Review of new NIV

Ben Witherington posted this link on his blog to an excellent review of the NIV.  It's excellent because of the way it breaks down the issues of choosing a translation.  If you're interested, have a look!

Translation Recommendation for Wesleyan Church

The Wesleyan Church has used the NIV generally for decades, but as we now know, the old NIV is being phased out and churches are having to decide what to use now and what to put in their pews.  I have waffled on a recommendation, but one has finally crystallized in my mind.  I'm recommending the new NIV 2011.  Here are my reasons:

1. Continuity
There are many other fine translations out there.  Some Wesleyans, for example, were involved in the translation of the NLT.  The NRSV remains the version that most scholars use and that you will use if you go to Asbury.  The ESV is now very popular among Calvinist evangelicals. The CEB is a new translation that has many fine features.

But to decide in any one of these directions requires a new direction for Wesleyans, and it is unclear that any of these are so much better as to tip the scales in their direction.  Our people are used to the NIV.  Why not stay with it?

2. It is an improvement on the old NIV.
To be honest, I used to make fun of the NIV from a scholarly perspective.  It added words here and there, wore its theology on its sleaves.  It was also a product of its age, meaning that it used "he" and "man" all over the place when it isn't actually there in the Greek or Hebrew. A lot of people think that the new NIV is caving in to political pressure in taking most of this language out.  But much of the time, it's actually more accurate to go neutral.

In fact, I think some who pushed the ESV for this very reason were surprised to find out how much of that language it took out.  Much of the time, the Greek doesn't specify the gender, meaning that doing away with this language is actually more accurate.

I came across this example.  Someone was concerned that the new NIV of 2 Corinthians 5:17 reads, "If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come."  They thought the ESV was more accurate to say, "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation."  But the Greek simply says, "If anyone is in Christ, new creation."  The ESV here thus makes the original more masculine than it was.

There are numerous places where the new NIV has improved things that I used to critique.  For example, the old NIV of Colossians 2:14 read that Christ had "canceled the written code, with its regulations." The NIV incorporates good evidence from archaeological discoveries that have led almost all scholars to agree that what Christ cancelled here was "the charge of our legal indebtedness." The translation of 2 Corinthians 5:17 above in another example of taking into account some recent scholarship on 2 Corinthians.

Bottom line: The new NIV is a better translation than the original NIV, and it was headed by evangelicals with absolutely solid evangelical credentials like Doug Moo of Wheaton.

3. Even more Wesleyan now!
I would claim that the NIV was originally a product of the primarily Calvinist-evangelical powers that be, despite the fact that Stephen Paine of Houghton was involved with it.  In my opinion, the ESV has become the new baby of this power block.  The new NIV, interestingly, seems to fit better with Wesleyan theology than the old one did or than the ESV does.

Notice, for example, that the new NIV calls Phoebe a deacon in Romans 16:1.  The ESV, since it was produced by people who generally resist women in ministry, could not bring itself to do this.  So in the ESV, Phoebe is just a servant of the church.  Meanwhile, while Junia in Romans 16:7 of the NIV is outstanding "among" the apostles, in the ESV she is "well known" to the apostles.  The new NIV lets you decide if she was an apostle.  The ESV doesn't want to give you the chance to think something awful like that.

Let's be clear about this "gender neutral" stuff.  The NIV only uses "brothers and sisters" when that's what we would all agree the original meant.  It never adds women to the translation when they weren't there originally in the meaning. While a translation would not have to do this, certainly it fits well with Wesleyan theology.  Sometimes rendering the neutrality of the original requires changing a singular to a plural to make good English, but in some places this may actually be less of a change than translating with "he."

All translations involve a loss of meaning.  You simply cannot render the exact meaning of something in one language into another.  All translations are approximations and interpretations.  If we are really this concerned about precision, we had better stop using translations altogether and learn Greek and Hebrew. Fine with me.  We'll do away with all translations and read the real Bible. ;-)

I wish everyone could do a quick study of the way the NT authors use the OT.  What you'll find is that they definitely fall in the "dynamic equivalence" camp.  Think The Message.  They make the new NIV look like the King James.

