 |
| 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.
[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. |
