In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Mar 2001 by Carson, D A

In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible. By Peter J. Thuesen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, 238 pp., $27.50.

This book came to birth as a doctoral dissertation at Princeton University. After an extended introduction that lays out the flow of his entire argument, Thuesen proceeds in five chapters. The first is devoted to the Reformation. Here Thuesen relies heavily on the analysis of Hans Frei. In some ways, the "pre-critical" Middle Ages have rightly been labeled a "culture of the Book." Yet most people who at the time "read" the Scriptures did so through images and reenactments (not least the Mass). Even the intellectual elite, who could read the Bible privately in Latin, rarely did so apart from the broader context of the corporate ecclesiastical rule. More importantly, during this precritical period, "magnificent in its homogeneity" (the phrase is from Erich Auerbach), "the truth of the biblical stories was an assumed quality" (p. 6). Historical reality, present reality, and Scriptural reality combined to constitute one providential universe. Exegetically, this unitary view of history and the Bible fostered some form or other of typological interpretation. In some ways, this typological approach was encouraged by the Reformation, which to that extent made it a premodern movement. In one respect, however, the Reformation constituted a partial transition to the modern world, namely, the domain of authority. Here there was an overturning of the ecclesiastical and iconographic authority of the medieval church. The emphasis on the Bible substituted an authority that was iconoclastic and Biblicistic. Nowhere, argues Thuesen, was this more strenuously the case than in the Anglo-Saxon world-more so, in particular, than in the world of Lutheranism.

The second chapter is devoted to the ideal of Bible revision in the late 19th century. The emphasis on truth, so characteristic of modernity, focused enormous energy on precisionism in lexicography. Newly discovered texts refashioned textual criticism. Increasingly there was a hunger to retrace what were later called the trajectories of the witnesses, in an effort to reconstruct the real history behind the Biblical stories. Out of this historical-critical world emerged the Revised Version (1881-85) and its American cousin, the American Standard Version (1901). Thuesen analyzes Protestant reactions to the new Bible, hailed in the press as "King Truth" (successor to King James). Most conservatives joined in the acclaim, but here and there some raised questions about the RV's (and ASV's) textual conclusions-- harbingers of more fundamental controversies just over the horizon.

The third chapter treats the making of the Revised Standard Version (1952). The work began in 1937. A committee appointed by the International Council of Religious Education and headed by Luther Weigle, dean of Yale Divinity School, shared the modernist assumptions of the translators of the RV, but sought to go beyond them in several ways. They aimed for the exactness of the earlier work, but aimed to recapture some of the literary elegance of the AV. More importantly, perhaps, they "sought to dispel the unyielding biblicism that had so long characterized Protestantism" (p. 13). When the National Council of Churches (NCC) assumed sponsorship of the project in 1951, the drive toward ecumenical comprehensiveness received new impetus. The old historiography that equated Protestantism with the Word and Catholicism with the image had to be repudiated, for here was an opportunity to produce a common Bible for English-speaking Christendom.

The fourth chapter charts the inevitable fury of conservative reaction, epitomized in Presbyterian Carl McIntire and Baptist Edgar Bundy. Though the issues raged over a wide range of issues, for both sides Isa 7:14 became the symbol of the debate. Thuesen argues that the controversy over the RSV was simultaneously a debate over authority and a struggle over interpretation. Many conservatives thought the NCC was usurping the authority of the Bible as the people's book. In this regard, the fact that these debates unraveled during the McCarthy era ensured that the NCC, like Communist regimes, was charged with attempting censorship over the printed word. Soon the label "Communist Bible" was attached to the RSV. As late as 1960, an Air Force training manual preserved the label.

In the final chapter, Thuesen traces some of the debates between conservative evangelicals and those he calls moderate evangelicals, many of the former drifting toward a "King James Only" stance, and many of the latter supporting the NAE in the production of the NIV. The developing debates were not pretty, and too complex to sketch here.

Thuesen ends his book with a brief epilogue that comments on the multiplicity of versions that have appeared since 1965. Although both liberals and conservatives are accused of being held in bondage by a modernist epistemology, undoubtedly Thuesen's most trenchant criticisms are aimed at the conservatives. For instance, he states, "Unfortunately, the realities of the critical context meant that even the most uncompromisingly conservative of Bibles would never fully settle the truth-question, for the biblical text would still be evaluated by modern standards of rationality. Fundamentalists who professed unswerving faith in every jot and tittle of Holy Writ still tended to subject the Bible's claims to the scientific criteria of 'evidence' and `proof.' The very shibboleth of inerrancy presupposed a disjunction between the biblical story and real history. Conservative Bible-readers tended to find complete truth in the text, while liberals tended to find only partial truth; yet for both, history would always exist, to a greater or lesser degree, in discordance with the Scriptures. ... It is this truth-obsessed reading of Scripture, not the Babel of Bibles per se, that deserves greater scrutiny.... The problem of modern Bible-reading is the problem of Isaiah 7:14 writ large-the confusion of textual with historical questions-and this exegetical indigestion is nearly impossible to neutralize, even by so potent a pill as Hans Frei's Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. Frei's is nevertheless a powerful case for a more literary, aesthetic reading of Scripture. This method does not exclude truth-- questions but brackets them in favor of exegesis that treats the Bible as something like a realistic novel. For Frei, the biblical novel's individual stories are to be read not primarily for their external referents in `real history' but for their internal relations as part of a large narrative. 'Narrative' reading is simultaneously literal and typological: the stories mean what they say, and they relate to each other by providential juxtaposition" (pp. 154-155).