Blue Cord

The Grand Rapids Press and and Channel 8 News in Grand Rapids, Michigan, are reporting that a man is suing two publishers, Zondervan and Thomas Nelson, over their publication of Bibles that contain the word “homosexual” in 1 Corinthians 6:9. The Thomas Nelson suit is over the NKJV translation, while the Zondervan suit appears to be connected to the NIV.¹

The plaintiff, Bradley Fowler, says his parents’ pastor used a translation that condemned homosexuality, which caused his parents to oppose homosexuality, which caused them to cause him to endure “emotional duress and mental instability.” He claims that it was “the intent of the publisher was to design a religious, sacred document to reflect an individual opinion or a group’s conclusion to cause ‘me or anyone who is a homosexual to endure verbal abuse, discrimination, episodes of hate, and physical violence . . . including murder’.”²

Setting aside the fact that neither Thomas Nelson nor Zondervan did the translation work and therefore may not be the right defendants, Fowler is going to have a very difficult time proving a causal linkage between the emtional duress he has suffered (which I am sure is quite real) and the particular translation his parents’ pastor used. Given that this is a church that used either the NIV or NKJV, it is probably a conservative church that was been opposed to homosexuality long before either of those two translations came out. Even when they read translations that did not use the word homosexuality, they were led by the Bible (and other factors) to conclude that homosexuality was wrong. The new translations may have given them some extra ammo, but it certainly did not create their opinions. And even if it did cause his parents to oppose homosexuality, it is still up to them to decide how to repond to their son. It is possible to disagree with someone who is gay without causing them emotional distress.³

The case also raises a lot of questions over academic freedom, translator responsibility, and freedom of the press (which includes any publishing activity, not just newspapers). For example, while I disagree with using the word “homosexuals” to translate 1 Corinthians 6:9 because it is inaccurate and somewhat anachronistic, it is a defensible translation. One can hardly claim that the translators (or publisher) were being irresponsible by translating it this way.

I suspect Fowler has one of two motives for bringing his suit. Either he is just trying to get money, in which case he is probably going to be disappointed, or he is attempting to get the publishers to change the translation. If it is the latter, I think arguments from solid scholarship are going to much more effective than a frivolous lawsuit.

1. The news sources do not discuss the translations, but as far as I can tell the NIV is the only translation they carry that uses the word “homosexual” in 1 Corinthians 6:9. The TNIV may also use the word, but I don’t have a copy to check. [back]
2. Only the part in single quotations is a direct quote from Fowler. The first part of the quote is the wording of the news report. [back]
3. I know our culture says that anyone who disagrees with you is automatically judging you, but that isn’t the case. [back]

The New York Times has an article today entitled “Churches Retool Mission Trips”. It discusses the rise in popularity of short-term mission trips as well as some of the problems with such trips. It is well worth a read, especially if you are a member of a church that sponsors trips like these.

I have often wondered about the effectiveness of these trips, especially those that involve building projects. It costs a great deal to reach some of these destinations, and often we are flying in unskilled labor. The article addresses both of these issues. On the one hand, it notes that sometimes missionaries have paid as much as $30,000 to fly a team to Mexico to build a house that could have been built by locals for $2,000. On the other hand, some structures have had to be torn down after the missionaries left because they were of substandard construction. In one case, a missionary-built building collapsed in a storm, killing two children. The article also raised the question of how culturally sensitive missionaries are being when show up in poor villages with lots of expensive digital cameras. If we want to help people, perhaps it would be better to send the $30,000 to the village to pay for them to build their own churches and houses. They would get better buildings and the influx of money would help the economy. We wouldn’t get the first-hand cultural experience, but it seems to me that missions work is supposed to be about enriching the lives of others, not about our own personal growth.

In the interest of full disclosure, I participated in one of these trip twenty years ago. I went to Jamaica for ten days to run Vacation Bible Schools in inner city Kingston. I enjoyed the trip, but I wonder how much any of the Jamaicans got out of it. I have always felt that the Spring Break trip I took to help clean up Charleston, SC, after Hurricane Hugo was a much better use of resources. Since serving in Lithuania for 2.5 years as a missionary, my ideas of what missions work is all about have changed quite a bit.

Update: Adam Couturier linked to this post and pointed to an entry on his own blog entitled “The Problem of Missions and Monetary Contributions in the Missions Field” from last month. It is well worth reading. Adam is a student at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary. I presume he found my blog through my friend Calvin Park at Random Bloggings, who is also at Gordon Conwell.

A friend of mine forwarded this story to me today. Last week, a 78-year-old man crossing the street in Hartford, Connecticut, was hit by a car that was traveling in the wrong lane. The car did not stop. Neither did anyone else. The entire event was caught on a surveillance video. For those unfamiliar with Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), this video serves as a re-enactment. The only difference is that there is no Good Samaritan in this story.

