts continued in the 2nd century.

More discussion of evangelism and social action

My friend Rick Hogaboam reflects on Matt Harmon’s theses that I commented on here.  Rick explores James 1:27 : “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world” (ESV).  Rick concludes  with a strong and wise message:

If you don’t care for those who are “afflicted”, then your orthodoxy means nothing…your religion is worthless.

If you don’t care for Scripture and personal piety, then your social engagement, though noble, proceeds from moral and epistemological bankruptcy. It is deficient.

Let us tend to both (caring for the afflicted and personal piety), knowing that each is at stake in the other!!!