Category Archives: Current events

Celebrating 400 years of the KJV

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I decided to mark this year’s 400th anniversary of the King James Bible (KJV) by learning more about it!

First, via Alister McGrath’s In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture (Doubleday, 2000), an informative though sometimes plodding overview of the KJV and how it emerged from new publishing technologies as well as the post-Reformation tensions between the Puritans and Church of England.

The KJV was not popular at first, notes McGrath; it took some 150 years, in fact, to be perceived as “a great work of religious literature.” Then, he says, historical distance, plus “a certain lack of knowledge of the early history of the translation” resulted in a “heady nostalgia” settling over its reputation.

“Heady nostalgia” is where Adam Nicolson’s God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (HarperCollins, 2003) seems to land, though not from any lack of knowledge of the period. Where McGrath is too easily content with “little is known” (most relevant records were destroyed in the Whitehall fire of 1619), Nicolson constructs a world from what is known of the period and from the fragments pertaining to the KJV. It was a time of hunger for “the undeniably solid” overlaid with a “love of variegation, of the multiplicity of things,” both impulses evident in the translation, he says. At times Nicolson waxes positively Jacobean himself, as in, for example:

The gift of this language-moment, the great Jacobean habit of mind on which the King James Bible rides for chapter after chapter and book after book, is this swinging between majesty and tangibility, the setting of the actual and perceptible within an enormous and enriching frame, the sense of intimacy between great and small, the embodiment of the most universal ideas in the most humble of forms, the sense in other words that the universe, from God to heifer, is one connected fabric.

It’s been no surprise to discover how political the translation was (which translation isn’t political, in the broadest sense of the word?) but I hadn’t realized how extensively the KJV was built on the foundation of the translations before it, especially Tyndale’s. Such borrowing was not considered a flaw but was indeed the project’s aim: to draw from the best, improving only where warranted.

I’m no apologist for the KJV, though I celebrate it gladly. It’s the Bible I was raised on, after all, and I didn’t think of it as a version; as far as we were concerned it was simply the Bible, and I memorized, as children did then — to shave a few dollars off camp fees or to earn gold stars on a piece of paper – hundreds of verses. Of course I knew God also spoke German, as that had been my first and preschool language, but the KJV was how God always talked when God talked English.

Now I rarely use the KJV. I don’t need to, really; I hear it still, almost unconsciously, it seems, underneath whatever other version I’m reading. What the newer versions do for me is freshen and elaborate the beloved but eventually too-familiar text by which I was nurtured.

The debate around “knowing”

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So what do we think of TIME’s decision to name Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg their Man of the Year? We, the citizens of Facebook, I mean — citizens of the third largest nation in the world, if 500 million accounts counted as a nation. But also we as in all of us, whether we’re on Facebook or not, who know how profoundly media and technology have shifted, who have adapted our communication and connection habits, whether we wanted to or not. And we as in all of us who know that notions of private and public are being re-shaped, again.

There’s plenty of chatter about the angles of this – from sneers that TIME isn’t exactly the authority it used to be on what’s important (which is why I asked what “we” all think, if the we over at Facebook can just pause from collecting tractors for our farms for a moment, or taking a test to discover what dead celebrity we might have been in another life) to SNL’s comics setting up WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as bitter over Zuckerberg getting TIME’s honour (and this landing in newspapers and on computer screens everywhere as news!).

Of the list of TIME candidates (Julian Assange, the Tea Party, Afghan president Hami Karzai, and the Chilean miners), my pick would have been Julian Assange.  Not because I find him more likable (it’s not about liking — Hitler was once was Man of the Year, and Stalin was twice), but because I think the WikiLeak events and the impulses behind them will reverberate through global politics and life more significantly than Facebook has or will. Continue reading →

Stories from Cape Town 2010

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This week I attended an informal discussion meeting in which my friend Doug Koop, editor of ChristianWeek, talked about his experience of Cape Town 2010, the third congress of the Lausanne movement (the first being 1974, in Lausanne). We discussed The Cape Town Commitment, a document authored for the congress by Chris Wright, but mostly we enjoyed hearing about the event, especially to get those perspectives one doesn’t necessarily get in official press releases. I confess that I hadn’t really informed myself about this event earlier, as I’m mostly out of the loop on matters Evangelical, but I did read some of Doug’s reports on Facebook.

He gave us a quick history primer: the Lausanne event in 1974, key organizers being the Billy Graham group and John Stott, with an internal debate sparked by then-young upstarts Samuel Escobar and Rene Padilla, arguing for a holistic gospel; then to the congress in Manila in 1989 whose primary result was partnerships and an emphasis on the language of “unreached people groups.” And now, a third congress in Cape Town, 2010. The Cape Town Commitment uses the language of love as a way of framing commitment (We love because God first loved us, we love the living God… etc., 10 points in all), which struck us as both compelling and significant, though one person in our discussion group commented (to the nods of others) that while it uses love language it seems to have a belief agenda.

Doug shared Cape Town 2010 highlights: the words of Libby Little, recently widowed when Dan Little was killed in Afghanistan, and of Sung Kyung, a young woman from North Korea. Other matters of note included controversy around John Piper going “off script” in his exposition of Ephesians 3, and the critique of “managerial missiology” or preoccupation with numbers.

Rather than trying to convey things third-hand, I commend Doug’s writing on the event at ChristianWeek blogs. There’s also an interesting piece there by Wendy Gritter of New Direction on her conversation about homosexuality with Anglican Archbishop Henry Orombi of Uganda.

Sometimes it seems that the large clusters of the Christian church — Evangelicals, World Council of Churches, Anabaptists — circle only in their own orbits, which partially explains the personal out-of-the-loop note above, but I notice that the Mennonite World Conference had some 30 representatives at Cape Town, according to this report by Byron Rempel Burkholder.