Translation as Interpretation
All Evangelicals believe that the Bible is inerrant in its original autographa, and, indeed, the historical evidence for the reliability of the Bible far outweighs any other ancient document. Generally speaking, Evangelicals also trust how translators have handled the Scriptures. Bible translators must have language skills, a knowledge of how language and specific words were used in the contemporary culture in which the document was written, a feel for the author’s voice, and an awareness of the danger of injecting their own personality and beliefs into the text.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that because translators are aware of these responsibilities it makes them naturally immune to any subjectivity in their own translations. Are journalists really objective in their political reporting or archaeologists unbiased in their interpretation of excavation findings? Like everyone else, translators are likewise prone to working their own presuppositions into their translation work, however unwitting.8
Consider also, for example, the tendency of many pastors you and I know in our respective locales. These men study to preach the Bible weekly, and like many other Evangelical pastors outside our local regions, they appear to believe what the Westminster Confessions states about God’s absolute sovereignty existing alongside human freedom. Suppose, then, that any one of these pastors had been a proofreading translator under King James I of England at the beginning of the 17th century. And suppose too that in the course of proofing the translation they read the rendering of Romans 9:22: “What if God, willing to show his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction…” Do you suppose as believers in God’s absolute sovereignty (sometimes called God’s providence) these pastors would render the verse any differently from what, in fact, the actual King James translators did? Note the phrase in verse 22: “…[God] endured with much longsuffering vessels of wrath fitted for destruction…” In this verse the King James translators rendered the verb “fit” in the passive voice, since the spelling of the verb appears as a perfect passive participle. Yet the exact Greek spelling of this verb is rendered the same way in the middle voice, which means that the verb “fitted” in the phrase “fitted for destruction” could just as easily have been translated to reflect a state of being which the vessels brought upon themselves (especially given the context). Now supposing further that these pastors knew that the Greek verb “fitted” was spelled the same way in the middle voice as in the perfect passive, and thus could be translated differently, i.e., “vessels of wrath who fitted themselves for destruction”—do you suppose they would have translated it thus? What compelling reason would they have for choosing to put the verb in the middle voice? In fact, to do so might imply that man was self-determinative and that God was not really absolutely sovereign over people’s choices. Naturally, as translators under the influence of Calvinism faced with a ticklish passage like Romans 9, they would want the verb rendered so it would be consistent with what they believed the Bible taught. Furthermore, even if they were not a follower of Calvin and were to translate it correctly, they would still have to know that Greek participles, like “fitted” in Romans 9:22, are spelled the same way in the middle voice as they are in the perfect passive.
But this same spelling in the middle voice seems as ignored today as it was then. I myself only know about this spelling because someone shared it with me from a radio program he had heard. Admittedly, all of us Christians—pastors and translators included—have gaps in our knowledge, and we should not be overly faulted for not knowing everything there is to know. But why the general ignorance about “fitted vessels?” The point here is that I don’t know of even one Bible translation that renders Romans 9:22 in the middle voice. In fact, I don’t even know of one Bible version that mentions the middle voice as a possibility in a marginal note. How many translators does that represent? The monolithic agreement with the Calvinistic view that vessels are “fitted for destruction,” i.e., as though God had fitted them, is universal in all extant English Bible translations, so far as I know. No wonder why Christians are so adamant about their Calvinistic leanings; their responsibility is to believe the Bible, isn’t it? Even Spiros Zodiates in his generally helpful Greek-Key Study Bible fails to mention this possible rendering in Romans 9:22, though verbs in the text have coded abbreviations that are referenced back to a prefix page which shows that he includes the middle voice indication.9 In light of all this, I must admit I smiled a bit when an online Calvinist, discussing the phrase in Acts 13:48 (see p. 409ff), i.e., “And as many as were ordained unto salvation believed,” remarked that the overwhelming preference by translators retained the word “ordained,” and that the only real preference in translation for “predisposed” was the New World Version by the Jehovah’s Witnesses! Such unbounded confidence in Christian translators might be understandable, but in light of how Romans 9:22 has been translated, it does not appear prudent. In fact, a few years later, I discovered that the word “ordained” in Acts 13:48 is also, like “fitted” in Romans 9:22, a ‘perfect passive participle,’ and should have been translated in the middle voice (again, see p. 409ff).
One might imagine, then, what I used to think as a Calvinist when reading the phrase “vessels of wrath fitted for destruction.” It appeared to me that God didn’t see fit to extend His mercy to certain people (for reasons unknown to me). Naturally, I had to brush off the paradox this verse implied, i.e., that God had to endure these vessels that He Himself had ordained for destruction according to His own self-satisfied plan. (Calvinists claim that since God ordains all things, everything that comes to pass is according to His good pleasure).
