This editorial first appeared in the April 2002 edition of
Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity.
Editorial
Heretical Bibles
The editors of Touchstone agree with Hendrik A. Mills on the importance
of defense of the faith against the recent tide of bad scripture translations
(see Letters
in this issue), and appreciate his putting the subject before us for comment.
While Fr. Reardon is our best Bible scholar, I will speak here for the senior
editors, for what is required is not so much expertise in translation as a
review of our indications that every Bible systematically employing what is called
"inclusive language," whether for God or man, is unorthodox and
unacceptable.
Each of the most widely used English Bibles current before this new spate
of versions has its strengths and weaknesses. No Bible translation is without
flaw. Even if the problems of selection from variant texts and actual mistranslation
were placed to the side, the impossibility of duplicating one language in
another remains. Some of those older versions we (varying among ourselves)
might have considered too "loose" to be of value for close study,
or colored by sectarian bias. Some, in the attempt to modernize or colloquialize,
date themselves with jargon or impoverished English. Some are hobbled by questionable
theories of semantic correspondence, some miss (or refuse) the advantage of
newer manuscript discoveries, some lack certain books of the Old Testament
canon, and most lack the genius that makes for truly great translation—all
imperfect, all requiring the superintendence of Spirit and Church in teaching,
preaching, and private reading.
None, however, had yet been altered to the dictates of egalitarian ideology,
the principal mark of the newer translations—some produced by reputedly conservative
committees—to which we assume Mr. Mills is referring. The reason we have not
felt the need to evaluate specific new translations is that we have a clear
and frequently stated theological opposition to sexual egalitarianism, along
with its stilted, artificial patois, upon which we have published a great
deal. Egalitarian Bibles encourage a faulty view of man, thus of Christ, thus
of God. All these translations are to be avoided because they deliberately
and systematically reflect doctrinal error. We reject the New Revised Standard
Version and the reworked New International Version on the same grounds we
reject the Bible used by the Jehovah's Witnesses.
Agreeing with the more clear-sighted (and hence non-Christian) egalitarians,
we believe that the language of Scripture is what it appears to be, that it
carries unavoidable theological freight with respect to the matter at hand,
and that the "male orientation" of the text they find so obnoxious
points to a biblical theology of humanity that must be abandoned by people
who have rejected the idea of male headship over the woman as an ordinance
of the world created and redeemed in and by the Son of God the Father and
reflected in the grammar of the Church from the beginning. "Blessed is
the man" ('ashrei ha'ish)
of the First Psalm, for example, points not only to the incorporation of the
woman in the man as her head, but does so precisely because it is a Christological
adumbration of the blessed Man whose sex as the Son of God and Paschal Lamb
is by no means insignificant, and into whose decisively male incarnation and
headship all who are saved must enter. All this is crudely and culpably disposed
of by translators who, in ignorance or defiance of Christian faith, and of
actual biblical usage, wish to even things out by forcing us to say "Blessed
are those" instead.
It will not do to say that language has changed so readers accustomed to the
new order must be accommodated for evangelical reasons, as though these changes
were not imposed by an anti-Christian ideology enforced by political and economic
sanctions. Even if the language were undergoing natural evolution to a more
egalitarian form quite apart from these artificial and all too frequently
mandatory constraints, the Scriptures themselves provide a theological-grammatical
contradiction that requires, for those who regard them as authoritative, the
reformation not of biblical, but of vernacular language. If, for example,
our native speech had only a gender-neutral word to describe the human race,
our conversion to the Christian faith and its theology would necessitate the
addition of "man" to our vocabulary as its proper name.
It is more than dismaying to hear educated people who present themselves as
orthodox, resting their own teaching authority on an infallible Bible, insist
that our standard for its translation includes conformance to the mind and
vocabulary of people whose discourse and understanding their Bibles tell them
is pervaded by sin and error. The proponents of these new versions have got
it exactly backwards: It is the Word of God that is to rule the word of man,
not the other way around. The first question to be asked is not whether language
has changed, but how God has taught us to speak. Where the ancestral tongue
serves Scripture, altering it so it can serve no longer must be identified
by Christians not as change to accept, but as corruption to resist.
Admittedly, part of the reason for the eclipse of the issue in our minds may
be that few of us still belong to, or will regularly attend, churches where
these Bibles are used or where teaching on these matters is foggy or the subject
of lively debate. Speaking for my wife and myself, we will not attend a church,
however orthodox or Evangelical it claims to be, where the teaching authority
sees no problem in the use of egalitarian Bibles or in singing hymns that
have been revised in accordance with feminist sensibilities. We will not have
our children's minds formed in this consciousness as though it were Christian,
nor will we allow our own sensibilities to become dulled, having seen so many
friends drift into heterodoxy by constant, unresisted exposure to error.
