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Preparing for the last teaching session in a study of Romans, I came to the book's final verses and relished finding there the same "obedience of faith" with which Paul began his epistle (Rom. 1:5; 16:26). At the start, I had understood this "obedience of faith" to be the necessary outgrowth of the gospel, although I had struggled with the multiple possibilities of meaning: the obedience that is faith … the obedience that grows out of faith … the obedience that is part of faith? Through the course of Paul's weighty argument in Romans, I had begun to grasp both the complexity and the necessity of the relationship between obedience and faith, so that, upon arriving at this phrase in the end, I could look back and celebrate what the whole book had taught me about "the obedience of faith." The significance of the phrase continues to grow in my understanding, as I connect it with other parts of scripture.
It was the English Standard Version which allowed me to learn from the Bible in this way. According to the preface, the ESV team from Crossway aimed for "an 'essentially literal' translation that seeks as far as possible to capture the precise wording of the original text and the personal style of each Bible writer." They have done well in accomplishing this aim. Committing themselves to the great "Standard Bible" tradition growing out of Tyndale and the King James Version, using the 1971 Revised Standard Version as their starting point, those working on the ESV compared every word of the RSV with the earliest Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek manuscripts, making changes throughout for the sake of a more literal and accurate English translation.
The great strength of the ESV is first and foremost that it allows readers to trust the words to be the Word of God. Any translation will be reliable according to the measure of its faithfulness to the original words—whether those words be political negotiations, love letters, directions, novels, or books of the Bible. Many contemporary versions of Scripture have moved toward a philosophy of "dynamic" or "functional" equivalence, translating "thought for thought" more than "word for word," elucidating the text for modern readers. The huge, historical, amazing claim of Christians, however, is that God inspired not just thoughts but words.
While respecting and indeed regularly enjoying the interpretive light offered by functional equivalency versions, I delight to find a translation which allows me to get as close as possible to the actual words God inspired. The perspective another version offers on Romans 1:5 and 16:26 is helpful, as I read "the obedience that comes from faith" and "so that that all nations might believe and obey him" (NIV). But those English phrases do not as accurately tell me Paul's words; they do not tell me that he said exactly the same words both times; and they do not allow me to discover all the levels of meaning that Paul's complex argument develops for those words through the course of the epistle.
As an English reader limited by my ignorance of the original languages, I want to be able to trust that the words in front of me are close to the ones God "breathed out" through the amazing minds and pens of those who wrote them down (2 Tim. 3:16). Paul claimed that he wrote "in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit" (1 Cor. 2:13); he thanked the Thessalonians for accepting his words "not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God" (1 Thess. 2:13). Scripture consistently points to its words; what a privilege to be enabled to follow that pointing with great confidence. Granted, any translation must do more than move literally from word to word, but, within the necessary framework of communication and readability in the English language, the ESV has sought "not to try to improve on the original."
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