So there's my recommendation to the church.  Let's stick with the NIV.  It's our tradition.  It's more accurate than the old NIV.  It's more Wesleyan than the ESV.

NIV 2011 and Romans 16:1

I was happy to see at least that the NIV 2011 got its head out of the sand and translated Romans 16:1 with the word "deacon."  The wimpy NIV 1984 as usual wore its Calvino-evangelical theology on its sleeve and translated her as a "servant" of the church at Cenchrea.  We all know this is bias.  If it had been a guy, there's little question they would have identified her as a deacon in the first place.

The NIV 2011

I know I've posted on this before, but I got an email today asking, "Do you know anything about a new version of the NIV?"

Here's the state of my answer.  The NIV 2011 is two things:

1. an admission of political/economic defeat in relation to the TNIV
2. an updating of the NIV

So is it better than the NIV?  Yes.  If you are happy with the NIV, go ahead and upgrade with the NIV2011.  It is better.

Is it the best translation out there as a translation?  No, not in any category.  The NLT, CEV, and in some places CEB are better dynamic translations. The ESV, and in many places CEB and NRSV, are better formal translations, in my opinion.

Right now I'm using the NRSV and CEB in my writing.

NIV, pronounced dead at 37

The NIV2010 revision is now available online.  My spot check leads me to conclude that the NIV is now dead at the age of 37. 

The NIV was never a very good translation from an inductive Bible study perspective.  It wore the theology of its translators on its sleeves in numerous places where it added words and played interpretive possibilities.

The TNIV was a definite improvement, and I was prepared to make it the default for all my church and university writing.  Of course politically, the use of "brothers and sisters" for "brothers" opened a door that the ESV walked through.  The ESV has quickly become the (Calvinist) evangelical favorite.  It is a better formal equivalence translation than the NIV ever was.

In this context, the NIV2010 would have had to hit some sort of wacky home run, and I was very curious to see what they would do.  Instead, it is less than expected.  It reverses clear gains of the TNIV while keeping the one aspect of the TNIV that ticked its clientele off--"brothers and sisters."  So it now combines the skew of the NIV with the marketing challenges of the TNIV.

It's dead.  There is nothing here to excite anyone and all the old embarrassments.  I wash my hands of the NIV. 

The NIV strikes again! (Acts 16:34)

Once again the ideological skew of the original NIV's translators strikes again!  The NIV of Acts 16:34 reads, "The jailer brought them [Paul and Silas] into his house and set a meal before them: he was filled with joy because he had come to believe in God--he and his whole family."

What the Greek of the last line actually says is, "and he rejoiced with his whole house, he having come to believe in God."  The "having come to believe" is nominative singular, and thus refers to the jailer alone.  What's going on here?  As usual, the translators didn't want anyone to get the impression that anything evil like infant baptism was going on here. :-)
Doug Moo, you out there?  Please take this pervasive theological ax grinding out of the N²IV!

Oh me, Oh Translations

I was writing on Paul this morning and came to a place where I wanted to quote 1 Corinthians. I had planned to use the TNIV going forward in my popular writing. But now I hear Zondervan is phasing it out. They're going to revise the NIV with Doug Moo in charge.

So now the TNIV is a bad choice for both the philosophy book and the Paul books and Bible studies I'm under contract to write--a bad choice for promoting in our new seminary or in our undergraduate program. I'm not going to use the outdated NIV or wait till 2011 to finish these books. Frankly I haven't felt that Zondervan is very Wesleyan-Arminian friendly anyway. Why reward them by supporting their translations?

What version to use? There is the ESV, which I suspect is the best literal translation overall currently on the market. But I eschew the politics of its origins. It was created in reaction to the pro-women in ministry trajectory of Christianity. Although thankfully I don't think these political dynamics have harmed the translation I find myself hating to associate myself or Wesleyan institutions with it given what it represents sociologically. Perhaps I will eventually give in but I am still holding off stubbornly, not wanting to support these forces in evangelicalism.