I view Romans 9:22 differently now. It just seems biblically logical that the verse should read, “What if God…who endured with much patience vessels of wrath which fitted themselves for destruction…” Biblical logic is not a bad thing, though admittedly logic has taken a fall in reputation among Christians for a long time. In general Christians have questioned logic at least since the time of the Enlightenment. During that period of history, man’s reason was often extolled as the final authority in matters of science and religion. Of course, in one sense Christians have been right to be skeptical about man’s logic, for history has shown that such ‘logic’ as applied to the interpretation of archaeology and history has hardly been objective or supportive of the Bible. Yet, it remains true that God is the author of all real logic. Thus when translators rendered Romans 9:22 to read that God endured those vessels that He Himself fit for destruction, how did they come to find logic in that? Should not that contradiction of logic have caused them to examine further the Greek possibilities for a non-contradictory rendering?
Consider, too, how God defines logic in Isaiah 5:20: “Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil, that put darkness for light and light for darkness, that put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” The logic defined by this verse means that evil cannot also be good. A university class in formal logic would put it thus:A cannot equal non-A. Paul repeated the same thought when he rhetorically asked in 2 Corinthians 6:14b-15a: “what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial?” So the question begs itself: Why would God tell us to think in either/or terms but then settle our apologetic on the kind of both/and dialectical statement held by the Westminster Confessions? The both/and (doublethink) of Calvinism affects one’s interpretation of the Bible in many places (technically in all places). I believe it also affected the way KJV translators translated certain other phrases in the Bible besides Romans 9:22.
Though we will discuss portions of Romans 8—9 in more detail later, consider for now one more example of a questionable translation—the well-known phrase in Romans 8:28: “all things work together for good to them that love God.” How many Christians (including myself) memorized this verse toward the latter end of the 350+ years in which the KJV was used in every place from Anglican High Church pulpits to American backyard children’s Bible clubs? Many people similar to me grew up believing that somehow, inexplicably, all things worked together to produce good for the believer. Again, that would mean everything. And everything includes Christ and Satan, light and darkness, righteousness and unrighteousness. Did someone lie about your reputation at work? Has college ruined your son or daughter so that he or she now finds your Christianity embarrassing and meaningless? Did your spouse finally admit to a long-term affair? Not to worry—for if the King James translators are to be believed, then all these things are working together for your good. (At least that’s what mainline, Evangelical commentary has accepted as the KJV’s intent.) So, taking into account Isaiah 5:20, Romans 8:28, and 2 Corinthians 6:14b-15a, what are we left with?—apparently a Bible that claims in 1 Corinthians 6 that righteousness and unrighteousness can have no communion, while stating in Romans 8 that good and evil are working cooperatively to produce good for the believer!
This contradiction of good and evil things working together is not something that is likely to bother the Calvinist very much. After all, if God foreordains all events there must be a sense in which God approves of all history, since it is ordered after the counsel of His good will and pleasure. Again, in effect, Whatever is, is right, as the poet Alexander Pope expressed it (apparently even when it isn’t right!). To what kind of ‘Romans 8:28 theology,’ then, does John Calvin actually invite me as a follower of God? Just this—one where I find myself at the end of most days not worrying too much about anything I did, since all the means of all my actions are ultimately working for my good anyway. In fact, despite Paul’s admonition in Romans 6 that I ought not to sin for the purpose of making grace abound, I see no reason to worry that much if I grow lackadaisical in my moral behavior, since even sin serves the purposes of God. I might even conclude that grace necessitates sin, since grace wouldn’t have any opportunities to exist were it not for sin. Perhaps this explains why I recently heard a president of a major Reformed seminary state on the radio that the sin of man praises God.
Examples of Sovereignty?
Perhaps that president’s attitude also explains the behavior of two Christian men I knew who once justified their behavior by appealing to an all-sovereign God. One of these men was a pastor of the church in which I had been raised. This pastor had graduated from what many would consider is the ‘Harvard’ of Evangelical seminaries, though his Calvinistic perspective upon his arrival at our church was relatively new to many of the church’s Methodist-influenced parishioners. At one point, however, this pastor fell into an adulterous relationship with another woman in the church. Moreover, the pastor and the woman with whom he was having an affair each had a spouse and children, and so their sin affected two entire families (not to mention the church). When the pastor was eventually confronted by two of the church’s elders his reply was enigmatic. How, he asked, could he have really done otherwise? Could he actually have frustrated God, who, in some sense, had already predestined every event that had come to pass?
