ESV not best for Wesleyans... another reason

Here's a promo quote on the collected study notes of the ESV: "Understanding Scripture: An Overview of the Bible’s Origin Eighteen of the ESV Study Bible articles, published separately in book format. The articles have been edited by Wayne Grudem, C. John Collins, and Thomas R. Schreiner."

These are not names that should be primary sources for anyone who is Wesleyan in theology.

Subordination of the Spirit?

Something dawned on me that I had never thought of until this weekend: just as the neo-Calvinists subordinate the Son to the Father, they subordinate the Spirit to the Son.

This realization dawned on me as I read the second to last chapter of Vanhoozer's Is There a Meaning in This Text. Both V and Grant Osborne keep the Holy Spirit on a short leash when it comes to biblical interpretation. According to them, the Spirit does not innovate when it comes to biblical meaning. He illuminates the intended meaning of the text and leads us to apply the appropriate significance of that meaning to our lives. He blows wherever He wills, but not whatever He wills. He does not make it mean something out of continuity with something it meant.

Of course whether the Spirit is subordinate to the Father or Son, this particular theology seems to crash on the rocks of NT texts. The Spirit seems to blow all over the place often with little concern for the intended meaning of OT texts. I guess He didn't read the rule book.

The question of subordination is an interesting one, though. Classic orthodoxy of course rejects any subordination of the persons of the Trinity within the Godhead itself. In that sense, individuals like Wayne Grudem and John Piper are unorthodox. They would see the subordination of the Son to the Father within the Godhead as a paradigm for the household today in which the wife is subordinate to the husband.

But since in my own way I accept the Protestant principle ecclesia semper reformanda--"the church always needs to be reformed"--I am open to the possibility that this consensus might need adjustment. I will give it the benefit of the doubt, mind you, to the consensus of the church over these "neo-reformers."

Certainly in the NT we see Christ subordinated to God the Father (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:28). But then again, questions about the relationships within the Trinity go well beyond the NT. When Paul subordinates Christ to God the Father, he is not thinking of the subordination of the second person of the Trinity but the subordination of the Messiah as mediator of God's kingship on earth. I remain convinced that Paul has no understanding of Christ's divine ontology.

And the logos Christology of John did not get the Trinitarian rocket fully into orbit. The classic creeds of the church did not use logos language because it played into views of Christ that did not see Christ to be quite as much God as God the Father.

So I see people like Grudem and Piper as inconsistent. If they're going to believe in the Trinity, then they're going to have to be willing to put some faith in the Spirit working through the church of the fourth and fifth centuries (and not just in an individual named Augustine :-).

But the same Spirit that led that generation to affirm the Trinity led them to affirm the persons of the Godhead as unsubordinated to one another.

Grant Osborne on Inclusive Language

I continue reading in Grant Osborne's Hermeneutical Spiral for the advanced topics class I am teaching this semester. The chapter on syntax has a new section on the "inclusive language debate," particularly in relation to the TNIV. Apparently Osborne served on the committees that created the NLT, so he is very open to "functional equivalence" translation like these, although clearly he is okay with formal equivalence translations as well. He sees a role for both and passes on a nice spectrum chart created by D. A. Carson:

ASV-NASB-KJV-NKJV-RSV/ESV-NRSV-NJB-NIV-TNIV-NLT-CEV-Message-LB

Of course the last two aren't really translations but paraphrases of the English.

The name that shows up over and over in this "excursus" is Wayne Grudem, who led a good deal of the charge against the TNIV. Osborne does not attack him at all, but by the time I was done reading this section, the magnitude of Grudem's lack of understanding of how language works was quite noticeable. This would then also include others who led the charge against the TNIV: R. C. Sproul, John Piper, James Dobson, etc... By the way, anyone who questions Grant Osborne or D. A. Carson's conservative credentials is psycho.

Here are some quotes from this section of Osborne:

"Spirit is feminine in Hebrew and neuter in Greek--should we translate 'she' in the Old Testament and 'it' in the New Testament? No one does so" (155).

"Do we 'change God's words' when we translate he as 'they' (so Grudem 1997:30-32)? If that were true, it would entail retaining every original word and syntax from the Hebrew or Greek, and the translation would be unreadable" (156).

"In terms of lexical [meaning] correspondence, we must realize that words do not have individual meaning but collational meaning, that is, they draw meaning from their relationship to other words in the sentence (e.g. make pancakes, make sense, make friends, make a place)" (156).

"Changing from the individual to the group or from the inclusive 'he' to a plural does not change the meaning in any way" (154).

The response of Craig Blomberg, another conservative evangelical, is also mentioned in an endnote. He mentions among other points that it is increasingly becoming correct grammatically to write, "anyone bringing their textbooks." I know I find myself writing this increasingly, although I usually then undo it since a colleague corrected me publically once for it in something I had written for a committee.

But of course English teachers do not create the rules and can only enforce them in their classes. "[S]tylistic conventions are determined by current consensus" (526, n.29).

I have put it this way--if we have to have the level of verbal accuracy in translation that Grudem, World magazine and others require, then shame on anyone for using English at all. To be consistent, we will have to ban all translations from use as the Muslims do the Quran. No translation can measure up.

Frankly, since all manuscripts differ from each other in some respect, we are lost if this is the case. We will all have to go back to the Greek tradition behind the KJV too on faith that somehow it was the Bible of the earliest Christians despite the evidence to the contrary. Surely God wouldn't have allowed the majority of Christians throughout the medieval period to follow a text that differed by as much as 5% from the original in its wording. And then we will all have to become Roman Catholic, for surely God would not have allowed the beliefs of the church to differ from the original for 1000 years either.

Or maybe the problem here doesn't have anything to do with the Bible but with typical resistance to the advance of God's kingdom because of deeply ingrained biases mistaken for God.

Wayne Grudem

Some might have been surprised that I didn't post something on the woman removed from her Sunday School class in Watertown, New York. I figure I've blogged quite a bit already on my views. It's more surprising that it's an American Baptist church, since they don't usually have a problem with women in ministry. As many have said, this probably had nothing to do with the fact that she was a woman--that was likely just a superficial side excuse or comment of a pastor with other motives.

What has me angry is Wayne Grudem's site in conjunction with the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: http://www.efbt100.com Now I really suspect that he's a nice and good person. He is fair in his views and presentation. More dangerously, his site is really "good" and no doubt would bombard anyone sympathetic to women in ministry from the sheer "shock and awe" of it. It's convinced me to start my own site or get IWU or the Wesleyans to do it.

Believe it or not, I have a tendency to pull my punches a little on these issues. In my mind, hitting them with full force would be a little like Israel's bombing tactics in Lebanon--a lot of innocence might get hurt in the process.

But now I'm ticked. Maybe it would be good for evangelicalism to work through some things it generally ignores.