Since Focus does not employ textual or translation experts, we have relied on outside scholars for advice regarding Bible translations — notably the conservative leaders who signed the Colorado Springs Guidelines for Translation in 1997.

Based on their input, we use or recommend the following Bible versions:

Gender-Specific Translations

Essentially Literal, “word-for-word” translations:

KJV King James Version

NKJV New King James Version

NASB New American Standard Bible

ESV English Standard Version

HCSB Holman Christian Standard Bible

RSV Revised Standard Version

Dynamic Equivalence, “phrase-for-phrase” translations:

NIV New International Version

NIrV New International Reader’s Version (1998 Revision)

Gender-Specific Paraphrases* (culturally adapted imaginative renderings of the Bible)

LB The Living Bible — Paraphrased by Kenneth Taylor

MSG The Message by Eugene Peterson

* Please note that if a paraphrase is used, it should always be in conjunction with one or more of the above “regular” Bible translations. Paraphrases can be helpful as a form of commentary or for inspiration, but they should not be one’s only source of reading.

Gender-Neutral Translations

Focus on the Family does NOT use or recommend the following gender-neutral Bibles:

TNIV Today’s New International Version

NLT New Living Translation

NRSV New Revised Standard Version

NCV New Century Version

CEV Contemporary English Version

GW God’s Word

NIVI New International Version Inclusive Language Edition

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>>TNIV: New Bible Translation Upsets Some Christians (Foxnews, 050202)

WASHINGTON — A new Bible translation, aimed at younger readers, is drawing fire from some scholars.

Today’s New International Version, or TNIV, has just been published in complete form by Zondervan Publishing. It’s meant for the prime-time demographic: adults 18 to 34 years old.

In this new translation, some masculine references are made more gender-neutral.

Genesis 1:27, “so God created man in his own image” in the more traditional New International Version, is changed in the TNIV to “so God created human beings in his own image.”

“In situations in the Bible where it is very clear from the original language, and also from the context, that the writer or the speaker was talking to men and women, that is simply provided accurately and specifically in the TNIV,” explains Paul Caminiti of Zondervan, which is owned by the parent company of FOX News.

God remains a “he” in the TNIV. But some critics say this translation changes the meaning of some Old Testament verses that may foreshadow Jesus’ life.

For example, Psalm 34:19 in the more traditional New International Version reads: “A righteous man may have many troubles, but the Lord delivers him from them all; He protects all his bones, not one of them will be broken.”

Many Christians believe this verse predicts the Crucifixion, in which it is said none of Jesus’ bones were broken.

But the TNIV reads: “The righteous may have many troubles, but the Lord delivers them from them all; He protects all their bones, not one of them will be broken.”

“It obscures the prediction of a specific man — that is the Messiah, Jesus — that would be fulfilled in the New Testament, and now it’s pluralized,” says Wayne Grudem, research professor of Bible and theology at Phoenix Seminary in Arizona.

==============================

>>Statement by Participants in the Conference on Gender-Related Language in Scripture (Focus on the Family, 970527)

Over the past two months evangelical leaders have engaged in a serious debate concerning the use of gender-inclusive language in English Bible translation. Dr. James Dobson called a meeting of concerned individuals to discuss together and seek the leading of the Holy Spirit in these matters. Those who participated in this meeting give glory to God for His grace evident among us as we worked together this day, and with hope we offer the following statement with the prayer that it will be of use to the Church for the glory of God.

All participants agree that our overarching concern in Bible translating is to preserve the sanctity of the truth of sacred Scripture by rendering the most accurate translation possible. In the interests of such accuracy, we all agree that modern language is fluid and undergoes changes in nuance that require periodic updates and revisions. We agree that Bible translations should not be influenced by illegitimate intrusions of secular culture or by political or ideological agendas. Specifically, we agree that it is inappropriate to use gender-neutral language when it diminishes accuracy in the translation of the Bible, and we therefore agree to the attached guidelines for translation of gender-related language in Scripture.

We agree there are limited times when the use of gender-neutral language enhances the accuracy of translations, but that the trend in usage of gender-inclusive language can easily becomeand because of overuse, in too many cases, already has becomean instrument of distortion of the Biblical text.

We agree that many of the translation decisions made by those who produced Hodder and Stoughton’s New International Version Inclusive Language Edition in the United Kingdom were not the wisest choices. Further, the statement in the Preface saying “it is often appropriate to mute the patriarchalism of the culture of the biblical writers through gender-inclusive language” (Preface to the NIVI, vii) was regrettable and sadly misleading.

We agree that it was also regrettable that the New International Reader’s Version (NIrV), released also as The Kid’s Devotional Bible, was released with a Preface which did not explicitly notify parents that gender-related changes were made in this version. We commend Zondervan for offering to refund the purchase price of any NIrV’s to anyone who makes a request. We agree that families that wish to be reimbursed for the cost of The Kid’s Devotional Bible (NIrV) should also be granted a refund.

Focus on the Family was distressed to learn that its own Adventures in Odyssey Bible, the International Children’s Bible of Word Publishing, is also a gender-neutral translation (in the Old Testament). Focus on the Family is working with Word, Inc. and has withdrawn that edition from its distribution channels. Focus plans to reimburse parents who request a refund (see attached Focus on the Family press release). We commend Focus on the Family for its decisive and straightforward actions.

It is ironic in light of the present controversy that Zondervan’s sales of inclusive language Bibles (NIrV and New Revised Standard Version) are only five percent of all their Bible sales, and in fact most inclusive Bibles are sold by other publishers: Thomas Nelson/Word (New Century Bible, International Children’s Bible, Contemporary English Version, and NRSV), Tyndale House Publishers (New Living Translation), World Bible Publishers (God’s Word and NRSV), and Baker Book House (NRSV). We commend the openness with which Zondervan approached this meeting, and we are encouraged by the willingness of the International Bible Society to revise the New International Reader’s Version so that the revision (which will be completed later this summer) will eliminate the gender-related changes that had been made, bringing it into line with the current NIV.

This throws into stark relief our wider concern with the translation of God’s Word among evangelical publishers at large and the necessity within Bible publishing for greater accountability to the Church concerning the matters here raised. The willingness of the IBS to re-examine the language of the NIrV and to move away from changes made to its text is greatly encouraging to us, and we call on the other publishers and copyright holders to issue similar public statements demonstrating similar reappraisals of their translation principles (see attached International Bible Society press release of May 27, 1997).

We agree that the discussions were transacted in a spirit of mutual trust and charity. Further, the policy statement issued by the IBS and the press release from Focus on the Family evoked profound gratitude and thanksgiving by all present.

With glory to God, and thanksgiving;

Ken Barker, Secretary, Committee on Bible Translation; Member, Executive Committee of Committee on Bible Translation

Timothy Bayly, Executive Director, Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood; Pastor, Church of the Good Shepherd, Bloomington, IN

Joel Belz, Publisher, God’s World Publications

James Dobson, President, Focus on the Family

Lars Dunberg, President, International Bible Society

Wayne Grudem, President, Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood; Professor of Biblical and Systematic Theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Charles Jarvis, Executive Vice President, Focus on the Family

John Piper, Member, Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood; Senior Pastor, Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, MN

Vern S. Poythress, Professor of New Testament Interpretation, Westminster Theological Seminary

Bruce E. Ryskamp, President and CEO, Zondervan Publishing House

R. C. Sproul, Chairman, Ligonier Ministries

Ron Youngblood, Member, Committee on Bible Translation; Professor of Old Testament, Bethel Theological Seminary West

Guidelines For Translation Of Gender-Related Language In Scripture

A. Gender-related renderings of Biblical language which we affirm:

1. The generic use of “he, him, his, himself” should be employed to translate generic 3rd person masculine singular pronouns in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. However, substantival participles such as ho pisteuon can often be rendered in inclusive ways, such as “the one who believes” rather than “he who believes.”

2. Person and number should be retained in translation so that singulars are not changed to plurals and third-person statements are not changed to second-person or first-person statements, with only rare exceptions required in unusual cases.

3. “Man” should ordinarily be used to designate the human race or human beings in general, for example in Genesis 1:26-27; 5:2; Ezekiel 29:11; and John 2:25.

4. Hebrew ‘ish should ordinarily be translated “man” and “men” and Greek aner should almost always be so translated.

5. In many cases, anthropoi refers to people in general, and can be translated “people” rather than “men.” The singular anthropos should ordinarily be translated “man” when it refers to a male human being.

6. Indefinite pronouns such as tis can be translated “anyone” rather than “any man.”

7. In many cases, pronouns such as oudeis can be translated “no one” rather than “no man.”

8. When pas is used as a substantive, it can be translated with terms such as “all people” or “everyone.”

9. The phrase “son of man” should ordinarily be preserved to retain intracanonical connections.

10. Masculine references to God should be retained.

B. Gender-related renderings which we will generally avoid, though there may be unusual exceptions in certain contexts:

1. “Brother” (adelphos) and “brothers” (adelphoi) should not be changed to “brother(s) and sister(s).”

2. “Son” (huios, ben) should not be changed to “child,” or “sons” (huioi) to “children” or “sons and daughters.” (However, Hebrew banim often means “children.”)

3. “Father” (pater, ‘ab) should not be changed to “parent,” or “fathers” to “parents,” or “ancestors.”

C. We understand these guidelines to be representative and not exhaustive.

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**Questions in the Inerrancy Debate

· Point of argument: Is the Bible inerrant in all areas, including science and history?

· Correct in all details unless proven otherwise (but not holding to inerrancy in all that is not part of the substance taught)

· All the prophesies will be fulfilled, but may not be literally. However, the argument should only be used when existing facts clearly demonstrate deviation from literal interpretation.

· need of harmonization?

o Genesis with science

o progressive creationism

o theistic evolution (danger: man as a product of evolution)

· reasons used to argue for inerrancy:

o wrong copying (manuscript correct)

o Bible over science

o explanation existent but not yet known

o far-fetched argument (e.g. quote of Zechariah in Matthew, but use Jeremiah’s name)

o predominant factor of the Flood (see Scientific creationism) to explain scientific discrepancies

· Biblical criticism:

o beware of the tendency to disprove the authenticity of Biblical prophesies

==============================

**Most Popular Bible Verses Revealed (Christian Post, 071031)

Some 37 million online Bible references were surveyed and then ranked by popularity to create a website that makes searching for scriptures easier.

TopVerses.com ranked every Bible verse by popularity and published the results on its website, which launched this month. Instead of starting in Genesis, the ranked search shows popular verses first. It found that 87 of the top 100 verses are from the New Testament.

“Putting the most popular verses first makes the Bible much more accessible. All sorts of people are visiting the site and seeing the Bible in a new way,” said Peter B. Chapman, the creator of the TopVerses.com. “I love finding old favorites in Psalms. You can see the top 10 Proverbs by simply clicking on Proverbs.”

The most popular verse was John 3:16, with over twice the reference as the second most popular verse – John 1.1.

Although the book of John was the most popular Gospel, it was ranked sixth overall with the book of Ephesians taking first place.

Shorter books tended to score better with the book of Malachi being the most popular book from the Old Testament and ranked 19th overall. It had five verses in the top 1,000 most popular verses.

“You no longer have to search through a hundred verses to find the one you have in mind. Most of the time, I find it on the first page,” said Pastor Jason Hubbart of Every Nation Church in Sydney, in a report.

Top 10 Verses

1. John 3:16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

2. John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

3. John 14:6 Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”.

4. Matthew 28:19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

5. Romans 3:23 For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

6. Ephesians 2:8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith-and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God.

7. Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

8. Acts 1:8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

9. 2 Timothy 3:16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.

10. Romans 10:9 That if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

Top 10 Books

1. Ephesians

2. James

3. Titus

4. 1 John

5. 2 Peter

6. John

7. Philippians

8. Colossians

9. Romans

10. 1 Peter

Top 10 Chapters

1. 2 Peter 1

2. Psalm 1

3. John 2

4. James 4

5. Romans 12

6. Isaiah 53

7. John 3

8. Romans 1

9. James 1

10. Acts 1

==============================

**Bible Illiteracy in America (Weekly Standard, 050523)

From the May 23, 2005 issue: A report just issued by the Bible Literacy Project suggests that young Americans know very little about the Bible. The report is important, but first things first: A fair number of Americans don’t see why teenagers should know anything at all about the Bible.

A REPORT JUST ISSUED BY the Bible Literacy Project (more on this later) suggests that young Americans know very little about the Bible. The report is important, but first things first: A fair number of Americans don’t see why teenagers should know anything at all about the Bible.

Scripture begins with God creating the world, but there is something these verses don’t tell you: The Bible has itself created worlds. Wherever you stand on the spectrum from devout to atheist, you must acknowledge that the Bible has been a creative force without parallel in history.

Go to the center of Paris and drop in on the apotheosis of the French Middle Ages--Sainte Chapelle, whose walls are made almost entirely of stained glass. It “has rightly been called,” writes the scholar Shalom Spiegel, “the most wonderful of pictured Bibles.” The King James Bible, says Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, “has influenced our literature more deeply than any other book--more deeply even than all the writings of Shakespeare--far more deeply.” The poet and painter William Blake calls the Old and New Testaments “the Great Codes of Art.” America’s foremost prophet offers his culminating vision in the second inaugural address--”With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right . . . “ Lincoln’s speech “reads like a supplement to the Bible,” writes the historian William Wolf, with its “fourteen references to God, four direct quotations from Genesis, Psalms, and Matthew, and other allusions to scriptural teaching.” “The best gift God has given to man,” Lincoln called the Bible. “But for it we could not know right from wrong.”

Ronald Reagan called America “a great shining city on a hill,” three-and-a-half centuries after John Winthrop (sailing for Boston in 1630) anticipated a new community that would be “as a Citty upon a Hill”--invoking the famous verse in Matthew, “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid” (5:14). Which harks back in turn to the prophets (Isaiah 2:2-3, Micah 4:2) and the book of Proverbs (4:18). John Livingstone Lowe called the King James Bible “the noblest monument of English prose” (1936); George Saintsbury called it “probably the greatest prose work in any language” (1887). Nearly two millennia earlier, the great Pharisee rabbi Hillel described the ideal life: “loving peace and pursuing peace; loving humanity and bringing it close to the Torah.”

Here is a basic question about America that ought to be on page 1 of every history book: What made the nation’s Founders so sure they were onto something big? America today is the most powerful nation on earth, most powerful in all history--and a model the whole world imitates. What made them so sure?--the settlers and colonists, the Founding Fathers and all the generations that intervened before America emerged as a world power in the 20th century? What made them so certain that America would become a light of the world, the shining city on a hill? What made John Adams say, in 1765, “I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence”? What made Abraham Lincoln call America (in 1862, in the middle of a ruinous civil war) “the last, best hope of earth”?

We know of people who are certain of their destinies from childhood on. But nations?

Many things made all these Americans and proto-Americans sure; and to some extent they were merely guessing and hoping. But one thing above all made them true prophets. They read the Bible. Winthrop, Adams, Lincoln, and thousands of others found a good destiny in the Bible and made it their own. They read about Israel’s covenant with God and took it to heart: They were Israel. (“Wee are entered into Covenant with him for this worke,” said Winthrop. “Wee shall finde that the God of Israell is among us.”) They read about God’s chosen people and took it to heart: They were God’s chosen people, or--as Lincoln put it--God’s “almost chosen people.” The Bible as they interpreted it told them what they could be and would be. Unless we read the Bible, American history is a closed book.

Evidently young Americans don’t know much about the Bible (or anything else, come to think of it; that’s another story). But let’s not kid ourselves--this problem will be hard to attack. It’s clear that any public school that teaches about America must teach about the Bible, from outside. But teaching the Bible from inside (reading Scripture, not just about Scripture) is trickier. You don’t have to believe in the mythical “wall of separation” between church and state--which the Bill of Rights never mentions and had no intention of erecting--to understand that Americans don’t want their public schools teaching Christianity or Judaism.

But can you teach the Bible as mere “literature” without flattening and misrepresenting it? How will you address the differences (which go right down to the ground) between Jews and Christians respecting the Bible? (The question is not so much how to spare Jewish sensibilities--minorities have rights, but so do majorities; the question is how to tell the truth.) What kind of parents leave their children’s Bible education to the public schools, anyway? How do we go beyond public schools in attacking a nationwide problem of Bible illiteracy?

Tricky questions.

AMERICAN HISTORY STARTS with the emergence of Puritanism in 16th-century Britain. The Bible was central to the founding and development of Puritanism. It was central to the emergence of modern Britain in the 16th and 17th centuries--and modern Britain was important in turn to America and to the whole world.

“Puritan” has been an insult for hundreds of years. (Where are the revisionists when you need one?) It suggests rigid, austere, censorious--exactly the kind of religion that secularists love to hate. The Puritans were rigid and censorious to a point; most caricatures are partly true. But mainly they were Christians who hoped to worship God with their whole lives, body and soul; with a dazzling fervor that still lights up their journals, letters, and poetry 300 years later. In the early 18th century the young Jonathan Edwards (eventually one of America’s greatest theologians) writes of being “wrapped and swallowed up in God.” “The Puritans wanted that fullness of life that made David dance before the ark” (thus J.D. Dow in 1897). America was born in a passionate spiritual explosion. The explosion was created and fueled by the Bible.

The invention of printing in the mid-15th century, and the Protestant Reformation in the early 16th--whose central idea was that Scripture and not human theological doctrine must be decisive for Christianity--created an English Bible-reading craze. The masses were hungry for literature, and religion was the hottest topic on the agenda. Already in Henry VIII’s reign (1509-47), the Bible was “disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern,” according to the king himself--who was not happy about it. The Bible was a radical, subversive book.

English Bible translations date back to medieval times. (In fact earlier: The first translation, into Anglo-Saxon rather than English proper, was a word-by-word crib added to the Latin of the circa-700 Lindisfarne Gospel Book--one of history’s most sublimely beautiful manuscripts and greatest artworks.) But translating the Bible into English was no mere literary act. It was a controversial theological declaration. Religious reformers saw the English Bible as nothing less than a direct connection between ordinary Christian believers and the Lord. Putting the Scripture into English was sacred work; some were willing to die for it. They were opposed by such Roman Catholic stalwarts as Sir Thomas More, who expressed a widely held view when he proclaimed it “pestilential heresy” to think that “we should believe nothing but plain Scripture.”

The English Bible as we know it begins with John Wycliffe’s work in the late 14th century. Wycliffe preached the primacy of the Bible and founded the Lollards’ movement, which in many ways harks forward to the Protestant Reformation. When he died in 1384, Wycliffe’s English Bible was nearly complete. But his translation was banned in 1408, and the Lollards (who had become revolutionaries of a sort) were brutally suppressed. Many were burnt alive with Bibles hung around their necks.

In the early 16th century the next great English translator, William Tyndale, announced to a learned theologian that “ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the scripture than thou dost.” Tyndale was inspired by Luther and dedicated to the task of producing an up-to-date English Bible. The English church denounced him; he fled to the continent. He was declared a heretic nonetheless, arrested near Brussels, and executed in 1536.

Henry VIII banned Tyndale’s translation for its alleged Protestant tendencies, but promised the nation a religiously acceptable English Bible. Meanwhile he brought Protestantism to England in his own idiosyncratic way. From Henry’s time onward, the English Bible was an established fact of English life. In his exhaustive analysis (1941), Charles Butterworth ranks Tyndale’s the early version that contributed most to the King James Bible. The Geneva Bible ranks a close second. It was published in 1560, two years into the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

“No greater moral change ever passed over a nation than passed over England during the years which parted the middle of the reign of Elizabeth,” writes the historian John Richard Green in a famous passage (1874). “England became the people of a book, and that book was the Bible.” Religious reformers, inspired by continental Protestants as well as the Bible itself, became dissatisfied with the Church of England--which was closely associated with the monarchy. They found it too popish, too fancy-shmancy, insufficiently “purified”; too removed from the Bible. They wanted a biblical Christianity.

People called the reformers Puritans. Most were Congregationalist or Presbyterian but some were Baptist, Quaker, or something else; some never left the Church of England. (Denominations weren’t as sharply defined as they are today. Nor did they stand for the same theological positions. Early Quakers, for example, weren’t necessarily pacifist.)

Elizabeth tolerated the Puritans. But things changed when the Virgin Queen died and the Stuarts came to power. On succeeding Elizabeth, James I announced that he would make the Puritans “conform themselves or I will harry them out of the land.” He meant it. Persecuted Puritans set sail in rising numbers for the New World.

THE GENEVA BIBLE became and remained the Puritans’ favorite. It had marginal notes that Puritans liked--but King James and the Church of England deemed them obnoxious. The notes were anti-monarchy and pro-republic--”untrue, seditious, and savouring too much of dangerous and traitorous conceits,” the king said. Under his sponsorship a new Bible was prepared (without interpretive notes) by 47 of the best scholars in the land. The King James version appeared in 1611--intended merely as a modest improvement over previous translations. But it happened to be a literary masterpiece of stupendous proportions. Purely on artistic grounds it ranks with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare--Western literature’s greatest achievements. In terms of influence and importance, it flattens the other three.

