A bit of ‘all the above’ really.

I read through the post, thought to myself “he’s setting up straw men here” amongst other things, then went to the comments and came away feeling queasy. I appreciate you linked to the original post; *to me* it felt like he was setting things up to cue the comments that followed.

There’s a lot I’d like to say about it that would be so much better face to face.

I generally don’t read the comments on the posts I quote here, so I don’t know what went down there. I’m interested in what the writer has to say, not necessarily what every Tom, Dick, and Harry has to say or argue about or disagree with. Sometimes I am, but generally not, especially when I am not part of that blog’s “community.”

Oh Gawd.

So many people, so many postures, so many poncy technical words to obfuscate simple truths. It made me remember why I was a fundamentalist. This made me want to ask, is the point of being trained in ‘theology’ to enable people to have those kind of discussions, or is it about actually trying to make a difference in the world. And that wasn’t a question.

Take, for instance, Romans 5:9. Almost every major translation (other than the HCSB, which continues to surprise me in a good way) says that we will be saved from “the wrath of God” when the Greek only says “the wrath.” Some (C.H. Dodd) argue that this “wrath” is not “God’s wrath” in some kind of active, punishing sense, but some kind of principle at work in the universe. Most scholars and translators, however, assume (based possibly on Romans 1) that Paul is speaking of God’s wrath and so for the benefit of the lay reader, they add the modifier. (I’d say it probably is God’s wrath, but along the lines described in the quote above. Actually, I wish I had read this when I was writing my major paper.)

Having said that, the NIV seems to be alone among the popular translations in using the word “deserving” here. I would say though, based on what the rest of the translations have done, that it’s a fairly benign interpolation. One might argue that what Paul says in Romans 1:18 suggests that the wrath is deserved, and a similar theme is carried on here. “Were by nature children of wrath,” the more literal reading, seems to be saying essentially the same thing, though the NIV version is seems more passive on the human side (that is “deserve” might imply receiving something in a way that the writer of the quote is suggesting doesn’t happen).

And now that I look at it, while the interpretation may not be a bad one (but I’m willing to be convinced otherwise), the bigger problem is that it changes “wrath” from a modifier of “children” to the object of a verb not present in the Greek. Again, this is not necessarily bad translation, but at first blush it seems more fitting of the philosophy behind the NLT than the NIV.

Sorry… I got a bit carried away there.

Good stuff.