How not to translate the Bible!

After posting the non-italicised words below, a commenter took the wind out of my sails, a little, by pointing out that the NLT I draw attention to has been revised in 2004. I note the revision below.

Recently, reading from the New Living Translation, I heard myself saying what the steward at Cana said, “… when everyone is full and doesn’t care, [the host] brings out the less expensive wines …” (John 2:10). I thought to myself, “That doesn’t sound right!”

The Bible when speaking about eating, drinking and other bodily actions generally uses frank, earthy terms. ‘Everyone is full and doesn’t care’ smacks of late modern Western euphemism for drunk, plastered, intoxicated or, as a man stepping out from a shelter in Hagley Park once explained his condition when asking if I should be so kind as to bike into Cathedral Square in Christchurch to buy him some chocolate, inebriated. (I wasn’t so kind, by the way).

To the Greek. Methuo, to be drunk. Why could the New Living Translators not be straightforward, ‘when everyone is drunk, [the host] brings out the less expensive wines’? We can only guess. One hopes it was not due to a sense of ecclesiastical correctness (conservative variety), nor to following too many other English translations at the expense of attentiveness to the Greek. The latter, incidentally, is also used at (e.g.) 1 Thessalonians 5:7 and Revelation 17:6 where the NLT correctly has ‘drunk’ (as in intoxicated rather than quenching thirst). English translations of John 2:10 include ‘drunk freely’ (RSV, NEB), ‘had plenty’ (CEV), ‘plenty to drink’ (JB Phillips), ‘well wined’ (NJB), ‘have well drunk’ (AV), ‘drunk a lot’ (GNB). Note the way ‘freely’, ‘well’ and ‘a lot’ not so subtly change the sense of ‘drunk’ from ‘intoxicated’ to ‘having imbibed plenty of liquid’. From the perspective of these modifiers, the NL Translation keeps good company among other translations.

Incidentally, the New Jerusalem Bible, which I personally like and use, but also know is somewhat uneven as a translation, both in accuracy and style, provides one of its less felicitous moments when it has the steward saying, ‘Everyone serves the good wine first and the worse wine when the guests are well wined; but you have kept the best wine till now.’ Sometimes assonance and alliteration lift an ordinary translation into the category of extraordinary, but here ‘worse wine’ and ‘well wined’ do not work. ‘Good’ should be complemented by ‘bad’ or ‘inferior’ in this sentence; and ‘well wined’ is an unfortunate way to say ‘drunk’ when ‘wine’ has already been used twice in the sentence and will be used one more time.

Does any translation get it right? I have found one. William Tyndale, unsurprisingly, ‘… when men be drunk, then that which is worse’, is our man.

Updated NLT, 2004, John 2:10 now reads: “A host always serves the best wine first,” he said. “Then, when everyone has had a lot to drink, he brings out the less expensive wine. But you have kept the best until now!” This is more in keeping with other translations, but, arguably, is not as plain speaking as the underlying Greek.

Gracious Truth

A couple of posts below I posted an excerpt from a stringent critique of Jewish and Christian biblical theology: the God of the Bible is difficult if not impossible to believe in because charity and capricious cruelty contradictorily constitute his characteristic behaviour. I also said I thought this charge (which is, of course, old and not new) could be defended. Here are a few thoughts, but not a comprehensive essay.

One comes from J.I. Packer's Knowing God (which a commenter on an earlier post pointed me to, re atonement and predestination). A recurring reminder in Packer's unpacking of the God of the Bible is that anthropomorphisms both help human understanding of God and lead us to false understanding if we forget that God is God and not some accumulated creation of the sum of all anthropomorphisms. In part, at least, Plotz in my post below savages belief in God because the anthropomorpic "God" is savage; but does not account for the true God, the God beyond the limits of human language.

Another, the source of which I have forgotten, is that I (and you) are not entitled to a god who fits our expectations of reasonable behaviour, desirable though such a god would be, our expectations as nurtured by modernity and post-modernity being crucial to our view of what is right and true. That is, we may be making the God of eternity subject to judgement from a thin perspective of temporal experience. (This response, however, could itself be undermined from within the Bible since even there various Jobs and Jeremiahs wonder at what God is up to when disaster strikes.)

Thirdly, finally for today, I suggest when we allow for limitations in human language used in the Bible, and have acute awareness of the danger of judging God from the narrow base of our own experience and expectations, we need to acknowledge the progression of theology through the Bible. In Jesus Christ, the full revelation of God is the revelation of a consistent charity in God's character which has not been revealed prior to Christ. This a relatively straightforward claim to make (an old claim of theology, not a new 21st century revelation, by the way) but it raises significant questions for how we understand the Bible, the relationship of 'theology' to 'Scripture', and the continuing role of the Holy Spirit in the life of the church.