“The Bible was central to [Britain’s] intellectual as well as moral life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” writes Christopher Hill (1993). “The effect of the continual domestic study” of the Bible, according to the eminent historian G.M. Trevelyan (1926), “was greater than that of any literary movement in our annals”--in fact was greater (he adds) than that of any religious movement since the arrival of Christianity in Britain. “The Bible in English history,” he writes, “may be regarded as a ‘Renaissance’ of Hebrew literature far more widespread and more potent than even the Classical Renaissance.”

We aren’t discussing a merely “popular” or “influential” book. We are talking revolution. In 16th and 17th-century Britain, the English Bible was capable of affecting the first thoughts people had on waking, their last thoughts before sleeping, their dreams, and their nightmares. British homes were decorated biblically--with Bible quotations or pictures painted or papered on the walls or printed on cloth wall-hangings. British life grew and flourished on a biblical trellis. Centuries later, Quiller-Couch wrote of the Bible in Britain that “it is in everything we see, hear, feel, because it is in us, in our blood.”

ARCHBISHOP LAUD, high church and bitterly anti-Puritan, made life even harder for the Puritans under Charles I, who followed James. James and Charles had picked a fight that would continue in one form or another almost till the end of the 17th century--a period that includes the English Civil War, the execution of Charles I, the Puritan Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell as “Lord Protector,” the restoration of the Stuart kings, and their final booting-out in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. When the smoke cleared, Britain was transformed: Parliament’s power had been established forever; absolute monarchy had been permanently rejected.

Friction between Puritans and the Church of England was a major cause of the Civil War (1642-51)--which in turn was a major shaping event of the modern world. Parliament and the Puritans (to strip things down to essentials) rebelled against King Charles I and the Church of England. The Bible figured heavily on both sides, especially among the Puritans. The Puritan army was famous for chanting psalms. Oliver Cromwell once halted his army during a hot pursuit so they could all chant psalm 117 together. (He was a fine general; 117 is a short psalm.) The biblical passage in which Samuel warns the Israelites of the nightmare dangers of kingship was a natural Puritan favorite. The idea of a “Covenant with God,” the whole population swearing loyalty to the Lord, was important too. (But the Bible was crucial across the theological and political spectrum. “Although the Puritans were great Psalm-singers, they were not as prominent in the writing of literary Meditations based on the Psalms as were the moderate Anglicans,” for example--thus the critic and historian Harold Fisch, 1964.)

In 2002, Fania Oz-Salzberger published a major paper documenting the Hebrew Bible’s influence on such seminal British political thinkers of the period as John Selden, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke. They all agreed, writes Oz-Salzberger, that “the people of Israel had a republic, a nearly perfect republic, from the time of the Exodus until at least the coronation of Saul. . . . And precisely because of its transcendent origin, it was an exemplary state of law and a society dedicated to social justice and republican liberty.”

John Locke is often described as the most important philosophical influence on the American revolution. Locke believed in a “social contract” in which citizens swap some freedom for a civilized life: Everyone’s freedom is curtailed, and everyone benefits. The results are civil society and the state. Locke relied heavily on the Bible. For Locke, writes Richard Ashcraft (1987), “the Bible was the primary source for any endeavor to supply a ‘historical’ account of man’s existence.”

After the 1600s, the Bible declined as a political hot topic in Britain, but all sorts of evidence attests to the nation’s continuing tendency to see itself as ancient Israel reborn--with an exalted destiny and special relationship to the Almighty. In 1719, for example, Isaac Watts published a bestselling translation of the Psalms--in which references to “Israel” were replaced by the words “Great Britain.” When Georg Friedrich Händel settled in London, he determined (naturally) to do things British-style. Thus a long series of oratorios--Esther, Deborah, Judas Maccabeus, Joshua, Susannah, Jephtha, Israel in Egypt--all presupposing that Britain was the new Israel.

The Bible’s influence on British literature was profound. The work of John Milton, peerless semi-Puritan poet and political agitator, would have been inconceivable without the Bible--”that book within whose sacred context all wisdom is enfolded,” he wrote in 1642. Wordsworth said of Milton’s poetry, “However imbued the surface might be with classical literature, he was a Hebrew in soul; all things tended in him towards the sublime.” (The first-century Greek who is now called “Pseudo-Longinus”--real name uncertain--got this ball rolling when he famously associated “sublimity” with the Hebrew bible, especially the start of Genesis.)

The Bible continued as a vital influence on English literature through William Blake and the romantics and (of course) even farther, down to our own day. In the literature of ancient Greece, Samuel Taylor Coleridge announced, “all natural objects were dead, mere hollow statues,” whereas “in the Hebrew poets each thing has a life of its own.” In the Bible “I have found,” he wrote, “words for my inmost thoughts, songs for my joy, utterances for my hidden griefs. . . . “ In certain of Lord Byron’s Hebrew Melodies (poems to be sung to Hebrew tunes), the poet captures not only the mood but the subject matter of the biblical Song of Songs--”She walks in beauty, like the night / Of cloudless climes and starry skies; / And all that’s best of dark and bright / Meet in her aspect and her eyes. . . . “ Examples of the Bible’s centrality to English literature are countless.

MEANWHILE, ANGLICAN SETTLERS founded Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607; Pilgrims arriving on the Mayflower founded Plymouth in 1620. Boston and Salem, 1630. The goal of the early Puritan settlers, writes the historian Sidney Ahlstrom, was “a Holy Commonwealth standing in a national covenant with its Lord.” Ahlstrom mentions also that “an ‘Anglicanism’ deeply colored by Puritan convictions would shape the early religious life of Virginia”; so it seems fair to describe the first stages of the invention of America as a basically Puritan affair. The early settlers founded a series of colleges to provide them with pastors and theologians, starting with Harvard in 1636. By 1700, a quarter of a million ex-Europeans and their descendants lived in the future United States.

America’s earliest settlers came in search of religious freedom, to escape religious persecution--vitally important facts that Americans tend increasingly to forget. A new arrival who joined the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1623 “blessed God for the opportunity of freedom and liberty to enjoy the ordinances of God in purity among His people.” America was a haven for devoutly religious dissidents. It is a perfect reflection of the nation’s origins that the very first freedom in the Bill of Rights--Article one, part one--should be religious freedom. “Separation of church and state” was a means to an end, not an end in itself. The idea that the Bill of Rights would one day be traduced into a broom to sweep religion out of the public square like so much dried mud off the boots of careless children would have left the Founders of this nation (my guess is) trembling in rage. We owe it to them in simple gratitude to see that the Bill of Rights is not--is never--used as a weapon against religion.

You cannot understand the literature and experience of 17th-century American Puritans unless you know the Bible. The Pilgrim father William Bradford reports in his famous journal, for example, that his people had no choice but to camp near their landing-place on the Massachusetts mainland. There was no reason to think they could do better elsewhere; after all they could not, “as it were, go up to the top of Pisgah to view from this wilderness a more goodly country.”

Bradford saw no need to explain that he was referring to Moses gazing at the Promised Land from atop Mount Pisgah before his death (Deuteronomy 34:1). To 17th-century readers, the reference would have been obvious--and so too the implied message: These Pilgrims are like biblical Israelites. They are a chosen people who made a dangerous crossing from the house of (British) bondage to a Promised Land of freedom. Other Puritan settlers expressed themselves in similar terms. There is a fascinating resemblance between these Puritan writings and the Hebrew literary form called “melitzah,” in which the author makes his point by stringing together Biblical and rabbinic passages. The Puritans’ world, like traditional Jewish society, was permeated and obsessed with the Bible.

Bradford’s comparison between Puritans and ancient Israel is central to the American revolution and the emergence of the new nation. Americans saw themselves as Israelites throwing off a tyrant’s yoke. Most historians look to the British and Continental philosophers of the Enlightenment, Locke especially, as the major intellectual influence on America’s Founding Fathers and revolutionary generation. To rely on Locke is to rely (indirectly) on the Bible. Yet the Bible itself, straight up, was the most important revolutionary text of all. Consider the seal of the United States designed by a committee of the Continental Congress consisting of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. (They don’t make congressional committees like they used to!) Their proposed seal shows Israel crossing the Red Sea, with the motto “Rebellion to kings is obedience to God.” The pastor Abiel Abbot proclaimed in 1799, “It has been often remarked that the people of the United States come nearer to a parallel with Ancient Israel, than any other nation upon the globe. Hence Our American Israel is a term frequently used; and our common consent allows it apt and proper.”

That Britain and America should both have been inclined to see themselves as chosen peoples made a subterranean connection between them that has sometimes--one suspects--been plainer to their enemies than their friends. Down to the war in Iraq, enemies of America and Britain have suspected an Anglo-Saxon conspiracy to rule the world. In part this is paranoia; but it might also have something to do with Britain’s and America’s Bible-centered cultural histories. The two nations speak of a “special relationship” with each other--besides which, each has a history of believing in its own “special relationship” with the Lord Himself.

THE BIBLE CONTINUED TO SHAPE AMERICAN HISTORY. Some Americans saw the great push westward as fulfilling the Lord’s plan for the United States, modeled on Israel’s settlement of the holy land. Meanwhile, many have noticed that the history of modern Israel resembles earlier American experience. Harassed Europeans arrive in a sparsely settled land in search of freedom. They build the place up and make it bloom. They struggle with the indigenous inhabitants, some of whom are friendly and some not. At first they collaborate with the British colonial authorities; each group winds up in a push for independence and a deadly fight with Britain.

But long before Israel resembled America, America resembled Israel. It’s true that Manifest Destiny--the idea that America was predestined to push westwards towards the Pacific--was less a Bible-based than a “natural rights” approach to America’s place in God’s plans. You didn’t have to consult the Bible to learn about America’s Manifest Destiny; it was just obvious. But America was called back to her biblical faith by no less a man than Abraham Lincoln himself.

As the Civil War approached, both North and South saw their positions in biblical terms. Southern preachers sometimes accused abolitionists of being atheists in disguise. Lincoln rose above this kind of dispute. “In the present civil war it is quite possible,” he wrote in 1862, “that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party.”

Lincoln was America’s most “biblical” president--”no president has ever had the detailed knowledge of the Bible that Lincoln had,” writes the historian William Wolf. Lincoln turned to the Bible more and more frequently and fervently as the war progressed. His heterodox but profound Christianity showed him how to understand the war as a fight to redeem America’s promise to mankind. Lincoln never joined a church, but said often that he would join one if “the Saviour’s summary of the Gospel” were its only creed. He meant the passage in Mark and Luke where Jesus restates God’s requirements in terms of two edicts from the Hebrew Bible: to love God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. Lincoln’s religion was deeply biblical--and characteristically American.

In modern times the Bible was no less important as a shaper and molder of American destiny. Woodrow Wilson, another intensely biblical president, spoke in biblical terms when he took America into the First World War--on behalf of freedom and democracy for all mankind. Harry Truman’s Bible-centered Christianity was important to his decisions to lead America into the Cold War, and make America the first nation to recognize the newborn state of Israel--to the vast disgust of the perpetually benighted State Department. Reagan’s presidency revolved around Winthrop’s Gospel-inspired image of the sacred city on a hill. George W. Bush’s worldwide war on tyranny is the quintessence of a biblical project--one that sees America as an almost chosen people, with the heavy responsibilities that go with the job.

There is no agreement whether God created the world, but the Bible’s awe-striking creative powers are undeniable. There is no agreement whether God “is not a man that He should lie” (Numbers 23:19), but the Hebrew Bible’s uncanny honesty respecting Israel and its many sins is plain. The faithful ask, in the words of the 139th psalm, “Whither shall I go from Thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from Thy presence?” And answer, “If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me.” Secularists don’t see it that way; but the Bible’s penetration into the farthest corners of the known world is simple fact. Most contemporary philosophers and culture critics are barely aware of these things, don’t see the pattern behind them, can’t tell us what the pattern means, and (for the most part) don’t care.

* * *

THE BIBLE LITERACY REPORT: What Do American Teens Need to Know and What Do They Know? was commissioned by a nonprofit organization called the Bible Literacy Project; it was published April 26. Students in the Gallup-conducted survey were mostly in 7th through 9th grades; they were enrolled at 30 public and 4 private schools (one Catholic, one Protestant, and 2 non-sectarian). Forty-one teachers took part--”a diverse sample of high school English teachers in 10 states.” All are reputedly “among the best teachers in their subject.”

These teachers are convinced that students ought to know the Bible and don’t. Forty of forty-one agreed that “Bible knowledge confers a distinct educational advantage.” But the majority estimated that fewer than a quarter of their current students are “Bible literate.”

Contrary to what a person might guess, the teachers don’t necessarily believe that Bible literacy has declined in recent decades. They describe a complex picture; naturally, individuals differ. (One teacher said that “Pentecostal kids or religious Muslim kids” seem better-informed than the others.)

The teachers are strikingly confused about the legal status of Bible-teaching in public schools. The ACLU and kindred organizations are winning the fight to suppress religion in public--to ban it from the public square as religion has traditionally been banned under regimes that tolerate it only marginally; to force it indoors and under wraps, as minority religions have traditionally been treated by powerful majorities that threaten violence. The ACLU and friends are winning by court order and--more important--by confusion and intimidation. “It was not uncommon,” says the report, “for educators to hold erroneous beliefs about the legality of using the Bible and Bible literature in public-school classrooms.”

Another of the report’s sobering aspects has to do with the Bible topics deemed by teachers to be important. Mostly these are people and stories, not ideas. The report lists 72 biblical “items” that the teachers consider essential. The list starts: “Ten Commandments, Cain and Abel, Christ, Genesis, Jesus, Adam and Eve, Bible, Moses, David and Goliath”--and so on. Not what you would call challenging stuff. From the special viewpoint of American history, it seems to me you would rate four biblical “items” essential: Exodus, Covenant, and the related ideas of Promised Land and Chosen People. Two of these appear on the teachers’ list; Covenant and Chosen People don’t make the cut. This is no criticism of the teachers or the report, merely a sad reflection of the collapse of our educational standards across the board. It used to be that young children learned Bible stories and Bible basics. They didn’t need high school teachers to bring them up to speed on the Ten Commandments.

Now let’s consider the actual results. What do high school students know?

The good news: If you ask questions that are so simple the average arthropod would find them patronizing, and cast them in multiple choice format to make things even easier . . . American high school students do okay. Almost three-quarters (72 percent) of students in the survey could answer correctly that Moses “led the Israelites out of bondage.” Ninety percent could tell you that Adam and Eve were the first man and woman in Genesis. Sixty-nine percent figured out that “the Good Samaritan” was “someone who helps others.” Break out the champagne!

On second thought . . . “Significant minorities of American students have not yet achieved even this rudimentary level of Bible knowledge.” “Eight percent of American teens,” for example, “believe that Moses is one of the twelve Apostles.”

Go beyond rudimentary and you find that “very few American students” have the level of Bible knowledge that high-school English teachers regard as “basic to a good education.” “Almost two-thirds of teens” couldn’t pick the right answer out of four choices when they were asked to identify “a quotation from the Sermon on the Mount” (“Blessed are the poor in spirit”). Two-thirds didn’t know that “the Road to Damascus is where St. Paul was blinded by a vision of Christ.” Fewer than a third “could correctly identify which statement about David was not true (David tried to kill King Saul).” And so on.

WHAT TO DO? Every school that teaches American history must teach the Bible’s central role. Easily said; but experience suggests that many of today’s classes in English and U.S. history are stuck somewhere between useless and harmful. High school history and English curricula ought to be rebuilt from scratch right now, on an emergency basis. Those rebuilt curricula should (of course) teach students about the centrality of the Bible.

But students need to read the Bible, not just about the Bible. High school Bible-as-literature electives are rare and controversial. Not long ago Frankenmuth, Michigan, became (briefly) famous when its school board refused to allow such an elective.

There are good reasons to be wary of such courses. There is nothing wrong with them on constitutional grounds, and the Bible Literacy Project has reasonable, serious curricula of its own on offer. But these courses have to keep well clear of teaching the Bible as a sacred text, or promoting religious views of any kind. And it happens that nearly all of the smartest, deepest readers of the Bible through the ages have approached it from a religious direction. No doubt their views can be worked in somehow, but in how natural a way? And won’t they be a lot easier just to skip?

And those in favor of such courses should be aware of their bleak history--specifically, the bleak history of Bible teaching that refuses to treat the Bible as sacred scripture. The German “higher critics,” starting with Julius Wellhausen in the late 19th century, picked the Bible to pieces like vultures addressing a dead cow. They were always ready to invent a new “source,” never quite able to see the point--to understand Scripture as loving readers do. Being in love with a book doesn’t guarantee that you will succeed as a critic. But not being in love guarantees that you will fail. (One reason “deconstructionism” is the least successful critical approach in modern history.)

When I was a graduate student in Bible studies during the long-ago late 1970s, this particular fight was raging. (Fights are nearly always raging in Bible studies.) Scholars such as Brevard Childs of Yale were struggling to wrest the Bible from the palsied grip (which looked a lot like a choke-hold) of higher critics who could tell you nearly everything about the Bible, in academic German as charming and graceful as Blutwurst, except what the words actually meant. The new “canonical critics” (such as Childs himself) were struggling to put the Bible back into the religious context out of which it had been untimely ripped by profoundly irritating Germans.

So let’s have Bible-as-literature electives in every public high school, by all means. But let’s also face facts: These are hard courses to teach at best. Do we have teachers who are up to the job? (With laudable foresight, the Bible Literacy Project is already developing workshops for teachers.) And let’s also keep in mind that, for most children, such courses can only be half-way houses. Children studying the Bible should learn their own religious traditions as precious truth, not as one alternative on a multicultural list.

Teaching precious religious truth is not what America’s public schools are for. Ultimately there is only one solution to our Bible literacy crisis. Our churches, our synagogues, and all other institutions that revere the Bible must do better. How well are they doing? To judge by the new report, lousy. (Of course some are doing a lot better than others.)

It’s impossible to find one global solution to the problem of Bible teaching in America. But it’s easy to find one global hope. America is fertile ground for Great Awakenings--mass movements in which large chunks of the population return to their religious roots. We haven’t had one for awhile; we are overdue. Great Awakenings are big, dramatic events that take off like rockets and burn out like rockets, after brief but spectacular careers. Even so, many people find in the aftermath that their life-trajectories have been changed forever.

The next Great Awakening will presumably be centered in the Protestant community--but will deal in friendship with America’s other religious communities. To have a Great Awakening, you need a great talker. (To change people’s ideas about religion and the Bible and God, you have to look them in the eye and speak to them from the heart.)

My guess is that our next Great Awakening will begin among college students. College students today are (spiritually speaking) the driest timber I have ever come across. Mostly they know little or nothing about religion; little or nothing about Americanism. Mostly no one ever speaks to them about truth and beauty, or nobility or honor or greatness. They are empty--spiritually bone dry--because no one has ever bothered to give them anything spiritual that is worth having. Platitudes about diversity and tolerance and multiculturalism are thin gruel for intellectually growing young people.

Let the right person speak to them, and they will turn back to the Bible with an excitement and exhilaration that will shake the country. In reading the Bible they will feel as if they are going home--which is just what they will be doing. Nothing would do America more good than a biblical homecoming.

What has the Bible been to this country? In 1630, John Winthrop repeated Moses’ instructions: “Lett us choose life.” How to do it? By reading and obeying the Bible, above all “the Counsell of Micah”--”to doe Justly, to love mercy, to walke humbly with our God.” Americans (by and large) have done their best to follow Winthrop’s instructions. If they haven’t always succeeded--if America has managed at times to be a profoundly sinful nation (which is no less than the Bible expects of all nations)--they have also tried hard to be good. They have tried hard to choose life. And the Bible has been as good as its own word (Proverbs 3:18)--”It is a Tree of Life to them that lay hold of it.”

David Gelernter is a senior fellow in Jewish Thought at the Shalem Center, Jerusalem, and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.

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**New Bible translation promotes fornication (WorldnetDaily, 040625)

[KH: Beware of “Good as New”]

Archbishop of Canterbury praises version for ‘extraordinary power’

A brand-new translation of the Bible – praised by Britain’s archbishop of Canterbury, that nation’s senior Christian voice – flatly contradicts traditional core Christian beliefs on sex and morality. Titled “Good as New,” the new Bible is translated by former Baptist minister John Henson for the “One” organization, to produce what the group calls a “new, fresh and adventurous” translation of the Christian scriptures.

The 104th archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams – leader of the Church of England – describes it is a book of “extraordinary power,” but admitted many would be startled by its content. “Instead of condemning fornicators, adulterers and ‘abusers of themselves with mankind’,” says Ruth Gledhill, the London Times religious affairs correspondent, “the new version of his first letter to Corinth has St. Paul advising Christians not to go without sex for too long in case they get ‘frustrated.’”

“The new version, which Dr. Williams says he hopes will spread ‘in epidemic profusion through religious and irreligious alike’, turns St. Paul’s strictures against fornication on their head,” adds the Times. The One organization that produced the new Bible translation is dedicated to “establish[ing] peace, justice, dignity and rights for all.”

It is also focused on “sustainable use of the earth’s resources,” challenging “oppression, injustice, exclusion and discrimination” as well as accepting “one another, valuing their diversity and experience.”

According to Ekklesia, a London-based “theological think tank” that supports the “One” translation: The translation is pioneering in its accessibility, and changes the original Greek and Hebrew nomenclature into modern nicknames. St. Peter becomes “Rocky,” Mary Magdalene becomes “Maggie,” Aaron becomes “Ron,” Andronicus becomes “Andy” and Barabbas becomes “Barry.”

