The inerrancy issue remains a problem for many Lutherans, particularly those who have been schooled in higher-criticism. While their sympathies may be with those who hold a high view of Scripture, the term “inerrancy” is a word that makes them uncomfortable. Ironically, inerrant is not nearly as strong a word as infallible. Inerrant just means the Scriptures contain no error. Infallible asserts that the Scriptures are incapable of error. Both terms are rightly used to describe the nature of the Holy Scriptures; however, they are not rightly understood unless they are understood in light of the reality that is Jesus Christ, the Word of God Incarnate. For that reason, I thought it would be interesting to share the Lutheran perspective on the inerrancy and infallibility of Scripture. When we consider the Incarnation, and the reality that Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man, we can better understand the nature of the Scriptures as being truly human, though without error. Thanks to Pastor Jay Webber for this collection of quotes on this issue. Source.

The Holy Scripture is God’s Word, written and, so to speak, lettered and put into the form of letters (gebuchstabet und in Buchstaben gebildet), just as Christ, the eternal Word of God, is clothed in humanity. And men regard and treat the written Word of God in this world just as they do Christ. It is a worm and no book compared with other books. (Martin Luther, WA 48, 31 [1541]; quoted in What Luther Says [Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1959], p. 71)

The Holy Scripture is God’s Word, written and, so to say, spelled out and pictured in alphabetic letters, just as Christ is the eternal Word of God veiled in humanity; and what happened to Christ in the world, happens to the written Word of God also: it is considered a worm and no book over against other books. (Martin Luther, WA 48, 31 [alternate translation]; quoted in Hermann Sasse, “On the Doctrine De Scriptura Sacra,” Scripture and the Church: Selected Essays of Hermann Sasse [Saint Louis: Concordia Seminary, 1995], p. 78)

The word of God is perfectly divine in its contents; but except where the divine form is as necessary as the divine fact, no book is more perfectly human in its form. It is inspired, for it comes from God; it is human, for it comes through man. But remember, we do not say that the human is without the divine. The Spirit is incarnate in the Word, as the Son was incarnate in Christ. There is deep significance in the fact, that the title of “the Word” is given both to Christ, the Revealer, and to the Bible, the revelation of God, so that in some passages great critics differ as to which is meant. As Christ without confusion of natures is truly human as well as divine, so is this Word. As the human in Christ, though distinct from the divine, was never separate from it, and his human acts were never those of a merely human being – his toils, his merits and his blood were those of God – so is the written word, though most human of books – as Christ, “the Son of Man,” was most human of men – truly divine. Its humanities are no accidents; they are divinely planned. It is essential to God’s conception of his Book, that it shall be written by these men and in this way. He created, reared, made and chose these men, and inspired them to do this thing in their way, because their way was his way.
Take up the Bible – read it impartially. You see in it the unity of truth, an agreement in facts, in doctrine and in spirit. It is one book, as “our God is one God.” Just as palpably, however, do you perceive difference in form. You have before you poetry and prose, history, biography, drama, proverb and prophecy. …
It is the great divine-human heart of the Bible, which has made it so varied in eternal freshness. How everything is permitted to shine out in its own light, and the men of all its eras permitted to make their utterances in the spirit of their own time! … These are the contents of the books of the Old Covenant, which their mere names recall.
And what is the New Testament but an unfolding of this same divine humanity? The New Testament is the life of God in human nature. … Through God in Christ, and Christ in man, we are led from the lineage of him in whom the blood royal of the realms of heaven and [of] earth met, to the closing book of broken seals and seals yet to be broken. But with whatever pulse your human heart may beat, God has placed in his book a heart as truly human as your own, to beat with it. …
The great Spirit who lives in the Universe gives it glory and unity; but it is the lower part of it – the material – which gives it variety. (Charles Porterfield Krauth, The Bible a Perfect Book [Gettysburg, Pennsylvania: Henry C. Neinstedt, 1857], pp. 10-13)

Read more…

This is an essential catholic and evangelical truth: the Word of God does not speak of something the way, for example, I may speak of something I know or have an opinion about. Scripture is God speaking. When Scripture speaks, we hear the voice of God.