The churches must stand against what is heard everywhere else, even though
the whole world be against them, actively teach where the error in such matters
lies, and present a clear example of what is right in their own discourse.
What good, after all, is a church whose main object is professedly to "win
people to Christ," when the Christ they are winning them to is a Christ
whose maleness, like all maleness, has no deep significance—that is, a Christ
who does not exist? Such churches, though they multiply converts, are, but
for an intervening grace, winning them to an idol. Our alienation from them
does not mean we won't publish any more on the topic, but we do think
the basic issue has been firmly and frequently addressed in these pages.
Editorial convictions notwithstanding, we have not forbidden our contributors
to use some neutered prose as touches man in their own work, if they feel
they must. As much as we dislike it, we allow them to write "men and
women" when they can't bring themselves to write "man," or
"he or she" when an inclusive "he" will do. It is not,
after all, a theological mistake (although it is often clumsy English) to
write this way, except when it is done consistently, in accordance with an
egalitarian principle—and this is not, after all, Bible translation.
We also understand that heresy is normally marked by rightness in what it
affirms—such as the equality of men and women in dignity and worth—and wrongness
in what it denies—male headship as an indispensable mark of divine being and
order. Someone who asserts the equality of the sexes, or uses language that
emphasizes it, is not by mere virtue of the fact wrong, for the sexes are
indeed equal. Often such expressions are required, the language as traditionally
spoken and written makes ample provision, and putting the idea in words is
no affront to good theology or euphonious English. It is when the assertion
is based on, or becomes, a denial of the other truth that it becomes false,
and its slavish, exclusive expression in prose makes writing tense, dissonant,
and ugly.
Some of our contributors, while agreeing with us on this, work in environments
where apparent concession to egalitarian demands is required. They reflexively
"balance" their writing less from conviction than from fear of reprisal.
We sympathize, and bear with them. (Most publishers, including now the major
Evangelical houses, expect neutered prose from their writers, and if they
don't get it, alter the submissions accordingly.) Some don't see the problem,
or don't agree with us on the point, and we allow it if the writing is otherwise
good, believing the editorial position on these matters to be clear and
corrective. As a practical matter, however, those who hold to egalitarian
principles rarely find appearance in Touchstone's pages amenable to their
publishing ambitions.
The grammar of orthodoxy, and so also orthodoxy of grammar, is important to
us. We promise our readers to continue swimming against the prevailing stream,
and will not intentionally allow mistranslation of any kind to be cited in
our pages as Holy Scripture.
For those we know will ask: The English Bible most favored by Touchstone's senior editors, especially
for teaching and public reading, is probably the Revised Standard version of 1952, adjusted,
when necessary, by our own translation. We are all over forty, and still have
the cadences of the King James or Douay-Rheims Bibles lively in our minds.
Making no exclusive claims for them, we can hardly bear thinking of many of
the most memorized and recited passages of Scripture in any other version.
—S. M. Hutchens, for the editors
These letters and the subsequent editorial first appeared
in the June 2002 edition of
Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity.
LETTERS
I would like to comment on S. M. Hutchens's editorial in the April 2002
issue of Touchstone ("Heretical Bibles"). Since the Greek word underlying
the concept of "heresy" means "choice," it seems that
Dr. Hutchens is unnecessarily excited about people reading versions of the
Bible he doesn't personally approve of.
I would like to call to his attention a short article entitled "What
Gets Lost in Translation" by Ben Witherington III, page 12, in the April
2002 issue of Bible Review. The article points out the difficulties encountered by translators
of biblical Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek and suggests consulting several different
versions when engaged in serious Bible study.
I feel it is more important that each person read his or her Bible rather
than spend an inordinate amount of time arguing over which single version
is the best. Let each person select the version or versions that they are
comfortable with and read God's Word with understanding and humility. Nevertheless,
Dr. Hutchens is certainly entitled to his views and so are the rest of us.