The second example of a man I knew who appealed to God’s sovereignty was the president of the small Reformed Christian college I attended. During one particular spring semester (many years ago) he proposed budgeting the college’s future resources by reorienting monies away from the Liberal Arts departments to help fund the Engineering and Science departments. Apparently, he thought the college should depart from its long-standing commitment to the humanities in order to respond to the growing market of technologies, thereby drawing more students into the college. His new proposal led to great dissent among many of the faculty and students on campus. A question and answer session between the president and students was arranged in hopes to quell the unrest. At the appointed day, students crowded into the upper lobby of the student center. The atmosphere was tense. After numerous questions were raised the president concluded one of his answers by appealing to the sovereignty of God. “Even if the new proposal is put into motion with misgivings, or in some sense is found wanting,” said the president, “we can still rest in the knowledge that God is sovereign over the decisions of men.” Hearing this statement, Mick,10 an older student, immediately shot out from where he had been standing near a side wall, and, pointing at the president, cried out with an intense voice, “This is man’s will and man’s decision; don’t make this out to be God’s will!” Despite his anger the point was made, and it was met with loud, spontaneous applause and approving shouts (all this, by the way, at a Reformed college). Though Mick later confessed to me that he felt terrible about chastising the president in public and believed he had been wrong to do so, his remarks underscore, I think, the continuing frustration many of us feel as we confront an Evangelical mindset that has been locked in doublethink and doublespeak for far too long. Mick was right; God’s will is not being perfectly worked out in all of man’s decisions; indeed, God’s will is not being done on earth as it is in heaven, as the Lord’s Prayer plainly tells us.
So what do we do with Romans 8:28? Was the president of the college correct to imply that God works everything according to His plan for those who love Him? Are we forced to accept this verse as teaching the idea that good and evil work together, even though Paul says elsewhere that certain things cannot have any communion with each other? Says seminary professor, Tim Geddert, regarding the general impression Romans 8:28 once made on him:
there was a time when I interpreted this verse to mean that there really are no “bad things” that happen to believers. If things seem bad, but really serve to fulfill God’s purposes, then even these things are ultimately good… (as though there is some deep magic in the universe that somehow creates the hidden “good” pattern out of all the “bad” pieces.)11
Geddert points out that since the beginning of the 17th century English translators have differed about whether the subject noun of Romans 8:28 was ‘God,’ or ‘all things’ (both are grammatically possible). The KJV settled on “all things,” the NIV on “God.” Geddert explains how Romans 8:28 could have been translated differently. He believes the NIV treatment is a more accurate translation than the KJV, i.e., “In all things, God works for the good of those who love him…” But Geddert notes something else in Romans 8:28. The verb sunergei (from which we get the English word synergy)is used four times in the New Testament (Mk. 16:20; 1 Cor. 16:16; 2 Cor. 6:1; Ja. 2:22) and always means two or more entities or parties working together as a team. The first three passages show God working with people or people working with each other cooperatively. The fourth is used metaphorically to describe how faith and works work together in consort. Says Geddert:
I have before me a new edition of the NIV. It contains two footnotes to this verse…The second says this: “OR…works together with those who love him to bring about what is good…” This way of reading the verse still views “God” as the subject of the verb “works together.” However, on this reading “those who love God” are not the beneficiaries of God interventions; they are God’s co-workers! Romans 8:28 is not about God working to bring about good things for us (though God also does that!); Romans 8:28 is about God working with us to bring about good things…
There is yet another possibility. Sometimes the grammar of a Greek sentence is ambiguous (technically it is called polyvalent). More than one grammatical option is possible and both meanings are intended. Perhaps the verse is about God working both with us and for us to bring about good things in tough situations.
So, then, as Geddert points out, the traditional interpretation of the key phrase “all things work together” in Romans 8:28 as found in the AV (Authorized Version, i.e., KJV) was never really biblical.12 Even if one argued that the AV translation of this phrase should be upheld because a precedent exists for inanimate objects said to be working together (i.e., faith with works in James 2:22), we still cannot say that all things without limitation work together. Incidentally, faith and works are not really inanimate, but are acts of human will.) That would mean that righteousness works with unrighteousness, that Christ works with Belial, that light works with darkness, etc., when, in fact, these persons or acts of persons are moral opposites which have no shared goal. It is surprising, is it not, that as well known as Romans 8:28 and 2 Corinthians 6:14-15 are to many churchgoers, not to mention the average translator, that the discrepancy between these verses has received very little attention? Many Christians seem to have sided with Calvinism so long that contradictions in logic no longer bother them. It’s rather like the purple-turtle-in-the-sky theology all over again (see chpt. 2). Christians come face to face with a biblical discrepancy that forces them in one of two directions. Either they will solve the KJV’s Romans 8:28/2 Corinthians 6:14-15 contradiction with irrationality and allow the contradiction to remain, or they will look further into Scripture to see what went wrong in the translation and interpretation of one or both of these passages, to prove there is no contradiction. So far, mainline Evangelicalism has taken the uncritical route.
