First line of an intercessory prayer heard recently at a morning service in a church, "O Lord, as you have served us very well in the past......."
The following claim, attributed by Craig Blomberg (Evangelical NT scholar) to Al Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Convention: welcoming the publication, from within their own publishing house, of the Holman Christian Standard Bible Mohler spoke of the importance of having "a Bible translation we can control".
Now many a year ago, when the NIV was first published by Zondervan, it was promoted as an "Evangelical" translation. The Principal of the Baptist College then was R E O White, for whom the Greek New Testament was the equivalent of Jeremiah's scroll, and was to be ingested and digested as the very marrow of Christian life and faith. I still haven't met anyone who could match his enthusiasm for grammar, syntax, punctuation, textual criticism, etymology, critical apparatus, lexical investigation, and who quite simply revelled in the work of textual criticism, translation and exegesis, insisting that such disciplined detail showed reverence for words, and the Word. One of his heroes (not sure but think it was J B Lightfoot) spoke of burying his head in a lexicon and raising it in the presence of God.
So when the NIV was being advertised in Christian media as an "Evangelical" translation, he took time in the Greek class to ask the question I've never stopped asking, "Why would evangelicals of all christian people, want a Bible translation that is made in their own image?" By which he meant, and I concur, shouldn't our desideratum be the criterion of accuracy, disciplined faithfulness to the text, refusal to ignore or give in to the pull of our own theological presuppositions, linguistic honesty, scholarly deference before the challenge of the text, respect for the harder reading even if it is theologically inconvenient, honest acknowledgement of the difficulties and of the polar attractions and repulsions of dynamic and formal translation?
So as an Evangelical Christian, when I hear any publishing house or Christian tradition aspire to the control of a translation I have a deep and reluctant to articulate uneasiness. But that first line of the opening prayer I quoted at the start, "O Lord as you have served us so well in the past...", with its unacknowledged assumption of God at our service, may well be the hermeneutical clue I need to explain and interpret my uneasiness. As Blomberg (see here) gently comments, "Funny. I always thought the Bible should control us..." Yes. And I always thought in worship we are at the service of God.
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