For most of Protestantism Scripture has become a book of rules to be followed, a set of principles to inform how we reshape the world, a set of practical tools to better your life, or a road map to lead you from here to eternity. But that is just plain wrong. Scripture is the voice of God. Scripture is the discourse of God in human words. This Word is powerful and can do what it claims and keep all its promises. This Word has the power to call and gather the Church.

On Sunday morning we often treat the Word of God as if it were nothing more than a book of wise sayings, some of which may be practical enough and pointed enough to make a small difference in the ordinary and mundane of our world. We treat so casually what is essentially the Voice of God who speaks to us and is speaking to us in Scripture.

We act as if the gems of Bible study were the hints or conclusions reached from that study — like a school child reads the encyclopedia for things he or she can use in a paper that is due tomorrow. Bible study is important because it is time with God, it is the conversation in which God is the speaker to us and we who have ears tuned in faith can hear Him speaking. It is not what we learn from Bible study but what we learn in Bible study as a people gather to hear every word and as a people who know that this every word is important.

Nowhere is that more true than in worship — the Word of God predominates not because we have found it useful but because it is Christ speaking to us. In this respect liturgy is the only real context for us to hear Scripture — everything else flows from this assembly and is not in competition with it or can substitute for it.

This is what we need to rediscover – the urgency, the immediacy of God’s voice in our midst. In response to that voice, we come, we listen, we hear, and we grow. The distasteful practice of cell phones and watch alarms going off in worship is a sign that we have not understood that Scripture is God’s voice speaking to us — or surely we would shut those things off. The strange practice of people moving in and out of the Sanctuary as the Scriptures are read and preached is a sign that we do not understand that Scripture is God’s living voice speaking to us or we would find a way to fit our bathroom needs around this holy and momentous conversation in which God is the speaker and initiates the dialog that brings forth faith in us and bestows upon us all the gifts of the cross and empty tomb.

Instead of burying our faces in bulletins to read, we would raise our heads to listen. I am convinced that the reading of Scripture is heard differently than the reading of Scripture from a service folder page. We don’t listen to each other with our heads buried in a booklet. We listen to each other by looking at the point where the voice is coming from and by learning to tune out the distractions so that we might hear what is said. This is the discipline that is so missing on Sunday morning.

All because we think of Scripture as a vehicle that delivers something to us instead of the thing that is delivered — the voice of God speaking grace and mercy, conviction and condemnation, redemption and restoration, death and life… Wisdom!! Attend!!

Source: Pastor Larry Peters

Here’s an interesting analysis of a “problem”that is, in truth, a crisis. Thanks to Justin Taylor for this post. David Nienhuis, a professor at Seattle Pacific University, has a helpful piece in the Modern Reformation on the problem of evangelical students “familiar” with the Bible but still essentially illiterate.

Here’s an excerpt on how it happened:

Christians schooled in this rather anti-intellectual, common-denominator evangelistic approach to faith responded to the later twentieth-century decline in church attendance by looking not to more substantial catechesis but to business and consumer models to provide strategies for growth. By now we’re all familiar with the story: increasing attendance by means of niche marketing led church leaders to frame the content of their sermons and liturgies according to the self-reported perceived needs of potential “seekers” shaped by the logic of consumerism. Now many American consumer-congregants have come to expect their churches to function as communities of goods and services that provide care and comfort without the kind of challenge and discipline required for authentic Christian formation to take place.