As the man lay conscious and bleeding on the pavement, no one stopped. Cars continued to roll by. Some slowed, but eventually went on their way. One car approaching in the lane in which he lay stopped for several seconds, then did a u-turn and went down another street. A guy on a motorcycle circled around to take a look, then headed on his way. Pedestrians on the sidewalk didn’t even approach the guy for the first half a minute, and even later they only got within five feet. The most anyone could be bothered to do was to call 911, which only four people out of the twenty-five to thirty people around him did. Eventually, a police car that happened to be driving by stopped to help him.

Now, some might argue that no one around had any first aid training. They didn’t help him because they didn’t want to make the situation worse. That may be the case, but that should not have prevented them from providing the simple comfort of human presence. Just having someone there talking with him would have calmed him down and it would have helped to know that someone cared. But apparently no one did care. Not only did no one come to be at his side, but no one even bothered to stop traffic so he wouldn’t get hit again. Cars full of priests just kept driving by, while the Levites on the sidewalk stood and watched.

I grew up in the South, but I have lived in New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Midwest. Of all of these, I am not surprised that this happened in New England. Yes, there are a lot of good things to say about New England and there are some good people here. But in the seven years I have lived in Connecticut and Massachusetts I have seen more disregard for one’s neighbor than I have in all my time in the other regions combined. The surprising thing is that I am not surprised by this video.

For comparison sake, let me tell you what happened when I lived in Iowa in 2003. One day in January as I was driving down the street, the car in front of me struck a pedestrian. The fact that a car struck a pedestrian is the only similarity between the story in Iowa and the story in Connecticut. In Iowa, the car that struck the pedestrian stopped. So did a bunch of other cars. Within fifteen seconds, there were six of us around him. Someone who had a cell phone called 911, while the rest of us took our coats off to cover the man and support his head. Even though it was ten degrees below zero, not a single individual held back his or her coat. And while some of us went to stop traffic to keep the man from getting hit again, others stayed and talked with the man so he would know that someone cared and was with him.

The basic problem in Hartford boiled down to this: everyone expected everyone else to do something, so no one did anything. Unlike the scribe in the parable they didn’t even bother to ask, “And who is my neighbor?” When you can see a fellow human being lying bleeding in the street and keep driving by, you as an individual are seriously lacking in character. And when everyone present does that, your culture is in deep trouble.

If you are visiting this site on April 8-9 (instead of reading it in an RSS reader), you will notice that the presentation of the site is a bit naked. That is because it is CSS Naked Day (which for some reason takes 48 hours). This was an event started two years ago to promote web standards. For those who are not familiar with web standards, they are a way of ensuring that web pages are displayed the same in all browsers and that web sites are accessible to people with disabilities.

One of the practices encouraged by web standards is the use of (X)HTML for the content of the site and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for the display. In the “old days” of web design, HTML did both. This made the sites hard to update and was a nightmare for people with disabilities. Making sure your (X)HTML is POSH (Plain Old Semantic HTML) allows people who have trouble seeing the screen to access the site, because there is nothing to interfere with software that scales your site to be large enough to read or programs that read the content aloud. Although users cannot override (X)HTML in a browser, it is possible to tell the page to display with a different style sheet. This is a very helpful feature for those who need assistance viewing the content.

As a Christian, I consider accessibility to be an ethical issue. It certainly falls under the umbrella command to love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18). But more to the point, it would seem to be demanded by the admonition not to put a stumbling block in front of the blind (Leviticus 19:14). When I write my code, I do my best to ensure that it does nothing to hinder a blind person who wants to read my sites.¹

CSS Naked Day is a way to encourage web standards. Participants agree to turn off their CSS, so that what is seen is the structure of the site. The pages displayed on these days are nothing but (X)HTML. This is what accessibility software and search engines see. Showing the pages without CSS gives people a better understanding of the underlying structure of a web page.

For those not familiar with CSS, I encourage you to visit the CSS Zen Garden. That site presents a number of different CSS designs. Although the designs have a variety of appearances, every single one of them has the exact same XTHML coding. All that is changes is the CSS.

1. For the record, I did not design the theme that is used on my blog. I am currently writing my own theme, however, which should premier in a month or so. The current theme would validate according to web standards if it wasn’t for the Amazon.com link to my book. For some reason, Amazon uses an older technology to deliver this content. [back]

Claude Mariottini has a post entitled “The Golfer and the King” about a sermon illustration given by Joel Osteen in his book Your Best Life Now. He raises the question of whether the anecdote related by Osteen is one that actually happened or a story that Osteen invented to illustrate his point.

In my own sermons, I always make sure that I carefully distinguish between stories that are true and ones that I have made up (or someone else has made up).  Usually, stories in the latter category are jokes, so it is obvious that they are not true. And it always annoys me when preachers illustrate sermons with stories that are not true.

It seems to me that if the gospel is true, there should be enough true stories to illustrate it without us having to make ones up.