In keeping with the times, translator Henson deftly translates “demon possession” as “mental illness” and “Son of Man,” the expression Jesus frequently used to describe himself, as “the Complete Person.” In addition, parables are rendered as “riddles,” baptize is to “dip” in water, salvation becomes “healing” or “completeness” and Heaven becomes “the world beyond time and space.”

Here’s how Williams, the top Anglican archbishop, describes the new Bible: “Instead of being taken into a specialized religious frame of reference – as happens even with the most conscientious of formal modern translations – and being given a gospel addressed to specialized concerns … we have here a vehicle for thinking and worshipping that is fully earthed, recognizably about our humanity.” In addition, notes Ekklesia, the archbishop praises Henson’s translation for eliminating “the stale, the technical, the unconsciously exclusive words and policies” in other translations.

Here, according to the London Times, are a few sample passages:

Mark 1:4 Authorized version: “John did baptize in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.” New: “John, nicknamed ‘The Dipper,’ was ‘The Voice.’ He was in the desert, inviting people to be dipped, to show they were determined to change their ways and wanted to be forgiven.”

Mark 1:10-11 Authorized version: “And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him. And there came a voice from the heaven saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” New: “As he was climbing up the bank again, the sun shone through a gap in the clouds. At the same time a pigeon flew down and perched on him. Jesus took this as a sign that God’s spirit was with him. A voice from overhead was heard saying, ‘That’s my boy! You’re doing fine!’”

Matthew 23:25 Authorized version: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” New version: “Take a running jump, Holy Joes, humbugs!”

Matthew 26:69-70 Authorized version: “Now Peter sat without in the palace: and a damsel came unto him, saying, ‘Thou also wast with Jesus of Galilee.’ But he denied before them all, saying, I know not what thou sayest.” New: “Meanwhile Rocky was still sitting in the courtyard. A woman came up to him and said: ‘Haven’t I seen you with Jesus, the hero from Galilee?” Rocky shook his head and said: ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!’” 1

Corinthians 7:1-2 KJV: “Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: [It is] good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, [to avoid] fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.” New: “Some of you think the best way to cope with sex is for men and women to keep right away from each other. That is more likely to lead to sexual offences. My advice is for everyone to have a regular partner.”

1 Corinthians 7:8-7 KJV: “I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.” New: “If you know you have strong needs, get yourself a partner. Better than being frustrated.”

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**Evangelical Theological Society Considers Adopting Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (Christian Post, 041129)

Attendees to the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS)’s 56th annual meeting passed a resolution to consider using the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy to clarify the organization’s position on the topic. The decision from the Nov. 17-19 meeting in San Antonio does not automatically enact the Statement as a bylaw to the organization, but rather allows the executive committee to further examine the resolution before the next annual meeting in 2005.

Last year, the ETS considered revoking the membership of two theologians because of their acceptance of “Open Theism” – a belief that argues that God does not know perfectly what will happen in the future. By a slim majority, the two theologians, Clark Pinnock and John Sanders, were acquitted, largely because “ETS members could not agree on a precise definition on the term “inerrancy” in the organization’s statement of faith,” according to the Southern Baptist Convention’s Baptist Press (BP).

Should the ETS adopt the Chicago Statement during the 2005 assembly, it will be allowed to exclude members who believe in open theism – among other theological beliefs that differ from the belief in biblical inerrancy.

ETS will give feedback on the Chicago Statement to the Executive committee throughout the year. The committee will then decide whether to recommend adopting the Chicago Statement as an ETS bylaw during its national meeting in Valley Forge, Pa., next August.

According to BP, the outgoing president of ETS Greg Beale said the committee could bring the resolution before the ETS membership for adoption or recommend further discussion. Either way, Beale said many members felt a precise definition of inerrancy would be needed in the near future.

Should the Chicago Statement be adopted, it will be a part of the ETS bylaw and will serve as a “a useful instrument for interpreting” the article on inerrancy, according to Beale. This “interpretive instrument” could then be used to exclude members with “aberrant views of Scripture.”

The Chicago Statement was chosen by ETS founder Roger Nicole as the statement that would best represent the ETS’ position on biblical inerrancy because of the document’s straight-forward nature, according to BP.

“In my judgment [adoption of the Chicago Statement] eliminates the claim by anyone that inerrancy is a vague term,” Nicole said. “The meaning of inerrancy is clarified and if there is any member who does not agree with that definition he should resign ... or be disciplined.”

Nicole was also the one who brought the charges last year against Pinnock and Sanders.

The Chicago Statement was produced in the fall of 1978 during an international summit of evangelical leaders. The statement was signed by nearly 300 renowned evangelical scholars.

Structurally, the statement contains five shorter statements that define inerrancy, and is followed by 19 “affirmations and denials” on the doctrine.

The following is the full text of the Chicago Statement:

**********************************************************************

PREFACE

The authority of Scripture is a key issue for the Christian Church in this and every age. Those who profess faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior are called to show the reality of their discipleship by humbly and faithfully obeying God’s written Word. To stray from Scripture in faith or conduct is disloyalty to our Master. Recognition of the total truth and trustworthiness of Holy Scripture is essential to a full grasp and adequate confession of its authority.

The following Statement affirms this inerrancy of Scripture afresh, making clear our understanding of it and warning against its denial. We are persuaded that to deny it is to set aside the witness of Jesus Christ and of the Holy Spirit and to refuse that submission to the claims of God’s own Word that marks true Christian faith. We see it as our timely duty to make this affirmation in the face of current lapses from the truth of inerrancy among our fellow Christians and misunderstanding of this doctrine in the world at large.

This Statement consists of three parts: a Summary Statement, Articles of Affirmation and Denial, and an accompanying Exposition. It has been prepared in the course of a three-day consultation in Chicago. Those who have signed the Summary Statement and the Articles wish to affirm their own conviction as to the inerrancy of Scripture and to encourage and challenge one another and all Christians to growing appreciation and understanding of this doctrine. We acknowledge the limitations of a document prepared in a brief, intensive conference and do not propose that this Statement be given creedal weight. Yet we rejoice in the deepening of our own convictions through our discussions together, and we pray that the Statement we have signed may be used to the glory of our God toward a new reformation of the Church in its faith, life and mission.

We offer this Statement in a spirit, not of contention, but of humility and love, which we propose by God’s grace to maintain in any future dialogue arising out of what we have said. We gladly acknowledge that many who deny the inerrancy of Scripture do not display the consequences of this denial in the rest of their belief and behavior, and we are conscious that we who confess this doctrine often deny it in life by failing to bring our thoughts and deeds, our traditions and habits, into true subjection to the divine Word.

We invite response to this Statement from any who see reason to amend its affirmations about Scripture by the light of Scripture itself, under whose infallible authority we stand as we speak. We claim no personal infallibility for the witness we bear, and for any help that enables us to strengthen this testimony to God’s Word we shall be grateful.

I. SUMMARY STATEMENT

1. God, who is Himself Truth and speaks truth only, has inspired Holy Scripture in order thereby to reveal Himself to lost mankind through Jesus Christ as Creator and Lord, Redeemer and Judge. Holy Scripture is God’s witness to Himself.

2. Holy Scripture, being God’s own Word, written by men prepared and superintended by His Spirit, is of infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches: It is to be believed, as God’s instruction, in all that it affirms; obeyed, as God’s command, in all that it requires; embraced, as God’s pledge, in all that it promises.

3. The Holy Spirit, Scripture’s divine Author, both authenticates it to us by His inward witness and opens our minds to understand its meaning.

4. Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives.

5. The authority of Scripture is inescapably impaired if this total divine inerrancy is in any way limited of disregarded, or made relative to a view of truth contrary to the Bible’s own; and such lapses bring serious loss to both the individual and the Church.

II. ARTICLES OF AFFIRMATION AND DENIAL

Article I.

We affirm that the Holy Scriptures are to be received as the authoritative Word of God.

We deny that the Scriptures receive their authority from the Church, tradition, or any other human source.

Article II.

We affirm that the Scriptures are the supreme written norm by which God binds the conscience, and that the authority of the Church is subordinate to that of Scripture.

We deny that church creeds, councils, or declarations have authority greater than or equal to the authority of the Bible.

Article III.

We affirm that the written Word in its entirety is revelation given by God.

We deny that the Bible is merely a witness to revelation, or only becomes revelation in encounter, or depends on the responses of men for its validity.

Article IV.

We affirm that God who made mankind in His image has used language as a means of revelation.

We deny that human language is so limited by our creatureliness that it is rendered inadequate as a vehicle for divine revelation. We further deny that the corruption of human culture and language through sin has thwarted God’s work of inspiration.

Article V.

We affirm that God’s revelation in the Holy Scriptures was progressive.

We deny that later revelation, which may fulfill earlier revelation, ever corrects or contradicts it. We further deny that any normative revelation has been given since the completion of the New Testament writings.

Article VI.

We affirm that the whole of Scripture and all its parts, down to the very words of the original, were given by divine inspiration.

We deny that the inspiration of Scripture can rightly be affirmed of the whole without the parts, or of some parts but not the whole.

Article VII.

We affirm that inspiration was the work in which God by His Spirit, through human writers, gave us His Word. The origin of Scripture is divine. The mode of divine inspiration remains largely a mystery to us.

We deny that inspiration can be reduced to human insight, or to heightened states of consciousness of any kind.

Article VIII.

We affirm that God in His work of inspiration utilized the distinctive personalities and literary styles of the writers whom He had chosen and prepared.

We deny that God, in causing these writers to use the very words that He chose, overrode their personalities.

Article IX.

We affirm that inspiration, through not conferring omniscience, guaranteed true and trustworthy utterance on all matters of which the Biblical authors were moved to speak and write.

We deny that the finitude or falseness of these writers, by necessity or otherwise, introduced distortion or falsehood into God’s Word.

Article X.

We affirm that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. We further affirm that copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original.

We deny that any essential element of the Christian faith is affected by the absence of the autographs. We further deny that this absence renders the assertion of Biblical inerrancy invalid or irrelevant.

Article XI.

We affirm that Scripture, having been given by divine inspiration, is infallible, so that, far from misleading us, it is true and reliable in all the matters it addresses.

We deny that it is possible for the Bible to be at the same time infallible and errant in its assertions. Infallibility and inerrancy may be distinguished but not separated.

Article XII.

We affirm that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit.

We deny that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and science. We further deny that scientific hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of Scripture on creation and the flood.

Article XIII.

We affirm the propriety of using inerrancy as a theological term with reference to the complete truthfulness of Scripture.

We deny that it is proper to evaluate Scripture according to standards of truth and error that are alien to its usage or purpose. We further deny that inerrancy is negated by Biblical phenomena such as a lack of modern technical precision, irregularities of grammar or spelling, observational descriptions of nature, the reporting of falsehoods, the use of hyperbole and round numbers, the topical arrangement of metrical, variant selections of material in parallel accounts, or the use of free citations.

Article XIV.

We affirm the unity and internal consistency of Scripture.

We deny that alleged errors and discrepancies that have not yet been resolved violate the truth claims of the Bible.

Article XV.

We affirm that the doctrine of inerrancy is grounded in the teaching of the Bible about inspiration.

We deny that Jesus’ teaching about Scripture may be dismissed by appeals to accommodation or to any natural limitation of His humanity.

Article XVI.

We affirm that the doctrine of inerrancy has been integral to the Church’s faith throughout its history.

We deny that inerrancy is a doctrine invented by scholastic Protestantism, or is a reactionary position postulated in response to negative higher criticism.

Article XVII.

We affirm that the Holy Spirit bears witness to the Scriptures, assuring believers of the truthfulness of God’s written Word.

We deny that this witness of the Holy Spirit operates in isolation from or against Scripture.

Article XVIII.

We affirm that the text of Scripture is to be interpreted by grammatico-historical exegesis, taking account of its literary forms and devices, and that Scripture is to interpret Scripture.

We deny the legitimacy of any treatment of the text or quest for sources lying behind it that leads or relativizing, dehistoricizing, or discounting its teaching, or rejecting its claims of authorship.

Article XIX.

We affirm that a confession of the full authority, infallibility and inerrancy of Scripture is vital to a sound understanding of the whole of the Christian faith. We further affirm that such confession should lead to increasing conformity to the image of Christ.

We deny that such confession is necessary for salvation. However, we further deny that inerrancy can be rejected without grave consequences, both to the individual and to the Church.

III. EXPOSITION

Our understanding of the doctrine of inerrancy must be set in the context of the broader teachings of Scripture concerning itself. This exposition gives an account of the outline of doctrine from which our Summary Statement and Articles are drawn.

A. Creation, Revelation and Inspiration

The God, who formed all things by his creative utterances and governs all things by His Word of decree, made mankind in His own image for a life of communion with Himself, on the model of the eternal fellowship of loving communication within the Godhead. As God’s image-bearer, man was to hear God’s Word addressed to him and to respond in the joy of adoring obedience. Over and above God’s self-disclosure in the created order and the sequence of events within it, human beings from Adam on have received verbal messages from Him, either directly, as stated in Scripture, or indirectly in the form of part or all of Scripture itself.

When Adam fell, the Creator did not abandon mankind to final judgement, but promised salvation and began to reveal Himself as Redeemer in a sequence of historical events centering on Abraham’s family and culminating in the life, death, resurrection, present heavenly ministry and promised return of Jesus Christ. Within this frame God has from time to time spoken specific words of judgement and mercy, promise and command, to sinful human beings, so drawing them into a covenant relation of mutual commitment between Him and them in which He blesses them with gifts of grace and they bless Him in responsive adoration. Moses, whom God used as mediator to carry his words to His people at the time of the exodus, stands at the head of a long line of prophets in whose mouths and writings God put His words for delivery to Israel. God’s purpose in this succession of messages was to maintain His covenant by causing His people to know His name—that is, His nature—and His will both of precept and purpose in the present and for the future. This line of prophetic spokesmen from God came to completion in Jesus Christ, God’s incarnate Word, who was Himself a prophet—more that a prophet, but not less—and in the apostles and prophets of the first Christian generation. When God’s final and climactic message, His word to the world concerning Jesus Christ, had been spoken and elucidated by those in the apostolic circle, the sequence of revealed messages ceased. Henceforth the Church was to live and know God by what He had already said, and said for all time.

At Sinai God wrote the terms of His covenant on tablets of stone as His enduring witness and for lasting accessibility, and throughout the period of prophetic and apostolic revelation He prompted men to write the messages given to and through them, along with celebratory records of His dealings with His people, plus moral reflections on covenant life and forms of praise and prayer for covenant mercy. The theological reality of inspiration in the producing of Biblical documents corresponds to that of spoken prophecies: Although the human writers’ personalities were expressed in what they wrote, the words were divinely constituted. Thus what Scripture says, God says; its authority is His authority, for He is its ultimate Author, having given it through the minds and words of chosen and prepared men who in freedom and faithfulness “spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (I Pet 1:21). Holy Scripture must be acknowledged as the Word of God by virtue of its divine origin.

B. Authority: Christ and the Bible

Jesus Christ, the Son of God who is the Word made flesh, our Prophet, Priest and King, is the ultimate Mediator of God’s communication to man, as He is of all God’s gifts of grace. The revelation He gave was more that verbal; He revealed the Father by His presence and His deeds as well. Yet His words were crucially important ; for He was God, He spoke from the Father, and His words will judge all men at the last day.

As the prophesied Messiah, Jesus Christ is the central theme of Scripture. The Old Testament looked ahead to Him; the New Testament looks back to His first coming and on to His second. Canonical Scripture is the divinely inspired and therefore normative witness to Christ. No hermeneutic, therefore, of which the historical Christ is not the focal point is acceptable. Holy Scripture must be treated as what it essentially is—the witness of the Father to the incarnate Son.

It appears that the Old Testament canon had been fixed by the time of Jesus. The New Testament canon is likewise now closed, inasmuch as no new apostolic witness to the historical Christ can now be borne. No new revelation (as distinct from Spirit-given understanding of existing revelation) will be given until Christ comes again. The canon was created in principle by divine inspiration. The Church’s part was to discern the canon that God had created, not to devise one of its own.

The word ‘canon’, signifying a rule of standard, is a pointer to authority, which means the right to rule and control. Authority in Christianity belongs to God in His revelation, which means, on the one hand, Jesus Christ, the living Word, and, on the other hand, Holy Scripture, the written Word. But the authority of Christ and that of Scripture are one. As our Prophet, Christ testified that Scripture cannot be broken. As our Priest and King, He devoted His earthly life to fulfilling the law and the prophets, even dying in obedience to the words of messianic prophecy. Thus as He saw Scripture attesting Him and His authority, so by His own submission to Scripture He attested its authority. As He bowed to His Father’s instruction given in His Bible (our Old Testament), so He requires His disciples to do—not, however, in isolation but in conjunction with the apostolic witness to Himself that He undertook to inspire by his gift of the Holy Spirit. So Christians show themselves faithful servants of their Lord by bowing to the divine instruction given in the prophetic and apostolic writings that together make up our Bible.

By authenticating each other’s authority, Christ and Scripture coalesce into a single fount of authority. The Biblically-interpreted Christ and the Christ-centered, Christ-proclaiming Bible are from this standpoint one. As from the fact of inspiration we infer that what Scripture says, God says, so from the revealed relation between Jesus Christ and Scripture we may equally declare that what Scripture says, Christ says.

C. Infallibility, Inerrancy, Interpretation

Holy Scripture, as the inspired Word of God witnessing authoritatively to Jesus Christ, may properly be called ‘infallible’ and ‘inerrant’. These negative terms have a special value, for they explicitly safeguard crucial positive truths.

‘Infallible’ signifies the quality of neither misleading nor being misled and so safeguards in categorical terms the truth that Holy Scripture is a sure, safe and reliable rule and guide in all matters.

Similarly, ‘inerrant’ signifies the quality of being free from all falsehood or mistake and so safeguards the truth that Holy Scripture is entirely true and trustworthy in all its assertions.

We affirm that canonical Scripture should always be interpreted on the basis that it is infallible and inerrant. However, in determining what the God-taught writer is asserting in each passage, we must pay the most careful attention to its claims and character as a human production. In inspiration, God utilized the culture and conventions of his penman’s milieu, a milieu that God controls in His sovereign providence; it is misinterpretation to imagine otherwise.

So history must be treated as history, poetry as poetry, hyperbole and metaphor as hyperbole and metaphor, generalization and approximation as what they are, and so forth. Differences between literary conventions in Bible times and in ours must also be observed: Since, for instance, nonchronological narration and imprecise citation were conventional and acceptable and violated no expectations in those days, we must not regard these things as faults when we find them in Bible writers. When total precision of a particular kind was not expected nor aimed at, it is no error not to have achieved it. Scripture is inerrant, not in the sense of being absolutely precise by modern standards, but in the sense of making good its claims and achieving that measure of focused truth at which its authors aimed.

The truthfulness of Scripture is not negated by the appearance in it of irregularities of grammar or spelling, phenomenal descriptions of nature, reports of false statements (for example, the lies of Satan), or seeming discrepancies between one passage and another. It is not right to set the so-called “phenomena” of Scripture against the teaching of Scripture about itself. Apparent inconsistencies should not be ignored. Solution of them, where this can be convincingly achieved, will encourage our faith, and where for the present no convincing solution is at hand we shall significantly honor God by trusting His assurance that His Word is true, despite these appearances, and by maintaining our confidence that one day they will be seen to have been illusions.

Inasmuch as all Scripture is the product of a single divine mind, interpretation must stay within the bounds of the analogy of Scripture and eschew hypotheses that would correct one Biblical passage by another, whether in the name of progressive revelation or of the imperfect enlightenment of the inspired writer’s mind.

Although Holy Scripture is nowhere culture-bound in the sense that its teaching lacks universal validity, it is sometimes culturally conditioned by the customs and conventional views of a particular period, so that the application of its principles today calls for a different sort of action.

D. Skepticism and Criticism

Since the Renaissance, and more particularly since the Enlightenment, world views have been developed that involve skepticism about basic Christian tenets. Such are the agnosticism that denies that God is knowable, the rationalism that denies that He is incomprehensible, the idealism that denies that He is transcendent, and the existentialism that denies rationality in His relationships with us. When these un- and anti-Biblical principles seep into men’s theologies at presuppositional level, as today they frequently do, faithful interpretation of Holy Scripture becomes impossible.

E. Transmission and Translation

Since God has nowhere promised an inerrant transmission of Scripture, it is necessary to affirm that only the autographic text of the original documents was inspired and to maintain the need of textual criticism as a means of detecting any slips that may have crept into the text in the course of its transmission. The verdict of this science, however, is that the Hebrew and Greek text appears to be amazingly well preserved, so that we are amply justified in affirming, with the Westminster Confession, a singular providence of God in this matter and in declaring that the authority of Scripture is in no way jeopardized by the fact that the copies we possess are not entirely error-free.

Similarly, no translation is or can be perfect, and all translations are an additional step away from the autograph. Yet the verdict of linguistic science is that English-speaking Christians, at least, are exceedingly well served in these days with a host of excellent translations and have no cause for hesitating to conclude that the true Word of God is within their reach. Indeed, in view of the frequent repetition in Scripture of the main matters with which it deals and also of the Holy Spirit’s constant witness to and through the Word, no serious translation of Holy Scripture will so destroy its meaning as to render it unable to make its reader “wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:15).

