2013 WELS Convention and the Endorsement of NIV 2011.

The following discussion was held on the Facebook Wall of Daniel Baker -- who was a delegate to this year's WELS Convention -- and is reproduced here with his permission. There are several points in this discussion worth consideration, and worth responding to -- sooner being better than later.

1. Even though the 2011 Synod Convention called for the TEC to educate the laity so that they would be prepared for the task of choosing a translation, can anyone say there was much evidence that such had happened? Did the delegates display evidence suggesting they were prepared to thoughtfully deliberate the issues?
2. What does it really mean to decide that "All translations are equally deficient, so we will use them all"...?
3. What does it really mean when it is said that "All translations are equally God's Word, so it is a disparagement of God's Word to cast doubt on any of them"...?
4. What does it really mean when it is said that "All translations are equally God's Word, isn't it wonderful that we have God's Word in so many forms"...?
5. How crippling is the division in our Synod?
6. Why is it that the "New Method Lutherans," in addition to harangue-ing everyone to become relevant by absorbing pop-culture into the church, also seem to be the one's pushing post-Modern linguistics?
   
   
7. What do you think about endorsing a given translation (NKJV was suggested below), and mounting an education campaign targeted at the laity, with the specific purpose of warning about the dangers of "Dynamic Equivalence" and "Functional Equivalence" and identifying their roots in post-Modern philosophy, while building up the virtues of Formal and Optimal Equivalence?
8. Knowing that the CoP and the entire faculties of MLC and WLS, along with what appears to be a majority of WELS Administrators, are on the side of the "New Method Lutherans," what would you think of such and effort knowing that it would come from outside those sources, and probably rely on scholarship from outside WELS?

Be assured, the "New Method Lutherans" see the endorsement of NIV 2011 alongside all other translation as a big opportunity to drive forward with the next big NIV release. They'll be better organized next time. And they are always better funded.

What other options or considerations may there be?

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Daniel Baker

5 hours ago near New Ulm, MN

Here's a summary of the WELS Convention's translation issue:

1. We approved all translations of Holy Scripture for use in our publications (the "eclectic approach").
2. We gave NPH sole discretion to decide what translations to use.
3. An overwhelming majority (over 3/4ths) voted against a Confessional Lutheran translation.

Some general observations:

• Opposition to a "Confessional Lutheran Translation" seemed to be overwhelming. There were even a number of speakers and a proposed amendment to strike "Confessional Lutheran" from the Resolution.
• The outgoing editor of NPH was on the TFC, which supported and recommended NNIV.
• NNIV is clearly on the list of NPH options, and prior to an amendment was the first on a short list of three options for their use.
• Sem. Profs made it clear that the result of the "eclectic approach" would be settling on just one translation - by "herd" decision, as one pastor and televangelist delegate put it.

As such, it seems clear to me that we are far from out of the NNIV woods.

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  Bryan Lidtke, Paul Rydecki, Jeffery Clark and 5 others like this.
  
  
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  Angela Gawel Al's not here to translate anymore. I think I get the gist but sometime I will have to have someone explain it:) just one question ... What would Alfred think of the outcome?

  5 hours ago via mobile · Like
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  Daniel Baker He would probably have mixed feelings like the rest of us.

  5 hours ago · Like
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  Paul Rydecki More like, you are deep in the heart of the NNIV forest.

  5 hours ago · Like · 5
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  Intrepid Lutherans Been thinking about this for several minutes after Committee 22 completed (and I posted this, below, too). Initially hopeful after last night's vote on Resolution 1 from Committee 21, the defeat of Resolution 1 from Committee 22 makes Resolution 1 of Committee 21 merely an acknowledgement of the fact that (a) all translations are equally deficient, and (b) we're really okay with that. No one could bring themselves to reject, say, the Watchtower as a translation to be avoided, the Douay-Rheims as a translation to be avoided, or even the "LOL-cat" translation of the Bible as a translation to be avoided. In the words of Seminary Presidents Wendland and Cherney, "They are all equally God's Word! Isn't it a wonderful thing that we have God's Word in so many forms?"
  
