Dumbing down the Good Book

Concordia Publishing House executive Paul McCain tries to convince disgruntled Missouri Synod members that the ESV is easier to read than the NIV in a recent posting. This may indicate that at least some of the normally docile sheep are less than happy with the choice of the ESV (a revision of the old RSV that's been tarted up for the conservative market) for Concordia's new Study Bible.

The assumption behind the post seems to be that easy-to-read English bibles are good. So what if translators themselves sometimes have no idea what an expression, or even a whole passage means? Dumb that sucker down anyway, and while you're at it, make sure it's skewed to put our church's theology (whatever that might be) in the best light.

A link on the McCain blog caught my eye. The nice people at Zondervan (owned by Rupert Murdoch) have provided "reading levels" for various translations.

The Message 4.3
Good News 6.0
New Living 6.3
NAB (Catholic) 6.6
NIV 7.8
ESV 8.0
NKJV 8.0
NRSV 10.4
NASB 11.0
KJV 12.0

I'm not sure how McCain deduces from this that "The publishers of the New International Version have issued their own “readility” [sic] analysis, and the ESV beats the NIV here too!" McCain continues: "There is some misinformation on the web that places the ESV on a 10th grade reading level. That may be a case of misunderstanding or of someone trying to shore up the NIV’s market position, which has been badly damaged by their decision to use gender inclusive language and by competition with the ESV."

These guys hate inclusive language. Why? And why assume that bible readers in the vacuous category of "laity" are all as dumb as a brick? On the inclusive language issue, here are some wise words from translator Nicholas King:

"Throughout this translation we have adopted the policy of using inclusive language, that is to say, not speaking of 'man' or 'men' or 'the sons of men' when referring to all members of the human race. This has the undoubted benefit of making it clear that the particular text does not restrict itself to just one gender. It brings with it two difficulties, however. First, it obscures the fact that the society that produced these texts was a patriarchal one, that is to say it was run by the (male) head of the household, and that its texts are androcentric, that is to say, written from an exclusively male point of view. The second difficulty is that using inclusive language can sometimes make for very awkward English; but it is a price worth paying to avoid the appearance of excluding half the human race from God's sphere of attention."

As for the one-eyed pointscoring between the ESV and NIV, it has all the charm of Coke vs. Pepsi.

Camping it up in Chronicles

Following a provocative link from the Dunedin School blog, I landed upon a contribution by Ocker academic Roland Boer in the online Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality. After quickly running through the obligatory series of Tim the Toolman grunts, I girded my loins and began reading.

Boer unleashes himself upon the books of Chronicles in the Hebrew Bible with the observation that "this phallic world [of Chronicles] is not as firm as it seems." Chronicles portrays a utopian (or uchronian if you prefer) retelling of Israelite history from the standpoint of the Levites.

And what an interesting bunch these lads were according to Boer.

First, the dimensions of the temple recorded in 2 Chronicles (which differ from 1 Kings) indicate "a massive phallic tower."

Second, there are those "begats" which chart the exclusively male lineages. No mention of the role of women here. "The genealogies become a huge story from the beginning of time of pregnant men, waddling about, belly-buttons popped out, waiting for the birth of yet another son from their own bodies."

Third, there is "an extraordinary concern with interior design; and an intense emphasis on those crucial cultic items such as utensils, incense, spices and freshly baked bread." Don't be fooled by those butch passages where the mighty men wield "swords and massive spears as though they were prosthetic penises (see 1 Chronicles 11:10–47)." Those mighty men of 1 Chronicles 11 for example - the ones who ran off to get water for their thirsty king - turn out, on closer inspection, to be more like the Three Stooges.

Fourth, there's the floor show:

"[T]owards the end of the second book of Chronicles we meet King Jehoshaphat, face to face with the marauding army of the Ammonites, Moabites and men of Mount Seir. Unfazed, Jehoshaphat asks God what he should do (2 Chronicles 20:1—17). The answer: sing! Forget complex maneuvers like ambushes, pincers or disciplined advances under cover of the archers. No, faced with the enemy, Jehoshaphat ‘appointed those who were to sing to Yahweh and praise him in holy array’ (2 Chronicles 20: 21)... Battle as a musical..."

Then there's the interior decorator motif:

It begins with David, who is no hack when it comes to interior design, and then that organizational skill passes (genetically?) on to Solomon. David leaves Solomon a detailed shopping list for an exclusive home furnishings store (see 1 Chronicles 28:15-18 and 29:3)...

Once the temple was up and running, what was the function of the Levites?