F. Inerrancy and Authority

In our affirmation of the authority of Scripture as involving its total truth, we are consciously standing with Christ and His apostles, indeed with the whole Bible and with the main stream of Church history from the first days until very recently. We are concerned at that casual, inadvertent and seemingly thoughtless way in which a belief of such far-reaching importance has been given up by so many in our day.

We are conscious too that great and grave confusion results from ceasing to maintain the total truth of the Bible whose authority one professes to acknowledge. The result of taking this step is that the Bible that God gave loses its authority, and what has authority instead is a Bible reduced in content according to the demands of one’s critical reasoning and in principle reducible still further once one has started. This means that at bottom independent reason now has authority, as opposed to Scriptural teaching. If this is not seen and if for the time being basic evangelical doctrines are still held, persons denying the full truth of Scripture may claim an evangelical identity while methodologically they have moved away from the evangelical principle of knowledge to an unstable subjectivism, and will find it hard not to move further.

We affirm that what Scripture says, God says. May He be glorified.

Amen and Amen

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**Text Criticism and Inerrancy (Christianity Today, 021022)

How can I reconcile my belief in the inerrancy of Scripture with comments in Bible translations that state that a particular verse is not ‘in better manuscripts’?

By J.I. Packer

The answer to this question parallels that of Charles Spurgeon who, when asked to reconcile human freedom with divine predestination, said, “I never reconcile friends.” He maintained that the two realities fit together. So here.

Manuscripts first. The New Testament books first circulated in hand-copied form, and hand-copying by monks went on till Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 15th century. Anyone who has copied by hand knows how easily letters, words, and even whole lines get dropped out or repeated. The New Testament manuscript tradition was not exempt from this.

Also, it is clear that some copyists facing what they thought were miscopyings made what they thought were corrections. Some of these copyists added in the margin amplifying words and sentences that the next copyist put into the text itself, thinking that was where they belonged. Because the copying was done reverently and with professional care, manuscripts vary little overall, except for the occasional slippages of this kind. Manuscript comparison reveals many passages that clearly need correcting at this level of detail.

The King James Version New Testament was translated from the “received text”—the dominant manuscript tradition at the time—and published in 1611. New manuscript discoveries have led to minor adjustments to that text, and where uncertainty remains about exact wording or authenticity, the margins of honest modern versions will tell us so. The New King James, for instance, while still following the received text, notes these things conscientiously as it goes along.

Other things being equal, manuscripts are “better” when they are nearer to the original—that is, earlier in date.

In the New Testament only one word per 1,000 is in any way doubtful, and no point of doctrine is lost when verses not “in better manuscripts” are omitted. (As examples, see Matt. 6:13b, 17:21, 18:11; Mark 9:44, 46, 49, 16:9-20; Luke 23:17; John 5:4; and Acts 8:37.) Such has been God’s “singular care and providence” in preserving his written Word for us (Westminster Confession I.viii).

So how does all this bear on the Christian’s very proper faith in biblical inerrancy—that is, the total truth and trustworthiness of the true text and all it teaches?

Holy Scripture is, according to the view of Jesus and his apostles, God preaching, instructing, showing, and telling us things, and testifying to himself through the human witness of prophets, poets, theological narrators of history, and philosophical observers of life. The Bible’s inerrancy is not the inerrancy of any one published text or version, nor of anyone’s interpretation, nor of any scribal slips or pious inauthentic additions acquired during transmission.

Rather, scriptural inerrancy relates to the human writer’s expressed meaning in each book, and to the Bible’s whole body of revealed truth and wisdom.

Belief in inerrancy involves an advance commitment to receive as from God all that the Bible, interpreting itself to us through the Holy Spirit in a natural and coherent way, teaches. Thus it shapes our understanding of biblical authority.

So inerrantists should welcome the work of textual scholars, who are forever trying to eliminate the inauthentic and give us exactly what the biblical writers wrote, neither more nor less. The way into God’s mind is through his penmen’s minds, precisely as expressed, under his guidance, in their own words as they wrote them.

Text criticism serves inerrancy; they are friends. Inerrancy treasures the meaning of each writer’s words, while text criticism checks that we have each writer’s words pure and intact. Both these wisdoms are needed if we are to benefit fully from the written Word of God.

J.I. Packer is an executive editor of Christianity Today and a professor of theology at Regent College in Vancouver.

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Bible society scraps gender-neutral translation (970528)

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Deluged with complaints from evangelicals, the International Bible Society has decided to scrap its gender-neutral translation of the New International Version of the Bible.

The society’s decision is a major victory for conservative Southern Baptists, who objected to a what they said was capitulation to feminism and political correctness.

“It’s a victory for the word of God,” said Andreas Kostenberger, a professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest. “You don’t compromise Scripture just to make women feel included.”

The International Bible Society, which sponsors translations of the most successful modern English Bible translation sold in the United States, had planned to publish an version that changed “men” to “human beings” or “people.”

Moderate pastors said the new translation, originally scheduled for publication in 2001, would have been no less accurate than other Bibles.

“When you’re reading the King James Version or the NIV, you’re not reading what was originally said. You’re reading a translation,” said Becky Albritton, pastor of Millbrook Baptist Church in Raleigh. “We lose sight of that. Somehow we think if it’s not this way, it’s not the Holy Word.”

But Southern Baptists, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, attacked the gender-neutral translation with a passion, flooding the society and Zondervan Publishing House of Grand Rapids, Mich., with complaints.

“The very vocal reaction from the evangelical constituency was: ‘Do not take this step. Our churches will not receive this,”‘ said Eugene Rubingh, vice president for translation at the International Bible Society in Colorado Springs, Colo.

Although most bookstores already carry gender-inclusive translations of the Bible, evangelical Christians were dismayed that the translation they most trust — the NIV — would be subject to the same cultural wars that have raged in society.

Paige Patterson, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, had called the proposed edition part of a “feminist effort to re-engineer society and abandon God’s parameters for the home and for the church.”

But some said the decision to scrap the gender-neutral translation was a simple matter of economics.

“Capitalism wins,” said Alan Neely, a retired professor from Princeton Theological Seminary who lives in Raleigh. “The bottom line, even for publishers, is the bottom line.”

Even in scrapping the new translation, the society said some of the changes would have rendered the original biblical texts, written in Hebrew and Greek, more accurate.

For example, instead of saying “God created man in his own image,” the new translation would have read: “God created human beings in his own image.”

The new translation would not have changed the masculine gender in references to God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.

Conservative pastors said any change to the biblical message is always hard to accept.

“The Bible is very precious,” said Greg Mathis, president of the Baptist State Convention and pastor of Mud Creek Baptist Church in Hendersonville. “Pastors are protective of any effort to mess around with it.”

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The Lord’s Prayer: For Ever And Ever (980214, London Times)

The traditional version will last while English is spoken

The Lord’s Prayer is the most familiar incantation in English. Not one in ten citizens of the United Kingdom goes to a Christian church on Sunday. But more than eight in ten can recite the Lord’s Prayer, which they learnt at school and at their parents’ knees. The best-known phrases in English were first published in Cranmer’s Prayer Book of 1549 at the formation of the Church of England. But their roots run far deeper than that.

So the decision by the General Synod to publish a version of the Lord’s Prayer in modern English is as shocking to many as the facelift of a familiar old friend. The new version retains the petition “hallowed be your name”. But for many, hallowed words themselves are being thrown out for a less numinous version.

These words have changed continually down the ages. The immediate predecessor to Cranmer’s version prays: “Thy will be fulfilled in earth as in heaven.” And earlier translations ask for our “guilts” to be forgiven. Some reasons for change are better than others. Change for the sake of change would confirm the stereotype of trendy churchmanship. There is more weight in change in order to keep up with language that has moved on since Cranmer.

“Hallowed” is not a word in everyday use, and some may misconstrue “trespass” as the modern offence of entering unlawfully upon someone else’s land rather than its original meaning of a general sin, which is five centuries older. But “thee” and “thou” language and “which” for “who” are trivial stumbling-blocks. Most manage to jump them for Shakespeare.

The wish for a common single version of the Lord’s Prayer for use throughout the English-speaking world is ecumenical. But even in the United Kingdom, a quarter of those who know the Lord’s Prayer know it only in a modern version. The best reason for change is that the new version is closer to the original, which was spoken in a dialect of Aramaic and written down a generation later in the Greek of the marketplace.

For those who care about content as well as form, the traditional version has ambiguities. Modern theology interprets “daily bread” not as the food from the supermarket that we eat every day, but the bread of the Messianic banquet. The prayer is for the coming of the Lord. “Lead us not into temptation” is a Puritan anachronism and implies that God rather than Satan is a tempter. The modern version runs “Save us from the time of trial”. This renders the first-century petition to be delivered from the testing at the end of time, and from apostasy or loss of faith in that age of persecution.

The decision to publish the new version alongside the traditional version in service books to be introduced to all churches by 2001 is an endearingly typical Anglican compromise. It will do nothing to standardise the Babel of versions when the congregation joins in the Lord’s Prayer. But at least the modern version is nearer to the original. And for traditionalists, Cranmer’s words (slightly modified) will rumble down the centuries as long as English lasts.

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Parents fail to teach Bible and prayers (980428)

BEDTIME prayers and Sunday school are disappearing from family life, according to a report by the Church of Scotland. Many parents are said to be ignorant of even the simplest children’s prayers and Bible stories.

“The church dare not make any assumptions relating to parents about the promotion of the Christian faith in the home,” says the report into children’s worship by the Board of Parish Education. “Without the co-operation of parents or guardians, the Church’s task of nurturing faith in children is rendered extremely difficult, if not impossible.”

The number of young people at services has declined, and parishes find it difficult to recruit volunteer teachers and youth leaders. Sunday school is said to be less relevant when children have more access to grown-up values through television and the Internet. The Rev Stewart Smith, the board’s convener, said: “We cannot assume that everyone knows the basics of the Bible. That does not apply any more.”

The report will be presented to the Kirk’s General Assembly next month. Apart from making after-school clubs more appealing, the main thrust of any changes are likely to concentrate on giving parents better support and religious training, perhaps using the Internet.

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Undersea ruins point to Noah’s flood (London Times, 000914)

THE remains of a Bronze Age village have been found more than 300ft below the Black Sea, offering the most compelling evidence yet for the Great Flood described in the Old Testament story of Noah.

The Neolithic settlement 12 miles off the Turkish coast was found on Sunday by a team of scientists led by Robert Ballard, the American oceanographer who located the wrecks of the Titanic and the Bismarck, the National Geographic Society, which funded the expedition, said yesterday.

The discovery appears to prove that human beings lived on the coast of the Black Sea about 7,500 years ago, when it was a much smaller freshwater lake, before they were driven inland by a cataclysmic flood. Geological studies, including one by Dr Ballard last summer, have already uncovered strong evidence that such a flood did happen, when rising sea levels at the end of the Ice Age caused the Eastern Mediterranean to break through the natural dam of the Bosphorus and inundate the Black Sea.

Dr Ballard’s latest findings show for the first time that human beings were killed or displaced by the flood, and suggest that an apocalyptic tale could explain the catastrophic inundations recounted in both Genesis and the Epic of Gilgamesh. “We now know that people were living on that surface when that event took place, because we are now finding evidence of human habitation,” he said yesterday. “This is an incredible find. It’s clear a vast amount of real estate is underwater and that a vast amount of people were living around the Black Sea.”

The remains, 12 miles northwest of the Turkish port of Sinop, consist of a building 12ft wide and 45ft long, with carved wooden beams. The architecture identified it as from the Neolithic Bronze Age, from 7,000 to 7,500 years ago, Dr Ballard said. It was found with the aid of sonar imaging from the surface ship Northern Horizon, and photographed from a remotecontrolled mini-submarine, which also found stone tools that appear to date from the same period. The structure is close to the mouth of a river,

No human remains have yet been discovered, which may suggest that the site was abandoned as the waters rose.

The researchers, who are in the third week of a five-week expedition, are now surveying the surrounding area for further evidence of human settlements. They plan to send divers to recover some of the artefacts for radiocarbon dating.

Fredrik Hiebert, the team’s chief archaeologist, said the site was a “Pompeii of landscapes”, and that the building seemed typical of other wattle and daub homes of the same period. “This find represents the first concrete evidence for the occupation of the Black Sea coast prior to its flooding,” he said. “It will begin to rewrite the history of cultures in this key area between Europe, Asia and the Middle East.”

Flood legends are common to several civilizations with roots around the Black Sea. In the biblical version, Noah’s Ark is said to have come to rest on the summit of Mount Ararat, to the southwest of the sea.

Walter Pitman, a geologist from Columbia University who first advanced the Black Sea flood theory in the 1997 book Noah’s Flood, said: “I certainly believed there had to be people living there but finding the structure was like finding a needle in a haystack.”

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Sacred mysteries (Daily Telegraph, 020720)

By Christopher Howse

The English Bible has become a Babel, according to Professor Gordon Wenham of the University of Gloucestershire. There is, he says, a proliferation of translations. The Alternative Service Book prescribed four different versions, and Common Worship, the new Church of England service book, uses yet another.

Yet Prof Wenham has just finished chairing a committee that has produced a new version of the Bible to throw on to this teetering Tower of Babel. It is called the English Standard Version, and it aims to steer a course between uncomfortable extremes.

One problem is that regular worshippers get used to the version they hear in church. But irregular worshippers find famous passages less stirring than they half remember - the 12th chapter of Ecclesiastes, say, where the Authorised Version of 1611 has: “The grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened . . .”.

In 1952, the year of the Queen’s accession, a new translation was published, the Revised Standard Version. It followed the AV closely, but updated misleading archaisms (changing prevent to precede and so on) and did away with thee and thou, except in addressing God. In the intervening years, two other important versions introduced into Anglican worship have been the New International Version and the New Revised Standard Version.

The NIV adopts the principle of “dynamic equivalence” - that the translation should make a similar impact on its readers as the original did. This leads to inconsistencies. In Prof Wenham’s view, the NIV is often disappointing when used for study or for preaching. In contrast, the English Standard Version tries to be traditional, consistent and accurate.

The New Revised Standard Version suffers from a great problem that has beset public Bible reading in the past 20 years. It adopts a thoroughgoing “inclusivity” - that is to say, the word he is disallowed wherever it can be replaced by a sexually unspecific paraphrase. This has painful consequences. Not only do sons become children and fathers become parents, but familiar phrases, such as “Blessed is the man” (Psalm i) are replaced by vaguer expressions (“Happy are they . . .”). The campaign for inclusive language, as a matter of Christian justice rather than of mere stylistic choice, has been so energetic that the use of man to mean “human person” now sounds grating to some ears.

Prof Wenham’s English Standard Version aims at being “moderately inclusive”. It translates he who as whoever, but retains he as a generic word where it helps make clear the original Hebrew or Greek. Hence: “Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness” (1 John ii 9).

But judging by the reaction in the Church Times letters page, Prof Wenham’s efforts have not pleased everyone. One parish clergyman describes his attitude as “tyranny”, “idolatry” and “the usual masquerade of political and religious conservatism”. Babel still stands.

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Revising a magisterial creation (Washington Times, 041122)

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) — It’s the most magisterial opening sentence in English literature: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

But now a major revisionist translation of the Bible would have the cosmos begin with a more conversational clause: “When God began to create heaven and earth ....”

And where the King James translation of Genesis has the earth beginning “without form, and void,” the new translation of the Hebrew Bible says that the earth was “welter and waste.”

Biblical scholar Robert Alter’s major new English translation of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible — alternately called the Five Books of Moses, the Torah or Pentateuch — has drawn critics to the barricades and others to applaud returning the work to its original Hebrew meanings and majestic repetitions.

Mr. Alter, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, says since he has never found a biblical translation that he likes or would recommend to his comparative literature students, he decided to make his own, starting with the story of Genesis and ending with the death of Moses.

He argues that past translations either get the Hebrew wrong or mangle the Bible’s syntax, or they lose the power of the work or are so up-to-the-minute that they become too conversational to be accurate or interesting.

He was determined to get back into the book every single “and” that other translators left out, saying that part of the book’s majesty is built by its use of repetitions.

The 1611 King James version, the most famous book ever written by a committee (and the best-seller of all books), reaches poetic heights, but Mr. Alter says it’s fraught with “embarrassing inaccuracies” and often substitutes Greek or Latin words and Renaissance English tonalities and rhythms for biblical ones.

But critics are unhappy with some of Mr. Alter’s “tonalities and rhythms” as well. “Reading through this book is a wearying, disorientating and at times revelatory experience,” says John Updike in a New Yorker magazine review of Mr. Alter’s 1,063-page translation of “The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary.” He complains about page after page of footnotes that explain obscure points.

Mr. Updike takes exception with some of the translation. For example, he prefers the King James version, in which “the spirit of God moved upon the face of the water” to Mr. Alter’s version: “God’s breath hovering over the waters.”

Mr. Alter says he used the phrase “God’s breath” rather than the “spirit of God” for a reason: “The Hebrew word means life’s breath, a constant moving of oxygen in and out. The body-soul split of early Christianity is something not imagined in the early Hebrew.”

Mr. Alter says his task was to find the English equivalents of the Hebrew. “Hebrew is filled with concrete images. For example, the King James translates the famous lines of Ecclesiastes as ‘vanity of vanities ... all is vanity’ but the closest word in English to the Hebrew is “vapor, vapor, all is mere vapor.”

He is especially pleased with restoring all the “ands” in a passage in which Abraham’s servant is sent on a mission to find a wife for Isaac and encounters Rebekah:

“And she came down to the spring and filled her jug and came back up. And the servant ran toward her and said, ‘Pray, let me sip a bit of water from your jug.’ And she said, ‘Drink, my lord,’ and she hurried and tipped down her jug on one hand and let him drink. And she let him drink his fill and said, ‘For your camels, too, I shall draw water until they drink their fill.’ And she hurried and emptied her jug into the trough, and she ran again to the well to draw water and drew water for all his camels.”

The 15 “ands” manage to build a picture of what Mr. Alter calls “the closest anyone comes in Genesis to a feat of ‘Homeric heroism’ — especially when one considers how much a camel drinks.

“I began this translation as a kind of dubious experiment asking, ‘Is there some [method] of getting biblical Hebrew into modern English in a way that would be readable but not be too contemporary sounding and reproduce many of the stylish effects of the Hebrew?’ “

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Today’s NIV Bible Barred from LifeWay Christian Bookstores (Christian Post, 050127)

The Rolling Stone Magazine reversed its decision not to air an advertisement for the Today’s New International Version (TNIV) of the Bible earlier this week, but the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC)-affiliated Lifeway Christian Resources has not yet changed its decision to keep the edition out of its 122 bookstores because of the version’s gender-neutral translations.

The controversy over the International Bible Society (IBS) and Zondervan Publishing House’s TNIV began in 2002 when initial publishing began. Fundamentals and evangelicals rejected the version’s rendering of male terms like “son” and “father” into the gender neutral “child” and “parent”, respectively.

By the year’s end, two of the nation’s largest evangelical denominations, the SBC and the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), passed resolutions establishing that the TNIV has “gone beyond acceptable translation standards.”

“Although it is possible for Bible scholars to disagree about translation methods or which English words best translate the original languages, the TNIV has gone beyond acceptable translation standards,” a part of the SBC’s 2002 Resolution 4 read. “This translation alters the meaning of hundreds of verses, most significantly by erasing gender-specific details which appear in the original language.”

Resolution 4 expressed “profound disappointment” with the IBS and Zondervan, and further resolved that “Lifeway not make this inaccurate translation available for sale in their bookstores.”

Lifeway’s spokesman Rob Phillips said Lifeway has not had the chance to review the full Bible yet, but does not have plans to stock it.

The TNIV is set to be released next week.

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Teen girls’ Bible talks of oral sex, lesbianism (WorldNetDaily, 050318)

Critic says publication smears ‘filthy graffiti across the Word of God’

A Bible created especially for girls age 13-16 that includes profiles of fictional teenagers discussing oral sex, lesbianism and “dream” guys is drawing sharp criticism from some Christian parents who say such material should not appear alongside Scripture.

The “True Images” Bible, published by Zondervan, promises on its dustcover to “strengthen your relationship with God, family, friends and guys.”

While the book includes the entire text of the New International Version of the Bible, it’s the “over 1,000 relevant and compelling notes and articles” that have critics upset.

The “In Focus” profiles are peppered throughout the text of the Bible and deal with subjects like sex, pregnancy, alcoholism, dating, homosexuality, depression, pornography and flirting.

An introduction in the Bible explains its goal: to present to young girls “true images”: “God’s message about who you are in his eyes.”

The “In Focus” article on sex appears amidst scriptural regulations on offerings in the book of Leviticus. It profiles the fictional girl “Ashley” and is entitled “Casual or Not?”

While the message of the profile is to save sex for marriage, critics aren’t convinced the frank-talk approach is appropriate for young teens.

Discussing her friend “Emma,” Ashley says, “The story is that she had oral sex with a guy friend of ours last week. Just for fun. They’re not dating, although they’ve always flirted with each other a lot. Emma took one look at my face this morning, and she knew I knew.”

Emma goes on to claim that oral sex “is not even sex,” but Ashley disagrees, saying, “God’s definition of sexual purity covers much more than intercourse.”

