June 2017

Another great article by Joe Sobran. I pity young men today who work in the pastorate and have to mature in their pastoral care and preaching without benefit of the weekly reading of Sobran I was blessed with in my mid-life.

Here's an excerpt to encourage you to click through and read the whole piece:

Utopian reflexes have become part of the job description of the American presidency. We take them for granted. The idea that the president is merely an "executive," that is, executing the laws passed by Congress, seems pathetic and pusillanimous. Today the president is supposed to think big, like Buzz Lightyear: "To infinity - and beyond!" 

Not so long ago, the writer Henry Allen has observed, politics was a rather narrow specialty: fat guys in three-piece suits cutting deals in those famous smoke-filled rooms. Politics pretty much left you alone. Now it encompasses absolutely everything: the food you eat, the air you breathe, the clothes you wear. Nothing is off-limits. Politics is life! 

(This is the third in a series responding to critics of my post pointing out Denny Burk is wrong and the Atlantic got it right in their reporting that Southern Baptists' Christian Standard Bible is gender-neutered.)

Honestly, you can't make this stuff up!

Seven years ago, back before the Holman Christian Standard Bible was neutered and "Holman" was taken out of its name, Denny Burk saw things more clearly. Follow this.

Back in 2010, Denny's preaching pastor at Kenwood Baptist Church in Louisville, Jim Hamilton, wrote a blog post explaining that he had been asked to contribute an article to a new dictionary and the publisher had sent him these rules his article was to conform to:

[Your] articles should avoid referring to “man” (likewise “mankind,” “men,” “he,” “his” and so on) generically. Language often regarded as patriarchal should be modified to avoid giving wrong impressions. Similarly, translations of biblical and other texts, when made by the contributor, should be no more gender specific than the originals are judged to be. Citations of standard translations of the Bible should not be altered, of course, but where contributors create their own translations of the biblical text, they may find strategies for effectively and responsibly avoiding gender-specific translations by consulting the New Revised Standard Version.

"Who pays the piper calls the tune," the old saying goes, so Jim Hamilton was going to avoid the male inclusive if he wanted his publisher to pay him. And if he was going to do any of his own Bible translating for the article, he needed to delete the Bible's male inclusives "adam" and "adelphoi." 1 

This got Pastor Hamilton thinking and he asked this question... 

Here is another argument against my post pointing out Denny Burk is wrong and the Atlantic got it right in their reporting that the Christian Standard Bible is gender-neutered in hundreds of places.

A reader writes:

[The translators] are simply trying to communicate the Scriptures in a clear way. Adelphoi does often mean brothers and sisters, so it's not wrong... There is an example in Euripides, Electra, line 536, where adelphos refers to both brother and sister...

...lexicography and semantics can be tricky... When Paul refers to the churches by adelphoi, he clearly has the whole congregation in mind. ...This is common in the ancient languages, where the masculine is the so-called "standard" linguistic gender.

...we are wrong when we assume that grammatical gender and biological gender are always the same thing

The one thing obvious is this man hasn't read the very post he is criticizing...

One man writes:

I am wary of suggesting (much less actually stating) what [Bayly] did at the end of the article, equating what was done to editing and changing the word of God in presumably a damnable fashion. This particular paragraph is what I have in mind:

"Denny Burk should warn the translators and publishers of his denomination's Christian Standard Bible that their removal of hundreds and hundreds of words with a male meaning component from Scripture places their souls in jeopardy of having their part in the tree of life and the holy city removed by God."

Say that is badly translated? Certainly. Call on them to change it in future editions? Sure. Say that the translators/editors are in danger of the fires of hell because of it? Why go to that extent?

Why go to that extent?

Because this is the explicit warning of the Holy Spirit. In the Word of God, He Himself warns us that those who do this very thing are in danger of not inheriting the Kingdom of Heaven. If this warning doesn't apply to the removal of...

What sort of music do you have leading the souls of your church in worship? Years ago, I noticed we worship God with crescendos about God's grace and how happy it makes us. Not to disparage grace, but only cheap grace: if you don't sing and preach God's judgment, the souls in your congregation don't have a clue about grace no matter how much you blather on about it and they sing about it. Preach the Ten Commandments and have your choir sing this anthem. Grace will become a reality in the hearts of the souls under your care.

We did and I promise you, it works. God is no liar and our worship shouldn't lie, either.