Evangelicals Concerned Inc.
“NIV's Twisted Sister,” World, February 9, 2002; “Word Games” by Joel Belz and “Sad Day” by Marvin Olasky, World, February 16, 2002; “Claim it – or Concede it” by Joel Belz, World, May 25, 2002; “Should We Trust the TNIV?” by Susan Olasky; “The His-and-Hers Bible” by Emily Nussbaum, The New York Times Magazine, February 10, 2002; “Why the TNIV Draws Ire,” Christianity Today editorial, April 1, 2002; “Statement of Concern ” ad, World, June 15, 2002.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
he fundamentalist World
magazine is leading an all-out assault against Today's
New International Version (TNIV), an updating of the
evangelically-produced NIV New Testament along well-trod
principles of dynamic/functional equivalence. The
publisher (Zondervan) says that translations were made
for “clarity” and a more accurate rendering
where the biblical author meant both men and women but
the previous version mentions only men. TNIV translators
include such venerable evangelical scholars as Gordon
Fee, Ronald F. Youngblood and John Stek and it's endorsed
by evangelical scholars from Fuller to Dallas Seminaries.
Opponents include James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Chuck
Colson, Pat Robertson, D. James Kennedy, and the Council
on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.
An ad endorsed by 100 fundamentalists presents evidence that the TNIV is “not trustworthy.” For example, Jesus' promise (Rev 3:20) to “eat with him” is changed to“eat with them.” Luke's (17:3)“if your brother sins” becomes “if your brother and sister sins.” (Do these people have too much time on their hands?)
World quotes Wayne Grudem's objecting to the TNIV's Hebrews 2:6. He claims that anthropos should be translated “man” rather than the TNIV's “mortals.” But anthropos – as Susan Olasky admits even in her attack on the TNIV – is the standard Greek for “person” or “humanity,” without gender specification. Grudem reads Greek, so he should know this. He objects to “human beings” for the passage's “son of man,” insisting the term is here a reference to Jesus. But evangelical scholars point out that technicalities in the Greek indicate that “the writer to the Hebrews did not find a christological title in the designation” and that “the parallel expressions ... were perfectly synonymous” – as they were in the Psalm from which the writer borrowed the expression. [William L. Lane] The Good News Bible has long rendered this instance of “son of man” as “mere man.” Grudem objects to the loss of “the special nature of fatherly discipline” in the TNIV's Hebrews 12:7: “God is treating you as children [instead of “sons”]. For what children are not disciplined by their parents [instead of “father”]?”
Here, the source of hostility begins to emerge. For what's at stake is the Religious Right's agenda for a strict hierarchy of gender roles in church and society and a total condemnation of same-sex relationships. Christianity Today (November 13, 2000) reports: “It is a slippery slope, Grudem says, from gender egalitarianism to accepting homosexuality.” According to World board chair Belz, “God has ordained distinctions between male and female for the good of His creation. [But the TNIV] changes betray a strong feminist bias ... and you don't have to be a scholar to see what's going on.” So without the textual literacy of a Bible scholar, Belz blunders: “ God knew exactly why He picked the words He did.” Then, going beyond TNIV changes, he warns of tampering with God as “Father” and makes this faux pas: “It's not just a metaphor, it is of God's very essence.” Moreover, Belz throws evangelism out the window, urging that we “stop worrying so much whether the Bible's ideas and language are capable of confronting a pagan and secular society.”
Susan Olasky accuses the TNIV of catering to a “feminist-inspired offense” felt by women who “don't like the fact that the inspired writers of the Bible often used a male example to represent a larger truth.” She, too, objects to the use of the plural to avoid masculine pronouns. She says the TNIV should have used the generic “he” or “his.” But she then objects to a rendering of the generic sense of “men” in the Greek of Acts 20:30 and sneaks in a plug for the fallacious notion that “early churches did not have women elders.” Editor Marvin Olasky calls the TNIV “unisex” and says the publisher “should label its new creation the `Feminist Bible.'” Objecting to TNIV's rendering of Jesus' fullest identification with humanity in Hebrews 2:17 (“For this reason he [Jesus] had to be made like his brothers and sisters in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest”), he quotes Grudem's creepy question: “Did Jesus have to become like a sister `in every way'? ... This text does not quite proclaim an androgynous Jesus, but it comes close, and many members of the `younger generation' that the TNIV is seeking to reach will read it this way and maybe even begin to teach it this way. ... Meditate on that word every for a while, and see if you can trust the TNIV.”
Given all this fuss, it's not strange that secular media have taken note. Nussbaum is no Bible-believing Christian. But she “out-funds” the fundamentalists and “out-fems” the feminists. Recognizing that “a gender-neutral Bible is one step closer to a gender-neutral society,” she faults the TNIV for “merely paper[ing] over the problem, literally.” She asserts that “copy-editing the contradictions out of the Bible is not the same thing as resolving them.” In to her superficial reading of the Bible, “The creator and his son stay resolutely male [and] men and women in the Bible are not even remotely equal.” She says the TNIV did not go far enough in dealing with “the shepherd(ess).” She suggests that “one solution, of course, is to reject the Bible entirely. Another is to regard it merely as a parable whose historical foundation can be ignored.”
Meanwhile, the editorial board of Christianity Today, evangelicalism's flagship periodical, reports that “a wide variety of pastors and Ph.D.s confirm that [the TNIV] stands firmly in the evangelical tradition.” The CT editors conclude that the “two driving forces behind the original NIV – evangelically driven accuracy and evangelistically driven clarity – remain behind the TNIV.”