Following Ashley’s narrative is a warning that “the physical and emotional effects of oral sex are similar to intercourse,” along with tips for dealing with friends who are engaging in the practice.

‘Am I Gay?’

Another “In Focus” story highlights the experience of “Trish” in “Am I Gay?”

Says Trish: “All my friends are wondering if this guy or that guy likes them. I don’t like any guys right now. Instead, I wonder if I have a crush on Sierra. She’s one of my best friends.”

Trish goes on to explain that her uncle tried to rape her when she was 12 and that ever since, “I haven’t wanted any guy to touch me – not even my dad.”

The follow-up warning to Trish’s story directs the reader to read Romans 1:24-32, in which Paul condemns homosexual behavior.

Wedged into the pages of the book of Jeremiah is a profile by “Lorraine,” in which she discusses finding Playboy and Penthouse magazines belonging to her father in the basement.

“I couldn’t believe it when I found the box. Those horrible magazines!” Lorraine says.

“I couldn’t even look at my dad after I found it. My dad’s a Christian! Yet he’s got this porn stash. It’s like he’s got this secret life.”

The feature then advises girls in Lorraine’s situation to “talk with a trusted Christian adult about the issue. Pray together, and come up with a plan for what to do next.”

‘Cuddling opps’

Though there is a rising movement within Christianity to promote courtship over traditional dating, the “True Images” Bible, like a secular teen magazine, appears to assume its readers are dating – or wish they were.

The “In Focus” feature on dating has “Taylor” upset because her boyfriend may be “cheating” on her with another girl.

“Does he really think I don’t have a clue?” she laments. “But I can’t stand the thought of losing him.”

One of several personality tests throughout the Bible deals specifically with dating, entitled “The Perfect Date.” One of the creative date ideas is to go to a symphony concert under the stars, since it will provide “romantic tunes” and “cuddling opps.”

On the same page is a colorful graphic stating: “You gotta kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince!”

Another quiz helps young teen readers discover what their “Prince Charming” will be like – everything from how he should look to what an imaginary night on the town would entail. After tallying the answers, readers can then “piece together a portrait of your dream man.”

One group of Christian teens the Bible doesn’t appear to recognize is homeschoolers. Many of the scenarios and personality quizzes use hypothetical situations that would only occur in a traditional school atmosphere, such as “You’re sitting next to the prom queen in English class. What are your thoughts?”

‘Filthy graffiti’

Leonie Beltzer is a homeschooling parent from Sterling, Va., who sent an e-mail warning to other homeschool families about the “True Images” Bible.

“I was exceptionally shocked when I was previewing the ‘True Images’ Bible for our daughter,” Beltzer writes. “It would be very easy to just think that because it contains God’s Word we can just give it to our kids and let them read it without censorship (believe me, I nearly did but thank God I did not!). I send this out as a warning.”

Beltzer goes on to describe the oral sex and lesbian features, saying, “I felt very compelled to at least give you all a head’s up.”

Stacy McDonald is editor of Homeschooling Today, author of “Raising Maidens of Virtue” and the mother of seven girls.

“I find this ‘Bible’ comparable to filthy graffiti smeared across the Word of God. Instead of edifying young girls and encouraging them to godliness it actually violates their purity by its very text,” she told WND.

“Having seven daughters myself, I am deeply grieved that parents would encourage their young daughters to read such graphic narratives. I would not give this ‘Bible’ to my 20-year-old virgin daughter to read – much less a 13-year-old. Why should she have images of oral sex, lesbianism and rape in her mind?”

A spokesman for Zondervan defended the content of the teen Bible, saying the company would be irresponsible not to include the controversial subject matter.

“In putting ‘True Images’ together, our guiding principle was to be as edgy as the Bible is and no more,” Cameron Conant, Zondervan’s public relations manager for Bibles, told WorldNetDaily. “We’ve forgotten that the Bible is filled with sex and violence, and God’s redemptive role in the lives of sinful people. The Bible itself is a pretty provocative book.”

Zondervan worked with the Livingstone Corporation, a Bible content developer that has worked on many study Bibles, to put together the publication. Conant explained that Livingstone did extensive research on 13 to 16-year-old girls to identify the main issues of concern to them.

“Again and again and again, the issues that repeatedly came up were a lot of issues related to sex,” he said. “Today’s teens are just bombarded with, highly suggestive, highly sexual media messages every day.”

Stated Conant: “These issues are out there, and we need to make sure teens have a biblical view of sexuality. We felt it would be irresponsible not to address some of these specific issues, even oral sex and homosexuality, even for 13-year-old girls., Virtually every 13 to 16-year-old out there is dealing with these issues.”

Conant said Zondervan didn’t want to bury its “head in the sand” and act as if teens aren’t aware of the sexual issues addressed in the “True Images” Bible.

“We want to point them to God-centered solutions and responses to the things they’re seeing on TV and the things they’re hearing from their friends,” he said.

Conant said the “True Images” website receives “tons of e-mails” from children who read the Bible “and are benefiting from it.”

Said one e-mail Conant supplied to WND: “I really like this Bible. It made me realize that God does understand what a girl has to go through with everybody – parents, siblings, friends, acquaintances, boyfriends and temptations.”

Another teen girl stated: “I truly believe that God has blessed me with this Bible to get a better understanding about dating and flirting and about me and my body, and I thank you for making the Bible that way, in that kind of style.”

Assaulting purity

McDonald said she doesn’t believe Zondervan’s contention that “virtually every” teen girls is aware of and concerned about the matters discussed in the “True Images” Bible.

“If they do know [about these issues],” she said, “it’s the parents’ responsibility to share these things with their children in a protected way. It shouldn’t come from a teen Bible.”

The author said she’s concerned that a grandmother might purchase the “True Images” Bible and give it to her granddaughter, not realizing its content.

“What’s wrong with giving them just the Bible,” McDonald asked, “and then encouraging relationships where girls can ask questions of parents? If an issue comes up, it needs to be the parent presenting it in a godly way, not in some little story.”

Continued McDonald: “Not every 13-year-old girl needs to be discussing oral sex, so why would we put it in a narrative that is almost titillating?”

Even if the sidebar texts point the reader to Scripture that gives the biblical perspective on an issue, McDonald said, “in attempting to instill purity in a child, what they’re doing is actually robbing them. They’re assaulting their purity because they’re exposing them to way more than they need to be exposed to at that young age.”

Conant countered McDonald’s view, saying, “As much as we as parents want to shield our kids from the world, it’s very difficult to do that. Even if we’re doing all we can, these issues are going to come up, and what better way for them to come up than in the context of a Bible.”

McDonald believes parents can better protect their children by schooling them at home.

“If the ‘real world’ of public school exposes them to oral sex, pregnant 14-year-old friends, homosexuality, rape, fornication, etc., the answer isn’t to ‘talk about it’ in some hip teen book,” she said. “The answer is to protect them, which may mean homeschooling them.”

The Bible has a companion version for teen boys called “Revolution.

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Was Jesus Christ really a woman? New version of Gospels changes gender of ‘Son of God’ to female (WorldNetDaily, 050603)

[Kwing Hung: never more ridiculous!!!]

A publisher is touting a new edition of the Gospels that identifies Christ as a woman named Judith Christ of Nazareth.

LBI Institute says its version, Judith Christ of Nazareth, The Gospels of the Bible, Corrected to Reflect that Christ Was a Woman, Extracted from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, takes Thomas Jefferson’s edited Gospel one step futher by “correcting” the gender of Christ and God.

“This long-awaited revised text of the Gospels makes the moral message of Christ more accessible to many, and more illuminating to all,” says Billie Shakespeare, vice president for the publisher, in a statement. “It is empowering. We published this new Bible to acknowledge the rise of women in society.”

WND sought comment from the LBI Institute’s Stephen Glazier, but he did not return messages.

The new version, according to the publisher, revises familiar stories, tranforming the “Prodigal Son” into the “Prodigal Daughter” and the “Lord’s Prayer” into the “Lady’s Prayer.”

A passage compiled from Luke 2, with corresponding verses at the beginning of each sentence, says: “4 And Joseph went to Bethlehem. 5 To be enrolled with Mary, his wife, who was then pregnant. 7 And she brought forth her firstborn child. 21 And her name was chosen to be Judith.”

A passage on the crucifixion, from John 19, says: “17 And She bearing her cross went forth. 18 There they crucified Judith.”

A resurrection passage from Matthew 28 states: “1 Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to see the tomb. 5 But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Judith who was crucified.” 6 “She is not here; for She is risen.”

The book’s foreword says, “The Jefferson Bible is faithfully followed by the present book, with the corrections in the name and gender of Christ, the gender of God, and some of the parables.”

The publisher explains Jefferson used extracts of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John rather than the complete books, in order to tell a “linear, complete, organized story” that emphasizes the moral teachings of Christ.

The foreword says, “Events in the Gospel that do not relate to the moral teachings of Christ are often omitted. However, the basic narrative of Christ’s life, death and resurrection is maintained.”

Reader reviews on the book’s Amazon.com page included these:

* “One star because there is nothing lower. May the Lord have mercy on the writers!”

* “A friend with a Hebrew doctorate noted to me: ‘There is no feminine form of the name Jesus (or Joshua). Judith is the feminine form of the name Juda - or Judas.’ How perfectly fitting!”

* Reading the other reviews here, I can’t believe that this is being touted as being an advance for women’s rights. That is just not true. God sent his only SON, not his daughter. It is also true that God loves all of us, male and female the same. He created each of us as we are. We should not strive to become something we are not. This book truly offends me. I agree with the other reviewer, those that produced this book will be held responsible for those they deceive. I pray for each of them.

* May the Lord God punish the author of this translation and its publishers if they do not withdraw this herectic bible from print Amen.

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Despoiling Holy Writ (Christian Post, 050608)

Recently, the nation was shocked and outraged to hear allegations that U.S. interrogators of alleged terrorists at Guantanamo Bay prison had flushed a Koran down a toilet. The story, which was first run by Newsweek magazine, was later retracted. But last week the Pentagon confirmed some abuses of the Koran had occurred. According to an Associated Press report, the Pentagon acknowledged that a U.S. soldier “deliberately kicked a prisoner’s holy book”:

“Prison guards had thrown water balloons in a cell block, causing an unspecified number of Korans to get wet; a guard’s urine had splashed on a detainee and his Koran; an interrogator had stepped on a Koran during an interrogation; and a two-word obscenity had been written in English on the inside cover of a Koran.”

While I believe it is wrong for U.S. officials to desecrate the hallowed writings of any religious group, I am considerably more concerned about the defiling of the sacred writings of my own faith. Moreover, I can’t understand why there hasn’t been, at least by the Christian church itself, shock and outrage at radical feminism’s new translation of the Scriptures that depicts Christ as a woman, named “Judith Christ,” and God as a female. Could there be any more open and flagrant despoiling of Holy Writ?

According to a press release from the Law and Business Institute (LBI), which is the publisher of the new “Bible,” the Gospels are corrected to reflect Jesus as “Judith Christ of Nazareth” and includes: “The Parable of the Prodigal Daughter,” and “The Lady’s Prayer.” Other well-known passages are revised to acknowledge, as LBI vice president Bill Shakespeare says, “the rise of women in society.” (See related news story)

I am incensed by this blasphemy! My anger is not directed so much at the feminist’s propaganda set forth in this new translation, as it is toward the mutilation of Holy Scripture for the purpose of making God after one’s own image. Whether feminism, humanism, or whatever “ism” makes no difference; to put one’s hand to literally change the text of the Bible, to add or take away from it, is one of the highest sins against God.

Dr. George Sweeting, Chancellor Emeritus of Moody Bible Institute, once wrote: “For centuries God has permitted men to make their idols. Some idols are of wood and stone, while some are intellectual concepts. But God himself remains the same. Every person will one day stand before Him as He is, not as He imagined Him to be. What is God really like? The only way to know is through written revelation, the Bible.”

To change God’s written revelation of Himself is to venture into forbidden territory. Revelation 22, verses 18 and 19 strongly warn: “For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book. And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.”

In these passages we are told that God has perfectly revealed Himself and His will in the Scriptures. To tamper with that by adding or taking away from it is to incur God’s wrath and be removed from His eternal blessing.

Some may suppose this warning only applies to additions or subtractions made to the Book of Revelation. But such a view only trivializes the matter. The Book of Revelation was simply the last book in the cannon. Its truths are tied to both the Old and New Testaments. So the warning actually covers the entire Bible.

To take away the name “Jesus” and add “Judith” in the Bible is a damnable matter. To feminize God, when He reveals Himself in the masculine, is the height of presumption.

But even so, there are still other ways to commit the heresy warned against in Revelation 22:18,19. For instance, today there is a wide array of liberal theologians, higher critics of the Bible, as well as other pseudo-intellectuals in Christendom who have essentially rejected, allegorized or ridiculed away Genesis chapters 1 through 11, or the book of Jonah, or the miracles of the Bible, or the virgin birth and literal bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. Such have impugned upon the divine integrity of the Scriptures.

Interestingly, the Bible begins and ends with the same warning. In Genesis 2, God warned Adam he should follow His word precisely by not eating the forbidden fruit of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”. But Eve, when she encountered the devil in the guise of the serpent, added to and subtracted from God’s word. She subtracted from it when she told the devil that God had said that they could “eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden.” Actually God had said they could freely eat of all the trees, save “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” She added to God’s word when she told Satan that God had not only forbidden eating the fruit from “the tree of knowledge of good and evil,” but he had also forbidden it to be touched. God had never denied Adam and Eve touching the fruit. Eve’s subtracting and adding to God’s revelation was the beginning of her own and her husband’s demise. How amazing the Bible concludes with essentially the same warning in Revelation 22:18,19 -- follow God’s word precisely; don’t add or take away from it in any way.

Commentator John Phillips summarizes the matter quite well when he writes: “God’s wrath abides on those who tamper with His Word, cutting out the parts which offend them and adding their own ideas thereto.”

Indeed, truth is not a property dependent upon our own belief system. Instead it is sacred, absolute, unchangeable, eternal, and found in the Holy Scriptures. It is not found in some new and postmodern revision of the Bible.

__________________________________________________

Rev. Mark H. Creech (calact@aol.com) is the executive director of the Christian Action League of North Carolina, Inc.

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Olive Tree, Tyndale Release First Digitally Animated Bible, Encyclopedia for PDAs (Christian Post, 060208)

Bible Software Company Releases First Digitally Animated Bible, Encyclopedia Palm PC Version

Olive Tree Bible Software has partnered with Tyndale House Publishers to produce the market’s first digitally animated Bible and encyclopedia suite for Pocket PC and Palm OS devices.

“What impressed me most about the handheld is that nothing of the original essence of the PC has been lost. If anything, the graphics are brighter and crisper in the scaled down version,” said W. Victor Kore, Marketing Manager from Beers Publishing Group Tyndale House Publishers, in a news release by Olive Tree Bible Software on Feb. 1. “The user interface is well thought out too. From the main page, you are only a tap away from the Bible, the encyclopedia, timeline or multimedia. It is not only functional, but a pleasure to look at.”

iLumina Mobile is a PDA Bible Study software suite that offers users the NIV, NLT, and the KJV Bibles; a select number of video animations and tours, maps, timelines; and other useful information resources. The original PC iLumina Gold version was updated to support Pocket PC and Palm OS devices.

Olive Tree Bible Software provides Bible versions and study tools for Palm OS, Pocket PC, Smartphone and Symbian cell phones, and BlackBerry devices. They publish over 80 electronic translations of the Bible, as well as commentaries, dictionaries, eBooks, and parsing tools. The Bible is offered in various languages, including German, French, Spanish, Chinese, and many others. Original Hebrew and Greek texts are also available.

Tyndale House Publishers was founded in 1962 by Dr. Kenneth N. Taylor as a means of publishing The Living Bible and has since grown into one of the premier publishing houses in the industry. Tyndale products include the popular Left Behind series and numerous other New York Times bestsellers. Tyndale also publishes the New Living Translation Bible and many other resources for church and family. Tyndale House Publishers is located in Carol Stream, Ill., a western suburb of Chicago.

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BIBLE: The Limits of Conscience and the Authority of the Word of God (Mohler, 060308)

Last week Rev. Jane Adams Spahr was found not-guilty of ministerial misconduct, even after the openly lesbian Presbyterian minister had defied the teachings of her church by performing “marriages” for two lesbian couples. Given the current state of mainline Protestantism, the actions by the trial court were not completely unexpected. Nevertheless, this act of rebellion against the church’s law and the clear teachings of Scripture sets the stage for an even larger conflict when the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) holds its General Assembly in June.

Rev. Jane Adams Spahr is no stranger to controversy. In 1991, the Downtown United Presbyterian Church in Rochester, New York called her as co-pastor. That call was subsequently invalidated by the denomination’s General Assembly and its Permanent Judicial Commission. Nevertheless, the church then called her to serve as a “lesbian evangelist” and she established her ministry as the organization called “That All May Freely Serve.” That ministry was formed in partnership with Westminster Presbyterian Church in Tiburon, California. As the denomination’s news service, PCUSA News explained, “Since then, Spahr has traveled the country mustering support for the ordination of gay and lesbian Presbyterians and building a network of regional groups to help in the effort.”

The current controversy emerged as Spahr was charged with breaking church law by marrying two homosexual men in Canada. Since her ordination was not recognized in that country, and therefore her name did not appear on the marriage certificate, a church court ruled that it could not prove that she had actually officiated at the wedding.

In short order, she eliminated that defense by openly officiating at the “weddings” of two lesbian couples. She officiated at ceremonies for Annie Senechal and Sherrill Figuera in 2005, and the previous year had officiated at a ceremony for Barbara Jean Douglass and Connie Valois.

Her current trial took place before the Permanent Judicial Commission of the Redwoods Presbytery in California. The trial took place at the Church of the Roses in Santa Rosa, located about 65 miles north of San Francisco.

As media reports indicated, the church was often packed with Spahr’s supporters and those who were openly advocating for a rebellion against the church’s rules.

Stephen L. Taber, the attorney prosecuting Spahr on behalf of the Redwoods Presbytery, had argued that the trial was not over gay rights, but the right of the denomination to establish its own rules and structure for church discipline. “The burden on this commission is not to decide whether same-sex marriage is or is not appropriate for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.),” he argued. “The only question here is whether Rev. Spahr committed certain acts, and whether those acts are in violation of the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church.”

Taber was standing on firm constitutional ground as he made his case. After all, the denomination’s Book of Order defines marriage as a covenant between a man and a woman, excluding all alternatives. Furthermore, the Permanent Judicial Commission of the General Assembly ruled in 2000 that ministers may bless same sex “unions,” but may not call such unions marriage.

In presenting her defense, Spahr claimed a right to individual conscience. As PCUSA News reported: “Spahr, as the first witness called before the seven-member commission, was far from repentant for presiding over the nuptials of the lesbian couples. She said she was following her conscience, a call from God and the wishes of the ‘brides’ when she officiated at their weddings.”

In pressing her case, Spahr argued that the church’s rules that disallow same-sex marriage are unfair and unjust. “I can’t begin to tell you what it is to say to [same-sex couples] that they were married by the church, by the authority of someone representing the church of Jesus Christ,” Spahr told the court. “What it means for lesbian and gay people who are told for so long that they’re no good, that our relationships are no good. That has a profound effect on them.” She also claimed that the denomination’s rules limiting marriage to heterosexuals violates the church’s commitment to “love and hospitality.”

Spahr’s attorney, Sara Taylor, argued that the church had no right to judge Spahr’s actions. “The reformers were clear in their assertions that the authority of the church to discipline belongs not to the church but to Christ.”

Of course, this is hardly fair to the reformers and their witness. Nevertheless, the trial ended with the court acquitting Spahr by a six-to-one ruling that determined that Spahr was acting within her ministerial “right of conscience” in performing the same-sex marriages.

Beyond this, the court’s majority went on in a “concluding affirmation” to offer a direct challenge to the denomination’s rules. “We affirm that the fundamental message of the Scriptures and Confessions is the proclamation of the Good News of God’s love for all people. It is a message of inclusiveness, reconciliation, and the breaking down of barriers that separate humans from each other, and that this proclamation has primacy in the conduct of the Church.” In other words, the court turned its back on the Bible’s clear teachings that condemn homosexual activity as sin and on the church’s explicit rules that prohibit ministers from officiating at same-sex marriages—all in the name of “the fundamental message of the Scriptures and Confessions.”

The Spahr trial and the larger controversy point to the most basic issues that have created such an explosive crisis within liberal Protestantism and the denominations commonly known as “mainline” Protestantism. For years, the mainline Presbyterians have been debating issues of scriptural authority.

The foundation for theological revolution was set in 1967, when the denomination replaced the historic Westminster Confession with a book of confessions that replaced one common doctrinal standard with several—insuring a process of theological compromise and accomodationism.

In June, the 217th General Assembly of the denomination is to receive the final report of the “Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church.” This task force was established in 2001 and was charged with developing “a process and instrument by which congregations and governing bodies throughout our church may reflect on and discern the matters that unite and divide us, praying that the Holy Spirit will promote the purity of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).”

The group’s report, entitled Peace Unity Purity [or PUP], is, in effect, nothing more than a call for continuing conversation and the embrace of even greater diversity within the denomination.