Blogs as Revelatory Texts

Odd-bit post today. Tonight I begin tutoring a class at Bishopdale Theological College, Nelson on 'Biblical Interpretation'. One book I have dragged off my shelves is Sandra M. Schneiders' The Revelatory Text: Interpreting the New Testament as Sacred Scripture. This is a good book as far as hermeneutics goes - many are long (this is middling in length), turgid (not here), and overly complex (not too bad). But Sandra M. Schneiders is in the blog world today; and this book is not the reason, indeed I have not seen it mentioned.

Damien Thompson, Holy Smoke (more accurately it might be entitled 'Holy Smote'!!), picks up on an email from Sandra which is doing the rounds (presumably no hoax), perhaps from First Things, since he approvingly quotes Elizabeth Scalia writing there on the email. Scalia herself has posted about this article on her blog, where one can read that the story broke in the National Catholic Reporter. Still with me?

In a nutshell the story in these revelatory texts is that Sandra M. Schneiders ('Catholic biblical scholar and feminist' according the publishers blurb on my book) is organising passive resistance to an inspection of the religious order she belongs to. The critique asks the question, does this order belong to Rome or not? If it does not, is a 'new Catholic church' in America being birthed through Schneider and her sisters' actions?

Hang on. We have heard that story already, mutatis mutandis, in North America Anglicanland!!!

Only read this if your faith in God is secure

"Not to sound like a theocratic crank, but I'm actually shocked that students aren't compelled to read huge chunks of the Bible in high school and college, the way they must read Shakespeare or the Constitution or Mark Twain.

That's my intellectual defense of Bible reading. Now a more personal one. As a lax, non-Hebrew-speaking Jew, I spent my first 35 years roboting through religious rituals and incomprehensible prayers, honoring inexplicable holidays. None of it meant anything to me. Now it does. Reading the Bible has joined me to Jewish life in a way I never thought possible. I trace this to when I read about Jacob blessing his grandsons Ephraim and Manasseh at the end of Genesis. I suddenly realized: Oh, that's why I'm supposed to lay my hand on my son's head at Shabbat dinner and bless him in the names of Ephraim and Manasseh. That shock of recognition has been followed by many more—when I came across the words of the Shema, the most important Jewish prayer, in Deuteronomy, when I read about the celebration of Passover in the book of Ezra, when I read in Psalms the lyrics of Christian hymns I love to sing.

You notice that I haven't said anything about belief. I began the Bible as a hopeful, but indifferent, agnostic. I wished for a God, but I didn't really care. I leave the Bible as a hopeless and angry agnostic. I'm brokenhearted about God.

After reading about the genocides, the plagues, the murders, the mass enslavements, the ruthless vengeance for minor sins (or none at all), and all that smiting—every bit of it directly performed, authorized, or approved by God—I can only conclude that the God of the Hebrew Bible, if He existed, was awful, cruel, and capricious. He gives us moments of beauty—such sublime beauty and grace!—but taken as a whole, He is no God I want to obey and no God I can love."

That is David Plotz, Editor of Slate, writing Good Book: What I Learned from Reading the Entire Bible. Read it all here.

This God of Scripture is challenging! I think there is a response to David Plotz, though it's not easy to do in a few pithy words. What do you think?

Substitutionary Atonement is Anglican, Buddhism is not

Buddhism offers some clues about meditation; meditation is a way of being still before God; Anglicans can do that. But Buddhism also offers some clues about the problem of suffering (one is tempted to say, the main clue is 'there is no problem', but that might say more about my superficial knowledge of Buddhism). These clues know nothing, make nothing of Jesus Christ dying on the cross in our place for our sins. Anglican theology continuous with Anglican theology, via the ancient church fathers and the Book of Common Prayer, makes a lot of Jesus Christ's substitutionary atonement, especially in the BCP; or, if it has forgotten this, ought to make more of it than it does.

Of course some Anglican theology today is discontinuous with Anglican theology, effectively creating two Anglican theologies, Mk 1 and Mk 2. Mk 1 has had its day; Mk 2 is the truth for our time. Kevin Thew Forrester's embrace of Buddhist ideas (see post below) will be interpreted by some as heresy (by those, that is, who follow Anglican theology continuous with past Anglican theology). By others this embrace will be unremarkable as it is simply Anglican theology Mk 2 at work.

The error involved in Mk 2 theology is the error the church has battled with repeatedly: a new revelation has been received, therefore we may now delete the former revelation. Spong, for example, offers this error at the heart of his theological proposals: for centuries the church thought this way about God, now, thanks to theologians such as Tillich, we realise the error of our ways and offer this new truth.

The battle for the future shape of the Communion is only between 'conservatives' and 'liberals' to an extent. The theological issue underlying the controversy is bigger and wider than that particular divide. It concerns whether the theology binding Anglican churches into one world Communion is coherent or not with the theology which formed and then reformed the Church of England.

Will the writer of these doctrines become a bishop in the Anglican Communion?

