Sunday Musings

I love this quote from Heartlight: "Any concern too small to be a prayer is too small to be a burden." (Corrie ten Boom)

Within the last couple of weeks I heard a couple of news stories that really bothered me... as an individual... as a believer... as one who is seen by many as a "face" of a local church. On pretty much any theological scale, those of us in the Stone-Campbell tradition fall somewhere on the conservative side of the scale. We believe the Bible is inspired, trustworthy and speaks of a living God who loves us enough to send Jesus as our redeemer. We accept what few commands there are in the NT as authoritative, and we attempt to follow the practices of those ancient first century believers where they make sense culturally and theologically. Those on the so-called "liberal" end of the scale do not necessarily accept all of these things. And, of course, there are some believers who are much to the "right" of our group. Well, with that as a backdrop, I'll share those two news stories.

The first one was about a Christian group in the southeast somewhere who had decided they needed to burn all the Bibles they could find that weren't the King James version (KJV). They were also going to burn Christian books written by such "liberals" as Billy Graham and others as well as CDs by various Christian artists. When someone interviewed the preacher who was leading this crusade, he said something about any translation of the Bible other than the KJV being from the Devil. Oh my... I have neither the time nor the desire to write about all the reasons why the KJV is probably the least reliable of the major translations, so let's just say that any translation that has been done under threat of punishment, if it doesn't come out reflecting critical party positions, has problems from the get go. Alexander Campbell, one of the founders of our particular Christian tradition back in early 19th century, thought the KJV was so bad that he did his own translation called The Living Oracles in 1826. I can hardly imagine the level of ignorance and pride stirred together it would take to get to the point of the preacher above. Sigh...

The other one was also a radio story I heard while driving. It seems there is a conservative group (as in conservative politically and economically) who are planning a new translation of the Bible to emphasize things they think are important that other translation groups have left out or gotten wrong. They say that other modern speech translations have a "liberal bias" and they want to correct that. They plan to emphasize, among other things, a logical doctrine of Hell, free market principles (is that a goal of the NT writers??), and the elimination of gender neutral language (like going back to "every man needs to repent" instead of "everyone needs to repent"). Here's their web site link. Now, I'm all for Bible translations, but the best ones have generally been produced by committees of translators from across the theological spectrum to minimize bias. It seems to me that these guys are purposefully starting out with a particular bias and are going to look for ways to translate the scriptures that will support that bias. That doesn't mean their entire product will be lousy (even the Jehovah's Witnesses translation has some some good parts). I just believe that anyone who uses this translation will need to spit out plenty of "bones" to get at the "fish." And... beginning with such a bias can hardly yield a result that is equal to or better than many other translations, and I fear some will actually use it just because it has the word "conservative" in title somewhere. When will we learn that the beauty of Christianity is (at least in part) it's ability to live and grow in any culture and any economic or political system? We'd be better suited to let Christianity influence our nation instead of nationalizing our expressions of faith.