Eugene Nida and the Fruit of Cooperating and Merging Institutions

VII. The Joy and Fruit of Ecumenism – Nida’s Acquired Doctrinal Indifference, Hort-Wescott’s Bad Text, Roman Catholic Unequal Partners in Dynamic Equivalence

 

              The next stage in translating came in 1942, adding a new entity, Wycliffe Bible Translators, which would send translators, and the original Summer Institute of Linguistics for training them. Cameron Townsend continued to manage SIL. Ken Pike, PhD, headed academics, and Eugene Nida was his associate. Their doctrinal statement included.

·        The divine inspiration of the Bible

·        The Trinity

·        The fall of man

·        The atonement of Christ

·        Justification by faith

·        Resurrection of the dead

·        Eternal life of the saved

·        Eternal punishment of the lost.

Townsend wanted to expand Wycliffe, so he pressed Pike and Nida to move beyond denominational and dogmatic boundaries.[1]

            Townsend, senior to Pike and Nida, resisted their emphasis on doctrinal unity, sensing instead that growth would mean taking down barriers.

1.      We cooperate with missions, governments, scientific organizations, philanthropic organizations, always cooperate and serve, never compete.

2.      We dare to follow even when God leads along strange paths.

3.      We are not sectarian or ecclesiastical, not even dogmatic. We don’t try

to force people into any type of denominational or anti-denominational mold.[2]

 

This provided a foundation familiar to many denominations, brilliantly described by John Michael Reu’s Unionism. People can view the history of cooperation and merger, dropping significant doctrinal differences. The Methodists kept merging and conservatives kept leaving.[3] The same thing happened with the Lutheran Church in American (1962 merger) and The American Lutheran Church (1960 merger). When they merged in 1987, an amount almost equal to The ALC left. However, the liberals in each case ended up holding the property, the schools, the endowments, and the pension funds. Merger and cooperation suffocate doctrinal debate, because differences might offend someone and slow the process of unity. Each time conservatives leave a denomination headed by radicals, the apostates celebrate with glee that opposition has decreased, power has increased.

            Nida’s advantage was his inability to work in Mexico, so he was proposed by Townsend as a link to the American Bible Society, which was once so conservative, they made sure the KJV was not corrupted in its printings.[4] Nida was perfectly comfortable with a creative paraphrase instead of the precision of the KJV model. The common critique of traditional translations – initiated by Nida was – “They are wooden,” an imprecise metric. His solution was the paraphrase, renamed “dynamic equivalence,” not the meaning of the words but to move beyond the words

 

Coming up – union of Bible Societies and Roman Catholicism

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[1] David Daniels, Why They Changed the Bible, p. 51.

[2] Quoted in Daniels, ibid., p. 52.

[3] Nazarenes and Wesleyans left the Methodist Church, which had the effect of people jumping from a hot air balloon basket, which only rises faster and invites more departures.

[4] Nujahr, An American Bible

The Villain Nobody Knows - Eugene Nida. Used Nida Books Sell for $100!

Walther Rauschenbusch is an example of liberal Baptist thinking, or rather a re-thinking the Bible. If you are meeting at Rauschenbusch Hall, you are not in a Southern Babtist camp.

VI. Eugene Nida United the Roman Catholics and Protestants with Bad Paraphrases Called Dynamic Equivalence Translation

 

              Pastors and laity will little note nor long remember the name of Eugene Nida, who was born in 1914 and captured the world of Bible translation because of poor health on his first trip to Mexico. Nevertheless, he lived to be 96 years old, and was hailed with his glorious but erroneous epitaph:

“The promotion of professional expertise, the development of translation theory and of translation procedures based on such theory, began when Eugene A. Nida joined the American Bible Society staff in 1943.” For more than fifty years, Gene Nida was the leader of the translation program of the American Bible Society, and subsequently the intellectual leader of the global program of the United Bible Societies, as well as consultant to that organization.[1]

In the Biblical field, Nida’s name is often spoken with the enthusiasm of a sports fan or gambler on a winning streak. Left unspoken is the abrupt change from the precise translation of the Biblical text to the barbaric paraphrasing and mistranslation of God’s Word. Nida was not a quiet translator bent over the text, praying for guidance in giving the revelation of God to a new audience. He was a manager of translations everywhere and an activist uniting everyone under one umbrella, his new style playing with the words of the Bible.