There is the NLT, which is great for preaching, but is a dynamic translation and so not suitable for detailed study of individual passages. Its strength is overall communication, not being able to hear the details of the original meaning.

So I find myself this morning using the NRSV in the quote. It is the choice of mainstream biblical scholarship anyway and bests the ESV in literalness if you understand its dynamic translation of "brothers" with "brothers and sisters" and such. I am not opposed to that dynamic translation for the purposes of communication and it was, after all, part of the TNIV too. Its just that the male-orientation of the original texts was, whether I like it or not, an aspect of the original text, just as those who do not use inclusive language today implicitly function in a male-oriented way.

We have to accept the fact that the original context of the Bible was sexist in its orientation. We can't be as Christians in our context, not and be faithful to the core message of Christ. But when we are studying the original meaning of the Bible, we simply have to deal with the fact that we are reading male-oriented texts, as all the texts of the day were. This is one area, interestingly, where Western society as a whole--even the fallen world at large--has thankfully moved closer to the kingdom than the New Testament itself, since its books were truth incarnated within the thought patterns of its day.

God took where they were, met them there, and pointed them in the direction of the kingdom. Pity those like the Grudems and Pipers of the evangelical world who mistake the wineskins for the wine.

Say what you like about the NIV

I don't like the NIV as a translation. But trying to find things quickly in the standard RSV is very frustrating. Versions that have paragraph headings are a gift from God. May the rest be shelved forever. Good grief, even the Aland Greek text has headings.

Tom Wright: Justification 7.4

This is the fourth dying gasp of my review of the seventh chapter of N. T. Wright's, Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision, Wright's response to John Piper's book, The Future of Justification.

Chapters reviewed thus far:

Chapter 1: What's it all about and why does it matter
Chapter 2: Rules of engagement
Chapter 3: First Century Judaism
Chapter 4: Justification: Definitions and Puzzles
Chapter 5: Exegesis of Galatians
Chapter 6: Interlude: Philippians, Corinthians, Ephesians
Chapter 7.1 Romans 1:16-17
Chapter 7.2 Romans 1:18-2:16
Chapter 7.3 Romans 2:17-3:20

And now 3:21-26 (pp.176-85). One day I'll have the mental strength just to plow through the rest. I finished the book Sunday on a plane, but I'm just sooo tired mentally.

Now righteousness of God has been revealed... "'God's righteousness', in the light of 2.17-3.8, must mean, and can only mean, God's faithfulness to his single plan, the plan through which he will deal with the problem of human sin and put the whole world to right at last" (176). Sounds familiar. I still think he reads too much meaning into the phrase, although I certainly agree more with him than Piper.

I did enjoy his rag on the NIV, again! "... fudging the evidence by translating dikaiosyne in verses 25 an 26 as 'justice', not noticing what a mess they are thereby making of the inner coherence of the paragraph" (177).

By the way, Steve Lennox is doing a review on the ESV Study Bible. I guess it has lots of bells and whistles... and of course is endorsed by several key wrong people for Wesleyans--John Piper, Mark Driscoll, Albert Mohler. I won't speak ill of all the names who have endorsed it, but Wesleyans should be aware that the individuals I just named hold views fundamentally incompatible with the Wesleyan-Arminian tradition (there is good in them, but you should treat anything you read from them as a hostile witness). The translation itself is a good translation, although I do not recommend it to Wesleyans (I'm endorsing the NLT and TNIV as our replacements for the NIV--I'll wait to see some of the other new ones). But I explicitly oppose the use of the ESV Study Bible by Wesleyans.

Now back to Wright: "faithfulness of Jesus Christ..."

"It was not so much that 'God needed a sinless victim', though in sacrificial terms that is no doubt true as well, as that 'God needed a faithful Israelite' (178). I agree with the first part, just don't see the second part.

I very much am sympathetic to his read of "the one from the faith of Jesus." Wright says it "looks as though it is a telescoping together of both halves of 3:22, 'through the faithfulness of Jesus for the benefit of all who have faith'" (179). Yes!

That's about as much of this section I feel like wading through today...