What do real men do in Chronicles? They concern themselves with crockery and cutlery, furniture, fine flour, wine, oil, incense, spices, flat cakes and showbread. Everywhere we find the singers; released from any other service, they were rostered on to sing day and night (1 Chronicles 9: 33). Picture the scene: the men in the temple, finely dressed and perfumed, mix the spices, cook the flat cakes, arrange the furniture, ensure that the holy crockery and cutlery are correctly ordered; as they go about their tasks, they are surrounded by groups of singers and choristers who launch into song 24/7. A musical? An early version of piped music? Masculine?

Boer concludes: "It is a text full of queers doing their thing, whether in the genealogies of men begetting men, in the comic machismo of the ‘mighty men’, in the interior design of the temple, or in the attention to the finest detail of temple organization and decoration."


I really have no idea how serious Boer is. Is this meant to reshape our understanding of Chronicles, or is it a clever piece for those "in the trade" to chortle over, beer in hand (or perhaps a nicely chilled Chardonney), on a Friday night? The man himself cheerfully states: "I like speaking my mind, being misinterpreted, and scaring the shit out of good, upright and conservative citizens."

If you want to tackle the full article, be aware that it's couched in academic-speak designed to swat away the casual reader, so perseverence may be required.

One thing I do know, I'll never be able to think of the books of Chronicles in quite the same way again!

Calvin, Barth, Torrance... eeccchhh!

I can't make sense of this. What is this dude talking about?

Jeff McSwain, founder of Reality Ministries in Durham, NC, talks with Mike Feazell about the difference between Calvinism and Arminianism, and the reformulated Reformed view of Karl Barth.

Inside the self authenticating bubble that constitutes the fictive universe of Reformed thought, I guess it must appear as non-nonsense, but, praise the Lord, most Christians beyond the gray walls of Geneva (Babylon the Grating) have been spared that travail. Ironically, the fellow doing the talking is in charge of something called Reality Ministries. Obviously an alternate reality, maybe somewhere close to Kolob, the Mormon home world, or orbiting close by with Xenu in one of L. Ron Hubbard's space ships.

Honestly, you could do a Seinfeld routine with a transcript of this thing. Forget the Mormons and Scientologists, it's those crazy Reformed folk we should all be worrying about.

(The picture above is an artist's impression of Xenu I think, but I suppose it could be either Barth or Calvin - or maybe even Torrance at a pinch...)

It Ain't the Barmen Declaration

Gathered in New York last month, the ideologues of conservative Christianity - "Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical Christians" - launched something called the Manhattan Declaration (definitely not to be confused with the 2008 Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change.) It's a call to action that begins with a slop-bucket-full of historical misrepresentation.

After the barbarian tribes overran Europe, Christian monasteries preserved not only the Bible but also the literature and art of Western culture. It was Christians who combated the evil of slavery: Papal edicts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries decried the practice of slavery and first excommunicated anyone involved in the slave trade; evangelical Christians in England, led by John Wesley and William Wilberforce, put an end to the slave trade in that country. Christians under Wilberforce’s leadership also formed hundreds of societies for helping the poor, the imprisoned, and child laborers chained to machines.

In Europe, Christians challenged the divine claims of kings and successfully fought to establish the rule of law and balance of governmental powers, which made modern democracy possible. And in America, Christian women stood at the vanguard of the suffrage movement. The great civil rights crusades of the 1950s and 60s were led by Christians claiming the Scriptures and asserting the glory of the image of God in every human being regardless of race, religion, age or class.

This same devotion to human dignity has led Christians in the last decade to work to end the dehumanizing scourge of human trafficking and sexual slavery, bring compassionate care to AIDS sufferers in Africa, and assist in a myriad of other human rights causes—from providing clean water in developing nations to providing homes for tens of thousands of children orphaned by war, disease and gender discrimination.

This account is of course riddled with what used to be called "sins of omission." But having massaged history into something acceptable, the clarion call goes out. What great concerns must now be addressed in our times?

Abortion and homosexuality.

These people really do have one-track minds. Moral living is all about what happens below the waist. From Barmen to barmy.

And who signed this Barmen ripoff?

Archbishop Akinola, Anglican "primate" of Nigeria
Leith Anderson, president of the NAE (inheritor of Ted Haggard's position)
A Charlotte, NC. talk show host
Mark Bailey, president of Dallas Theological Seminary
Dr. James Dobson
Jerry's little boy, Jonathan Falwell
A couple of Cardinals
Ravi Zacharias
And a whole lot more.