  It is apparent to me, however, that there are really two, and only two, reasons the WELS faculties opposed this -- and neither has anything to do with money or time. 
  
  
  

  (1) There is a stark division in WELS regarding linguistic philosophy, which impacts our fundamental understanding of the nature and function of language, and consequently, the nature of that which was Breathed by God, and thus also, the appropriate Christian principles for translating God's Word into English or any other language. This division is exposed now, yet we are led to believe that we can live with this division as if it does not impact our working together. Yet, a WELS translation effort will fail to progress beyond merely starting on this very point -- and that failure WILL EXPOSE HOW TRULY CRIPPLING THIS DIVISION IS.
  
  (2) Even though we most certainly do have the *technical skill* to translate the Bible, we simply do not have the *literary talent* to produce an excellent translation. Like it or not, the KJV is *still* the standard of literary excellence, and they know that the product of any translation effort we would undertake would be compared to the KJV, and failing to measure up, would simply land somewhere in the plethora of *equally flat and deficient* translations we already have to choose from, none of which really distinguish themselves. A general rejection of our translation as an excellent one, on such grounds, would likely represent a general indictment of our school system, which is so highly respected.

  
  

  That's my take on this. -DL
  
  
  

  
  

  Main Page - LOLCat Bible Translation Project

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  Blessinz of teh Ceiling Cat be apwn yu, srsly. This is the lolcat Bible Translat...See More

  
  
  

post-Modern Christianity + post-Modern Culture = Christian Capitulation

The following audio is a recent Telegraph interview with the former (Anglican) Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, and with Damian Thompson (a former religious affairs correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, and a current director of the Catholic Herald), following analysis of the 2011 British Census showing a 15 percent decline in Church attendance over the previous decade, and the growth of Islam among young Britons to 1 in 10. Nazir-Ali has much to say regarding Christianity's numeric decline, centered mostly on the Church's capitulation to a worldly secularist culture:

“The churches have been complicit in what has been going on in culture since the 1960's...”

“Secularization... has removed the need in people to ask spiritual questions about themselves, about the world in which they live. This has to do with education... Science has made huge progress in identifying What things are... but what has not been emphasized in education is the Why? of things... and the What for?... We are wired, inately, to ask the questions of meaning and significance... If you don't have the Christian answer, you manufacture an answer... or you go into depression... or you trend toward extremism...”

“[Regarding] the assumption that there is some kind of ‘secular neutrality’ which can then replace Christianity; well, there is no such thing as secular neutrality. Secularism has its own set of presuppositions... it is its own Worldview. One of the things we have to set aside is this lie... that secularity is some kind of tabula rasa...”

“How [Christians] excuse this is by saying, ‘this is about engagement, so we must understand the language of secularity in order to make the Christian faith intelligible...’ but, what can then happen is that the language of secularity takes over, so instead of engagement, you have capitulation. This is constantly happening now in the Christian churches: the Christian Worldview is simply capitulating to a secular Worldview... The churches have generally capitulated to secular culture and therefore cannot bring a distinctive voice to public debate.”

Likewise his fellow interviewee, journalist and author Damian Thompson, who comments most notably on the growth of Islam in Briton, to the effect that it offers youth a “legitimate” outlet for anger. Why do youth seem to find this factor compelling? What is missing in their education that would prompt them to a simplistic religion (as Thompson characterizes it) that offers them an outlet for anger?

“I'm interested in comparing Christianity... to Islam. Christianity is really rather a complex system of belief, the relationship between Jesus and God the Father is hard to explain, the question of how you're saved is the source of continuing dispute. Islam, particularly in its more puritanical well-founded expressions, is in many ways, simpler [appears to be simpler, as Nazir-Ali emphasizes later]. It has this relatively pure concept of God, and it offers salvation through detailed and easy-to-grasp, if not easy-to-follow, rules... But also... it offers an outlet for anger. Since the fastest growing expressions of Islam stigmatize non-believers in a way that is not fashionable in Christianity anymore... religious anger in response to political grievances, which is an enormous amount, is sanctified...”

