Monthly Archives: October 2009

Faith works

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What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? . . . Faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.

—James 2:14,17 (ESV)

One of the main emphases for those of us in the Reformed stream of the Christian faith is that salvation does not come by our own effort in any way, but is purely by faith, which itself is a gift from God. We know that we can’t earn our salvation, because we can’t live up to God’s standards; rather, we receive it as a free gift—what we cannot do, God did for us in Jesus Christ. This was a major theme of the Reformation, as Martin Luther and John Calvin challenged a Catholic Church that had grown corrupt, because it’s a major theme in the letters of Paul; it was a significant recovery for the church, for all the conflicts that came along with it.

Unfortunately, one of the divisions that arose, in the mind of Luther—and among Catholics as well—was between Paul and James. Luther saw James as contradicting Paul, and dismissed the book as “a right strawy epistle.” He didn’t quite go so far as to leave it out when he translated the Bible into German, but he’s said to have ripped it out of his personal Bible. His objection was based, however, on a misreading of the book.

It’s easy to see where that came from, as both Paul and James talk about faith and works and salvation; superficially, they sound very similar in their language, and seem to be addressing the same issues. If you read a little more closely, though, you see that though they use the same words, they aren’t talking about the same things. When Paul talks about faith versus works, he’s talking about “works of the law”—that’s his phrase; his point is that you can’t earn your salvation by keeping the law, because you can’t possibly keep it well enough to satisfy God. His focus is on the most basic level: how are we saved? How do we enter into the life of the kingdom of God?

James, by contrast, isn’t talking about “works of the law” at all—he never uses the phrase. Rather, he’s talking about works of faith. He’s not talking about how we get saved, about how we lay hold of the life of God—rather, he’s talking about what that life looks like, and about true faith versus false faith. Where Paul’s argument deals with what we can do, or can’t do, in order to be saved, James’ concern is with how our lives should look because we have been saved. Like the whole rest of the book, this is about what it means to live the Christian life—to live the life of God in this fallen world. All he’s really doing in chapter 2 is restating and expanding on a point he made in chapter 1: it’s not enough for us to hear the word of God, we need to submit our lives to its authority and do what it says, if we want to call ourselves Christians.

(Excerpted, edited, from “No Private Matter”)

On this blog in history: April 17-21, 2008

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Holy discomfort
On Pope Benedict and his critique of the selfish, reductionist individualism of our culture.

The old made new—not replaced
All things will be redeemed, including the works of our hands.

The Ascension, the body, and the kingdom of God
Our bodies aren’t temporary.

Meditation: on barbering churches
Is the church defined by its edges? If so, how?

Brief meditation: on art
Considering art, God, mediation, and the problem of definition.

Skeptical conversations, part IV: Considering humanity
On what it means to be human.

No Private Matter

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(Genesis 15:1-6; James 1:22-25, James 2:14-26)

We celebrate when people come to join with us in our fellowship and ministry in this community; we rejoice when people come to faith in Christ and claim their place in his body. But those moments are just the tip of the iceberg, built on much that has come before. Part of that is the inquirers’ class that we run from time to time. I don’t call it a membership class, since taking it doesn’t mean you have to join; there’s no pressure. Rather, it’s for anyone thinking about membership, wondering if they should join this congregation, if they want to, what it would mean if they did, and still uncertain. I’m not much of one for high-pressure salesmanship, and quite frankly, I’m no good at it anyway; I’d rather just present the truth as best I can and let the Spirit lead people wherever God wills, and so that’s the approach I take.

Now, there are a lot of ways to do this, but given the busyness of people’s schedules, I figured I ought to keep ours short. As such, I use a three-session structure designed to answer this question: what does it mean to be a member of a Presbyterian church? What’s the significance of that word “Presbyterian”? More generally, what is this thing we call the church, anyway? And what does it mean to be a member? We don’t insist people agree completely with everything in order to join, but it’s still important to lay out what this church, being rooted in that theology and having that particular understanding of the church and the meaning of membership, is all about.

