Faith: Bending the Bible a bit

WASHINGTON, May 29 (UPI) -- Nothing seems more difficult in religion than separating fads from the holy. Even evangelicals are not immune from the temptation to have the Bible bent just a bit in an attempt to accommodate fads.

To say it outright, this commentator shares the concern of "100 Christian leaders," who have just refused to endorse a new Bible translation called Today's New International Version.

The TNIV, as it has come to be known, is produced by Zondervan Publishers of Grand Rapids, Mich., and the International Bible Society.

Neither institution could be accused of excessive liberal leanings. Their new translation, aimed at more conventional Christian audiences, avoids egregious lapses such as the Oxford New Inclusive Translation's references to "God the Father-Mother."

But the "100 Christian leaders," including Charles Colson, founder of the Prison Fellowship Ministries, do have a point with their complaint that "the TNIV obscures many biblical references to 'father,' 'son,' 'brother' and 'man.' To accomplish this, the translators have inserted English words into the text whose meaning does not appear in the original languages.

"The result is that in hundreds of verses, the TNIV changes language with masculine meaning in the original Greek to something more generic."

Often important theological nuances become casualties of this redaction process you might charitably call "p.c. lite."

For example, Revelation 3:20 reads in Zondervan's much older New International Version, which is the favorite of evangelicals:

"I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me."

Just to avoid male masculine pronouns, the TNIV translators changed this important sentence to: "I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with THEM, and THEY with me."

As the TNIV's critics have pointed out, this mistranslation of the Greek singular pronoun "autos" ("he, him") misses the teaching of fellowship between Jesus and the individual believer.

Hundreds of similar examples can be found on the Web site of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood -- www.cbmw.org.

However, this column is intended to go beyond the conventional conservative Christian critique of political correctness and especially kowtows to feminist ideology.

These concerns are fashionable in North America and Western Europe and linked to quirks of the English language.

Travel to Africa, Asia or South America, where Christianity is growing robustly, and you will encounter bewilderment over the way the West's gender war has been allowed to pollute even sacred spaces.

Suddenly texts considered holy for thousands of years were warped to fit the demotion of the male in the eyes of the postmodern world. How do you explain this to societies with positive views of fathers and brothers -- societies that consider the Bible their holy book, too?

How do you explain it even to some Western societies such as Germany where everything has a gender -- a table masculine, a machine feminine, and a bed neuter?

You should see the linguistic acrobatics German feminists torture themselves with as they strive to attain their American sisters' level of victimhood.

Since all nouns have either male or female endings -- "Priester" for a male priest, "Priesterin" for his female colleague -- you do not reach the critical point of sex discrimination until you try to fit male and female priests (plural) into one headline.

You could, of course, use both forms side by side, but that would be too long. So to be truly politically correct you butcher the poor word by inserting a capital "I" into its middle. Then you have "PriesterInnen" (priests in the plural, male and female merrily baked into one).

Most Germans find this ridiculous -- and thankfully don't use it.

When this correspondent was in seminary in Chicago, the ecclesial gender war had just begun to engulf Lutheranism. One morning, feminist students and their mellow male allies wearing armbands marched out of chapel almost in lockstep because the Psalter had not been sufficiently neutered.

Foreign seminarians also noted curious hymnic hiccups resulting from the feminists' attempt to replace the Almighty's male personal pronoun with "God," while others cheerfully continued to sing "He."

Then there was a time when a young woman celebrant opened the Eucharist part of divine service with a new Trinitarian formula -- not "In the name of the Father, the Son and the Hole Spirit," but "in the name of the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sanctifier."

At this point it was the conservatives' turn to leave because this statement deprived Christ of his maleness and reduced him to only one of his roles -- that of redeemer, while assigning creation exclusively to the Father, though that's not what he was called.

Yet the Bible teaches that before his incarnation, Christ was the very agent of creation: "All things were made through him" (John 1:3).

At that point some alien seminarians introduced the idea that perhaps one should leave the ancient texts and liturgies intact but instead accommodate gender sensibilities of American believers by invoking the Holy Trinity in German, French, Spanish or any of a host of other European languages.

True, Father, Son and Holy Spirit -- in German: Vater, Sohn und Heiliger Geist -- will still be masculine.

But taken together they would be DIE Dreifaltigkeit, LA Trinité, LA Trinidad. There you have it: It takes three males to make one female Trinity -- that is, if you really want to play games with God's name.