“What also strikes me is the lack of intellectual self-confidence among Christian leaders... a tremendous lack of the sort of leadership at the top of Christianity that you would find at the top of every other area of human activity.”

British Christianity dies while Islam thrives. Why?

 

This podcast is taken from the May 30, 2013 edition of Telegram Religion Editorial: British Christianity dies while Islam thrives. Why?
(Right-click here to save MP3)
We unmistakably see the capitulation of which Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali speaks, as especially true among mainline liberal protestantism, but equally so within the Evangelical Movement, which, seeking to “grow the church” and foster unity among Christians through ecumenical and evangelical dialogue, has increasingly prescribed the adoption of worldly philosophies and methods as a panacea for the challenges of the visible church in the face of rising secularism: “If culture in its growing secularism is becoming more irreligious, well then, for the Church is to remain relevant to culture, it must speak to it in a more irreligious tone, as well.” In my opinion, the Evangelical Movement isn't really evangelical at all, anymore. It is now, thanks especially to the Church Growth Movement (CGM), just a species of liberal protestantism.

The funny thing is, “secularism,” or the idea of a complete separation of religion from society, was only ever a sociological hypothesis – one that has long been disproven, even rejected by the Austrian-born sociologist who initially posited it in 1971. Nevertheless, the idea continues to not just “hang around,” but to be a driving force – and militantly so – in politics, education and society. In a 2010 lecture I attended in Strasbourg, France, entitled “Biblical Authority of Scripture,” Dr. Thomas Schirrmacher explained:

“Interestingly, there was a new social theory expressed in 1971, by [Lutheran] sociologist Peter Berger, that as nations become more technologically advanced they become more secular, and need to rely less on the mysticism of religion. In 1971, there was every evidence that this was true, but it had nothing to do with technological achievement – it was political. Either a nation sided with NATO or with Warsaw, and to do so required secularization. Berger renounced his own theory in 1983, as by then the data showed that his theory was false, but this theory is still repeated in the media ad nauseum. Within twelve years, the rise of evangelicalism worldwide (700,000,000 today), and the rise of Islam had proven him wrong. Peter Berger wrote in a recent article that the reason the perception exists, that the world is becoming less religious rather than the reality that it is becoming dramatically more religious, is that the ‘Three most influential groups in the world are essentially atheists: media, academics, and politicians’”

Schirrmacher, T. (July 13, 2010). Lecture Eleven: International Academy of Apologetics, Evangelism and Human Rights. Strasbourg, FR.

(NOTE: The reader should look closely at the profile for Dr. Peter L. Berger, linked above, and notice the prominent and recurring theme in connection with his research: Knowledge and Reality as a Social Construction. We have warned of this concept with great frequency on the pages of Intrepid Lutherans, in connection to post-Modernism and its relationship to linguistics and translation ideology (see, for example, The NIV 2011 and the Importance of Translation Ideology, but mostly in the context of pedagogics: The Epistemological Learning Theory of Social Constructivism. The fact is, as a result of my studies in Education, I recognized Berger's name when Dr. Schirrmacher mentioned him in this lecture, having in the past been acquainted with Berger's book, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise on the Sociology of Knowledge. As a result, I carefully copied down Dr. Schirrmacher's words, as Dr. Berger has not been uninfluential. So, the conscientious Christian should ask: Why is it that strict secularism is the political-preference of today's quietistic Christians? How does this idea serve an irreligious secular-social Worldview? Why is it that Lutherans and other Christians have adopted this Worldview as a basis of their Evangelism and Education? Where do these ideas really come from? Why do Lutheran laymen today continue to be force-fed these ideas by Church leadership?)