One of the things we talk about in the first class, because it’s at the heart of what it means to be Presbyterian, is that we understand that salvation does not come by our own effort in any way, but is purely by faith, which itself is a gift from God. We know that we can’t earn our salvation, because we can’t live up to God’s standards; rather, we receive it as a free gift—what we cannot do, God did for us in Jesus Christ. This was a major theme of the Reformation, as Martin Luther and John Calvin challenged a Catholic Church that had grown corrupt, because it’s a major theme in the letters of Paul; it was a significant recovery for the church, for all the conflicts that came along with it.

Unfortunately, one of the divisions that arose, in the mind of Luther—and among Catholics as well—was between Paul and James. Luther saw James as contradicting Paul, and dismissed the book as “a right strawy epistle.” He didn’t quite go so far as to leave it out when he translated the Bible into German, but he’s said to have ripped it out of his personal Bible. His objection was based entirely on our passage this morning, thirteen verses out of the 108 that make up the book; and it’s based on a misreading of this passage, which unfortunately has become all too widely accepted.

It’s easy to see where this came from, as both Paul and James talk about faith and works and salvation; superficially, they sound very similar in their language, and seem to be addressing the same issues. If you read a little more closely, though, you see that though they use the same words, they aren’t talking about the same things. When Paul talks about faith versus works, he’s talking about “works of the law”—that’s his phrase; his point is that you can’t earn your salvation by keeping the law, because you can’t possibly keep it well enough to satisfy God. His focus is on the most basic level: how are we saved? How do we enter into the life of the kingdom of God?

James, by contrast, isn’t talking about “works of the law” at all—he never uses the phrase. Rather, he’s talking about works of faith. He’s not talking about how we get saved, about how we lay hold of the life of God—rather, he’s talking about what that life looks like, and about true faith versus false faith. Where Paul’s argument deals with what we can do, or can’t do, in order to be saved, James’ concern is with how our lives should look because we have been saved. Like the whole rest of the book, this is about what it means to live the Christian life—to live the life of God in this fallen world. All he’s really doing in chapter 2 is restating and expanding on a point he made in chapter 1: it’s not enough for us to hear the word of God, we need to submit our lives to its authority and do what it says, if we want to call ourselves Christians.

Remember, one of the overarching themes of this book is that there are two ways of life, the way of friendship with the world and the way of friendship with God, and that the truly Christian life is the way of friendship with God. What does it mean to be friends with someone? Well, among many things, it means that you take seriously what’s important to them, and you don’t make a habit of doing things that will hurt or upset them; you spend time with them, listen to them, tell them the truth. If you have a pattern of disregarding someone’s feelings and treating them carelessly, chances are pretty good that your friendship with that person will not survive your behavior. The same applies to our friendship with God. There are differences, of course; our friendship with God is not a friendship of equals—he has a much greater right to expect certain things of us than any human being would. As well, where human friends will only take so much from us before walking away, God will not let go of us no matter what. Still, James’ point is clear, that if we are friends of God, we need to act like it.

This is where his discussion of faith comes in, because it’s by faith that we are brought into this relationship with God, and he wants to make the point that faith in God logically entails a change in behavior. Contrary to what a lot of people think, faith is not simply a matter of intellectual assent. It doesn’t just mean deciding in your mind that you believe certain things or agree with certain statements. Faith is a commitment of your whole person. It’s a difference captured in a story told of The Great Blondin, who used to entertain crowds by crossing Niagara Falls on a tightrope. Supposedly, one time as he came to the end of his show, he asked the crowd, “How many of you believe I could carry one of you back and forth across this tightrope?” There was a loud roar of agreement. Then he said, “Who’s willing to climb on my back?” Dead silence. The former is a kind of belief; true faith is climbing on. True faith is resting the whole weight of your life on Jesus and committing to go with him wherever he goes and do whatever he does. It’s not just giving him your agreement—it’s giving him your life, the whole thing, without reservation and with nothing held back.