It's a pretty ugly mob. Little wonder that you can find the Manhattan Declaration proudly on display at the First Things website.

Bibliolatry and the Age of Orthodoxy

The Reformation was an era of fiery debate, empowered by a dynamic that saw the world in broad brush strokes. Once the fire died down, and until the Enlightenment broke through, the embers were used to justify the reign of Orthodoxy.

Those assertions are not new, but I've been reminded of them by reading Bernhard Lohse's A Short History of Christian Doctrine. It's a remarkable work, especially given that the first German edition dates back to 1963 (which, if you're in need of a pop culture reference point, was the year The Fugitive first hit black and white television screens.)

Lohse is measured in his approach, but there's not much doubt that he is less than enchanted with the rise of Protestant Orthodoxy. The fact that it now lies gutted on the floor, a victim of the rise of historical thinking, doesn't change the fact that it affects us all still. Its outstanding but pernicious legacy may be the way most of us, as a default setting, were once taught to superstitiously regard scripture.

The Reformation thrust the Bible into a new prominence, and the big name Reformers were responsible for making it central to their agendas. Yet, as Lohse points out, the original layers of Protestant confessional writing contain no specific doctrine of scripture. That had to wait till the Formula of Concord in 1577.

It was possible, in those salad days, to be very critical of scripture - the letter of "James" for example (famously dismissed as "an epistle of straw") or the book of Revelation. The criteria for such judgment seems to have been whether or not a particular biblical document witnessed to what was seen as the essential gospel proclamation. Early German Protestant bibles happily relegated whole canonical books to a New Testament appendix, something almost unimaginable today.

In the Formula of Concord are found "the first traces of that development which sought to find in Scripture merely proofs for a comprehensive system of doctrine and which, at the same time, used Scripture as a law book..." (p.220)

Why? "This was done in order to obtain a bastion which would be safe from attack by the [Catholic] church... not even the most curious theories were disdained." (p.221)

Orthodoxy never solved the problems associated with this approach in a satisfactory way. In time the "dead hand of Orthodoxy" was first dissed by the Pietists (whose progeny yet prosper in a variety of evangelicalism) before collapsing under the impact of a modern world. But the proof texting approach that emerged then endures and prospers in the pigpens of fundamentalism.

The liberators - and of course Lohse is writing from a European perspective - emerged in the figures of Semler and Lessing, and the questions any thoughtful Christian faces today are not perhaps much different from theirs - unless you were raised in a "liberal" tradition to begin with. Semler "demonstrated the gradual development of the biblical canon, and in doing so undermined the Orthodox doctrine of the verbal inspiration of Scripture." Lessing grounded Christianity in the beliefs that predated the creation of the New Testament, the "rule of faith." Idolatrous claims about the bible and its alleged perfections have a long history of challenge.

For Lohse, these were liberating deeds. If so, it's a freedom that was enjoyed by many of the Reformers themselves, but after more than four hundred years has still to percolate through to the coal face of conservative Christianity.

I love American Lutheranism

1. Because it's a long way from here, and the grass always looks greener...

2. Because the frisson between the various synods is invigorating.

3. Because the cardboard stereotypes of Missouri (conservative), Wisconsin (fundamentalist) and ELCA (liberal) members are uncannily accurate.

4. Because you can both be horrified by and admire American Lutheranism at the same time.

5. Because of people like ELCA member Ursula Stemm, who, commenting on a proposal by a Missouri Synod task force to remove the word Missouri from the denominational name, "believes an LCMS name change would enhance the state’s reputation."

6. Because of the anonymous ELCA commenter on the Pretty Good Lutherans blog who, with reference to that same proposal, innocently asks: "Any talk about removing the word “Lutheran” from their name? "

Word & World

I've just noticed that Word & World now has its 2004 quarterly issues online in full. W&W is approachable theology from a committed Christian perspective, but not one weighed down with the baggage of Calvinism, what passes for evangelicalism, or crass apologetics. It's a commendable practice to make its wealth of archived articles available to all comers, including impoverished theology students, even if there's a five year time lag involved. The latest issue has me salivating for subscription status: In the Wake of the Beagle: Faith After Darwin, but alas, it's not currently in the budget. The editorial is however available, and once you recover from the title, it makes its point well.

Any undergraduate student in biblical studies would do well to check out the offerings, going back to Vol. 1 (1981), for suitable supplementary reading for course work. The 2004 themes include 1 Peter and Violence. W&W is produced by Luther Seminary (ELCA).