One of the more notable consequences of this “Christian Capitulation” to worldly culture, according to Nazir-Ali, is a severe pedagogical imbalance which, in the name of strict secularism, completely disregards that part of the whole person which yearns for completion. Berger and other post-Modernists, try to discover and define that completion in the context of humanity itself, by inflating the impact of man's social existence to ontological and epistemological authority. Such approaches, however, do not take the whole person seriously. As with all alluring falsehoods, the compelling deception they offer rests on the fact that they are partly true. Humans were designed and created by God for a social existence: for communion with Him and with one another on account of Him. The unregenerate person – the person outside of Christ, who is spiritually dead – is incomplete without this communion. And such a person inherently knows he is incomplete – thus his search for “fulfillment” to a degree that, as the sheer volume of data demonstrates, literally explodes the secularist hypothesis: man cannot and does not exist independently of a very real yearning for communion with his Creator, for an “otherness” that his naked social, physical and intellectual existence simply cannot satisfy. In the face of an advancing secularism that is foisted on Western Society by elites in the media, politics and the universities, the people nevertheless innately reject the myth of “secular neutrality,” and continue to desperately grope about in a thickening fog for a meaning and significance that transcends the realities of their human existence. Yet, with a Western Christianity that has capitulated to secular culture and has joined it in self-loathing, what many folks find in their blind groping is simply more of the same emptiness, and with nothing to grasp, lay hold of that which conjures within man the most compelling experiences he can muster within himself as evidence of true religion: those experiences of love and hatred, of joy and anger.

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The WELS is in Convention this week. The link to the online proceedings is here. In many ways, and by all visible accounts, our Synod is suffering terminal illness. Financial mismanagement of previous administrations which sacrificed Lutheran distinctiveness in exchange for the conspicuous sectarianism of the Evangelical Movement, has done more than change our practice and left us penniless: by dramatically changing how we are willing to express our doctrine, it has begun to change the very terms, and invariably with them the relationships between the terms, in which we think about our doctrine and practice. It has led to an endorsement of post-Modernism as our ideology of education and as fundamental to our understanding of language – which impacts our understanding of what it means for the Scriptures to be inerrant, infallible and perspicuous, and consequently what it means to aspire to accuracy and precision in a translation of the Bible. There are many WELS Lutherans who are – either rightly or wrongly – concerned about one doctrinal perversion or another that seems to be manifest among us. Without discounting the seriousness of those concerns, in my honest opinion, WELS is facing a much more significant and overarching concern: that of the Word of God, itself. That is to say, like the Missouri Synod faced, from the late 1930's through the mid-1970's, we in WELS are now facing our own Crisis of the Word. Why is this overarching? Simply put: No Bible, no doctrine. No reliable Bible, no reliable doctrine. Whatever other doctrinal concerns there may be, with a perverted views of Plenary Inspiration and the Perspicuity of the Scriptures, which are necessitated by a perverted post-Modern understanding of the nature of language, there is no possible way to maintain any doctrine with any clarity or fidelity whatsoever. Yet, most WELS Lutherans continue to regard matters of “Bible Translation” which issue from conflicting “philosophies of language” to be non-essential and inconsequential matters.

Will those who think otherwise make an actual show of it at this year's Synod Convention? Will they continue to nurse what by all external appearances is a terminal disease? Or will they capitulate, with little or no substantive debate, regarding the adoption of the NIV 2011 – a translation of the Bible built on a philosophy that is ultimately hostile to the fundamentals of Christianity – and in so doing announce to the rest of us in this final coup de grâce that all reasonable hope is lost, and that it is simply time to move on with a different group of Lutherans? We'll see.

 

Synod convention highlights - IL edition

Here’s my little recap of what I consider to be the high’s and low’s of last week’s synod convention.


Schroeder re-election = High

The convention started off on a very high note with Pres. Schroeder’s landslide re-election. He has been quite outspoken over the past four years about our need as a synod to embrace confessional Lutheran doctrine and practice in all areas, including hot button areas like worship and outreach. His overwhelming re-election is a good sign that the synod as a whole believes he is on the right track and wants to be led in that direction.