Of course, Scripture stands at the very center of this controversy. The PUP report cites The Second Helvetic Confession and asserts: “we believe and confess the canonical Scriptures of the holy prophets and apostles of both Testaments to be the true Word of God, and have sufficient authority of themselves, not of [human beings].” Responding to this confessional statement, the group asserted: “We acknowledge that there is heated debate over biblical interpretation among Presbyterians who honor the authority of Scripture. In the midst of these debates it is important to remember that the consciences of us all are bound by the witness of Scripture to Jesus Christ. Even as it is important to preserve freedom of conscience and the interpretation of Scripture, such freedom is subject to standards . . . and must be exercised within constitutional bounds . . . .”

As should be obvious by now, the acquittal of Rev. Jane Adams Spahr should demonstrate conclusively the failure of this proposal.

In the first place, one must question the group’s decision to suggest that the heated debate over the interpretation of Scripture on issues of sexuality is found “among Presbyterians who honor the authority of Scripture.” Such a statement effectively implies that persons may deny clear teachings of Scripture, while still claiming to honor its authority.

By any measure, the acquittal of Rev. Spahr should demonstrate that a call for all ministers to bind their consciences “by the witness of Scripture,” does not avail. The presbytery of the Redwoods did nothing to require Rev. Spahr to subject her conscience to the constitutional bounds of the church or to the clear teachings of the Bible.

Rev. Spahr’s attorney cited the reformers of the sixteenth century as suggesting that the church must leave matters of ministerial discipline to God. This flies in the face of the actual writings and actions of the reformers. John Calvin, whose legacy stands as the very fountain of the stream that eventually produced the Presbyterian denomination, insisted that “we must be ruled by the Word of God.” Furthermore, “Seeing God will be served with obedience, let us beware and keep ourselves within those bounds which God hath set,” Calvin insisted. Martin Luther, famously standing at his own church trial at the Diet of Worms, famously told his judges that his conscience was “bound by the Word of God.”

The Presbyterian Lay Committee, a group of concerned Presbyterians who have been seeking to pull their church back to biblical and theological accountability, has referred to the PUP document as “a political solution to a theological problem.”

“Some persons who call themselves Christians, including ordained leaders of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), struggle with claims of the authority of Scripture,” the group argued. “They affirm Scripture as a guide and source of wisdom, but regard it as culturally conditioned and of human origin. Thus they place it alongside, and even, at times, under the judgment of other human authorities. They prefer to say, ‘Listen for the Word of God,’ rather than ‘Listen to the Word of God’ when reading the Bible in the context of worship. Persons who hold such beliefs clearly are not talking about the Scriptures that Jesus upheld and fulfilled and that his church has affirmed for more than 2000 years.”

As the Presbyterian Lay Committee’s argument concludes, “Making the denomination’s implicit pluralism explicit, by whatever inclusivist scheme, would admit but not solve our current disorder. Elijah’s counsel to Israel is precisely the word that the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) must hear. We must cease limping between two opinions. We must answer Christ’s compelling question: ‘Who do you say that I am?’ We must make a choice.”

The Presbyterian Lay Committee has it right—the denomination must make a clear choice. The acquittal of Rev. Jane Adams Spahr sets the stage for the denomination’s General Assembly to face the question squarely when it meets in June. Nothing less than the denomination’s witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ is at stake. If individual conscience is allowed to invalidate the clear teachings of Scripture, the denomination faces an unavoidable disaster.

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BIBLE: The Limits of Conscience and the Authority of the Word of God (Mohler, 060308)

As media reports indicated, the church was often packed with Spahr’s supporters and those who were openly advocating for a rebellion against the church’s rules.

The group’s report, entitled Peace Unity Purity [or PUP], is, in effect, nothing more than a call for continuing conversation and the embrace of even greater diversity within the denomination.

As should be obvious by now, the acquittal of Rev. Jane Adams Spahr should demonstrate conclusively the failure of this proposal.

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BIBLE: Biblical Authority: Must We Accept the Words of Scripture? (Mohler, 060322)

The most contentious debates among Christians are arguments over biblical authority. While Christians who accept the full authority of Scripture—even the inerrancy and infallibility of the biblical text—may debate issues ranging from baptism and church government to eschatology and spiritual gifts, the issues of greatest debate in our time fall along the fault line of biblical authority.

This is especially true when dealing with the issue of sexuality, and the question of homosexuality in particular. Those who argue for the acceptance of homosexual behavior and the blessing of homosexual relationships have to deal with the fact that the Bible straightforwardly condemns homosexual behavior. In light of this, some attempt to subvert the text by arguing that these texts have actually been horribly misunderstood for over two thousand years. Increasingly, however, some now concede that the Bible condemns homosexuality in every relevant text, but that Christians are no longer bound by the authority of these texts as we deal with the present moral crisis.

One scholar who takes this approach is Brian K. Blount, Richard J. Dearborn Professor of New Testament Interpretation at Princeton Theological Seminary. Professor Blount specializes in “cultural hermeneutics,” and he applies this approach to the issue of homosexuality and biblical authority in an essay entitled, “The Last Word in Biblical Authority.”

Blount’s essay is published in Struggling with Scripture, which Blount authored along with coauthors Walter Brueggemann and William C. Placher. The book emerged out of a symposium on the theological interpretation of Scripture in which the three were participants.

Blount begins his essay by suggesting that some persons simply must have the last word on any subject. “Many people treat the biblical words that way, believing that those words, all of them, must always be the last words standing. Now in matters of faith—in matters of understanding our human relationship before God and God’s moves to nurture, develop, restructure, and refine that relationship through the prophetic and incarnate Word—most of Christendom, I think, agrees that those inspired words are lasting words. But in matters of the proper way to appropriate those words of faith ethically, there is and has always been considerable discussion and debate.”

Well, give Professor Blount credit for honesty. When he looks to the Bible, he does not see eternal words that are to be received as fixed and determinate, but as a text that is to be divided between “matters of faith” and other, presumably negotiable issues.

In making his case, Blount points to the issues of slavery, gender, and sexuality as evidence that “even the inspired biblical authors, when they applied God’s prophetic and incarnate Word to their very human situations, allowed those situations to influence how they heard God and therefore how they talked to each other.”

Several clarifications must be inserted here. First, the Bible does not sanction race-based chattel slavery as practiced in many parts of the world, America included, throughout history. The Bible does seek to regulate slavery, but there is no way that slavery, gender, and sexuality can be linked as equal issues in terms of biblical interpretation.

Nevertheless, Professor Blount argues that when confronting biblical texts that deal with these issues, the contemporary church must not allow these words to be the last word on the subject. Instead, he argues that “ethical biblical authority is contextual biblical authority.”

The interpretive key, according to Blount, is the human spirit. “The role of the spirit is a constant,” he explains. “Laced into the fabric of human beings is that part of us that reaches beyond the boundaries of our flesh and blood and touches the essential voice of God’s own Holy Spirit. Did you ever hear someone say a room is wired for sound? We’re wired for God, wired by God with a human spirit that despite its limitations can be touched by God’s Holy Spirit. In every time, in every place, in every moment of history, the spirit plays this interlocutory role.”

He argues that the church should hear God’s voice “like an inaudible whisper—sometimes gentle, sometimes fierce—that jangles the nerves of the human spirit until, tensed and alert, it attends to what it is that God wants to ‘say.’”

Nevertheless, what God says “will be different according to the variable conditions in which the human spirits who encounter it find themselves.”

Note his argument carefully. He is suggesting that human experience is the key to interpreting scripture, and that the words of Scripture may take on different meanings in different contexts. The ethical teachings of the Bible, he asserts, are limited to specific times and specific places, where the prejudices and realities of any given time may shape the biblical text in unethical ways. When such texts are encountered, they “ought to be challenged when we find that they were influenced by their contexts in such a way that they are damaging, and not life affirming, in a contemporary circumstance.”

Professor Blount understands that he has set himself up for some difficult questions. Which words of the Bible are to be seen as living and authoritative and which are to be seen as ethically substandard? He accuses the contemporary church of wanting to remain in an infantile state, unwilling to acknowledge the reality of these issues and instead desiring a stable and authoritative text. “We’re too often not ready for the meat of mature considerations about the words of texts that were often right for their own times twenty centuries ago but may well be wrong for our time.”

This raises a most interesting question. Is Professor Blount arguing that, assuming his interpretive scheme, slavery was at one time ethically right, but is now to be seen as ethically wrong? When did this transition in the morality of slavery take place? Similar questions could be addressed to the other controversial cases he raises.

Sometimes, he argues that the Bible simply has to be put in its place. He cites Carlos Mesters to the effect that the poor and oppressed in Latin America have had to learn to put the Bible “in its proper place, the place where God intended it to be.” As Mesters affirmed, “They are putting it in second place. Life takes first place!”

“We’ve often made the biblical words the last word in the sense that none of them can ever change,” Blount argues. “Even if the words were on the mark for a first-century community but are no longer on target for ours, even when they have become like rickety, arthritic knees that don’t bend and twist so well in the new race we’re running for God, we treat them as if they just started competing yesterday. A last word can’t breathe; it can’t endure this marathon of living with the people of God who run in the presence of God’s ever-living, ever-sustaining Holy Spirit.”

Beyond this, Blount argues that treating the biblical words as fixed and enduring transforms them into literary artifacts. Over time, these words become fossilized and the faith becomes more like an exercise in archaeology than a living faith “that celebrates seeing God say and do new things in new times.”

To be clear about this, what Blount argues is that God is now doing and saying something different than he did and said in the past. Responding to new realities, new people, and new contexts, God is presented as leading His people in new directions, often in contradiction to where he presumably led His people previously.

For most mainline Protestant denominations, the issue of homosexuality is now where the question of biblical authority is most clearly encountered. When he gets to this issue, Blount makes some rather surprising concessions. “The New Testament’s words on homosexual behavior are also clear. They are words of condemnation; I don’t try to deny that. I don’t think anyone should,” he asserts.

Nevertheless, these words are to be seen as coming out of a “particular context” that is significantly different than our own. Thus, “I don’t think the words are any longer living, but are, rather, dead words if we try to read them without contextually understanding them today.”

This is where “cultural hermeneutics” serves as a license to liberate the church from the undeniably clear words of Scripture. Applying his tools of cultural hermeneutics, Professor Blount argues that the Apostle Paul “was inspired by God’s Word in a world where sexuality was understood in a radically different way from how it is understood today.” For Paul, homosexual activity was tied to idolatry and the “unnatural” dimension of homosexual acts related to the fact that they were not related to procreation. Blount argues that the Apostle Paul derived his understanding of sexuality from the larger secular culture of the Greco-Roman civilization. “He tied his understanding of sexuality to an understanding of sex acts that were properly condoned only when done according to the natural order designed for procreation or as a remedy for the burning passions of lust that apparently threatened the eruption of human bonfires all over the ancient world.”

Pushing further, Blount argues that Paul’s thoughts should be divided between his creation theology and his Christ theology, and the two theological strains should be seen as competing with one another in the text of Paul’s letters.

Brian K. Blount attempts to offer a hermeneutical rationale for denying the authority of biblical texts that condemn homosexual behavior. In the name of liberating humanity, he would liberate the church from the actual words of Scripture and look instead for an “inner dynamic within the biblical text that transcends the actual words.” This is why a doctrine of verbal inspiration is indispensable to biblical authority. If the very words of Scripture, in the original languages, are not inspired of God, and thus precisely the right words for the church throughout all time, then we are left in a constant battle to negotiate the meaning of the biblical text. Its meaning in one generation might be very different from its meaning in another, and generations to come might actually reverse the interpretation settled upon by Christians living in our times. In other words, God seems to be leading His people in many different directions over time, and the biblical text becomes a fabric that can be stretched in any number of different directions, all claiming to be led by the Spirit of God.

Professor Blount’s approach should be understood to be more honest than the arguments made by many others, who would seek to subvert the text by denying that the words actually mean what they appear to mean. Blount accepts that the Bible clearly condemns homosexual behavior, and he advises his colleagues that it is unwise for them to argue otherwise. Nevertheless, he then makes an astounding jump of theological imagination to suggest that the church should simply liberate itself from these words, and should do so in the name of God’s own Spirit.

We are reminded all over again that debates over these contentious issues are, at their very base, debates over the nature of biblical authority. Professor Blount wants to affirm some understanding of biblical authority, but his methodology actually places the human spirit and the interpretive community in the roles of greater authority. The biblical text simply has to give way to the “living Word” that the church now experiences.

How long will it be before similar arguments begin to emerge within circles that think themselves solidly committed to biblical authority? We can only wonder—and watch with great care.

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New Survey Reveals U.K. Christians’ Lack Of Basic Bible Knowledge (Christian Post, 060403)

London – less than a quarter of christians in the united kingdom possess enough knowledge of the bible to be able to place key events in the order they appear, according to the results of a new survey by the bible society released last week.

The christian evangelical organization carried out a survey of regular churchgoers, which revealed that 76 percent of people were unable to put a series of ten popular bible stories in the order that they appear in the bible.

Events used in the survey included noah’s ark, solomon’s building of the temple, and jesus feeding the five thousand, among other similar incidents.

The survey was carried out by asking the questions in a quick-fire quiz style, and was designed to assess the common assumption that christians possess an in-depth knowledge of the bible.

The survey results have been published to coincide with the recent publication of “the drama of scripture,” which is an spck (society for promoting christian knowledge) book that has been created in association with the bible society. The book aims to portray the bible as a drama containing six “acts,” including creation, sin, israel, jesus, mission, and new creation.

The director of program at the bible society, ann holt said, “it seems that even christians struggle to see the big picture when it comes to the bible – never mind those who never read it.

“the drama of scripture has been published to provide christians with some much-needed help in rediscovering afresh the significance of god’s word for living out their faith today. That is why we recently supported the launch of the book with the mass distribution of a booklet containing key extracts from the publication.”

The drama of scripture has been written by craig bartholomew and michael goheen, and is available online from www.spckonline.com or www.bibleresources.org.uk.

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New York, L.A., Atlanta to Host China Bible Exhibit (Christian Post, 060427)

LOS ANGELES – A Bible exhibit from China will be displayed in three key U.S. cities – New York, Los Angeles, and Atlanta – for close to two months with the goal to let the churches outside China learn more about the Bible ministry in the country.

China Christian Council and the National Committee of Three-Self Patriotic Movement of Protestant Churches in China will sponsor the exhibit that will highlight Christian witness in China from Apr. 28 – June. 15. The theme of the exhibit is “A Lamp to My Feet, a Light to My Path – China Bible Ministry Exhibition” and will open to the public Apr. 28 at the Crystal Cathedral in Los Angeles.

From May 19-24, the exhibit will be hosted by the Second-Ponce de Leon Baptist Church in Atlanta with a special opening address by former President Jimmy Carter. Next, the exhibit will be on displayed at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York from June 5-12.

The China Christian Council says the purpose of the exhibition “is to bear witness to how Chinese Christians love God’s Word, how the Good News in the Bible has been spread in China and how Christ’s body has been built up under the consistent guidance of the Word.”

The exhibit features six galleries with topics on the early history of the Bible in China, Bible publication after 1980, Bible distribution after 1980, Bible ministries for national minority churches, the Bible and church life, and Christian art works.

Containing nearly 1,500 years of Christianity in China, the free exhibit was first held in Hong Kong in 2004. Within six days, the exhibit was said to have drawn some 20,000 visitors, according to Amity News Service.

One of the highlights of the exhibit is the “imperial edition” of the Bible, a special New Testament published in 1894 and presented by a group of Christian women to the Empress Dowager Cixi of the Qing Dynasty.

Hosts of the exhibit include Azusa Pacific University, Christian Leadership Exchange, Crystal Cathedral, ECF International, Fuller Theological Seminary, Grace Church of Glendora, and Saddleback Church.

For more information visit: www.bibleexhibition.org

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The Bible Literacy Project Under Fire (Christian Post, 060501)

The Bible Literacy Project (BLP) has been promoting its textbook, The Bible and Its Influence, around the United States, and a visit to the BLP website informs one that their textbook does not “contain errors, use plagiarized material and claim urban legends to be scientific facts.” This clearly reveals that the BLP lacks credibility, as the textbook contains a number of errors, such as a contradiction of what Jesus actually said in Matthew and Luke about parables (p. 215 in the textbook).

The BLP textbook also asks students to question traditional Biblical teaching. For example, it asks “If God allows evil things to happen, can God honestly be described as good?” The textbook doesn’t leave this as a question, but then states that “This puzzle remains essentially unsolved.” (p.156) And among other problems with the BLP textbook, it states that the Book of Job “provides no clear cut moral or answer to Job’s situation.” (p.161) But how can anyone read the last chapter of Job (Chapter 42) and still say there is no clear cut moral?

Another problem with the BLP textbook is what it leaves out. On page 50, it quotes the Mayflower Compact as stating, “Having undertaken a voyage to plant the first colony,” when it actually states: “Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony....” What does it say about the BLP that it thought it important to leave out “for the Glory of God” and “Advancement of our Christian faith?”

Beyond the factual and other errors in the textbook, try and figure out whether the BLP is proud of the National Education Association’s support or running from it! The BLP website wants visitors to know their textbook is not endorsed by the NEA. However, the website also says its The Bible And Public Schools: A First Amendment Guide should be used with its textbook, and BLP vice-president Sheila Weber has proudly published that their Guide is endorsed by the NEA!

Dr. D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries has written a letter criticizing the BLP textbook as being “extremely radical” and containing “very anti-Biblical material.” Furthermore, a letter to an Alabama state legislator similarly raising concerns has been written by Dr. John C. Hagee, who holds three doctorates, including one from Netanya University in Israel. In his letter, Dr. Hagee, who is pastor of the 18,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, remarks: “My overview of The Bible and Its Influence is that this is a masterful work of deception, distortion and outright falsehoods.”

Dr. Hagee gives examples of how the BLP textbook is dangerous because it plants concepts in the minds of children which are contrary to Biblical teaching. He goes on to warn that “distortions, deceptions and falsehoods never produce moral, emotional, political or intellectual health....This book (The Bible and Its Influence) in the hands of children in public schools, whose intellect has not matured sufficiently to decipher the clever distortion of this book, would be greatly damaged. I believe this book would be of great value for advanced study in America’s theological schools as an example of literary ‘wolves in sheeps’ clothing’.”

Dr. Hagee concludes his letter by addressing the Alabama Legislature: “The acceptance or rejection of the intellectual, moral and spiritual poison of The Bible and Its Influence will be the choice of the Alabama Legislature. I pray the distinguished members of the Legislature recognize it for what it truly is...distortion, deception and utter falsehoods and disallow it to be placed in the public schools of the great State of Alabama.”

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D. L. Cuddy, Ph.D., has taught in the public schools and at the university level, and has been a Senior Associate in the U.S. Department of Education in Washington, D.C.

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Poll: Nearly One-Third of Americans Believe Bible Word-for-Word (Christian Post, 060522)

Although some recent surveys found that Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code has altered some people’s views of Christianity, a new Gallup poll reveals a long-standing decline in Americans who believe the Bible to be literally true.

According to the survey, about 3 out of 10 Americans continue to profess belief in a literal Bible today, which accounts a 10 percent drop over the past three decades. More than 1,000 adults were asked to describe their view about the Bible with 28 percent responding that the Bible is the “actual Word of God and is to be taken literally.”

Poll results saw a 45 to 49 percent increase among those who said the Bible is the inspired Word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally. However, the survey also recorded a larger increase of Americans who said the Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by man (13 to 19 percent).

Gallup broke down the surveyed sample to subgroups and found that younger people are less likely to profess belief in the Bible, word for word. Results showed 23 percent of Americans aged between 18 and 29 years believe in the actual Word of God compared to 36 percent of the more elderly bunch aged 65 and older. The unlikelihood of believing in the Bible literally also paralleled with education. Only 10 percent of postgraduates said the Bible is the actual Word of God while 39 percent of people with a high school or less education had the same affirmation. Belief in the literal Bible was also highest among those living in the South and lowest in the West.

The young and highly educated were highest with 58 percent in the belief that the Bible was inspired and that not everything is to be taken literally.

Over the last three years, the Scriptures have drawn a lot of attention since the release of The Da Vinci Code. Calling into question the lessons and truths taught by the Church, including the life of Jesus, the novel has put the Bible to the test, not so much for its factualness but how it is perceived by the people. A recent Barna report found that five percent of Americans said they changed any of the beliefs or religious perspectives they had after reading Brown’s thriller.

A report conducted by Decima Research for the National Geographic Channel saw higher figures in Canada where nearly one third believe The Da Vinci Code to be true.

Although the Gallup poll was conducted May 8-11, at a time when Brown’s novel had sold 60 million copies worldwide and the film version was soon to be released, declining numbers of those professing belief in the Bible as literally true has come as no surprise.

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Enhancing Your Bible Study – Verse-By-Verse (Christian Post, 060511)

Pastor, if you want to maximize your personal Bible study time, I’ve got a simple suggestion for you: verse-by-verse study.

It’s not hard. In fact, you can glean an enormous amount from just five simple steps. Just pick a passage, grab a pen, and follow these procedures:

1. Write a personal paraphrase.

Write out the verse in your own words. Do not use one of the modern paraphrases except to get the idea of how to do it. Stay true to the verse you are paraphrasing, and try to condense rather than expand it.