—Robert K. Hering
By e-mail
Please cancel my subscription to Touchstone immediately. While I am
sympathetic to the general theological concerns of the magazine, your editorial
in the April 2002 issue on Bible translation was woefully shortsighted about
translation (I wonder how many Bible translations would exist if we did not
conform its language "to the mind and vocabulary of people whose discourse
and understanding their Bibles tell them is pervaded by sin and error"),
arrogant (agree with us on an issue that has never been embodied in an ecumenical
confession or you are heretical), and cowardly (you other folks need to resist
the trend; we won't insist on it here at Touchstone). As one of the translators
of Today's New International Version who "presents himself as orthodox,"
I was personally offended by the tone of the editorial—e.g., "crudely
and culpably disposed of by translators who, in ignorance or defiance of Christian
faith . . ."—and dismayed to find alleged theological
orthodoxy defended at the dismaying and ultimately self-defeating expense
of orthopraxy: simple Christian charity toward those who hold different positions
well within the boundaries of historical orthodoxy.
—Douglas J. Moo
West Chicago, Illinois
I appreciate the goals of the Fellowship of St. James and look to your magazine
for an ecumenical yet traditional Christian voice on current issues facing
the Church. As an evangelical and orthodox theologian, I stand with you and
the goals of your mission statement, which I believe do honor to Christ.
However, in your most recent issue (April 2002) I found an editorial ("Heretical
Bibles") that does not, in my view, honor Christ. If I may be blunt,
the reason for this is that you have abused the powerful word heresy and
elevated your own biases to the status of orthodox dogma. The test of orthodox
theology lies in Scripture and the ecumenical Creeds, and here you have no
standing for your human opinion about inclusive language and sexual equality
(outside the priesthood). By elevating your opinion to the status of dogma,
you undermine true orthodoxy.
Let us leave aside the questions of women priests and of English grammar.
You state that sexual equality is, or leads to, heresy. In this matter you
are flatly wrong. The recent trend of inclusive-language English Bible translations
is not heretical. Some translations may, indeed, be based upon heretical biases,
but these Bibles are not. The issue has nothing to do with language for God,
but rather of language for human beings. You elevate your traditionalism about
English grammar to the status of orthodoxy. Your purely human preference has
nothing to do with dogma, since "God is male" is not a part of the
orthodox faith. Traditionalism is not the same as orthodoxy.
Questions of grammar and even of women in the priesthood pale in comparison
to the question of what counts as true Christian doctrine, and what counts
as heresy. How can you be so scrupulous about the word man and so loose in your use
of the word heretic? Is this not duplicitous? The movement toward inclusive English
grammar is based upon the ideas that language shapes our views of reality
and that women are fully human. The plain fact is that the full humanity of
women, and their equality before God with men, is no heresy. On the contrary,
it is the traditional teaching of the Bible and of the early Church that women
and men alike are created in the image of God, and are joint heirs of the
Kingdom of Christ (see, e.g., Gen 1:27; 1 Cor. 11:11,12; and Clement of Alexandria,
Stromateis, iv.8). Searching through the ecumenical Creeds of the unified
Church before a.d. 800 we find no reference at all to the gender issues that
you find "heretical." In fact, your assertion that the Son of God
became a man (rather than a human being) is contrary to the Greek text of
the Nicene Creed, which clearly states that he "became human" (anthropos), not that he "became
a male" (aner). We share with Jesus his full humanity, not his
full manliness. So contrary to your opinion, sexual equality in general terms
is not a heresy (again, ignoring the issue of women in the priesthood). You
of all people should use this powerful and oft abused word, heresy, with more care. By abusing
the word heretic and elevating your traditionalism to the status
of dogma, you have done a disservice to the Church and to its Head. You owe
a public and printed apology, repenting of your doctrinal error, to all those
who have labored to bring us these new Bibles in contemporary English.
—Alan G. Padgett
St. Paul, Minnesota
Editorial
Unmanning the Bible
by
S. M. Hutchens
The editorial "Heretical Bibles" in the April edition of Touchstone has predictably brought
much response, both negative and positive. The letters in this issue from
Mr. Hering and Drs. Moo and Padgett are typical of the former, and call for
reply. Those who weary of our emphasis on this and related topics must understand
that while we, too, would like to let them rest, the issues will not go away.
We believe this to be the principal place of doctrinal engagement and defense
in our day, where old errors are recrudescing in subtle and not-so-subtle
modern forms, and against which the Church is called to engage as often as
it is challenged. While this editorial is based specifically upon letters
we have received, an excellent general explanation of "the necessary
failure of inclusive language translations" by Fr. Paul Mankowski, "Jesus,
Son of Humankind?" may be found in the October 2001 issue of Touchstone.
Mr. Hering and Dr. Moo have, each in his own way, accused us of uncharitableness,
Hering because we have unkindly warned people away from finding God in the
Bible or Bibles of their choice, Moo because we have wantonly scandalized
the Church on a difference of opinion that does not touch the heart of Christian
doctrine and upon which, therefore, earnest Christians should be allowed to
disagree without suffering the disapproval of the Touchstone editors.
