In partnership with others, the extremely liberal National Council of Churches (NCC) has recently conducted an ambitious update of the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) translation of the Bible, called the “NRSVue” or NRSV Updated Edition.
But the NCC is not an academic, intellectually responsible, or non-partisan organization.
We at IRD have documented over the years how, despite its name and church ties, the NCC is largely a divisive, extremely liberal, clearly partisan U.S. political activist group. The liberal NCC has repeatedly promoted hard-left stances on homosexuality, abortion, and other matters, even opposing the official stances of its affiliated denominations.
Jim Winkler, the NCC’s President and General Secretary since 2013, has been notorious for his extreme ignorance and misrepresentations of Scripture as well as very basic matters of the official theology of his own United Methodist Church. He views “so-called Christian academies and home schooling” in America as similar to extremist Islamic madrassahs in Pakistan.
The NCC Governing Board was led by its radical former board chair, United Church of Christ head honcho John Dorhauer, in its process for approving the NRSVue translation update. Dorhauer’s baseless, paranoid rantings are a matter of public record.
We understand that the thousands of revisions of this liberal group’s updated NRSVue Bible translation for the sake of “modern sensibilities” were not all bad, and that the project included some serious and theologically orthodox scholars.
But this track record extreme ideological stridency and intellectual sloppiness raises serious questions of trusting if the liberal NCC’s updated NRSVue has stuck to honest translation or strayed into reshaping the Bible to reflect liberal biases. How reliable, or liberally biased, is the NRSVue Bible translation?
In this guest column below, the Rev. Arthur Collins addresses how the liberal NCC’s NRSV Updated Edition (NRSVue) translation significantly dilutes the meaning of two key words related to homosexuality, relying on more extensive analysis by New Testament scholar Robert Gagnon (which in turn cited even liberal scholars in support of his points). Professor Gagnon’s The Bible and Homosexual Practice has been credited with definitively, once-and-for all discrediting any serious scholarly attempts to argue that the Bible does not really condemn consensual homosexual practice.
Arthur Collins is a retired elder in the Indiana Annual Conference. He has an MDiv from Asbury Theological Seminary and a PhD from Indiana State University. In addition to blogging about the state of The UMC, he writes a lot about church history — especially the English church tradition, language, and Scouting ministry. He plays several instruments badly, can cook like nobody’s business, and has been married for 48 years to a very patient woman. This article originally appeared on his personal blog. Reposted with permission.
UM Voices is a forum for different voices within the United Methodist Church on pressing issues of denominational and/or social concern. UM Voices contributors represent only themselves and not IRD/UMAction.
An updated version of the NRSV is now available, and Bible students are giving it a lookover. The NRSV was itself an update of the RSV, which was a modernization of the KJV and its American offspring. The new revision does some interesting things to a couple of NT terms relating to homosexuality, softening the edges and making it easier to say that the NT doesn’t condemn same-sex intercourse. For instance, the Greek arsenokoitai has been muted to “men who engage in sexual immorality,” when the actual meaning is “men who have sex with men.” The revisers say the term in the original Greek is unclear; it isn’t. Arsenokoitai was coined by rabbis of Second Temple Judaism (the translators of the Septuagint), and then picked up by Christian teachers. It was coined specifically to refer to behavior that Jews and Christians highlighted as wrong, but which the culture around them treated in more nuanced ways. Likewise, the revisers of the NRSV have rendered the NT Greek malakoi as “male prostitutes,” which locates the basic wrong not in the sexual behavior, per se, but in its being offered for money. And, of course, one may prostitute one’s body with either sex. But malakoi (rendered “Sodomites” in the KJV) means “soft men,” effeminate men, implying men who offer themselves sexually to other men – whether or not money is directly involved.
Such controversies are not new, though the focus on sexuality is of our age. When the Puritans were agitating for a new English translation of the Bible, King James proposed to give them one, but then he rigged the game against them. They wanted a Bible that translated ekklesia as “congregation” rather than “church” and rendered episkopos as “overseer” rather than “bishop.” They were congregationalists and opposed to bishops. (Interestingly, the Geneva Bible – their preferred translation – rendered episkopos as “bishop” in 1 Timothy 3 and other places.) King James ordered that “certain comfortable old church words” not be changed. The KJV is an amazing achievement, but reading the instructions to the translators is an enlightening exercise.
Establishing what the Bible says is not merely a matter of choosing the right words in translation, of course. It also is a matter of agreeing upon the meaning of the words after everyone has adopted them. The doctrine and practice of “Believer’s Baptism” articulated by the Anabaptists and then taken up by the English Separatists (who spawned the Baptists we know and love) is an invention of the 16th Century. Likewise, St. Paul would struggle to recognize the “New Testament Church” established by Stone and Campbell in the early 19th Century. Much the same thing happened when transubstantiation was first mooted in the late 1st Millennium: the novel interpretation ousted the traditional understanding and labelled the latter an innovation – and therefore, heresy. Later low church Protestantism, in its rejection of Roman Catholic teaching, took up the same words and came up with a doctrine of memorial-only, in which the central action of the eucharist is constructed only in the mind of the worshiper – which is not what the early Church taught, either. In these and other matters, everybody uses the same words, but means slightly different things by them.
This is why we have a professional class of clergy. The clergy don’t exist to do the ministry of the Church – every Christian has a ministry to do. The clergy exist to teach the faith – and hold each other accountable for the substance of their teaching. Now, laypeople do, in fact, sometimes make practical compromises with Christian teaching. Folk Christianity may incorporate a number of ideas and practices that are not fully compatible with the actual meaning of the Bible. However, to really screw up doctrine requires the clergy, since the function of clergy is to declare what the teaching of the Church is. When they go wrong, you have the beginnings of a new understanding, which may grow into a separate movement entirely. Whether we label that new teaching a heresy or a sect depends on how vital we think the issues at stake are.
I have followed – and been followed by – pastors who had radically different understandings of the faith. It sometimes depresses me that few people in the pews seem to have noticed that they were being taught very different things. On the other hand, those who loved and appreciated those other pastors loved and appreciated me, too. In this, the laity show that they are co-equal guardians of the faith once delivered to the saints. The finer points may pass over them (or be ignored by them), but neither are they to be stampeded by enthusiasts. If “speaking the truth in love” is the ultimate standard of Christian teaching, then the clergy’s wrangles over truth have to be balanced by the amazing ability of the laity to love us and get what they can from each of us. Which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter what is taught; only that there is more involved than merely being correct.
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