Over this past weekend (March 27-29), we hosted our Campus Preview Weekend for prospective students and their families. With such weekends in both fall and spring semesters, CPW provides the opportunity for them to get to know us just a bit – to attend classes, stay on residence halls, eat in the Great Hall, meet our faculty and students, and begin to imagine themselves at Covenant.

During a Q&A session with parents, I was asked about the emphasis we place on writing across the curriculum, and I was delighted to be able to respond that writing continues to be a strength of our program. Not only in specifically writing-oriented disciplines like literature and history, but also in business and education and the sciences, written assignments are a consistent feature.

After the session, a student related the story of a friend of his who is enrolled in our pre-engineering dual-degree program with Georgia Tech. After completing the designed three years at Covenant, he joined engineering students from many institutions in classes at Georgia Tech and found that he quickly became the “designated writer” for his group. He reported that, while his classmates were well-prepared technically, they had almost never been required to write during their earlier college years and were simply not able to do it to an acceptable standard.

Reflecting on writing at Covenant prompted my thinking about reading at Covenant. After all, it’s virtually impossible to learn how to write well without reading widely and much. A common characteristic of excellent writers is that they are voracious readers, and it’s their exposure to great writers and great writing that serves them well in their own writing efforts. Again, at Covenant reading is at the heart of our curriculum, and our faculty set high expectations for the volume and level of reading in their students’ academic work.

Awhile back, John Piper posted an article about the importance of reading, particularly for those of us who are “people of the Book,” as reading and understanding the Bible are foundational and essential for a growing and vital faith.

As Piper puts it, the effort and skill required to read difficult biblical texts well provide:

…an overwhelming argument for giving our children a disciplined and rigorous training in how to think an author’s thoughts after him from a text – especially a biblical text. An alphabet must be learned, as well as vocabulary, grammar, syntax, the rudiments of logic, and the way meaning is imparted through sustained connections of sentences and paragraphs…. (A)part from the discipline of reading, the Bible is as powerless as paper. Someone might have to read it for you, but without reading the meaning and the power of it are locked up.*

The Bible frequently clues us in to this matter of taking reading seriously: “Have you not read…?” “Have you never read…?” “Did you never read…?” “How does it read…?” God’s people are repeatedly commanded to read the Scriptures, again and again and again.

Piper concludes:

The ability to read does not come intuitively. It must be taught. And learning to read with understanding is a life-long labor. The implications for Christians are immense. Education of the mind in the rigorous discipline of thoughtful reading is a primary goal of school. The church of Jesus is debilitated when his people are lulled into thinking that it is humble or democratic or relevant to give a merely practical education that does not involve the rigorous training of the mind to think hard and construe meaning from difficult texts.

Thus far I’ve focused on the importance of writing well and the underlying necessity of reading well – with special emphasis on the reading of the Bible. But I want to back up one more step in the logical sequence: Reading well and with understanding helps us get at the writer’s meaning only if we have dependable access to the writer’s meaning. Once again, this brings us to the reading of the Bible. Even a good reading of a scriptural text won’t enable us to think the author’s thoughts after him if the text in translation is not a dependable transmission of the text in the original language. Not only should this prompt us to consider the study of Hebrew and Greek as a more regular feature of the ministry of the church, but it also should heighten our interest in which English translation we utilize for our study.

We don’t have to look far to find examples of the radical difference translation can make, not only for our understanding but also for our theology and our discipleship. Let’s briefly consider two cases from Peter’s letters.

2 Peter 1:16-21 is a text of biblical epistemology: how we know what we know about Jesus and his coming again, so that we might believe and live rightly. Peter offers two levels of validation for the coming of Jesus in glory and judgment: his own eye- and ear-witness account of the glory of Jesus revealed on the mountain of transfiguration, which served as an anticipation of the glory to be revealed at his coming; and the testimony of the prophets, who wrote, not according to their own interpretation or will, but as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

But what is the relationship between these two levels of validation? Is Peter’s eye- and ear-witness account a more solid foundation for our faith than the prophets’ testimony, or is it the reverse? Which it is is important – the issue goes to the heart of the confidence we can have in the written Word of God.

And yet we find two different popular translations giving contrary versions of the order. The New International Version translates v. 19 as follows: “And we have the word of the prophets made more certain…”, the sense being that the written testimony of the prophets has been made “more certain” by the eye- and ear-witness testimony of Peter and the apostles. On the other hand, the English Standard Version translates the same verse, “And we have something more sure, the prophetic word…”, the sense being that the written word of the prophet is more sure than Peter’s own personal account.

The point is that we can read either version closely and get the meaning, but – which meaning did Peter intend?

