Bible Translation as Bilingual Quotation

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In recent months I haven’t blogged much about Bible translation, either here or at Better Bibles Blog. This doesn’t mean that I have been entirely silent on the subject. In the last few days I have been commenting actively on a recent post on this subject by John Hobbins, where I have been arguing that The Message may be “the closest thing we [English speakers] have to a DE translation for adults”.

Mike Pritchard of Zondervan has sent me a link to a post at the Zondervan blog which recommends a paper by Karen Jobes Bible Translation as Bilingual Quotation, a PDF download. Wayne Leman has also recommended this paper, at BBB and at TNIV Truth (it looks rather odd that he gave a hat tip to himself!), and John Hobbins has posted his own comments on the paper. Here I will weigh in with my own evaluation.

Continue reading →

St John's Shaughnessy leaves the Anglican Church of Canada

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Last November I wrote two posts about St John’s church, Shaughnessy, in Vancouver, the largest congregation in the Anglican Church of Canada, and its controversial Rector David Short. Today the news has broken that this church, of which J.I. Packer is a member, has voted overwhelmingly to leave the official Anglican Church and affiliate to the Province of the Southern Cone. This decision is hardly a surprise, given that Short is a director of the Anglican Network in Canada which has as a whole affiliated to the Southern Cone, and Packer has given a presentation supporting this move. Nevertheless it is significant that the congregation has overwhelmingly accepted their position, even under the threat of legal action from their diocese to appropriate their church buildings.

Thanks to Michael Daley and Anglican Mainstream for the tip.

Archbishop Rowan and the Centaur

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Essex vicar Paul Trathen offers an interesting image, apparently his own photograph:

“a Lapith pinned by an aggressive Centaur”, as portrayed in a marble from the Parthenon in Athens, currently in the British Museum. This could have made a good caption competition, but Paul has already offered his interpretation of it as relating to Archbishop Rowan Williams: Continue reading →

A Revelation 13 government?

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Ruth Gledhill reports an amazing statement by Bishop Graham Dow of Carlisle, at a meeting in connection with the Church of England’s General Synod. The bishop reportedly said:

I happen to believe that our Government is moving into the realm of imposing its morality and it has therefore become a Revelation 13 Government rather than a Romans 13 Government. In the view of the Book of Revelation, the Roman Empire had become a demonic beast and was imposing its morality.

When asked for clarification by Riazat Butt, the Muslim woman who is the new religious affairs correspondent of The Guardian newspaper, Bishop Dow expressed his surprise that press correspondents were present. But they had been invited. It seems that Rowan Williams is not the only bishop who needs some elementary lessons on handling the media.

But what of the bishop’s suggestion? We mustn’t forget that when Paul wrote Romans 13 the Roman empire was already much more repressive than any modern western democracy and strongly imposed its morality and religious practices on the whole empire. Our British government is in some ways moving in a bad direction, but it has a long way to go before it matches Romans 13, let alone Revelation 13. It is surely not helpful in a situation like this to throw around words like “demonic”, even in meetings which are thought to be private.

Sacred spaces?

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Eddie Arthur writes:

Until recently, I was more or less ambivalent to the architecture and decoration of church buildings. … However, as I grow older, I realise that the surroundings can help me to develop a sense of awe and wonder.

In support of this, he quotes from ThinkChristian, who is in fact at this point quoting The Aesthetic Elevator:

We should build spaces crafted specially for a human-divine encounter with God.

Ah, but how should we design such spaces? Is our traditional church architecture, a pastiche of mediaeval cathedrals, necessarily the best design? Is this in fact a completely subjective matter? In support of this idea, I think Eddie should also have quoted this from the same ThinkChristian post:

The fact also remains that different people will always own different aesthetics, and attempting to satisfy all at the same time is unrealistic.

Eddie and ThinkChristian both omitted this part of the original post from The Aesthetic Elevator:

perhaps we shouldn’t build sacred spaces at all.

I tend to agree. We need functional spaces, buildings to meet in. But it is not for us humans to declare them sacred or presume to make them “crafted specially for a human-divine encounter with God”. If we are to “develop a sense of awe and wonder”, we should do this not through buildings which then become idols, but by beholding and reflecting the glory of God, 2 Corinthians 3:18.

