Warn, Wake, and Walk
I ran into a tiny snag in this morning’s sermon, a snag that nobody noticed, and that’s fine. It illustrates, though, a problem in preaching from Scripture and in Bible translation, so I mention it here not to fuss about the very dear reader, but to flag up ways that trying hard to weave together homily and Scripture and liturgy and hymnody can still come a cropper.
The Epistle reading for today is Romans 13.11–14:
Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light; let us live honourably as in the day, not in revelling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarrelling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.
and I had picked out the closing phrases ‘make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires’ as the text for the sermon.* Now, what I (like Officer Obie with his ‘twenty-seven 8-by-10 color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was, to be used as evidence against us’) had not counted upon, which was that the reader for the epistle had chosen to read the lesson from the New International Version, a translation that notoriously translates the Pauline metaphor ‘flesh’ for what the translators thought ‘flesh’ really meant in that context — namely, our ‘sinful nature’.
Now the NIV translators have gotten plenty of stick for that decision, and if I’m not mistaken there’s a new version of the NIV that reverts to ‘flesh’. I disagree vehemently with the translators’ original decision, partly because it forecloses possible ambiguities that a reader is entitled to perceive. If ‘flesh’ ever stands in for ‘sinful nature’, it doesn’t always do so, and the translator shouldn’t be the one who presumes to resolve the ambiguity on behalf of the reader if it’s at all possible to preserve the ambiguity. Further, ‘flesh’ is at least partly a metaphor here, in a way that I rely on in the sermon, and substituting a flat declaration for a metaphor is always a loss for the reader. At length, I’m not convinced that Paul ever means ‘our sinful nature’, although there’s a particular theological angle that takes that reading to be a cornerstone of their theology (so it must be translated that way in order to bolster the apparent case for the theological perspective).**
As I say in the sermon, I take Paul’s theological metaphor to convey the point that ‘flesh’ is part of the complex of images that illuminate ‘badness’ in his theological imaginary: death, perishing, flesh, mortality, sin, weakness, and others. Paul reckons that flesh can’t of itself attain godliness, and we can see this play out as flesh ages and withers and ultimately dies. This same flesh also experiences desires that run contrary to what Paul and other Christians take to be a godly way of living: speaking for myself as a cisgendered heterosexual male, I do not always experience inappropriate desire when I encounter every woman (as I presumably would if ‘desire’ were a function of my sinful nature) but only intermittently, as a function of my imperfection. (Sorry if anyone thought I was already perfect, but like St Paul himself, I am not.) On my account, then, ‘sinful nature’ misrepresents both Paul’s thinking and his rhetoric, both of which are preserved by very straightforwardly rendering the Greek word sarx (the Greek behind all this bother) with ‘flesh’.
Anyway, the reader read ‘sinful nature’, I said ‘flesh’, and I don’t think anyone whatsoever in the congregation (other than I) noticed. That’s all just by way of introducing the point that the sermon is enclosed here below the fold.
* I customarily read out the text for the sermon before I invoke God’s threefold Name, then start the sermon after that. Often the text has a very direct bearing on the sermon, but sometimes it’s part of a greater mix, so to speak, and at other times it has only a ‘solve this puzzle’ relationship. This morning, the sermon rests on a number of parts of all three readings, so this one falls into the ‘in a mix’ category.
** I’m bemused by the number of articles, PR statements, and explanations for the successive changes in the NIV that have been deleted over the years — leaving no authoritative record of what the Committee on Biblical Translation or the publishers were doing or thinking. Now the readily available testimony comes only from on-lookers: critics, commentators, kibitzers. If everything were as above-board as one would ordinarily think, why delete pages that refer to a sequence of changes in translation? Conveniently, the Wayback Machine does a sterling job of retrieving what editors, comms officers, PR flacks, and others would want to have erased. Thank you, Wayback Machine!
Continue reading “Warn, Wake, and Walk”