Many evangelicals live in a very strange world, a sort of dark Dr. Seuss landscape in which peaceful places can shift hazardously at a moment's notice. At times, the landscape is fairly flat and stable. Lots of different people and communities and ideas and concerns can exist together, with good-natured exchanges all 'round, including even the occasional sincere and civil disagreement—a sort of Serengeti water hole. But sometimes the ground transforms abruptly, and evangelicals find themselves perched on top of a steep mountain of truth. From here, any step away is a step down. Worse, any step risks a calamitous slide all the way down a slippery slope to wreckage on the opposite deadly danger below.

Such an earthquake shook the green pastures of Bible translation a couple of years ago. In recent decades, Christians have produced a wide range of versions of the Scriptures they love. Some evangelicals have grumbled ("This one is too wooden"; "That one is too idiosyncratic"), but most of us tolerate, and many even rejoice in, the diversity. At times, resistance to a translation has been more intense. Most significant and widespread among evangelicals was the criticism of the Revised Standard Version (RSV), issued in the 1950s. Many evangelicals thought this translation manifested an ominous theological agenda: a liberal agenda that challenged such key doctrines as the Virgin Birth (so Isa. 7:14 and "a young woman") and the Atonement (so 1 John 2:2 and 4:10 and the milder expiation for the KJV's propitiation). Other evangelicals, however, were not convinced that the RSV was unfaithful to the Greek and Hebrew texts and so used it as a helpful alternative to the archaic—and therefore often more misleading—expression of the KJV.

In the last couple of years, however, American evangelicalism has been wracked with controversy over a quite different issue. Now the question is so-called inclusive language translations, those versions that have changed some or all of the Bible's use of generic masculine language to language that explicitly includes, or at least does not implicitly exclude, women. No more mankind or man or he who will and so on when all persons, not just males, are meant. Interestingly, when the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) was released in 1989, some evangelicals were happy to use it as the first translation to apply such principles in a sweeping way, while most other evangelicals simply ignored it. The earlier battle over the RSV perhaps had sorted things out: you either liked and used the RSV or you didn't, and the same would go for the NRSV.

The ground did not heave up until a significantly altered edition of evangelicalism's most widely used modern translation, the New International Version (NIV), emerged in Great Britain in 1996, with a U.S. edition reported to be in the works. This magazine has traced the resulting controversy in its pages. Periodicals such as World magazine, Bible scholars such as Trinity International University's Wayne Grudem, and popular leaders such as James Dobson sounded an alarm against what they saw to be a serious threat to—well, to what? Why had the rather peaceful plain of Bible translations—to each his own, there's room enough for all—tilted into a sheer cliff down which one would tumble if one surrendered one's position at the peak?

A spate of books has appeared to advise us in this situation. None are more helpful than two by conservative evangelical Bible scholars, Bethel Seminary's Mark Strauss—Distorting Scripture? The Challenge of Bible Translation and Gender Accuracy (InterVarsity)—and Trinity's Donald Carson—The Inclusive Language Debate: A Plea for Realism (Baker). Especially because both authors are at the same time experts in translation and personally committed to traditional viewpoints on gender relations, their moderate perspective on this issue deserves a wide hearing. They surely cannot be accused of—that is, of abetting—sloppy or duplicitous translation in the cause of feminism.

Subscribe to Christianity Today and get 3 free trial issues. No credit card required. Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery. Offer valid in U.S. only. If you decide you want to keep Christianity Today coming, honor your invoice for just $19.95 and receive nine more issues, a full year in all. If not, simply write "cancel" across the invoice and return it. The three trial issues are yours to keep, regardless. Click here for international orders2-for-1 Gifts!

-- Select --CT Magazine Home PageNewsOpinionEssaysReviewsIndexArchivesContact Us