My mother-in-law randomly asked me today what I thought about sage smudging. I kind of smirked and said, you mean like Native American sage blessings? She said yes. I said well it’s not biblical if that’s what you want to know. She proceeds to tell me about a man who visited her church (Vineyard) who was talking about it and it kind of weirded her out. Then she told me he was writing his own bible. I wanted to laugh, but I asked his name. She said his name is Terry Wildman.
So I looked him up and was stunned to find IVP is publishing his First Nations Version: An Indigenous Bible Translation of the New Testament.
It’s coming out in August. But here is John 3:16.
“The Great Spirit loves all creation so deeply that he gave his Son—the only Son who represents him fully. All who trust in him and his way will not come to a bad end but will share in the life of the world to come that never fades away, filled with beauty and harmony.” John 3:16
I mean I knew IVP was a bit off the rails but this is ridiculous.
You’re right, it’s the leather bound that just coming out. The original was published in 2021. Still are there no ends to which people will make a god after their own image and call it the Word of God.
This is actually quite a challenging issue for the church in my country (New Zealand), as it engages with own our ‘first nation’. Knowing when and indeed how to draw the line as we engage with ‘tribal’ cultures is tricky. Exercises like the First Nations Version can land badly, I get that, but they do raise questions as to how we should do things. Are there any former missionaries around here who could shed more light on this?
My Grandfather was a missionary to Australia for a short time, but spent most of his ending years in Papua New Guinea. He spent many years there and while we would certainly disagree on matters of Calvinism and such he would be appalled by this paraphrase, which they are wrongly, in my opinion, calling a translation.
A non-reformed church that I went to for several years went so far as to create an orthography of the Doe tribal language in New Guinea, so that they could then translate the Bible into that language. I respect that work.
But translating the English Bible into a form of English that simply drops the trinitarian distinctions to accommodate henotheism, or animism, is simply horrible.