              The history of New Testament text editing brought forth a completely new text, one which never saw the light of day in earlier times. The current Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament is a deliberate rejection of Traditional Text, which is called the Majority Text for its overwhelming dominance. Note this simple fact -

The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work of literature, with over

5,800 complete or fragmented Greek manuscripts catalogued,

10,000 Latin manuscripts and

9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic and Armenian. The dates of these manuscripts range from c. 125 (the 𝔓52 papyrus, oldest copy of John fragments)…[2]

Following Hort and Wescott, Nestle-Aland buried the Traditional Text and replaced it with their own invention – the best, the purest, the most scientific Greek text ever, so perfect that individual Greek words are voted on and off the Standard Text – as they call it, tongue in cheek. The Bible societies of the world no longer print the Traditional (Majority) Text of the King James Version, but the current Nestle-Aland. Thus the playful – or careless – attitude of the Nestle-Aland monopoly is echoed by the carnival approach of Nida’s offspring.

 

Nida’s Physical Collapse – The Beginning of Unified Paraphrasing

            Nida attended a summer camp for training Bible translators – Camp Wycliffe, run by Cameron Townsend. Nida had just finished bachelor’s degree summa cum laude at the University of California. He was not sure what he wanted to do, so the invitation connected him to his childhood training in the Bible. However, when he joined others in a working trip to Northwestern Mexico, work and the climate contributed to a major breakdown in his health. Recovering back in the US, he enrolled in a master’s program at the University of Southern California. In 1943, he completed a PhD at the University of Michigan. His doctrinal orientation was indicated by ordination in the Northern Baptist Convention, in 1943, where Social Gospel leader Walther Rauschbusch and the John D. Rockefeller Senior and Junior were members.

            The rationalistic doctrine of Rauschenbusch is clearly revealed in his interpretation of the miraculous in the Gospels, his Yale lectures on the Social Gospel in 1917.[3] Human reason explains them away, so the basic words of the New Testament are used to claim their meaning was quite different. Jesus died on the cross to show His solidarity with the poor. The miracles are not miracles at all, but somehow express something important. I attended an American Baptist camp in the 1960s, and we met in Rauschenbusch Hall where the Social Gospel leader was treated with great reverence. That shows how different Northern (now American) Baptists are, compared to Southern Baptists, though the differences are fading. The same is happening with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, sharing so much in common with the Missouri Synod, Wisconsin Synod, and the Evangelical Lutheran Synod.

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[1] Philip Stine, Eugene A. Nida: Theoretician of Translation, http://www.internationalbulletin.org/issues/2012-01/2012-01-038-stine.html, quoting William A. Smalley, Translation as Mission: Bible Translation in the Modern Missionary Movement (Macon, Ga.: Mercer Univ. Press, 1991), p. 28.

[2]Biblical Manuscript, retrieved from - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_manuscript#:~:text=The%20New%20Testament%20has%20been,%2C%20Ethiopic%2C%20Coptic%20and%20Armenian.

 

[3] My Notre Dame dissertation was about A. D. Mattson, who was converted to the Social Gospel at Yale Divinity, and taught at Augustana Seminary for three decades. His inaugural address, after gaining tenure at the school, was on the Social Gospel.

Wescott Hort laid the egg - and Nida hatched it.

Thomas Egger Receives Call To Be President of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis

Thomas Egger earned his MDiv and PhD at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.
"He served three terms on the CTCR and was part of the seven-member LCMS Catechism Revision Committee, which prepared the 2017 Objective Justification revision of the Synod’s explanation of Luther’s Small Catechism."

The Missouri Synod is completing its 100% Objective Justification saturation, perhaps in the hopes of a merger with WELS having a positive effect on its numbers. Readers may recall that a failing AAL merged with Lutheran Brotherhood to form AAL and hide the bad news.

The LCMS-ELS-WELS seminaries used their Schwan loot to build and remodel seminary buildings, a great leap backwards as enrollments sank and online classes became more practical for working adults. 

When the liberal ALPB discussed the future seminary president, they addressed every possible sociological angle - 

• Aging population
• Different needs
• Getting along together.

But they missed all the doctrinal issues, mainly their rejection of the Chief Article - Justification by Faith, their use of Calvinist Universalist Bibles, and their shameless copying of Fuller Seminary's box of gimmicks.

The radicals took over the LCMS with the 1932 Brief Statement, making it the 67th book of the Bible. Once they had the opportunities, they embraced Pentecostalism, ecumenism, the dreadful NIV Bible, and Church Growth.

The keystone and the cornerstone of Protestantism have been replaced with the Nida paraphrases of the Bible and the Unitarian confession of no faith.