This is why James says, essentially, faith works. Faith in God produces action. It’s not enough just to believe that God exists—the demons believe that more strongly than you do, and they’re certainly not saved. Their faith, if you want to call it that, doesn’t change anything for them, except to cause them great fear. True faith, by contrast, changes everything, because it’s not just believing with our mind, it’s believing with our whole being. If someone comes to you—James specifies a fellow Christian—so poor that they can’t even feed or clothe themselves properly, and you say to them, “Go in peace; I have faith that God will provide for you,” what good is that? Is that any kind of real faith? No! That kind of faith is empty, it is worthless, it is dead—there’s simply nothing alive there. True faith produces a response to the needs of others, moving us to step up and meet their needs, trusting that God will provide for us in our needs in turn. True faith produces action in the same way that acorns produce oak trees—it’s simply the nature of the thing. If someone claims to have faith in God but shows no evidence of it in the way they live their lives, that faith is like a body without a spirit: dead.

Now, there are a lot of ways we could go in applying this. We could talk about the importance of looking at ourselves and our lives to see if what we say we believe actually determines how we live. It’s certainly worth asking ourselves if our faith produces works—if we believe it with our hands and feet, not just with our minds and lips. As I was thinking about this passage, though, it was something else that struck me: this understanding of Christian faith is really quite countercultural these days. The idea is widespread in this country, even among Christians, that our faith should be a private matter, between us and God, which really shouldn’t mess up our public lives. It’s fine to be a Christian and go to church and all that if that’s what works for you, but people around you shouldn’t have to deal with that if they don’t want to; out in the “real world,” you ought to go about your business the same way as everybody else.

This is the way of thinking James calls “friendship with the world,” living in such a way as to keep the world happy; and as he makes clear, this is the exact backwards of the way of life to which God calls us. True faith cannot be merely a private matter; it cannot be something we keep restricted to safe times and places when there’s no one around who might object. True faith changes everything we say and everything we do, at every time and in every place, in every aspect of our lives. True faith isn’t concerned with whether we’re telling people what they want to hear, it’s concerned with whether or not we’re being faithful witnesses to the truth and the life of Jesus Christ—who, after all, often made people quite uncomfortable by telling people exactly what they didn’t want to hear, because it was the truth they needed to hear.

Now, this isn’t a matter of trying to work to turn ourselves into God’s friends—that would be works trying to produce faith—because this isn’t something we have done, or need to do. Rather, this is something God has already done and is doing. Remember what I said earlier, that the life of faith is all about the grace of God; it is God who by his grace has declared us to be his friends. We simply respond by recognizing that friendship with God is a far, far greater and more wonderful thing than friendship with the world, and pursuing him in turn as he pursues us, opening ourselves to the work he is doing and plans to do in our lives. It’s a matter of understanding how great and how wonderful is the love and the grace of God—how much better he is than anything this world can offer—and responding accordingly, by learning to desire friendship with God more than we do friendship with anyone else. When we truly want to please God, the rest will follow.

We need an extraordinary savior

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Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 16
Q. Why must he be truly human
and truly righteous?

A. God’s justice demands
that human nature, which has sinned,
must pay for its sin;1
but a sinner could never pay for others.2

Note: mouse over footnotes for Scripture references (does not work in IE 6).

This is the keystone of the dilemma: no one who is not truly and fully human, fully participating in human nature and human life, could possibly serve as the mediator we need and pay the penalty for human sin—it had to be one of us; what human beings had put wrong, another human being must put right. At the same time, no one who participated in human sinfulness, no one who was himself or herself guilty of sin, would have the ability to pay that price. “Pretty good” isn’t good enough for the salvation we need; not even the best human being we’ve ever known or heard of is up to the task. No one less than a completely perfect human being could do it.

Q & A 17
Q. Why must he also be true God?

A. So that,
by the power of his divinity,
he might bear the weight of God’s anger in his humanity
and earn for us
and restore to us
righteousness and life.1

Logically, then, we need a savior who is both fully human and fully God, since only God can be perfect enough to satisfy his own demands. And yet, there’s more to it than that. Only God could bear the weight of what had to be done; only God could endure bearing the near-infinite guilt of all human sin and suffering. Only God could lay down a life of infinite worth, in a deliberate choice of infinite love, as an act of infinite grace, to wash away that near-infinite guilt.

