Objectively Wrong?, AW Tozer, and “Me And Fee pt. 3”

a)

So, in my class there are a total of five regular students. One of them is an Indonesian guy named Jimmy. Jimmy is a large guy – not like John Hagee or Fat Albert fat, but just a little large. Anyways, we were reading sentences in our book and the following was written:

wo tai pang le, zhe jian yifu you dienr shou, bu tai heshi
(trans: I’m too fat, this shirt’s a bit small – its not very comfortable)

Anyways, the mongolian girl read it, and then our teacher said, in good spirit, something to the effect of (in Chinese) “you are not fat, but maybe Jimmy should read this”. At this point, the Israeli girl and I looked at each other in disbelief (and shared laughter haha).

So… is that wrong? We’ve been told to say “it’s not wrong. It’s different”. Does that apply here? I dunno…

b)

Been picking up AW Tozer’s Knowledge of the Holy. Good times. He says this:

The Church has surrendered her once lofty concept of God and has substituted it for it one so low, so ignoble, as to be utterly unworthy of thinking, worshipping men… The low view of God entertained almost universally among Christians is the cause of a hundred lesser evils everywhere among us… Modern Christianity is simply not producing the kind of Christian who can appreciate or experience the life in the Spirit. (vii)

Powerful stuff! Also been listening to a bit of Tozer. He’s a funny guy. Here’s a good talk on the ecumenical movement:

http://sermons.christiansunite.com/A.W._Tozer_2.shtml

One interesting thing he says is the difference between Christendom and the Church. Paul and Jesus say that in the end times there will be many who’s love will be cold and they will gather teachers to tell them what they want to hear (they will be part of Christendom), but the Church are the ones who endure till the end. The Church should be one. But the Church has no obligation to have unity with Christendom.

Tozer also says that Jesus’s prayer that we be one has already been emphatically answered in the giving of the Holy Spirit at Pentacost. By the Spirit we are baptized into One Body (Eph. 4:4-6).

That’s pretty thought provoking given that nowadays “unity” is such a high virtue. But, I think if Biblical unity was really valued, there would be more of an effort to seek to understand and discuss doctrinal issues, instead of a desire to minimize them. There would be more of an effort to lift up and proclaim the Gospel, not just have conversations or bbq’s. Friendships are nice, but sweeter when they are based on the enjoyment of the same truths of God and a shared pursuit of His Glory in our lives.

c)

In case you didn’t read my first post, I actually do like this book (How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth). But yeah, if you think I’m unfair, post a comment:

So, the Today’s New International Version (TNIV) made a bunch of changes to the NIV. I’ve heard some of them are good (real important Evangelicals like DA Carson and John Stott really like it). But they also decided to make male-specific words gender-neutral whenever they thought it referred to guys and gals alike. The TNIV (and NIV) also has a philosophy of translation called “dynamic equivalence”, meaning (to maybe oversimplify it) that they do not think preserving the exact wording is as important as preserving the original meaning. I’ll mostly be talking about the latter, cause that’s what the book mostly talks about.

My first issue is that if you are going to fairly argue your point, you should be as generous to your opponent as possible. Fee describes two theories of interpretation: formal equivalence and functional equivalence. He also informs the reader that these both have more common names, which Fee says are “literal” and “dynamic equivalence”. Fee writes, ‘The closer one moves toward the Hebrew or Greek idom, the closer one moves toward a theory of translation often described as “literal”’ (41). But the translators for the English Standard Version (ESV) have always called their theory “essentially literal” (and I’d imagine they weren’t the first to coin this more accurate term). Although this seems like a small point, giving his side a much more intelligent-sounding name and the other side a much less careful name enables Fee to make his later argument appear much more credible.

Of course a completely literal translation of every Greek and Hebrew word would be unhelpful to the average modern reader. That is not the philosophy of the essentially literal translators. They seek to preserve the Holy Spirit inspired wording of the text as best as possible while giving only additional changes when necessary. Calling this theory “literal” is misleading.

On the other hand, functional equivalence is called “dynamic equivalence”. From my experience, your usual conversation with some semi-knowledgeable friends will refer to these theories as “word-for-word” (essentially literal) and “thought-for-thought” (dynamic equivalence). These terms do not capture the complex nature of these two theories. “Dynamic equivalence” does while “literal” does not. I doubt this was an instance of unintentional neglect on the part of the authors, but a choice to serve their own argumentative purposes.

My second thought is that it might have been better in the interest of fairness to provide a summary of the arguments for an essentially literal translation. However, this is nowhere to be found in this chapter. To be fair, I probably wouldn’t have thought this a problem if it were the other way around (though… I think the argument for dynamic equivalence is much more obvious). I think John Piper’s argument for the use of the ESV is pretty convincing.

Anyways, I’ve got more thoughts, but will save them for another time.