Moo's reaction of deep offense as a translator of Today's New International
Version
(TNIV) seems more reasonable than that of those who are willing to allow us
our opinions as long as they can have theirs. He knows fighting words when
he hears them, and therefore also, we presume, understands that what is at
stake among those for whom this Bible is intended is nothing less than the
division symbolized in his own cancelled subscription.
We doubt it is possible to identify people as abettors of heresy in a way
that will sound charitable to them until they come to agree, so once again,
we must go to the point. As the editorial and the history of our publishing
on the subject indicate, we believe the egalitarian anthropology the wording
of his translation supports does indeed lay violent hands on the heart of
Christian doctrine, since it obscures and confuses headship in the human order
that, according to St. Paul, directly reflects the Divine. This, we believe,
is one of the principal points of attack in our generation against the orthodoxy
Dr. Moo desires to uphold and defend. Because man is made in the image of
God, bad anthropology is also bad theology. To misunderstand and misrepresent
man is to misunderstand and misrepresent God.
We do not enjoy offending people, especially the decent kind of people that
stand behind the letters written to us by our critics on this issue. We hoped
the account of how far we forebear in our own publishing, identified by Dr.
Moo as hypocrisy because we do not force our contributors to write exactly
as we do, would serve as evidence of a reasonable and generous spirit. Apparently
not. It is true, however, that we hold Bible translators to a higher standard
than Touchstone
contributors, and he is correct in thinking the editorial was aiming directly
at, among others, the translators of the TNIV.
Dr. Padgett says we are being un-Christlike, and we presume this means that,
like Mr. Hering and Dr. Moo, he is accusing us of uncharitableness, of treating
sincere Christians badly by calling them terrible, false names, for which
we should repent and give an apology to the innocents we have harmed. If things
stand as he says they do in his digest of egalitarian conviction, however,
the situation is even worse than that, for our un-Christlikeness amounts to
belief in, and teaching of, a different Christ than his own.
Padgett's Christ, the Christ of a rather large and influential new crop of
Evangelical egalitarians, assumed a generic humanity that is equally a quality
of men and women. This is found neither in Scripture nor in nature nor in
Creed, but is the product of egalitarian re-imagination, read back into all
three. Padgett is right to point to the word anthropos as the token of the controversy,
but very wrong in his Greek. The word as used in Scripture means "man"
as English apart from egalitarian adjustment means man, as the Church has
known man from its beginning, man as the proper title of the male as primary,
comprehensive, and representative of the human race, something that can be
seen even by readers of Bibles that have undergone egalitarian adjustment,
whether or not they know the original languages. It pervades the narrative.
One cannot rid the Bible of it by grammatical tinkering. It inheres as a fundamental
structural element of the whole, there for rediscovery even if the egalitarians
were wholly successful in their attempt to neuter biblical grammar. As we
have observed many times, this is a commonplace of feminist theology, which,
with unassailable reason, finds it necessary either to radically revise or
to reject both Judaism and Christianity as hopelessly sexist from the creation
narratives forward.
The egalitarian juggernaut breaks upon the rocks of the Bible's very first
chapter, from God's seminal incursion into the formless and empty earth to
the creation of a man like himself: "So God created man [ha'adam,
LXX: anthropos] in his own image; in
the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." So it is carried
on through the Scriptures and by those who follow them, the man as the defining
member of the woman, of the Church, and of the race. Naturally, the egalitarians
will not recognize the connections. They do not see why creating a male first,
identifying humanity with his name, and then making a woman from him, whom
he in turn names, should have any bearing on their doctrine. This failure
to see and understand is the chief of their faults as would-be teachers of
the Church. One cannot place women's ordination or any other issue that involves
divine order to the side in such matters. They are all connected, and intimately,
to what is identified in the Pauline writings as the headship of the man over
the woman, of Christ over the man, and of God over Christ—not an invention
of St. Paul, but a prior teaching of Scripture rightly divined and re-delivered
to the Church with apostolic force and authority.
This knowledge will be compromised for those who rely on these bad translations,
for this is the very thing they deliberately obscure in accordance with egalitarian
doctrine, and for which they should be decisively rejected. The Christian
teaching, as dark and blighted as it is to the egalitarians, is that the maleness
of particular men, not "humanness," is the essence and sign of the
inclusivity in which they claim to delight. There exists no generic quality
of humanness apart from the particularity of Adam and Christ as the comprehensive
men any more than there exists a generic Godness apart from the particularity
of the Father as the Source of the Son and Spirit. God did not become human
except in that he was "made man," which means not simply made human,
but made human only and in so far as he was made a particular male, and so
able to comprehend all men (including female men) in his person as the "firstborn
of all creation."