A benefit to the Obama victory I hadn’t considered

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If you’re familiar with the history of Hawaii, I’d think you’d likely agree that the annexation of the islands wasn’t exactly America’s finest hour. On a rational level, one could debate whether Hawaiians are better off as a part of the USA than they would be as an independent nation, but national pride and the sense of national identity doesn’t operate on a rational level, or at least not only so; there’s still a lot of resentment among many Hawaiians that the US didn’t play fair back in the 1890s, and many who would rather have had their independence back in 1959 than statehood. Of course, tourism is a major part of the Hawaiian economy, and tourist economies tend to generate a lot of resentment of the tourists anyway, and those two things no doubt work to reinforce each other.

Apparently, though, that’s being mitigated somewhat by Barack Obama’s ascension to the presidency, as having a Hawaiian in the White House—even if he hasn’t lived there full-time in many years—has created a lot of pride. My in-laws just returned from a trip, and one of the points that really struck them was how every place President Obama lived, went to school, etc. was pointed out to them; from the comments people made, it sounds like his election has given many in his home state a new sense of ownership in America, a new sense of being Americans as well as Hawaiians. That can only be a good thing. I tend to think the US government ought to offer Hawaii the chance to regain its independence if the Hawaiian people want it—no doubt the feds would insist on retaining military installations, but one imagines a deal could be worked out, if a constitutional means for such a plebiscite could be found—but given the unlikelihood of such an act, it is well that Hawaiians at least have more reason to feel like they belong to the country of which they are legally a part.

So much for the post-racial presidency

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From America’s most accurate pollster, Scott Rasmussen:

Just 60% of U.S. voters now say that American society is generally fair and decent, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

That’s down nine points since late August and the lowest measure since President Obama took office in January, fueled in large part by growing unhappiness among African-American voters.

Twenty-seven percent (27%) of all voters say U.S. society is basically unfair and discriminatory, up six points from late August and the highest level measured since December.

Only 14% of African-Americans now feel society is fair and decent. That number has dropped 41 points from 55% a month after Obama took office. Sixty-six percent (66%) of black voters think society is unfair and discriminatory, up 26 points since early February.

The majority of white voters (65%) say society is fair and decent. Seventy-two percent (72%) of all other voters agree.

John Hinderaker comments,

It’s interesting that Latinos and Asians evidently have a higher opinion of the decency of American society than whites. But the main point here, obviously, is the dramatic shift among African-Americans. What could have caused it?

The only possible answer is that many Americans have opposed President Obama’s policies. But why would that cause African-Americans to think that our society is “discriminatory” rather than “decent”? No mystery there: in a well-coordinated campaign, the Democratic Party has relentlessly portrayed all disagreement with the Obama administration’s policies as “racist.” That contemptible and divisive tactic had seemed to produce no results, but we now see that it had one consequence: alienating African-Americans from their country.

Some “post-racial President.”

As I noted a week or so ago, drawing on a post by Cornell law professor William Jacobson, and as I touched on again a few days ago, using the accusation of racism to demonize anyone who dares disagree with the President’s agenda is a toxic tactic that will only sicken this nation. I think Rasmussen’s polling is picking up the first symptoms of that illness.

On abortion and the political divide

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I was thinking this morning about one of the odder facts of recent American political history: the flip-flop in positions on abortion between the parties. Up into the ’60s, the Democratic Party was firmly pro-life, as hard as that may be to believe now. In large part, I imagine, that was due to the fact that Catholics were as firmly in the Democratic camp as blacks are now, and the Catholic Church has always been strongly pro-life—in fact (here’s another thing that sounds bizarre now), when Roe v. Wade was handed down in 1973, the decision was applauded by the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention(!) on grounds of religious freedom. Abortion was seen as a Catholic issue; the SBC interpreted Roe as a victory for Protestants over Catholics, and thus (by their anti-Catholic logic) as a freeing of the law from Catholic influence. Beyond that, though, it was generally understood that the logic of liberalism and its emphasis on social justice meant defending the rights of the unborn.