He goes on to describe the difference between those transformed by the Word and those who are merely informed quoters of the Word:

To make a real difference in people’s lives, biblical literacy programs will have to do more than simply encourage believers to memorize a select set of Bible verses. They will have to teach people to speak the language of faith; and while this language is of course grounded in the grammar, vocabulary, and stories of the Bible, living languages are embedded in actual human communities that are constituted by particular habits, values, practices, stories, and exemplars. We don’t memorize languages; we use them and live through them. As Paulo Freire reminded us, literacy enables us to read both the word and the world. Language mediates our reality, expands our horizons, inspires our imagination, and empowers our actions. Literacy therefore isn’t simply about possessing a static ability to read and write; it is a dynamic reality, a never-ending life practice that involves putting those skills to work in reshaping our identity and transforming our world. Biblical literacy programs need to do more than produce informed quoters. They need to produce transformed readers.

Toward the end he lays out his vision:

We want to create a community ethos of habitual, orderly, communal ingestion of the revelatory text. We do so in the hope that the Spirit of God will transform readers into hearers who know what it is to abide before the mirror of the Word long enough to become enscripturated doers; that is, people of faith who are adept at interpreting their individual stories and those of their culture through the grand story of God as it is made known in the Bible.

The whole thing is worth a careful read.

A colleague passed this information along to me, and I to you. I think you will find it very interesting. We hear sometimes that people think the ESV reading level is more difficult than the NIV. This is, in fact, a misunderstanding. I personally did a lot of Bible reading with children for a research project last year, reading to and with pre-K through second grade. That’s one of the reasons I’m aware of this information about readability. The ESV and the NIV are on virtually the same reading grade level (ESV 7.4 and NIV 7.8). Crossway has provided very specific information about the ESV readability scores on their blog: http://www.esv.org/blog/2005/08/readability-grade-levels/ Some might think this is biased information, since of course the publisher of the ESV would want the best possible outcome to such a question. But here is where it gets really interesting. The publishers of the New International Version have issued their own “readility” analysis, and the ESV beats the NIV here too! Here is information from Zondervan about the readability level of the NIV: http://www.zondervan.com/Cultures/en-US/Product/Bible/Translations/NIV.htm?QueryStringSite=Zondervan There is some misinformation on the web that places the ESV on a 10th grade reading level. That may be a case of misunderstanding or of someone trying to shore up the NIV’s market position, which has been badly damaged by their decision to use gender inclusive language and by competition with the ESV. According to retailers, the ESV is growing exponentially in popularity while the NIV is now in rapid decline. Their editorial board is planning a revision of the NIV. You can read about that here: http://www.christianpost.com/article/20090901/scholars-to-revise-popular-niv-bible/index.html

I have been enjoying a new book just published titled The Bible in Pictures: From the Workshop of Lucas Cranach (1534). A number of years ago, the publisher, Tachsen, produced a facsimile of the first complete Luther Bible translation, the 1534 edition. What Tachsen did with this book is pull all the illustrations out of the first complete Luther Bible, used a companion volume also published at the time, and printed a complete collection of the illustrations that Cranach and his workship prepared to illustrate the 1534 Luther Bible. It is a handsome, 200 page hardback volume. I picked it up from Amazon. The cover image Amazon uses is the German, not the English edition, but the book is in English.

I had an interesting meeting yesterday with the leaders of Good News Publishing, the publishers of the English Standard Version. During our meeting we talked about the surprising announcement from the publishers of the New International Version that in 2011 they are going to stop publishing both the original NIV and Today’s New International Version and produce a hybrid of the two. Most conservative Christians were outraged by the publication of TNIV which fell into the trap of gender inclusivity and neutrality that plagues much of modern Protestantism and Christianity. Here is the real problem coming up for those persons and churches still using NIV. They will lose the present text and be forced, if they continue using NIV, to use a text that will continue down the path of a translation that is more agenda-driven than committed to offering an essentially literal translation of the Scriptures. We don’t know what this means for the future of any edition of the NIV presently being published. Needless to say, we breathed a collective sigh of relief and gave thanks to God for the ESV, and the choice by The LCMS to use the ESV as our translation of choice in all worship materials.