As for all the blustering, the accusation that we are mere traditionalists
attempting to force our tastes on the churches, that we are nasty and uncharitable
and whatnot, these distractions were anticipated in the offending editorial
and dealt with there. Even if true, they are small matters next to the issue
at hand, which is doctrinal, and very grave. If I have any qualms of conscience,
it is not in that we used the word heresy, which refers to false teaching
and its effect on the Church, but that to avoid graver offense, stronger biblical
terminology referring to the character, origin, and ends of such teaching
has not been used. If in this avoidance we have erred, it is the same error
of which we accuse those who do not identify departures from the Faith with
appropriate words, or oppose them with sufficient vigor—a serious failing
indeed.
We have also received critical correspondencefrom a representative of a school
very influential among conservative Evangelicals that endorses inclusive language
versions by calling for realism in matters of Bible translation—that because
language changes, Bible translation must accommodate the changes to be accurate.
It should be clear from the editorial that we reject this approach as insufficiently
appreciative of the doctrinal implications of biblical grammar and insufficiently
critical of ideologically
altered language.
Adherents of this school observe that if one is to convey the meaning of biblical
Hebrew and Greek accurately to modern readers of English, he must, in order
to give them God's Word, translate it into egalitarian forms as regards man
(though not God), but insist that this operation is still compatible with
the complementarianism (i.e., male headship) to which they still hold. Their
philologists are at pains to demonstrate the difficulty of achieving semantic
equivalence in translation, and regard those who will insist on using superceded
terminology on a new audience as unrealistic. They identify their own Bible
translations as "gender accurate."
The writer of a letter criticizing us from these quarters accused us of ignorance
of this school of thought, as though any reasonable person, once confronted
by it, would be forced to submit to its logic. On the contrary, much of what
appeared in the editorial was in response to this way of thinking as involving
a serious flaw: the apparently seductive notion that the principal goal of
the Bible translator is always to achieve, as far as possible, semantic equivalence.
Not so. As useful and necessary as this rule is, in Bible translation it must
be subordinate to the grammatical requirements of the theology of the text.
We believe semantic equivalence cannot in point of fact be achieved by the
egalitarian forms of language for mankind because the Hebrew and Greek of
the Bible reflect a doctrine, and thus also a semantics, of man in, with,
and under a masculine-dominant grammar that the egalitarian forms cannot reflect.
The grammar of the original languages, as well as that of traditional English,
in other words, fits the theology of the Bible in a way the altered English
the realists take as their ruling paradigm cannot.
The goal of the translator must be to transform or reform, not submit to,
a conceptually or grammatically deficient receptor language. This may be supremely
difficult, practically impossible, in fact, to achieve except over time, as
the culture into which a translation is introduced is changed by the mind
it finds in the Scriptures, altering its symbolic systems and its semantics
accordingly. That this might indeed happen is precisely as unrealistic, but
precisely as necessary, as the evangelization of that culture—for these are
exactly the same goal. The conversion of a language group involves also the
conversion of its language, just as its apostasy involves language's degradation.
Bible translators cannot make a principle of submitting to the latter on the
grounds of semantic equivalence.
We readily grant that certain unhappy concessions must be made for initial
communication, that translation is an ongoing task that must take proper account
of changes in language, and that it is a supremely difficult art. The translator
must often pass on a very unsatisfactory product. Be that as it may, semantic
equivalence can never be the goal of the translator apart from that of the
reformation of the semantics of a culture and its language better to serve
the Faith. Not every language is equal in its ability to convey truth, but
since every language changes—as the realists never tire of reminding us—there
is always the prospect that what is lacking may be provided, what is wrong
made right. Indeed, this is what we expect in the language of heaven, the
first semantic requirement of which must be the removal of the influence of
sin. (This is part of the lesson of Babel.) In the meantime we cannot employ
translation theories that proceed as though this influence did not exist or
were not a crucial consideration in the matter of "inclusive language"
Bibles.
To submit to the language of a degraded receptor culture is especially blameworthy
when it has only recently undergone ideological deformation, where echoes
of a superior form are still strong enough to be recovered and re-instituted
by Christians as part of their evangelical duty. The end of translation of
the gospel cannot be simple communication, but the bringing of human language,
by the sacramental and transformative ministrations of the translator, into
conformance with the Word of God. In this we judge the inclusive-language
Bibles to be retrograde and perverse.
—S. M. Hutchens, for the editors
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