Kevin Thew Forrester has been elected to be bishop of the Diocese of Northern Michigan. To actually become the bishop his election requires approval from diocesan standing committees in TEC. Will they or won't they confirm?

What would your decision be as your read this kind of thing from a candidate for the episcopacy publicly espousing views of a mixed Christian-and-Buddhist kind?

"And yet, it has not been easy for me to see this belovedness in my own life, or in all of God’s creatures – such as those who flew planes into the Twin Towers. I seem to thrive on setting-up conditions for God’s love. My fear and ego needs have been blinding all too often. Sin is another word for such blindness. Sin has little, if anything, to do with being bad. It has everything to do, as far as I can tell, with being blind to our own goodness. And when we are blind we hurt ourselves and others – sometimes quite deeply.

Zen Buddhism, for me, is about learning how to see the bedrock truth of our baptism – we are beloved. To say this may sound odd, at first. But 2,500 years ago, an Indian prince became known as the Buddha, or the Enlightened One, because he courageously sat and faced his fears, and after years of facing them, saw this basic truth about life: we are one, utterly one, yet we do not know it. We suffer because we fearfully cling to this or that thing (for me, trying to be perfect) in the hope that it will bring us happiness."

Jesus died, apparently, because we are blind to our own goodness.

(Read the whole account of Kevin Thew Forrester's amalgam of Christo-Buddhist beliefs here. You might like to compare it with this more recent, after the fact of the election, apologia for being Christian and sympathetic to Buddhism here. Do the two statements gel?)

Let's see if TEC confirms this election or otherwise. Either way we will learn something about TEC's commitment to a common, orthodox, Christian theology for the Anglican Communion.

Is Jesus Saviour of the World or Saviour of the Elect?

Triggered by a note in another blog I have been doing a little reading and reflecting on the question in the title above. Calvinism's TULIP has blessed us with the idea of 'Limited Atonement' or, probably better expressed, 'Particular Redemption'. If Christ died in our place receiving the punishment for our sins then he did not die for everyone, since then some people would be punished twice for their sins, once on the cross and once in hell. Ergo, Christ died for the sins of the elect and not for the sins of the non-elect.

Silly people like me wonder why the Bible then includes John 3:16 (God so loved the world) and John 4:42 (This is indeed the Saviour of the World), but no doubt if I look harder enough I will find the appropriate Calvinist solution.

The howlers here are fairly obvious and make one book I was alerted to somewhat inglorious! Howler 1 is thinking about the death of Christ and its theological meaning in a human mechanistic manner, including 'punishment' for sins being a 'thing' there can be two helpings of. What is punishment for sins from the perspective of God? Perhaps it looks quite different!

Howler 2 is assuming we have a completely satisfactory grasp of what the 'elect' means. Perhaps 'the elect' means those who are destined to be saved with the logical corollary that the non-elect means those who are destined not to be saved. But what if it does not mean that? If, for example, the elect is not a neat category of people, inexorably linked to predestination in the sense of God's irresistible force which means some must become Christians and others not, then Christ's death is not quite so particular!

Howler 3 is a generally small-minded approach to salvation: it's about numbers of people and measurable dollops of punishment, according to this watertight theory; but everything the Bible says about the grace of God reeks of the mystery of the immeasurable dimensions of God's grace. God in Christ reconciles the whole world to himself; heaven is envisaged as peopled with an unnumbered crowd; Jesus of Nazareth mingles with all shades and shapes of people, and not only with those 'destined' to become his disciples.

Calvinism needs to get a life! If a preoccupation with the penal substitutionary theory of atonement leads to such howlers, perhaps the 'theory' needs revisiting, rather than attacking critics of limited or particular atonement. For what it is worth I find the 'penal' part of the theory unhelpful: it too readily draws into our minds mechanical versions of the consequences of sin such as 'X years in prison' or 'a fine of Y dollars'. The consequences of our sin are more and less than that. For example, one consequence is slavery to the power of sin. On the cross Christ provides the means ('redemption') for release from that slavery: that release is available to all, but not all avail themselves of it.

The book, incidentally, is Pierced for our Transgressions: Rediscovering the glory of penal substitution and written by Steve Jeffery, Mike Ovey and Andrew Sach. Its foreword is by John Piper, noted American preacher and arguably the current doyen of Calvinism in the world today.

Now here is an interesting 'Anglican Down Under' angle on this book and its argument for limited atonement or particular redemption. The three authors are Anglican theologians connected through teaching/study at Oak Hill Theological College, London. But one of the theologians they have a go at because he or she argues against particular redemption is none other than the late Broughton Knox, former Principal of Moore College, Sydney, and the theologian par excellence behind the general theological tenor of the Diocese of Sydney today (pp. 276 - 278).

One of the beauties of Anglicanism, I suggest, is that it distances itself, rather than embraces, the full-blown '-isms' of other modes of being Christian, whether it is Calvinism, Lutheranism, Pentecostalism or Roman Catholism.