Synchronicity in IVP Bible paraphrase

The Public Square
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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.

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Looks like an older version of the New Testament “translation” has been out for a few years. I’m looking at it on the Bible app.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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What in the passage you posted drops trinitarian distinctions?

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Not only Trinitarian distinctions, but I find the replacement of God the “Father” with “Great Spirit” problematic and dangerous.

I spent a semester a few years ago crafting a syllabus and reading list for an Indigenous Religion class with a native Hawaiian professor at Indiana University. Did lots of reading on Native philosophy and cosmology. While “Great Spirit” sounds like a decent replacement, oftentimes within Native American religion this spirit is androgynous even if it is called by masculine pronouns. Additionally, this androgyny is often reflected in the creation accounts of different tribes where men and women are created independently and separately from each other. Of course there is immense diversity within Native American religion, and not all have these problems.

An additional problem (excuse the liberal speak) is the centering of Native American tribes within the Biblical narrative. God chose to reveal Himself to the Jew first, then the Gentile. This paraphrasing makes it seem as if God chose to reveal Himself through Native American names, phrases, and language. But He did not do this. He inspired the Hebrew, and then He used the Greek. That’s important, not for just our doctrine of inspiration but also for our anthropology and our dealing with race and ethnicity issues within the Church and in our broader society.

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Thanks for people’s comments on this - much food for thought.

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How does “Great Spirit” compare with what the word “God” meant in Germanic languages before the arrival of Christianity? How does it compare with what the word “theos” meant before the Hellenization of Judaism and its later adoption by Greek-speaking Christians, including its out-breathing by the Holy Spirit in the New Testament? How does it compare to how non-Hebrew Semites would have understood the word “Elohim” in the Hebrew?

I’m not defending this fellow’s translational decisions—the back half of his rendition of John 3:16 is way more interpretive than translational. And I for sure don’t know enough about Native American spirituality to say if Great Spirit is helpful or not. But please bear in mind that these questions are very difficult and there aren’t pat answers here.

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I completely understand. I wasn’t trying to take away from the difficulties of language translation or the challenges that arise from different nations and cultures coming into contact with the Gospel. Wisdom in evangelization means meeting people where they are, not where we think they should be.

I was just expressing my concerns about trading the inspired words of God for alternatives not inspired, and then treating those replacements as if they are the word of God. “Elohim” and “theos” were inspired, “Great Spirit” was not.

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Pretty sure “Great Spirit” is still in English. This isn’t a translation, it’s a paraphrase.

And, as far as the New Testament Greek goes, this was the common language at the time that Jesus even spoke, and the language in which God inspired the authors to write the scriptures.

In other words they required no translation committee to condescend to the reader and adapt it to make it more acceptable.

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Agreed. On a related note, there have been some huge debates within Wycliffe in the last few years about how to translate Scripture in some Muslim settings.

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Actually, the key thing under debate for decades has been whether to retain Scripture’s male semantic meaning components, and this is precisely what is at stake with “Father,” the first member of the Trinity. The defense of Scripture’s thousands of words with male semantic meaning components flows from the archetypal Fatherhood of God. It is His Fatherhood which gives the male of the species He named “man” federal headship, and that headship is reinforced with all the words with male semantic meaning components, especially Scripture’s male inclusives.

Because of God the Father Almighty, our race is named “adam” (or “man”) and in Adam we all die and Christ was not God’s daughter, but His Son, with a body that is male…

So this is very simple. God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Fatherhood of God requires it and the inspiration of Scripture requires it.

Don’t take your eye off the ball. Either every word of Scripture is inspired by God or merely the concepts behind His words. The entire church has moved from words to concepts during my short lifetime and that’s why people think the question of how to translate Father and Son and Holy Spirit is difficult.

Sure, Sorbonists tell everyone translation is extremely complicated needing experts, but this is always the way of the guilds. It was this same argument made by Rome for not allowing the plowboy to read Scripture in his own language. It was this same argument which gave rise to the Reformers’ doctrinal statement of the perspicuity of Scripture.

All the decline of the church which dulls the scalpel of God’s Word, rather than sharpening it (Keller vs. Apostle Paul) justifies itself with talk of evangelization and contextualization and meeting people where they are, which doesn’t make any of these things intrinsically wrong.

They’re wrong, though, when they are used to justify corruption of the inspirated Hebrew and Greek of God’s Word such that His words can be left behind in order, purportedly, to better communicate His meaning. Bunk!

What’s really true is that His words are left behind in order for us to become the message of the Gospel: our sensitivity, our scholarly judgments, our aspirational work of translation, our soul patch, our brewskis, our compassion, or oh-so-humble attempts at contextualization, etc. Start with the Godhead’s Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then with God naming the race “adam,” then with God’s Son becoming a male, and the attempt to speak of “Great Spirit” becomes evidently unfaithful as well as foolish.

Remember what I showed in Daddy Tried: most modern Bible translations (paraphrases) since the nineties use the “father” and its cognates between one-quarter and one-third fewer times than prior translations.

Spent my life on this issue and it’s my judgment that the most important thing humble Christians need to be told about why Bible translators are changing thousands of words is not that the work of translation is difficult or complicated, but that the scholars doing the work are aspirational in their translation of Scripture, wanting to impress their peers by cleaning up the holy men of God who spoke as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.

I suppose we all know that Muslims deny God is “father.” Always seemed to me this alone is sufficient to use this precise Name for the Only True God we confess as “God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth.” It reminds me of an old saying that the problem between us is not that we don’t understand each other, but that we do—and disagree. Love,

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