Intellectual Arrogance and the Archbishop

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Ruth Gledhill writes in The Times – not in her blog but in a proper newspaper article – about Archbishop Rowan Williams:

Although he is a holy and spiritual man, danger lies in the appearance of the kind of intellectual arrogance common to many of Britain’s liberal elite. It is an arrogance that affords no credibility or respect to the popular voice. And although this arrogance, with the assumed superiority of the Oxbridge rationalist, is not shared by his staff at Lambeth Palace, it is by some of those outside Lambeth from whom he regularly seeks counsel.

Neither the Archbishop nor his staff regard his speech as mistaken. They are merely concerned that it has been misunderstood. This characterises the otherworldliness that still pervades the inner sanctums of the Church of England.

I share with Dr Williams his Oxbridge rationalist background (as does Bishop NT Wright). I studied at Clare College, Cambridge a few years before Williams became Dean and Chaplain there. Jane Paul who later became Mrs Williams was a fellow student with me, and we worshipped together at the college chapel.

At Cambridge I saw this rationalism and intellectual arrogance at work, and to some extent I shared it. But then, called by God as I believe, I left the ivory towers and my plans for PhD studies to get a job in the real world of Essex, and to join a real church. Now, after 30 years and various travels, I am back in Essex and both living and worshipping on a former council estate used for housing single parent families and people with drug problems. And quite frankly I am much happier to be away from the world of intellectual arrogance and instead in touch with and listening to, although often not agreeing with, ordinary people in the real world.

Meanwhile, press coverage (summarised here; see also this BBC analysis) remains largely hostile to Williams. But the Church of England at its General Synod seems to have largely closed ranks around him, even giving him a standing ovation. Perhaps this is because the majority share Williams’ Oxbridge rationalism and are at least tinged with his intellectual arrogance. Only a small minority at the Synod, led by long-term critic Canon Chris Sugden of Anglican Mainstream (ironically also an Oxbridge rationalist) is publicly criticising him. So it looks as if Williams will survive this crisis unless he chooses to go himself. But the cost has been immense to the credibility of the Anglican church in this country, and even more so in places like Nigeria and Pakistan.

The most worrying thing is that Dr Williams doesn’t seem to care what ordinary people think or say. As Ruth Gledhill puts it,

Dr Williams holds such populist tendencies in disdain. … The difficulty [his chief adviser] and the Archbishop’s other advisers face is that Dr Williams does not believe he is in a hole, or that if he is, it is a false hole, one dug for him by the media.

The wisest fool in Christendom

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According to Jeremy Paxman on the BBC programme Newsnight last night (Friday) (click “Watch Now” on this page, but probably only until Monday), King James I was called “the wisest fool in Christendom”,

because he never said a foolish thing or did a wise one.

But Paxman suggested that Archbishop Rowan Williams has inherited this mantle.

I was privileged to meet this morning (Saturday), for the first time, one of Paxman’s guests, John Richardson, who blogs at The Ugley Vicar and Chelmsford Anglican Mainstream. We met only hours after Paxman interviewed Richardson, at the meeting where I also heard Bishop Pete Broadbent speak. Richardson drew my attention to another wonderful quote from Paxman on the programme:

How do you solve a problem like sharia?

You need to get the pronunciation right for this: rhyme with “Maria”.

The Archbishop’s comments on sharia law have apparently generated easily the biggest response the BBC has had to any story – 17,000 comments in 24 hours, the great majority critical of Williams. Continue reading →

Broadbent quiet on Lambeth and GAFCON

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I just got back from a talk by Bishop Pete Broadbent of Willesden, as advertised here. This was an interesting talk on the subject “United We Stand”, a very positive one in fact but I wonder how realistic this positive attitude is.

In a previous post I pointed out that Broadbent was not among the 21 evangelical bishops in the Church of England who wrote to the Church of England Newspaper urging their fellow Anglican bishops around the world to attend the Lambeth Conference.

At this morning’s talk Broadbent declined to answer a question about whether he would attend the Lambeth conference, the Global Anglican Future conference (GAFCON), or both. He did mention that there were 35 evangelical bishops in the Church of England. Of these, 21 signed the letter to the Church of England Newspaper, and two, Nazir-Ali and Benn, are known to have rejected Lambeth in favour of GAFCON. This leaves 12, including Broadbent, who as far as I know have not made their position public. They are probably wise to do so. Nevertheless, given his general attitude I would be surprised if Broadbent stays away from Lambeth, although he might also attend GAFCON.