First there was Revolve, a version of the New Testament made to look like Seventeen magazine and now there's Refuel, which is basically the same thing for guys, except it looks a bit more like Guitar World on the cover.
When Revolve first came out, there was some hue and cry about how this was an inappropriate "glamming" of Scripture. It sent the wrong message to its intended audience, affirming the look and feel of the teen culture it copied, if it didn't explicitly endorse modern teen lifestyles. I suppose similar things will be said about Refuel. After all, few things symbolize sex, drugs and rock and roll more than a low-slung electric guitar--the very icon that graces the cover of Refuel.
But it seems to me that many of the critics of these magazine-scriptures may very well fall prey to hypocrisy. After all, do these same critics not object to the plethora of Scripture translations being marketed today? Is there really much difference between the New Century Version, the Good News Bible, and the Contemporary English Version? What does the New American Standard Bible have over the English Standard Version? Can anyone tell the real and distinct difference between the New International Version and the Revised Standard Version?
But it doesn't stop there. What about all the niche Bibles? There's the Women's Study Bible, the African Heritage Bible, the Teen Bible, the Promise Keepers Bible, and so on--never mind that these are not different translations, indeed many of them are the exact same translation, but merely the same text with different "study and devotional aids." You want your Bible androgynous? There's the New Revised Standard Version or Today's New International Version New Testament. You want it "literal"? Take your pick: the Holman Christian Standard Bible or the New American Standard Bible (now in the Updated edition).
It seems to me that the critics of Revolve and Refuel who also endorse these endless varieties of translations and editions of Scripture are subject to the their own criticism. After all, all of this is just a different way of glamming Scripture.
The problem is essentially this: a mindset that assumes first that Scripture must be made relevant, that is to say culturally comfortable, to an individual reader (even if that reader is one of a marketed group of readers) and last that the reader has the capacity, even a right, to demand his Scripture on his own terms. (There's a related problem of turning God's Word into profit-making, copyrighted material. Which is not to say that there are not legitimate protections necessary for a translation nor that translations and copies of Scriptures ought always to be free. But one wonders if the Bible market is too much about profit and not enough about the sanctity of Scripture.)
By culturally relevant, I don't, of course, mean translating the Scriptures into the vernacular. One of the geniuses, if I may so put it, of the Author and authors of Scripture is that it was written in the language of the people to whom it was given. First in Hebrew, then in Koine Greek. Indeed, the Church's Old Testament, the Septuagint, was, to simplify a bit, the Hebrew Bible translated into the common language of the world; in which language the New Testament was written. Translating the Scripture is both implicitly and explicitly endorsed from the very beginnings of the Church.
But what one doesn't find is a "Good News" Koine, for readers for whom Koine is a second language. Or a "New American Standard" Koine, for those who are more interested in a "literal" Bible.
Nor, for that matter, does one find the "Ethiopian Heritage" Bible, for those who want to affirm their place of racial or ethnic origin, or the "Diana" Bible for those concerned about the Bible's patriarchal language, or the "Pater Familias" Bible, for those men who've lost their way due to the influence of the Artemis cult on society.
Rather, what one finds is a universal translation (subject to the vagaries of hand copying), owned and kept by one's local congregation (since copies were so expensive). One didn't have one's own copy--at least most Christians didn't. If one knew Scripture at all, it was through memorization of it in the services of the Church.
By demanding Scripture on one's own terms, I don't, of course, mean trying to understand Scripture from the standpoint of one's present convictions and presuppositions. We can never wholly come to the Scripture as blank slates. We come to an embodied Scripture as embodied people. We will always read and understand Scripture from our own unique history and personality. And this is as it should be, for we are converted from within our own unique history and personality.
Rather, what I mean by demanding Scripture on one's own (or the culture's) terms is the conscious conforming of Scripture to a set of presuppositions the Scripture does not contain. The neutering of patriarchal language, for example, in the Scripture is not a more accurate rendering of the sense of Scripture, as proponents of such translating proclaim, but is rather, the conformation of Scripture to a sociopolitical ideology. The advocacy of "dynamic equivalency" translations, to use another example, presumes more than it delivers--that one can know both the impact and feel of the Scriptures on the original audience--and ultimately enshrines the translators' interpretations as Holy Writ. This is the NIV's "flesh" problem, for example.
But translation matters are only exacerbated by the marketing of the niche Bibles. A plain brown cover NIV Bible (remember those?) isn't good enough for Christian women. No, the Bible must be adorned with all sorts of interpretive and devotional aids, specifically targeted to the market group known as "today's Christian woman." Or, the Bible must have a chaos of color and graphics, in-text quote boxes, and advice on dating, or teens won't read it. The intent is laudable, to demonstrate how the Bible is relevant to all people in their particularity (which is to say, their embodiedness), and to get more people to read the Bible.
But this was never how the Church got Scripture into people's lives. People and Scripture connected--always--in the services of the Church, which liturgies are almost entirely direct citations of Scripture, and in the reading and proclamation of the Word of God. There were few individual copies. Scripture belonged to, was proclaimed and interpreted and "made relevant" by the Church. One didn't walk into the local bazaar and head to the "Christian bookselling" section to look for the latest teen marketed Bible for one's child. If one wanted to get their children to interact meaningfully with Scripture, they took them to Church. If one wanted to understand what Paul meant when he talked about God's "irrevocable gift" in Romans, one listened to what the Church, in the person of one's pastor who himself was under the authority of the bishop, had to say on the matter. One didn't turn to the index of the Ryrie Study Bible.
Do I want to take away any of the good translations out of the homes of Christian people? Hardly. Do I long for the day that copies of Scripture were so expensive few individuals could afford their own? Not at all. The impulse to get the Scriptures into the homes, minds and lives of every Christian is not a bad thing in itself.
But when it is coupled with a consumerist, individualist society, it can become a very dangerous thing. Private interpretations, prohibited by the Petrine epistle, become de rigeur, unity of doctrine is sacrificed, and everyone does what is right in their own eyes.
Posted by Clifton at June 3, 2004 06:00 AM | TrackBackYou may have a point, and I assure you I am the last one for "whoring the Church after the culture" in the form of trying to be popular and chic.
I think, however, that giving the Scriptures to the people can be good. Recently I was at a "Bible Study" in a 99.9% non-American (there were two people born in this country; myself and my Palistinian-American friend)Jerusalem Patriarchte Church. The priest told us to open to "The first book in your Gospels, called Matthew;" when we finally got the English Bibles turned from upside down and backward to right side up and forwards, everyone was still skimming the book of Genesis for the word "Matthew." This was all in the first five minutes of the "Bible study," and the evening progressed similarly. To their credit, these people are familiar with the Church; to their discredit, most of them had never held a Bible, much less read it. This is not a good thing. While they very much live in an immigrent community, to survive in the American culture and especially to deal with Protestants who are well-versed in Scriptural apologia, every Orthodox Christian should have and be familiar with a Bible.