For several reasons I think the ESV translation is the better one (more faithful rendering of the Greek, the internal logic of the passage, the gospel account of the transfiguration event itself – which even Peter himself, eyes and ears open as they were, didn’t understand at the time, and other biblical passages in which we are explicitly told that the written Word is a more dependable ground for our faith than immediate experience, e.g. Luke 16:27-31). On the basis of a good translation and a good reading, we can follow Peter in affirming the magnificent gift of the Word of God written and the powerful, life-giving blessing it brings – far beyond momentary, less dependable, and often confusing sensory or spiritual experiences.

The other passage is 1 Peter 5:6-7. The New International Version translates this passage:

Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him for he cares for you.

By translating these verses as two separate sentences, the NIV creates for the reader the challenge of understanding the connection between them. What does “Cast all your anxiety on him…” have to do with “Humble yourselves…”? Is verse 7 a new thought? Is it a general exhortation to leave our worries with the Lord?

The English Standard Version translation preserves the grammar of the original Greek, presenting v. 7 as a subordinate clause as follows:

Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.

By faithfully rendering the grammar of the original, the ESV enables the reader immediately to see that there is a close connection between humility and getting rid of our anxiety. In fact, the reader is instructed to demonstrate true humility before God by casting all anxieties on him. Worry is pride, a refusal to acknowledge who God is and who we are.

Now could a reader of the NIV get this right? Well, of course – the reader could take these verses the way the ESV renders them. But there are other ways to take the NIV translation that would miss the mark and fail to drive Peter’s sharp point home: Do you worry? Are you full of anxiety? Don’t pray for “more faith.” Turn away from your pride, your presumption that you fully understand your situation and how bad it is. Humble yourself before the Lord, the One who cares for you with infinite mercy and love, giving over all your worries to “the God of all grace who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ” and who “will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you” (5:10).**

I am very grateful for the place of writing in the academic program of Covenant College, and I hope we will always be known as a place that takes writing seriously and hones writing skills so that our graduates will be able to lead the way in written communication.

I am very grateful as well for the place of reading here at Covenant, not only as foundational for good writing but as the principal doorway into knowledge and understanding of our world, its beauty and complexity, and our place in it.

This reading emphasis is most significant for us with regard to reading the Bible. We take the very words of Scripture seriously, believing that the human authors, without being robots or stenographers, nevertheless wrote down exactly what God intended. And this means that we are concerned not only about reading well – vocabulary, grammar, syntax, etc. – but also about the dependability of what we read, both the text in the original languages and the text in translation. To read and understand, no matter how well, what the author did not intend leads us away from the truth which God would have us believe and live.***

May our reading and writing be instruments of God’s blessing in the church and in the world!

* And it’s not just a matter of vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and organization. I remember the challenge of reading the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, who wrote some of the densest and most complicated philosophy in the English language. His major work, Process and Reality, comes with an extensive glossary of terms at the back because Whitehead frequently made up his own words – they looked like English words but they didn’t appear in a standard dictionary! – and he frequently assigned his own unique meanings to familiar words and collections of words. Years later, I came across a recommendation from a literary critic about reading difficult texts, and this encouragement brought back memories of the challenge, and the resulting satisfaction, of working hard to understand Whitehead: “Keep staring at the text, and eventually random acts of understanding will begin to occur!”

**One further example of the crucial importance of translating according to the grammar of the Greek text: Ephesians 5:18-21. Compare the ESV with the NIV and note that the latter breaks up this one complex sentence into separate sentences, and even presents v. 21 as a stand-alone paragraph rather than the fourth in a series of subordinate clauses intended to build out the meaning of “be filled with the Spirit” (v. 18). In so doing, the NIV, along with its gender-neutral companion TNIV, opens the door for (a) understanding v. 21 as a thesis statement for the passage that follows regarding wives and husbands, and (b) the proposal of an egalitarian understanding of husband-and-wife relationships, i.e. their service and submission to one another are identical and without differentiation – thus undermining the actual teaching of vv. 22-33 in line with this alleged introductory thesis.

***A few years ago, I was describing to a friend the benefits of essentially literal translation demonstrated in the English Standard Version, and he commented that he found The Living Bible version of a particular passage in Romans easier to understand. While I have long appreciated the devotional benefits of The Living Bible, it was soon clear to both of us that the “easier” reading altered and even left out crucial aspects of the original language text that the ESV version included. The point is that ease of understanding is not the most important criterion for a version of the Bible, particularly if what is understood, no matter how easy, is not what the author intended. My wife Kathleen has recently completed a two-volume study of the book of Isaiah, and she has sometimes been tempted to apologize when those using it complain about its difficulty. But then she stops herself, knowing that Isaiah is indeed a very difficult and complicated prophetic book and that careful and accurate study requires facing the difficulty head-on. It is no virtue to make something easier than it actually is, or to leave out or change meaning in order to make it palatable to less diligent students. Reading and understanding the Bible is often very hard work! As the philosopher Spinoza put it, “All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”