My feeling is that we got out of the NIV while the getting was good, and I advise others to do the same. I remain convinced that The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod made a very good decision in returning to a more literal and accurate translation of the Bible. The New International Version is not that, and it is only going to get more difficult to use. Here is the article I posted some time back on why The LCMS adopted the ESV as its translation of choice.

You’ll be interested to know that, contrary to the false statements repeatedly printed in Christian News, the publishers of the ESV do not pay one red cent to the National Council of Churches as part of the revenue stream they are receiving for sales of the ESV. In fact, quite the opposite. A portion of all sales of the ESV is set aside to distribute Scripture for free as part of Crossway’s publishing efforts. Generous donors, a number of years ago, provided funds to pay for the RSV text outright from the NCC and absolutely no part of sales of the ESV goes into the pockets of the NCC. Also, note that sales figures on various Bible translations show startling declines in sales of various Bible translations, with NIV, NASB, NKJV and KJV done, often over 30-40%  and sales of TNIV down over 60% last year, but…the ESV has seen sales increase in this same period over 35%! This is a remarkable testimony to is increasing popularity.

For our part at Concordia Publishing House, we are very grateful for the fact that the ESV demonstrates a much greater consistency in how it translates key terms and phrases, and most particularly, those terms and phrases that are so critical to the proclamation of the Gospel itself, like “grace” and so forth. A person quipped in my hearing the other day that more and more we are witnessing Christians rejecting paraphrases and other such loose translations, described as “graceless”and “bloodless” Bibles! Amen.

From time to time, I hear from pastors and lay people asking, “Why did the Missouri Synod decide to go with the English Standard Version in its new hymnal resources and now across most of its published resources?”

It has been a number of years, nearly six to be exact, since the Missouri Synod’s Commission on Worship issued their recommendation to The LCMS that as part of the process of adopting a new hymnal, the English Standard Version Bible translation be the translation of choice for all worship materials in the Missouri Synod. And since the hymnal and all companion resources was adopted by the Synod convention with an overwhelmingly strong majority, since the Commission on Worship surveyed the entire Synod’s pastoral roster relentlessly beforehand, and kept everyone fully aware and informed of all decisions about this, and all matters related to the hymnal, and then, in light of the fact that now nearly 70% of all LCMS congregations are using Lutheran Service Book, with an amazingly high level of satisfaction, and low level of complaint, it is clear that the decision to go with the ESV has been very well received and well accepted.

The ESV is now used in the campus chapels of both of our seminaries and most of our universities. In the process of selecting and recommending the ESV, a massive amount of consultation was done with both seminary faculties and our Commission on Theology and Church Relations.

I thought it might be useful to share the Commission on Worship’s statement on the choice to use the ESV Bible translation. Here then, from December 2003, is the Commission’s statement. Available at: http://www.lcms.org/pages/internal.asp?NavID=5126

Bible Translation Recommended
December 2003

A statement from the Commission on Worship of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod

After careful study and consultation, the Commission on Worship is recommending the English Standard Version (ESV) as the primary Bible translation for the new LCMS hymnal and its companion volumes. The commission made its decision at its October 27–28 meeting. Their recommendation will go to the synodical convention next summer along with the rest of the Lutheran Hymnal Project proposal.

Read more…

The Lutheran Study Bible traces its origin back to a man in a remote castle in Thuringia, Germany, in 1521, translating the New Testament into German. National Geographic regularly posts photos from its archives, and this is one they dug up some time back. You can can go here to get various sizes for background images for your computer desktop. It is a shot of the Luther Bible resting a table in the room where Martin Luther stayed in protective custody after he had been condemned as a criminal at the Diet of Worms in 1521. During his stay at the Wartburg Castle, he produced his translation of the New Testament, which was printed in September 1522, hence its name, “The September Testament.” He and his colleagues in Wittenberg continued working on translating the rest of the Bible and they published the first edition of their translation in 1534. It was continually revised and improved, until right before Luther’s death in 1546, the last edition printed in Luther’s lifetime was produced in 1545.