Tom Wright: Justification 2

I won't be doing one of these every day, but I did have a chance to read Wright's second chapter of Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision. The second chapter is titled, "Rules of engagement."

My summary/review of the first chapter is here.

The thrust of this chapter is to say that exegesis of biblical texts is messy, but it is a core value for evangelicals. Its product is not systematic theology. The goal is the sermon, not a tidy system.

This sentence ironically summarizes Wright's critique of Piper well: "Proper evangelicals are rooted in scripture, and above all in the Jesus Christ to whom scripture witnesses, and nowhere else" (34).

Part 1
Again, Wright is thoroughly modernist in this chapter. In that sense I believe his hermeneutic is incomplete. He is right insofar as he is reminding us how to determine what the text meant originally. And thus he is right insofar as he critiques Piper, whose exegesis often qualifies as pre-modern, unaware of how read a text in its original context. To that extent, the metaphor of Piper trying to show Wright that the sun goes around the earth is apt.

Wright again gives great illustrations. He tells one about a woman who came to church the Sunday after Princess Diana died. But the pastor decided to follow the lectionary and preached on Mary, the mother of Jesus. After the sermon, the woman was in tears of puzzlement and grief. "Can you help me get the sermon's point?"

This woman, Wright means to say, is like Piper and others who come to the biblical text for answers to questions the text never addressed in the first place. "The history of the reading of Paul is littered with similar mistakes -- not always quite so obvious, but mistakes none the less: texts pressed into service to address questions foreign to the apostle, entire passages skimmed over in the hunt for the key word or phrase which fits the preconceived idea" (25).

One fun ironic move Wright makes in the first half of this chapter is to note that individuals like Piper, although they would fight tooth and nail for Paul as the literal author of Ephesians, still generally ignore it when they are reconstructing Paul's theology. He suggests that Piper would be much more accepting of the "new perspective" if he had begun there (28). "No wonder Lutheran scholars have been so suspicious of it. But why should that apply to conservative readers for whom it is every bit as much Holy Writ as Romans or Galatians."

Fun, although I don't think a person should start their theology of Paul with Ephesians. Then the skewing just goes in the opposite direction. Ephesians is distinct from Paul's other writings, regardless of affirming Pauline authorship. In my opinion, Wright, Johnson, and others are guilty of sloppy exegesis here, although they are popular at that point for the same reason Piper is--they come off as more traditional.

Wright ends the section with some very sound thoughts on distinguishing traditional interpretation from original meaning. He rightly points out again that "when faced with both the 'new perspective' and some of the other features of more recent Pauline scholarship, 'conservative' churches have reached, not for scripture, but for tradition, as with Piper's complaint that I am sweeping away fifteen hundred years of the church's understanding" (28).

I must point out, that he is referring to conservative Calvinists and Lutherans here. We Wesleyan-Arminians are quite carnally delighted to find out that our understanding of Paul fits much more nicely with these turns in scholarship than the Reformation mafia's does. The theology that the Reformers rejected has become the head of the corner... :-)

Not that Wright is Wesleyan-Arminian. Certainly Dunn is not. Sanders I think is, in background, although it won't do me any good politically to claim him. :-) Strong (foreign) Calvinist elements remain in some of Wright and Dunn's interpretations, I believe.

The reason I believe the return to reading Paul in his Jewish context--which is really what the new perspective is about--favors Arminian theology is because I believe the Jewish focus on concrete behavior remained in Paul's theology much more strongly than allowed for in Calvinist or certainly in Lutheran theology.

Wright rightly points out that doctrinal statements, not just those of Nicaea or Chalcedon, are a product of their time. Anselm did not unfold his spin on penal substitution in a vacuum, nor was the Westminister Confession created in a bubble. Piper and the neo-Reformed treat the WC the same way older Roman Catholics might have treated Trent. [I'm embellishing Wright a little, although not too much here]

Wright smiles on our esteemed fellow blogger Mike Bird, as well as J. I. Packer, for the fact that--while they affirm the idea of the imputation of Christ's righteousness theologically--they recognize that Paul never explicitly states it. The bottom line for Wright: "when our tradition presses us to regard as central something which is seldom if ever actually said by Paul himself we are entitled, to put it no more strongly, to raise an eyebrow and ask questions" (30).