2. List some questions, answers, and observations.

List any questions you have relating to words, phrases, persons, topics, and doctrines in that verse. Write down any answers you find and also record any observations you make. Mark these as follows:

Q = Question

A = Answer

O = Observations

3. Find cross-references for each verse.

Using the cross-references from your study Bible or from Scripture memory, write down at least one cross-reference for the verse you are studying. Identify the word or phrase you are cross-referencing at the end of this chapter. Use a concordance if you do not have a cross-referenced Bible.

4. Record any insights you get from the verse.

Having thought through the words, phrases, and concepts in the verse, record any insights that you get from them. These could be further observations, words, and names that you have looked up and defined, or any other thought that comes to you. Let your imagination go and be as creative as you can.

5. Write down a brief personal application for each verse.

As you go through the verses, record the devotional thoughts that come to you. Later, when you’re planning a devotional Bible study, you can pick one of those thoughts and develop it further. Or, if a particular verse seems to meet an immediate need, go ahead and write out an application that is possible, practical, personal, and measurable.

My suspicion is that the notes you gather through your personal study time will eventually find their way into a sermon. And that’s okay! That’s a great way to maximize your time in the Word. But the real benefit of verse-by-verse study is your own personal refreshment. If you’re in need of refilling, pick a passage and get going – verse-by-verse.

This article is adapted from Rick Warren’s book, The Purpose Driven Church.

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The Bible told them so (Townhall.com, 060726)

By Mike S. Adams

Yesterday, a reader wrote to complain that, in my columns, I rely too often on the Bible as a source of knowledge. In fact, he stated that “The Bible was written and edited by still unknown authors who, at the time, thought the world was flat and a wheelbarrow was a modern invention.”

The assertion that the Bible was “written and edited by still unknown authors” is not terribly important. For example, the fact that scholars can’t agree on who wrote the Book of Hebrews—they generally agree on the authorship of all other Books of the New Testament—is hardly a sticking point for non-believers.

But more people are kept from faith by the idea that the Bible was written by an ignorant lot (with a little “l”) yet to benefit from the advances of science. The accusation that the Bible represents backward thinking is, in reality, an example of backward thinking. The God-inspired writers of the Bible have always been well ahead of the scientists—a scenario that hasn’t changed from the days of Moses to the days of Darwin, or even now in the 21st century.

Astrophysicist Hugh Ross helped me—through his brilliant writings—to compile a list that illustrates how authors of the Bible have remained far ahead of the scientists throughout the ages:

Leviticus 17:11 says, “For the life of the body is in its blood. I have given you the blood on the altar to purify you, making you right with the Lord. It is the blood, given in exchange for a life that makes purification possible.” For centuries after these words were written by Moses the scientists were bleeding the sick with leeches. How much better would humanity have fared, had these scientists listened to the Word of God?

Job 28: 24, 25 says, “For he looketh to the ends of the earth, and seeth under the whole heaven, to make the weight for the winds; and he weigheth the waters by measure.” Long after these words were written, scientists maintained the primitive view that air is weightless. Eventually they caught up to the Bible and realized that air has weight.

Job 38: 19, 20 says, “Where does light come from, and where does darkness go? Can you take each to its home? Do you know how to get there?” When God asked these questions of Job, he was letting him in on the secret that light actually travels. It would take the scientists many years to figure that one out without the guidance of the Holy Scriptures.

Ecclesiastes 1:6 says, “The wind blows south, and then turns north. Around and around it goes, blowing in circles.” Long after Solomon shared the truth that the wind blows in cyclones, the backward scientists were still claiming that it blew straight. They should have listened to Solomon. He was a very wise man.

Isaiah 40:22 says, “God sits above the circle of the earth. The people below seem like grasshoppers to him! He spreads out the heavens like a curtain and makes his tent from them.” Scientists once thought the earth was flat. Had they read the great prophet Isaiah, they would have learned much earlier about the “circle of the earth.” In fact, they could have formed a progressive “Round Earth Society” based on the Bible’s teachings.

Jeremiah 33:22 says, “And as the stars of the sky cannot be counted and the sand on the seashore cannot be measured, so I will multiply the descendants of my servant David and the Levites who minister before me.” The scientists believed there were only 1100 stars long after Jeremiah knew there were a closer to a billion.

I suspect that many of those who see me as a backwards (or back woods) fundamentalist will be shocked to read the passages in this short column. That’s because, until now, most of them have been too narrow-minded to take the time to read the Bible.

As I close in on my eighth reading of the Bible I am now well aware that it is hardly an impediment to rational thought and human progress. Instead, it has served as a God-inspired miracle allowing men to boldly go where no scientist had gone before.

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Truth Project Confronts Scripture Skepticism (Christian Post, 060822)

Major evangelical group Focus on the Family is launching the most ambitious project in its history to bring truth back into the modern world. The Truth Project is expected to transform thousands amid a wave a skepticism and uncertainty that has continued to arise against Scripture.

“With so few Christians having an accurate biblical worldview, many in the church are living lives that are, in many ways, undistinguishable from lives of non-believers,” said Dr. Del Tackett, senior vice president of Focus on the Family and The Truth Project conference host and speaker, in a released statement.

A Barna Group survey in 2003 discovered that only 9 percent of born-again Christians have a biblical worldview. A more recent Gallup Poll found that about 3 out of 10 Americans continue to profess belief in a literal Bible today, which accounted a 10 percent drop over the past three decades.

“As we look at the modern world, the church is every bit as much a problem as the culture,” said best-selling author and lecturer Dr. Os Guinness, in a promotional recording on The Truth Project website.

The Truth Project was born in response to the “stunning” statistics. The DVD-based small group curriculum is comprised of 12 one-hour lessons taught by Tackett who provides a starting point for looking at life from a biblical perspective. As Tackett described it, “It’s a transformation that will radically change the way [people] view the world and the way they view their life.”

Apologist and author Ravi Zacharias, who commended the new project, defined the single most important question people have: “What is truth?”

That question became more prominent in recent years especially as millions of Americans and people around the world were shaken by a wave of doubts caused by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Many religious leaders had affirmed that the widely popular novel and film was not so much the cause of questioning Biblical truth, but a phenomenon that uncovered the little truth and history of Christianity that believers knew in the first place.

“If you know the truth, when you read The Da Vinci Code, you’re not going to be swept off the path of righteousness,” Craig Smith, founder and president of Shepherd Project Ministries, told hundreds of believers at a “Deciphering The Da Vinci Code” conference held in May.

The fictional novel, however, changed the beliefs or religious perspectives of five percent of Americans, representing about 2 million adults, according to a Barna survey, and nearly one third of Canadians.

Focus on the Family’s Truth Project will examine truth in art, media, philosophy, ethics, history and other areas.

“We don’t’ know who we are until we know who God is,” commented theologian and author R.C. Sproul

Helping Christians and others facilitate the resource, Focus on the Family will be hosting conferences and training events throughout the country beginning Sept. 15 in Boston, Mass. Tackett will be teaching The Truth Project curriculum during the two-day event.

“We believe The Truth Project(TM) represents the possibility for exponential change within the body of Christ, as we expect that thousands will be transformed by this training - and we are excited to have the opportunity to share this life-changing program with our friends in New England,” stated Tackett.

For more information, visit www.thetruthproject.org.

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THEOLOGY: The Heretic, the Bible, and the Birth of the Modern World (Mohler, 060814)

In a very real sense, the modern world began 350 summers ago when a young man was excommunicated by the Jewish community in Amsterdam. The excommunication of Baruch (later changed to Benedict) Spinoza is one of the hallmark events in the development of the modern mind and modern secularism. The anniversary of Baruch Spinoza’s excommunication also serves as a reminder of the ideological roots of modern biblical criticism and the political agenda behind Spinoza’s critical approach to the Bible. Born November 24, 1632 to Michael de Espinoza and Hana Debora, his second wife, Baruch Spinoza was a son of privilege. His ancestors had fled Portugal and Spain during the Inquisition and the Spinoza family became pillars of the Marrano Jewish community in Amsterdam.

As a boy, Spinoza was noted for his brilliance. In his fascinating new book, The Courtier and the Heretic, Matthew Stewart quotes a Polish observer who noted the brilliant young Jewish boys of Amsterdam, speaking of them as “small as grasshoppers” who were also “like prodigies because of their unusual familiarity with the entire Bible and the science of grammar.”

No one knows exactly what happened between Spinoza’s childhood and adolescence as an orthodox “grasshopper” and his emergence in early adulthood as a scandalous heretic. As a matter of fact, the actual writ of excommunication, pronounced on July 27, 1656, provides little specificity. Instead, the declaration indicates that the ruling council of the Jews in Amsterdam had “for some time known the evil opinions and work of Baruch de Espinoza” and, having “endeavored by various ways and promises to bring him back from his evil ways,” nonetheless excommunicated him for his “horrible heresies” and “awful deeds.” The sentence of excommunication was the most serious ever handed down by the Jewish authorities of Amsterdam: “We warn that none may contact him orally or in writing, nor do him any favor, nor stay under the same roof with him, nor read any paper he made or wrote.”

Within four years of his excommunication, Spinoza would complete his most famous work, the Ethics, in which he would promote a theory of pantheism more extreme than anything yet encountered in Western thought. As Jewish scholar Yirmiyahu Yovel notes, “With these ideas Spinoza distances himself from both Judaism and Christianity, and even from the accepted philosophical traditions; he was a heretic not only from the point of view of the established religions, but also from the point of view of the freethinkers and from the several varieties of philosophic deism they were espousing at the time.”

As Yovel explains, the deistic heresies “have at least acknowledged the existence of a transcendent deity elevated above the world.” Spinoza, on the other hand, simply denied any distinction between God and the universe. “In short,” Yovel explains, “Spinoza proclaimed himself a heretic not only among the faithful, but also among representatives of the accepted heresy of his period, thus separating himself from all of the major spiritual currents of his time.”

In the end, Spinoza would deny any concept of a personal God, all claims to divine revelation, any claim of biblical inspiration, and the validity of miracles. In essence, he serves as the father of modern biblical criticism. As a matter of fact, Spinoza is the first major figure credited with proposing an exclusively secular reading of the Bible. The philosopher Leo Strauss acknowledged Spinoza’s legacy over three decades ago: “In our time, scholars generally study the Bible in the manner in which they study any other book. As is generally admitted, Spinoza more than any other man laid the foundation for this kind of Biblical study.”

Interestingly enough, the focus of Spinoza’s early heresies was Judaism, but he soon turned his critical attention to Christianity. Spinoza saw dogmatic Christianity as the great enemy of the modern age and his project of biblical criticism was expressly intended to liberate Christianity from its dogmatic moorings.

As Roy A. Harrisville and Walter Sundberg note, “Spinoza’s intent is clear, if indirect: false Christianity is dogmatic Christianity of any stripe. It is a child of unreason. For the sake of reason, dogmatic Christianity must be overcome.” Harrisville and Sundberg then explain why biblical criticism came to serve as Spinoza’s major proposal for removing the threat of dogmatic Christianity. “What is needed is something to direct the passion of the multitude from false religion to true religion . . . . Since the Christian Bible is the authoritative source for the Christian religion, its understanding must be reshaped by rational criticism. Spinoza’s political program of reform, then, is established in the exercise of biblical criticism.”

Most modern persons would doubtless be surprised to know that the main ambition behind the emergence of biblical criticism was political—to transform the society by removing the obstacle of orthodox Christianity. Yet, as Spinoza’s essays in his most notorious work, the Theological-Political Treatise make clear, this was precisely Spinoza’s ambition.

In Spinoza’s view, both Jews and Christians had simply mistaken the particularity of their religious texts for a claim to divine revelation. Since Spinoza believed in no personal God, it was impossible for God to have inspired the Bible in any sense. Instead, Spinoza believed that the Bible was simply a product of human authorship, reflecting all of the historical circumstances, prejudices, and faults of those authors. As a thoroughgoing rationalist, Spinoza believed that the goal of human existence should be to live by the service of reason alone. Nevertheless, he believed that the vast majority of human beings were driven by emotion and passion, and were thus unable to understand what was known by the rationalist elite. Thus, the masses are attracted to simplistic and fanciful ideas such as miracles.

Spinoza’s rejection of the miraculous was absolute. In the first place, he did not believe in a God who would act in any personal manner. Beyond this, his absolute denial of any distinction between God and nature meant that it would be impossible for any action or event contrary to nature to occur.

As Spinoza wrote: “The universal laws of nature are merely God’s decrees, following from the necessity and perfection of the divine nature. So if anything were to happen in nature contrary to her universal laws, it would also be necessarily contrary to the decree, intellect and nature of God. Or if anyone were to maintain that God performs some act contrary to the laws of Nature, he would at the same time have to maintain that God acts contrary to his own nature—than which nothing could be more absurd.”

The idea of a supernatural deity who revealed himself in the Bible is nothing more than superstition, Spinoza insisted. And superstition is “the bitter enemy of all true knowledge and true morality.”

Spinoza denied the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and the inspiration of the Scriptures as a whole. The prophets were simply men of elevated moral insight, whose actual worldviews and understanding of reality were often woefully deficient.

In one central paragraph, Spinoza offers his approach to understanding the Bible: “Now in exactly the same way the task of Scriptural interpretation requires us to make a straightforward study of Scripture, and from this, as the source of our fixed data and principles, to deduce by logical inference the meaning of the authors of Scripture. In this way, by allowing no other principles or data for the interpretation of Scripture and study of its contents except those that can be gathered only from Scripture itself and from a historical study of Scripture—steady progress can be made without any danger of error, and one can deal with matters that surpass our understanding with no less confidence than those matters that are known to us by the natural light of reason.”

As Spinoza scholar Steven Nadler suggests, Spinoza denies that the Bible provides “privileged knowledge of natural or spiritual phenomena.” In Spinoza’s view, the enduring message of the Bible is merely obedience to God, altruism, and submission to the divine predetermination of all things.

With specific reference to Israel, Spinoza denies that the Jews were in any way “elected” by God. Instead, they were simply the product of historical circumstance, benefiting from historical, geographical, political, and economic realities. The Torah was simply a fortuitous development that offered rules and precepts that aided the Jews in their endurance, survival, and national development. The Bible is simply the work of human writers who were often ill informed, prejudiced, and superstitious.

As Matthew Stewart argues, “In short, Spinoza presents a thoroughly secular and historicist reading of the scriptures—entirely unexceptional by modern standards—according to which the Bible is clearly the work of human hands, and the truths it relays are, in the main, not factual but moral.”

Armed with his new philosophy, Spinoza saw himself, as Stewart acknowledges, as “the spiritual leader of a global revolution.”

The foundations of modern biblical criticism, and the secular worldview from which these foundations emerge, are all present and visible in Spinoza’s writings. Indeed, one of the most fundamental distinctions common to the critical reading of the Bible—the distinction between meaning and truth—is well established in Spinoza’s thought. In Spinoza’s own words, “the point at issue is merely the meaning of the texts, not their truth.” Or, as Harrisville and Sundberg explain, “The distinction between truth and meaning is crucial to Spinoza’s argument. Truth refers to matters of universal significance that reason is able to discern regardless of time and place. Meaning refers to the cultural expressions and artifacts of specific peoples bound to time and place.”

Thus, the miracle accounts found in the Bible are described as meaningful, even if untrue. The “truth” of the Bible is found only in its call to “true virtue.”

Harrisville and Sundberg understand the revolutionary character of Spinoza’s thought: “In retrospect, Spinoza appears to be the trailblazer of a revolutionary position. In his work the Bible has become the object of historical science. This science is unalterably opposed to the proposition that the foundation of biblical study is revealed religion. The only proper foundation of religion is human reason.”

Further: “The motivation for historical criticism of the Bible is clear. It is a primary means to free society from the destructive force of religious passion. That is to say, the purpose of this new exegesis is not proclamatory or dogmatic, but political. The content of the Bible is investigated with an eye firmly fixed on its social effect. By undercutting religious passion, Spinoza encourages doubt. From doubt, Spinoza believes there will spring the social good of tolerance.”

Thus, the anniversary of Baruch Spinoza’s excommunication in Amsterdam 350 years ago serves as a reminder of the radical roots of modern biblical criticism—and of what little remains when divine revelation is denied. The Bible is left as nothing more than a “meaningful” witness to the religious passions of the ancients, marked by all of their own prejudices, faults, and misconceptions.

Once again, we face the basic fault line in modern thought—the line between the belief that the Bible is indeed the written Word of God and the belief that the Bible is nothing more than a fallible moral witness. Matthew Stewart is absolutely correct in noting that Benedict Spinoza’s concept of biblical criticism is now seen as “unexceptional” in the modern secular academy. Beyond this, Spinoza’s distinction between meaning and truth has found its way into all too many pulpits, churches, seminaries, and denominations. We can only hope that a reminder of what took place in Amsterdam 350 summers ago might serve to remind the believing church of what is at stake today.

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American Christians Urged to Share Bibles Amid Troubling Statistics (Christian Post, 061124)

A ministry with the mission to share Christian books in countries lacking theological resources has launched a project to help American Christians share Bibles in areas where the average third world pastor has zero Bibles.

Christian Resources International (CRI) executive director Fred Palmerton was troubled by statistics from Christian Booksellers Association and Zondervan Publishers which indicate that the average American Christian owns nine Bibles while the average third world pastor owns zero Bibles.

In reaction, CRI has launched Operation Bare Your Bookshelf, a project that makes it easier for American Christians to send Bibles and Christian books to believers overseas.

The ministry would send mailing materials as well as the actual request letter for Bibles to the interested American Christian after the person fills out an online request form.

According to CRI’s “extensive first-hand” reports gathered over the past 50 years, the average developing church has at most access to one copy of the Bible which is often shared with other pastors, and perhaps one or two theological books.

The Michigan-based ministry receives more than 250 letters a month from pastors or Christians overseas for Bibles and Christian books, with some pastors not having even a New Testament.

CRI’s Palmerton said that everyday more than 122,000 people become Christian – most from Africa, Asia, and South America. However, these new Christians attend churches where the pastor does not even have a Bible.

Doug Burnie, a CRI volunteer, regularly uses old ambulances and school buses to Guaymas, Mexico, to donate Bibles and Christian books to churches, charities, clinics, and schools. Burnie found out the second time he met a Mexican pastor that the pastor had traveled 800-miles to Guaymas to receive the free Christian books. The pastor said he had shared the11-pound bundle of books he received the first time with six other pastors in his community.

While pastors such as the one Burnie met in Mexico go without Bibles and Christian resources, the average American Christian has nine Bibles. The nine Bibles usually include Bibles in different languages, study Bibles, children’s Bible, Baptismal Bibles, confirmation Bibles, bridal Bibles, and old Bibles that have been replaced by newer versions.

“The resources that are desperately needed in the developing church already exist,” said Palmerton in a statement. “They are gathering dust on the bookshelves of American Christians.”

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Meet the New Bible for the Postmodern Culture (Christian Post, 070202)

We’re not only trying to think outside the box; we are not starting within one, says the team behind a new Scripture translation project for the postmodern culture.

“The Voice” project will release its third book - The Voice of Matthew - this month. Coming from the translation of a Jewish believer, Lauren Winner has incorporated her own conversational writing style to tell the story of Matthew in a fashion that reads like a novel.

An excerpt from The Voice of Matthew reads:

Jesus: It is written, “Man does not live by bread alone. Rather, he lives on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” (Matthew 4:4)

(commentary)The point, of course, is not that Jesus couldn’t have turned these stones to bread. As you will see a little later in our story, He can make food appear when He needs to. But Jesus doesn’t work miracles out of the blue, for no reason, for show or proof or spectacle.

“Her take on what Matthew was saying, this gospel [having been] written specifically to Jews, is really helpful - the insight she lends to the story,” said Chris Seay, a leader in the emerging church discussion and whose vision spearheaded the milestone voice project.

Numerous translations of the Bible already exist and it’s the best-selling book of all time. But Christian leaders in the postmodern culture are not a fan of the current translated word. They are not interested in just presenting Biblical facts and truths in their preaching. They want to tell the entire story of the Bible just as Jesus did. Jesus taught through parables and metaphors. Today’s translations consist of irrefutable fact statements, according to The Voice website (www.hearthevoice.com).

“What we miss too often [in Scripture] is the narrative and the poetry and the beauty,” Seay told The Christian Post as he described his vision birthed 15 years ago. “What would it be like if we have scholars that worked with poets and storytellers and fiction writers in the translation process so that we not only get the translation of the words right but we really nail the beauty and the poetry of the story?”

Current translations tend to homogenize the books of the Bible, Seay said, when the Scriptures are actually very diverse in terms of literary style.

The Voice project comes at the point of impact where the modern church, with its tradition and stability, collides with the developing church of the future, according to project’s website. “This is our effort to help work through these changes and to focus attention on God’s word to us.”

Seay is now recapturing what was lost - the passion, grit, humor and beauty of Biblical stories - in the first-of-its-kind retelling of the Bible for the emerging church.

The Voice project was launched just after Easter of 2006 with The Last Eyewitness and The Dust Off Their Feet, which is a translation of the second half of the gospel of John. The text includes illustrations and commentary.

Best-selling author and intellectual leader on the emerging church Brian McLaren translated the book of Acts and is now working on Luke, just as Luke wrote both Luke and Acts.