Whoever believes and holds to Christ’s Word, heaven stands open to him, hell is shut, the devil is imprisoned, sins are forgiven, and he is a child of eternal life. That is what this book teaches you— the Holy Scripture—and no other book on earth.

—Martin Luther

I was asked to prepare a brief essay on the story of The Lutheran Study Bible. This will be posted to The Lutheran Study Bible's home page on the Internet, but I thought you might like to have a chance to read it here. I encourage you to pass this along to whomever you wish, but I ask that the content not be changed.

Here is a PDF version of it, with the image:

Download The Story of The Lutheran Study Bible

Here is a RTF version, text only:

Download The Story of The Lutheran Study Bible

_{Engraving for the title page of the New Testament
from a 1769 printing of the Luther Bible}

The story begins in 1521 in an isolated room at Wartburg Castle, a mountaintop fortress in Eisenach, Germany. Martin Luther had been taken there under protective custody by Elector Frederick the Wise after being declared to be not just a heretic but an outlaw by Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. Frederick gave Luther safe haven and protection to prevent his arrest and execution, both very real threats and dangers imposed on Luther as a result of his bold confession of Christ and His Word. Consequently, Luther had nothing but time on his hands, and he put that time to very good use. [Image on left: The Wartburg Castle; Eisenach, Germany].

Among other projects during his exile at the Wartburg, Luther translated the New Testament into German, which was published in September 1522 after his return to Wittenberg from the Wartburg in March 1522. Luther’s work of translating the Bible continued until the end of his life. He and a team of colleagues continued working on the translation of the Bible, including the entire Old Testament, and in 1534, the first complete “Luther Bible” was published. It was repeatedly updated in new editions until Luther’s death in 1546.

"The so-called September Testament was received so
enthusiastically that a second edition with corrections by
Luther was printed as early as December of the same year.
Not only is the September Testament regarded as a milestone in
the history of German Bible translation, but also it had an
unequalled hand in the promotion of the Reformation, as
well as in the dissemination of the High German language.
Numerous reprints bear witness to its success: 12 editions
were published in Basel, Augsburg, Grimma and Leipzig
during the year 1523 alone.
At the same time, first editions of the translations of the
remaining parts of the Bible were prepared in Wittenberg.
Although Melchior Lotter was still involved in the publication
of the first part of the Old Testament in 1523, the publishers
Christian Döring and Lucas Cranach banned him
from all further participation in that project in 1524, following
his trial for the maltreatment of one of his workshop
collaborators. A handier and more easily portable New
Testament edition had probably been projected early on and
was now realized by Lotter as his sole responsibility." [1] Source.

Read more…

There is potential for confusion among Lutherans now that Crossway has released its ESV Study Bible. Here are some key points and facts. Feel free to share this information with whomever you believe would benefit from it. Many Lutherans have heard about the new forthcoming study bible: The Lutheran Study Bible.

•    The Lutheran Study Bible is not the ESV Study Bible, with Lutheran content.

•    The Lutheran Study Bible has nothing to do with the ESV Study Bible, nor does it make any use of the ESV Study Bible.

•    The Lutheran Study Bible uses the English Standard Version translation, but all the study notes, introductions, articles, etc. are uniquely Lutheran and were developed exclusively and entirely for The Lutheran Study Bible. There is nothing borrowed from the ESV Study Bible or any other non-Lutheran study Bible.

•    The Lutheran Study Bible is the first-ever, from the ground-up, completely Lutheran study Bible in English.

•    The Lutheran Study Bible is on schedule for delivery in October 2009.

We need to say, with all sincere and due respect to our friends at Crossway, that while we honor and respect their devotion to Christ and their commitment to basic historic Christian truth, we need to recognize the significant difference in theology and understanding of Christian truth that continue to separate Reformed and Lutheran churches to this day, which are quite apparent throughout the ESV Study Bible. And we are sure they would also acknowledge and recognize these differences, which, in fact, we know they do.