Part 2
In the rest of the chapter, Wright rightly takes Piper to task for his feeble attempt to deny (that the earth goes around the sun) that the way to know what Paul meant is to read his words against the backdrop of the way words were used in Paul's day. This section, really, reveals what is really going on with Piper. Basically, contextual interpretation has caught him with his theological pants down.

What do you say when all of a sudden someone points out the obvious--uh, these words probably had a meaning to the people they were actually written to... and that meaning probably is a function of the way people used words at the time. What do you say? You're pants are down. It's embarrassing.

So Piper responds, "No they're not."

Wright: "Yes they are."

Piper, "Come back you lily livered coward. I'll bite your knees off."

Piper's feeble response is, we have to go with the obvious (to me given my schooling in the Calvinist tradition) meaning of the text without bringing in "dubious" information from the ancient world. Or in the words of early 1990's Saturday Night Live skit Cave Man Lawyer, "Your tall buildings frighten me."

Wright: "it is clear that what he [Piper] means is 'Please do not be seduced, by N. T. Wright or anyone else, into imagining that you need to read the New Testament within its first-century Jewish context'" (31).

By the way, Wright gives a good side critique of just one of D. A. Carson "My pants aren't on fire" projects, Justification and Variegated Nomism (another would be his Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament). These are nothing but the dying gasps of the Ptolemaic scientists who feel threatened by a heliocentric universe.

I have dipped into Variegated on various Early Jewish literature and have been puzzled almost every time. I have been puzzled because I haven't really found much to object to--nor have I found material that drastically undermined new perspective views on Judaism.

Here is Wright's comment: "To the extent that the essays there [in Variegated] are fully scholarly, they do not make the case their principal editor claims they do; to the extent that they appear to do so, they are themselves subject to question as being, to put it mildly, parti pris" (31-32).

The chapter ends with a critque of the NIV that, again, superbly fits things I have long said, although perhaps some of Wright's statements are a little extreme. While Wright was initially enthusiastic about the translation, "I discovered that the translators had had another principle, considerably higher than the stated one; to make sure that Paul should say what the broadly Protestant and evangelical tradition said he said" (35). "I do know that if a church only, or mainly, relies on the NIV it will, quite simply, never understand what Paul was talking about."

:-)

The TNIV has since corrected many of my issues with the NIV translation, just as the current generation of evangelical scholars are much better at reading the Bible in context than the first, American generation of evangelicals was (British evangelicals like F. F. Bruce and R. T. France have generally been superior to their American counterparts).

What will become of post-NIV evangelicalism?

It occurred to me this morning that Bible translations may very well be a way to map sociological developments within evangelical Christianity in America. I think I've written here before that I believe the NIV will now steadily decline. Those over 40 will continue to use it, I suppose, until they die... maybe.

But there is now something better than it in every category, so the only ones that will continue to use it are those for whom it has become the new King James.

When I think back a couple decades, versions were a good sociological analysis even then. Fundamentalists used the King James, and evangelical pastors and lay people used the NIV. I would guess that the "missional" minded, radical Jesus People types used things like the Living Bible and Today's English Version. Scholars used the RSV and many more scholarly minded evangelicals used the NASB.

Today scholars use the NRSV. But there is no NIV equivalent for the next generation of evangelicals yet that will command as much use as the NIV had in the shift away from the KJV. Evangelical scholars, particularly those of a Calvinist or complementarian bent, now prefer the ESV. It will be a major heir of the NIV. I'm guessing that the NLT will take an equal or greater portion from older NIV and missional types. Younger fundamentalists might use the New King James or shift to the Holman Standard Bible.

No offence to the TNIV, which is much superior to the NIV, but I'm just not sure it has a power group to give it dominance. But I would be quite happy for IWU and the Wesleyan Church to start using it as a default over the NIV. Of course in this postmodern world, it remains to be seen whether there will ever be a default again.