Seay wants to preserve the unique voices throughout the translations, hence the project name. “Most translations were translated [written] word, but this is a more active and speaking word,” noted Seay.

So far, translated texts from The Voice project have been well received by churches. But Seay predicts some critique may come since the translations, paraphrases, and cultural context can be easily misunderstood by some church leaders.

The emerging church in general, however, is often misunderstood.

The most common misunderstanding, according to Seay, is that the emerging church is on the far extreme left or right. But one cannot think of the emerging church in the typical liberal/conservative world, he said. Another common misconception is that the emerging church is only about “hip and cool.”

“The truth is, we’re engaged in people’s lives,” explained Seay who said the movement emphasizes social justice.

And believers in the 21st century movement do not embrace the term “emerging,” he noted. “We talk about ourselves as ‘missional.’”

Seay, a third-generation Baptist who pastors Ecclesia church in Houston, Texas, believes church communities will pop up all over the country that have a keen focus on the needs of the local community, AIDS, Sudan, famine and other such issues.

“They’re going to think outside the box and be ready to act.”

Meanwhile, “missional” Christians can watch for The Voice’s entire Bible translation in 2009.

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New ‘Postmodern’ Bible Targets Seekers, Evolution Advocates (Christian Post, 070302)

American culture has been “hijacked by extremists” - atheists and fundamentalists - one author believes. That leaves a lot of people in the “middle ground” where although there may be a belief in Jesus, their interests are far from conventional Christianity.

A new Bible series is now targeting that middle ground. The first volume of a “postmodern” edition of the Bible was released this week, reaching out to seekers and skeptics. And it also invites people of different faiths and those who believe in evolution.

“You see, I believe that if Jesus was alive today, he would understand that his ancestors, just like ours, were beasts,” says Ruth Rimm, author of the new The Lost Spiritual World series.

When Rimm, a high school teacher in the Bronx borough of New York, became a Christian, she wanted to give believers who are in “the middle” a place to go – a place not threatening and of comfort. Rimm professes belief in Jesus and in evolution, which some Christians are debating as theory and not scientific fact.

Coming from such a controversial standpoint, Rimm also recognizes that her new Bible series is controversial. “I would have been burned at the stake for this book … had I lived in another time or place,” she says.

But Rimm argues that her book is appropriate for this era. “At no other time in human history was a book such as this possible.”

Rimm is one of many people more interested in spirituality than traditional religion in the postmodern era.

A UCLA study had shown that the majority of college students said they have an interest in spirituality and believe in the sacredness of life. The high interest in spirituality, however, did not necessarily amount to highly religious students. A 2006 Barna study found that the majority of young adults have become spiritually disengaged, not attending church or reading the Bible. And movements outside of the traditional forms of church, such as the emerging church movement, are growing.

“Most Americans would rather discover the spiritual truths behind the religious metaphors, especially given how fundamentalism is impacting public life with a narrow view of religion,” Rimm says.

Chris Seay, a leader in the emerging church discussion, says followers of Jesus are not going to take this new Bible series “very seriously.”

And although it markets a “postmodern” edition and has a postmodern feel, Seay says that it does not fit the “emerging, new sciences, quantum physics” but rather is mostly about the “old sciences” such as evolution. He also notes that “spiritual people” are most likely to say that the miraculous is possible, as opposed to what Rimm presents, which is not to take the miracle stories literally.

Such perspectives are a “modern argument,” says Seay.

Still, Seay, who recently spearheaded a new Scripture translation project (The Voice) for the postmodern culture, recognizes that Rimm’s work caters to a large need in today’s culture.

“I think that the understanding that there is this need for middle ground and a place for dialogue - not just a place where someone who would tell you what they believe - is really important in a postmodern world,” he says.

Martin Kierschenbaum, director of marketing for the Global Renaissance Society, Rimm’s publisher, explained that the intent of The Lost Spiritual World is to invite people who come from different traditions, including an evolutionary perspective, to just look at the Bible.

The first volume on the Gospel of Mark, released Monday, features the complete gospel in the Scholars Version, which Seay notes is a largely unfamiliar translation, and adds artwork and commentary. The additional side commentaries cater to audiences that may not view the Bible the way it is presented in its many popular translations.

Miriam Therese Winter, a bestselling composer and professor of spirituality at Hartford Seminary, says the new series underscores how younger artists and writers are exploring the world’s religions “not as traditional believers, but as spiritual seekers. They are rediscovering the spiritual and mystical core common to all traditions,” according to a news release.

“Even though I disagree radically on a lot of their conclusions,” Seay says, “anything that encourages people to talk about who Jesus is, I’m ultimately for. The way Jesus put it, ‘those who seek will find.’”

Along with the gospels and the first two books of the Old Testament, later volumes will present other faith traditions including the Torah, Buddhist sutras and Sufi mysticism.

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Bible League Announces 3.3 Million Bible Studies Completed in 2006 (Christian Post, 070322)

A mission group actively working in dozens of locations around the globe recently announced that nearly 3.3 million Bible studies were completed worldwide in 2006.

The Bible League – a ministry using Bible studies as the basis for evangelism, discipleship, and church planting – reported that an average of 9,032 Bible studies were completed each day in the more than 60 countries that it works in.

“We give thanks and rejoice, not only for all that God has done, but also for the faithfulness of His people who serve in and through Bible League ministries around the world,” said Mike Southworth, executive vice president of ministries, in a statement.

“I find it vital to remember that each Scripture provided represents a person whose life has been touched and impacted by God.”

Some 19.3 million Bibles were given out last year – a 12 percent increase from 2005, according to the group. In total, Bible League has given out more than 712 million Scriptures since its founding in 1938.

Bible League teaches the Word of God to people around the world through a series of Bible studies designed to lead them from evangelism to discipleship. The strategy behind the studies is based on the story in Acts 8 of Philip and the Ethiopian traveler.

“Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip asked. “How can I,” [the Ethiopian] said, “unless someone explains it to me.” So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.

(Acts 8:30-31)

New believers are taught side-by-side with local Christians to help deepen their relationship with the local churches and members as their understanding of Scripture increases. Bible study students receive a copy of the Bible when they finish the study.

Last year saw a significant growth in the number of Bible studies completed in certain countries. Most notably, Thailand experienced a nearly 300 percent increase over 2005 with 61,377 Bible studies completed.

The dramatic growth was attributed in part to strong efforts by Thailand’s ministry team, which visited local churches, met with church leaders and encouraged Bible studies in the heavily Buddhist country.

Significant increases in Bible studies were also seen in Cameroon, where the studies rose by 106 percent – from 34,818 in 2005 to more than 72,000 in 2006.

Puerto Rico witnessed a 67 percent increase with many testifying that the Bible Studies helped deepen their faith.

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, the Bible League team used innovative outreach strategies through church conferences, children’s festivals, hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and prisons to share the Gospel with its citizens in 2006. Overall, there were 20,000 more people who completed Bible studies last year compared to 2005.

“The political situation in Ukraine compels us to have flexibility, foresight, and the ability to quickly make adjustments to any situation we face,” said Bible League’s national director in Ukraine, whose name could not be revealed for security purposes. “Ministry must not suffer under any circumstances for we are obliged to fruitfully use whatever time we have to testify to the Gospel.”

Bible League is an international ministry with the three-fold function of evangelism, discipleship and church growth. The group provides Scriptures to people and teaches them how to read the Bible in their own language. Bible League works with local churches in more than 60 countries, teaching them how to engage people in Bible studies.

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Alabamians Beat Nation in Biblical Knowledge (Christian Post, 070326)

[KH: how awful!]

MOBILE, Ala. (AP) — Most Alabama residents say they have a religious faith, and a majority in a new poll showed they have a basic knowledge of the Bible.

For example, nearly 70 percent of respondents to last week’s Press-/sRegister/University of South Alabama survey correctly named all four Gospels.

“They don’t call it the Bible Belt for nothing,” said Keith Nicholls, a political scientist and director of the USA Polling Group, which conducted the poll.

The poll showed that Alabama residents know more about the Bible than other Americans.

Most Americans can’t identify even one of the four Gospels, according to polls cited by Boston University professor Stephen Prothero, who has received national acclaim for his recent book titled “Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know - and Doesn’t.”

The Press-Register/USA telephone poll of 404 adults statewide had a margin of error of 5 percentage points.

More than 70 percent of the Alabama respondents knew the location that the Bible identifies as Jesus’ birthplace - Bethlehem.

Only 16 percent, however, knew that President Bush was making a reference to the biblical parable of the good Samaritan when he cited the Jericho Road in his first inaugural address.

Prothero, whose work has received attention ranging from Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” to the cover of the current Time magazine, was impressed by the religious literacy that Alabamians displayed, although he noted it was something that he might have expected.

Still, he said, he was troubled that 30 percent of respondents attributed Benjamin Franklin’s adage “God helps those who help themselves” to the Bible.

“It’s not biblical,” he said. “I mean it in two senses. One is that it’s not in the Bible, but the other is that it’s actually opposed to the spirit of the Bible. The biblical teaching, in my view, is God helps those who cannot help themselves.”

In Mobile, the Rev. Christopher J. Viscardi, chairman of the theology and philosophy division at Jesuit-founded Spring Hill College, said religious literacy is a critical issue, given the growth of religious extremism globally.

“If we have certain illiteracies about our own tradition, even much more so do we have an illiteracy about other traditions,” he said. “It sets the stage for facile misinterpretations and misunderstandings and for taking what extremists present as the accepted interpretation of a particular religious tradition.”

Cecil R. Taylor, dean of the School of Christian Studies at the Southern Baptist-affiliated University of Mobile, said it upsets him to know “how biblically illiterate even students who come from Bible-believing, Bible-teaching churches are.”

Poll respondents who identified a religious preference were asked if they would like to learn more about the teachings and beliefs of their own religions. Forty-one percent said they wanted to learn more, while 59 percent said they possessed a “full understanding.”

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NAE President Backs Bible Text for Public Schools (Christian Post, 070401)

The new president of the National Association of Evangelicals has endorsed a hotly debated public school Bible textbook that was recently highlighted in Time magazine’s cover story about why the Bible should be taught in public school.

Leith Anderson, president of the evangelical association claiming more than 30 million people, described The Bible and Its Influence a work of “excellent scholarship” that explains the “value and relevance of biblical literacy for today,” according to the Bible Literacy Project, the textbook’s publisher.

“In The Bible and Its Influence, the Bible Literacy Project has produced an outstanding textbook that will both encourage literacy and open students’ minds to the significant role the Bible has played in shaping our modern civilization,” wrote Anderson, in a released statement.

“It provides a broad-based curriculum that explores the history, culture and content of the entire Bible.”

The text is to be used along side the Bible as a guide for students in public high schools to study the Bible as an elective in English or Social Studies. The Bible courses and the text are meant to educate students on the influence of the Bible and its content in history as an academic study rather than a promotion of religious belief.

Some secular challengers, however, have opposed the textbook arguing that it is biased and feels like it is “written as if I am a Protestant Christian teaching Protestant Christians,” as described by Jennifer Kendrick, one of the first Bible-literacy teachers in the nation, in last week’s Time article. Furthermore, opponents note that outside sources have to be brought in to balance its content.

Some Christians have also voiced disapproval of the text book, including radio talk show co-host Nancy Manno of the In Great Company, who said it “uses the Bible to advance a secular humanist agenda and a one world, pluralistic religion.”

Manno also said in a statement that she discredits the book’s author, Freedom Forum First Amendment Center Senior Scholar Charles Haynes, as an unreliable source for Christian input.

Despite such opposition, The Bible and Its Influence is in its first year and is being used in 83 school districts in 30 states. In total, Bible curricula are now being studied in 460 school districts in 37 states, according to Time magazine.

Others who support the text include Bishop Richard Sklba, chair of the Catholic Biblical Association and Marc Stearn, the general counsel of the American Jewish Congress.

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First Full Bible for Aborigines Aims to Reach the ‘Insides’ (Christian Post, 070509)

After nearly 30 years and more than 100 linguists, the first full Bible for Australia’s aborigines is now available.

The Bible in Kriol, the most widely-spoken indigenous language in Australia, was launched on Saturday at the 40th Katherine Christian Convention in Australia, according to Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

“They actually now have access to the entire text of the Christian Bible,” said Phillip Zamagias, director of the Bible Society in the Northern Territory in Australia, to ABC. “It means they can read it for themselves.

“They can really understand it and they can make their own choices about whether they want to follow Jesus as their Lord and savior,” he added.

It is noted that most of Australia’s 500,000 indigenous people adhere to the Christian faith, but they speak hundreds of different languages and dialects making the translation process a difficult task, according to BBC.

Kriol is often mistaken to be somewhat similar to English, there are often words that sound similar but have different meaning, explained Margaret Mickan, one of the translation project’s coordinators, to BBC.

As a result, translators emphasized that they strived to translate the Bible not just literally but culturally.

For instance, the Gunwinggu people do not associate the heart with the emotion of love, explained linguist Peter Carroll. Instead they use a word that means “insides.”

“So that to love God with all your heart was to want God with all your insides, and it was that use of the word ‘insides,’ not the word ‘heart,’ that established the right connection with emotions and made the translations effective,” explained Carroll.

The service at the launch event was conducted in Kriol with the Anglican Archbishop of Melbourne, Philip Freier.

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Bible Under Fire in Hong Kong for Sexual, Violent Content (Christian Post, 070516)

Hundreds of residents have flooded Hong Kong’s media decency watchdog group with complaints against the Bible for its sexual and violent contents.

Protestors call on authorities to reclassify the Bible as “indecent,” which would make it illegal for minors under 18 years of age to purchase and would cause the Bible to be wrapped with a statutory warning notice.

As of noon on Wednesday, Hong Kong’s Television and Entertainment Licensing Authority (TELA) said it had received 838 complaints about the Bible, according to Reuters.

“I can confirm that the complaints were received,” said a TELA spokeswoman to Agence France-Presse. “The thrust of the complaints was that the Bible was obscene, that different parts of the Bible were offensive to readers.”

TELA refused to give details of the complaints but local media say they refer to acts of violence, rape, incest and cannibalism.

The complaints are thought to have sparked from an anonymous website, www.truthbible.net, which said the Bible “made one tremble” from its sexual and violent content and had urged readers to press TELA to reclassify the Bible as an indecent publication.

Moreover, the website compared the Bible to a recent sex survey published in the Chinese University’s “Student Press” magazine, which asked readers if they ever fantasized about incest or bestiality.

The site had argued that the Bible’s sexual content “far exceeds” that of the column, which was labeled “indecent” by the Obscene Articles Tribunal.

The survey has sparked a storm of debate over social morality and freedom of speech in Hong Kong.

As for TELA, it says it is undecided on whether the Bible had violated Hong Kong’s indecent articles laws.

However, a Hong Kong protestant pastor is not too worried about the Bible’s decency status.

“If there is rape mentioned in the Bible, it doesn’t mean it encourages those activities,” said the Rev. Wu Chi-wai, according to Reuters.

“It’s just common sense … I don’t think that criticism will have strong support from the public,” he added.

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Israel Museum Displays Rare Old Testament Text (Christian Post, 070605)

JERUSALEM (AP) - A rare Old Testament manuscript some 1,300 years old is finally on display for the first time, after making its way from a secret room in a Cairo synagogue to the hands of an American collector.

The manuscript, containing the “Song of the Sea” section of the Old Testament’s Book of Exodus and dating to around the 7th century A.D., comes from what scholars call the “silent era” — a span of 600 years between the third and eighth centuries from which almost no Hebrew manuscripts survive.

It is now on public display for the first time, at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

“It comes from a period of almost darkness in terms of Hebrew manuscripts,” said Stephen Pfann, a textual scholar at the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem. Scholars have long noted the lack of original biblical manuscripts written between the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the latest of which come from the third century, to texts written in the ninth and 10th centuries, Pfann said.

Scholars can only piece together scraps of information on the period using translations into Greek and other languages, he said, “so to have a piece of the original text from this period is quite remarkable.”

The parchment is believed to have been left in the Cairo Genizah, a vast depository of medieval Jewish manuscripts discovered in the late 1800s in a previously unknown room at Cairo’s ancient Ben Ezra Synagogue. It was in private hands until the late 1970s, when its Lebanese-born American owner turned it over to the Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Special Collections Library at Duke University.

The manuscript is now on extended loan to the Israel Museum and is on display in the museum’s Shrine of the Book, which also houses the Dead Sea Scrolls.

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Poll: 1 of 3 Americans Say Bible Should be Taken Literally (Christian Post, 070526)

About one-third of American adults believe in the actual word of God and that it should be taken literally. And people who attend church more frequently are more likely to believe in the literal truth of the Bible, a Gallup Poll found.

According to the new survey, 54 percent of Americans who attend church weekly believe the Bible should be taken literally word for word. The more seldom church attendees are less likely to hold that belief with only 30 percent of those who attend church monthly and 8 percent of those who never attend church believing in the actual word of God.

Church attendance is highest in the South, the poll also noted. Thus, Southerners are most likely to believe in a literal Bible. Those least likely to hold that belief are Americans in the West (22 percent). Westerners are more likely to believe in the inspired word of God, but not literally so (50 percent).

A prime example of a denomination that can support the poll’s results is the Southern Baptist Convention – the largest Protestant group in the nation. Their “Faith and Mission” statement states, “The Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired and is God’s revelation of Himself to man. It is a perfect treasure of divine instruction. It has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter. Therefore, all Scripture is totally true and trustworthy.”

Forty percent of Protestants believe in a literal Bible while 48 percent of believe in the inspired word of God. Among other Christians, 45 percent believe the word of God is to be taken literally and 46 percent say the Bible is the inspired word of God.

Catholics are most likely to believe in the inspired word of God with 61 percent holding that belief and only 21 percent believing in a literal Bible.

The survey further revealed that the higher level of education one gets, the less likely the individual is to believe that the Bible is the actual, literal word of God. Those with a high school education or less are most likely to believe in a literal Bible (42 percent) compared to 20 percent of college graduates and 11 percent of post graduates. Someone with a lower education level is also least likely to believe the Bible is the inspired word of God with 41 percent of Americans with a high school education or less holding that belief compared to 57 percent of post graduates.

The Gallup Poll did not find a highly significant relationship between age and belief in a literal Bible. Americans aged 18-29 years are just as likely to believe in a literal Bible (29 percent) as those aged 30-49 and slightly less than those aged 50-64. Among Americans aged 65 and over, 35 percent said they believe in the Bible is to be taken literally.

Overall, the most popular view Americans hold today is that the Bible is the inspired word of God with 47 percent claiming such a view while 19 percent believe the Bible is a book of ancient fables, legends, and history as recorded by man.

Survey results are based on aggregated data from surveys in May of 2005, 2006 and 2007, totaling a sample size of 3,010 adults, aged 18 and older.

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Theologians Disturbed by ‘Politically Correct’ German Bible (Christian Post, 071105)

A politically correct German Bible which emphasizes gender equality and social concerns is still sparking controversy a year after its release.

The “Bibel in gerechter Sprache,” or the “Bible in equitable language,” is a modern translation that makes women more visible, “corrects” anti-Semitic sentiments, and modernizes social issues such as class difference.

Instead of Jesus referring to God as “Father,” he says “our Mother and Father who are in heaven.” Also, Jesus is no longer referred to as the “Son” but rather the “child” of God, according to Catholic World News.

“The Bible doesn’t only offer paradigms, but rather it speaks to the heart of people’s existence,” said Pastor Margit Buttner, according to Germany’s Deusche Welle news agency.

“When that’s suddenly called into question, when suddenly I’m not supposed to pray ‘our Father in heaven,’ but am told: Jesus instructed his male and female disciples, you should pray: Our Father and Mother in heaven – that can put off people.”

The new translation consistently mentions women wherever men are mentioned and even refers to female and male rabbis when the first women rabbis were not ordained until the 1970s.

Catholic theologian Helen Schungel-Straumann, a feminist, said she disapproves of the new translation because it distorts historical truth, according to Deusche Welle. She contends understanding the patriarchal society which the Bible takes place in is important to grasping the text.

However, she was favorable about the translation moving away from the traditional view that God is male.

The authors of the translation contend justice is the main topic in the Bible and the changed text on gender, Judeo-Christian dialogue, and social justice help make the main topic in the Bible more justice.

The 2,400-page book was published last fall.

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Christian Bookstores Refuse to Sell Gay Study Bible (Christian Post, 071126)

Conservative Christian bookstores are refusing to sell copies of a new Bible study guide that challenges standard New Testament translations that teach gay sex is sin.

U.S. distributor God’s Word to Women has banned the Australian publication and withdrawn another Bible translation by the same publishing company, Smith and Stirling, for promoting a lifestyle contradictory to scriptures, according to the Australian newspaper The Age.

Moreover, Australia’s largest Christian retailer, Koorong, said it is unlikely to carry Ann Nyland’s Study New Testament for Gay, Lesbian, Bi, and Transgender if the version proves controversial.

In the study guide, Nyland contends that the word “arsenokoites” has been wrongly interpreted to mean homosexual. According to the classical Greek lexicographer, the word’s meaning is one who anally penetrates another and does not exclusively apply to males, according to The Age.

She further claims that most New Testament translations are based on a lack of understanding of Greek word meaning, context, and disregard for academic research.

Because of Nyland’s authorship of the gay study Bible, two American scholars have withdrawn their endorsements from her other works.

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