Zabell essay = High

Rev. Jon Zabell delivered an excellent essay on the Sacramental Life, with a very practical emphasis on the role of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper in the daily thinking and spiritual life of the saints. The essay was very carefully worded in regard to “forgiveness won” at the cross and “forgiveness distributed” in Word and Sacrament. I was impressed by the spirit of the essay as well as the content, and appreciated the encouragement to consider offering the Sacrament of the Altar more often.

Translation Evaluation Committee report = Low

Let me reiterate what I have said before: I respect the men on the TEC and don’t question for a moment their qualifications, their integrity, their honesty, their motives or their Christianity. And I appreciate the time they have invested in studying this issue.

That said, I disagree with most of their conclusions. I think they are absolutely wrong. Not only do they see the numerous changes to gender-neutral language in the NIV 2011 as innocuous, but they even seem to embrace and welcome most of these changes. They are not swallowing hard as they recommend the NIV 2011 to the synod. They are promoting it as a translation they favor.

It’s not just the gender-neutral issue that concerns me. It’s the approach to translation that, in the process of trying to “help” the reader, ends up adding to or subtracting from God’s inspired Word. As Mr. Lindee has articulated so well in his articles on translation philosophy, we are going down a very dangerous (and non-Lutheran) road if we move too far away from the formal equivalency model employed by Luther and the KJV. That doesn't mean we need to retain "Thee's" and "Thou's" and other words that have changed in meaning over the last 400 years. It does mean that attempting to convey the "most 'relevant' aspects of the essential 'meaning' intended by the biblical text" is not good enough.

Delegates’ response to TEC report = High

In spite of the credentials of the men on the translation committee, the delegates did not behave like lemmings. They respectfully asked for more study and for more time, which they have now been given. Next year at the district conventions, the twelve districts will each have the opportunity to vote on a translation for use in our synod publications. This is a good thing. But it means we have lots of work to do in the next year. While the TEC has been enlisted to try to build a consensus around the NIV 2011, those of us who disagree will have to articulate our concerns very thoroughly and very loudly.

Much more will be said about translations over the coming year.

Time of Grace resolution = Low

Two memorials were submitted to the synod convention regarding Time of Grace with Mark Jeske. The first did not address the content of Time of Grace, but rather called for an end to Time of Grace’s Recognized Service Organization (RSO) status with the LCMS, since it is, at best, a cause of confusion and offense and, at worst, unionistic. The second memorial did not address the RSO status at all, but praised the content of Time of Grace and called for the synod to officially encourage WELS members to watch Time of Grace and make use of the materials they produce.

Time of Grace mailed to all the convention delegates a packet of promotional information, including a defense of their RSO status. To the delegates on the floor committee to which the two ToG memorials were assigned, Time of Grace sent a second mailing with a point by point rebuttal of the memorial that criticized their RSO status.

The delegates at the convention ended up adopting a merger of the two memorials, mostly praising the content of Time of Grace, but also recognizing the concerns that have been raised, and sending the issue back to the Southeastern Wisconsin District for resolution, to be presented to the Conference of Presidents in October.

The delegates, in good faith, assumed the messages of Time of Grace to be “doctrinally sound,” since there was no evidence presented to the contrary. One cannot fault them for that, but I think it was unwise for them to turn their good-faith assumption into a synodical declaration. One wishes that they had avoided entirely speaking to the content of the programming – either for or against.

I found the Time of Grace arguments in defense of their RSO status to be utterly...unconvincing. Over the past two years I have corresponded directly with Time of Grace over this issue, and have forwarded all my thoughts and concerns, as well as copious documentation, to the president of the Southeastern Wisconsin District and to President Schroeder. In deference to synodical leadership, the matter has not been the subject of discussion on Intrepid Lutherans during all that time, in spite of the public nature of the issue. In one more show of good faith on our part, we will continue to postpone the discussion, trusting that the Southeastern Wisconsin district presidium, together with the COP, will bring the matter to a God-pleasing resolution by their October meeting.