Is a Key Presumption Fueling the Debate?
Frankly speaking, Calvinism has gotten a lot of mileage out of readers’ inference from the AV’s rendering of Romans 8:28. I once knew an elderly Presbyterian woman who said that she hung onto this verse for all it was worth, after her son, a young WWII veteran, unexpectedly committed suicide while in his mid 20s. Her son, raised in church where he heard many sermons from the pulpit, though apparently none that explained the Hebrew distinctions in the Old Testament words ‘kill’ and ‘murder,’ went away to war at age 17 convinced that killing the enemy was still a violation of the sixth commandment (’Thou shalt not kill’). Apparently at some subconscious level he believed there was no such thing as a ‘just war.’ He then fought in three companies where every soldier but him was either killed or wounded out of action. When the war was over, he came back to the States and eventually developed signs of post-traumatic stress. Finally, he moved from the East Coast to California, and one day someone found him in a closed-up garage with the car running and with a suicide note next to him on the car seat. Now I ask you—What caring pastor six months after this young man’s death wouldn’t want to be able to tell the still grieving mother that somehow even this tragedy would somehow ultimately work together for her good? What biblical counselor wouldn’t have wanted the KJV rendering of Romans 8:28 in his back pocket when trying to comfort this same woman five years later because her infant granddaughter died after a two-year battle with liver disease? Perhaps this woman had even learned of Romans 8:28 from her mother who had once lost three small children to scarlet fever within a month. This woman—like other Christians who seem to have a penchant for practical daily faith—will find some way to get through the day. But not all Christians are so inclined. Indeed, a few end up in garages with the car running, having committed the kind of act that Dietrich Bonhoeffer once described as someone’s last attempt to give human meaning to what has become for them a meaningless human existence.
To be sure, tragedy still mocks even those who know their trials are tied to the fact that they live in a fallen world in which God did not necessarily design the circumstances they face. Yet I wonder how many of us would still pose the “Why God?” question if some personal disaster came knocking on our door. Personally, I think almost certainly I would. And so I find myself praying “O Lord, I believe that Romans 8:28 does not mean what the traditional interpreters say it does about all things working together; help thou mine unbelief.” Yes, I want to be done with candy- coating the Bible, because such gloss-overs have never really led anyone to the truth. Today the Church wonders why some Christians sail through difficulties full of ‘faith’ while others cool off in their spiritual ardor at an almost imperceptible pace and for reasons not even clear to themselves. The problem may be that the Bible is perceived by these latter folk as guaranteeing to meet their needs, though, we note, only on an illogical basis [since Romans 8:28 (KJV) remains (as traditionally interpreted, at least) in standing contradiction to 1 Corinthians 6:14-15]. And so this dilemma gnaws at such persons’ minds until the raw nerve-ends of doubt are exposed. Yet in one sense what is actually happening to these believers is that their faith is being tested in the midst of what they imagine is a withdrawal from God. And in fact they are withdrawing from a false view of God rather than embracing it, though they simply do not realize it. Instead they find themselves depressed, separated from the assembly and wondering what has happened to their faith. Yet, had they followed the Evangelical party line about the absolute sovereignty of God, it would merely have led to their worshiping something else in addition to the God of the Bible. Despite, then, what other illegitimate reasons there may be for the ‘cooling off’ of some Christians, it would appear in such cases these persons are closer in their walk with God than many of us imagine. Meanwhile, the Church has yet to test a truly biblical model that fully ministers truth to such grieving persons facing the problem of evil.
8And yet Christians so often quote controversial passages as though translations were as infallible as the autographa.
9 The problem, of course, is that the average reader won’t realize that participles coded as perfect passive appear the same way when spelled in the middle voice.
10Not his real name. These statements are given in their essence and according to memory.
11 “Another Look at Romans 8:28.” [http://mbseminary.edu/main/ articles/geddert1.htm], 1999.
12 A third possibility of translation may be that “all things” refers to the list of things Paul immediately gives in 8:29-30, i.e., God’s foreknowledge, predestination to conformity to the Son, calling [naming out from among (Gr. ekalese )], justification, and glorification of the believer, all of which could be said to be working together for the same goal, i.e., the good of the believer. In such a case the period at the end of Romans 8:28 would require a colon in translation (the autographa of the New Testament was without punctuation) so that the “all things” could be contextually understood to have this limited meaning, as opposed to “all things” in the world, which would include sin, the Devil, etc., none of which or whom share any commonality (in the synergistic sense) with Christ or His cause. Observe that absent punctuation in the autographa sometimes makes it possible for the Spirit to lead the reader into a multi-leveled understanding of certain passages. One such result is that Romans 8:28 could be considered polyvalent in meaning