While the ESV Study Bible will, no doubt, serve well as a reference resource, it certainly can not, due to its very serious theological flaws, serve as the study Bible of choice for Lutheran Christians interested in a study Bible that is genuinely faithful to the whole counsel of God and to those truths as properly set forth in the Lutheran Confessions. Here are reasons why this must be said.

Defining Evangelicalism
The goals set for The ESV Study Bible are very good (p. 10) and clearly helped guide the development of the project. Overall, the notes are scholarly and evangelical. However, the description of the book’s doctrinal perspective as “classical evangelical orthodoxy, in the historic stream of the Reformation” (p. 10) raises some points of concern. The reality is that the ESV Study Bible is a presentation of classic Zwinglian/Calvinist doctrine, the so-called “Reformed” theology, with the very strong influence of decision-based American Evangelicalism.

Read more…

I had an interesting conversation some time back with my colleague here at CPH: Rev. Robert Lail, the mastermind/creator/programmer of the Lutheran Service Builder software. He indicated to me that he was surprised to note that when one compares how many verses of the Bible one receives in the three year lectionary, with how many in the one year lectionary, the difference is not really as large as one might assume. He counted verses in each lectionary, which may not be the most accurate way of doing it, say, as opposed to word counts, but since that standard is applied to both lectionaries, it gives a good ballpark, to be sure. What are the results?

Here is a screen shot of the Excel file Bob gave me. You can see here the percentage of verses in each book of the book of the Bible between the two lectionaries, which book is featured less, or more, between the two lectionaries, and the total, at the bottom of the image: 23.9% of the Bible is provided in the three year lectionary, and 14.8% of the Bible is provided in the one year lectionary. Not that massive a difference, as one might think. Interesting, no? [Click on the image for a much more readable version].

For several hundred years, the vast majority of Christians used the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament. This translation, known as the Septuagint, was prepared by Jews, not Christians, during what we call the "Intertestamental Period." It is quoted often in the New Testament. A review copy of the translation is available on the web in PDF format. The value of the Septuagint is that it offers the contemporary reader the most ancient translation of the Old Testament available, thus providing a perspective on how the OT was understood by Jews before the time of Christ. Thus, it is particularly fascinating, and led to no little debate between Jews and Christians in the first centuries of the church, when we read in Isaiah 7:14 an absolutely unambiguous assertion of a birth of a child from a virgin, not young woman, a virgin. The Greek uses the word "parthenos" to translate the Hebrew "almah" which may be translated simply as "young woman" but the Jewish translators of the Septuagint used the word "Virgin." Many other examples of this kind of thing abound in the Septuagint. The Septuagint was "the Bible" for many of the greatest church fathers, for example, St. Augustine who vigorously debated the authority of the Septuagint with St. Jerome, who of course, translated the Hebrew Old Testament into Latin.

And another site I’ve come across before, but was recently reminded of when browsing a blog site. A web site where you can study the Greek New Testament. Tremendous resources, for free.

HT: Pastor Jonathan Watt

"I beg and admonish faithfully all devout Christians that they not be offended or stumble over the simple stories related in the Bible, nor doubt them. However poor they may appear, they are certainly the words, history, and judgments of the high divine Majesty, Power, and Wisdom. For this is the book which makes all wise and clever people fools, and can only be understood by simple people, as Christ says (Matthew 11:25). Therefore let go your own thoughts and feelings and esteem this book as the best and purest treasure, as a mine full of great wealth, which can never be exhausted or sufficiently excavated. thus you will find the divine wisdom which God presents in the Bible in a manner so simple that it damps the pride of clever people and brings it to nothing. In this book you find the swaddling clothes and the manger in which Christ lies, and to which the angel directs the shepherds. Those swaddling clothes are shabby and poor, yet precious is the treasure wrapped in them, for it is Christ."  –Martin Luther

Source:
WA Tischreden 6:16
translated in:
Day by Day We Magnify Thee
Fortress Press 1982, p. 108
Translated by Margarete Steiner and Percy Scott

http://www.biblemap.org/

Really cool!