Within a very short time, though, that all changed, and the pro-life movement found itself entrenched within the Republican Party instead. Why? Well, part of that is probably the rise of the Catholic Right—noted traditional Catholic William F. Buckley launched National Review in 1955, and though not an overtly Catholic magazine, it’s always had a definite Catholic character to it—but the shift came nearly two decades later; at most, the rise of the Catholic Right gave Catholics who left the Democratic Party someplace to go. It doesn’t explain why they left, nor why many non-Catholics went with them. Take the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, who as a Lutheran pastor in NYC was a leading intellectual light on the Left in the ’60s, involved in the civil rights movement and an intimate of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; how is it that by the ’80s, he was one of the most influential thinkers and leaders in this country on the Right?

The answer is that after Roe, the parties reconfigured themselves. As Princeton’s Robert P. George tells the story,

Neuhaus opposed abortion for the same reasons he had fought for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. At the root of his thinking was the conviction that human beings, as creatures fashioned in the image and likeness of God, possess a profound, inherent, and equal dignity. This dignity must be respected by all and protected by law. That, so far as Neuhaus was concerned, was not only a biblical mandate but also the bedrock principle of the American constitutional order. Respect for the dignity of human beings meant, among other things, not subjecting them to a system of racial oppression; not wasting their lives in futile wars; not slaughtering them in the womb.

It is important to remember that in those days it was not yet clear whether support for “abortion rights” would be a litmus test for standing as a “liberal.” After all, the early movement for abortion included many conservatives, such as James J. Kilpatrick, who viewed abortion not only as a solution for the private difficulties of a “girl in trouble,” but also as a way of dealing with the public problem of impoverished (and often unmarried) women giving birth to children who would increase welfare costs to taxpayers.

At the same time, more than a few notable liberals were outspokenly pro-life. In the early 1970s, Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy, for example, replied to constituents’ inquiries about his position on abortion by saying that it was a form of “violence” incompatible with his vision of an America generous enough to care for and protect all its children, born and unborn. Some of the most eloquent and passionate pro-life speeches of the time were given by the Rev. Jesse Jackson. In condemning abortion, Jackson never failed to note that he himself was born to an unwed mother who would likely have been tempted to abort him had abortion been legal and easily available at the time.

The liberal argument against abortion was straightforward and powerful. “We liberals believe in the inherent and equal dignity of every member of the human family. We believe that the role of government is to protect all members of the community against brutality and oppression, especially the weakest and most vulnerable. We do not believe in solving personal or social problems by means of violence. We seek a fairer, nobler, more humane way. The personal and social problems created by unwanted pregnancy should not be solved by offering women the ‘choice’ of destroying their children in utero; rather, as a society we should reach out in love and compassion to mother and child alike.”

So it was that Pastor Neuhaus and many like him saw no contradiction between their commitment to liberalism and their devotion to the pro-life cause. On the contrary, they understood their pro-life convictions to be part and parcel of what it meant to be a liberal. They were “for the little guy”—and the unborn child was “the littlest guy of all.”

It seems strange to think that some of the justices who crafted Roe and its successor decision, Doe v. Bolton, were considered conservatives and considered themselves to be acting on conservative principles, but it’s the truth. The decision, however, galvanized reactions, as all major decisions do, producing shifts in the political landscape:

By 1980, when Ronald Reagan (who as governor of California in the 1960s had signed an abortion liberalization bill) sought the presidency as a staunchly pro-life conservative and Edward Kennedy, having switched sides on abortion, challenged the wishy-washy President Jimmy Carter in the Democratic primaries as a doctrinaire “abortion rights” liberal, things had pretty much sorted themselves out. “Pro-choice” conservatives were gradually becoming rarer, and “pro-life” liberals were nearly an endangered species.

This, combined with the movement to re-ideologize American politics that began in earnest in 1968, is probably the most important fact in creating the political landscape as we know it.

One further thought: what of the Rev. Dr. King? He was a man who knew his history, who knew that part of the drive behind Planned Parenthood and the promotion of legalized abortion was the eugenicist impulses of white racists like Margaret Sanger who believed that “Colored people are like human weeds and are to be exterminated”; he was also, inarguably, a man of great moral courage. He’s generally thought of now as a man of the Left, and certainly had moved in that direction in a number of ways in the last few years of his life—but would he have followed the Left’s migration on the abortion issue, helping to realize Sanger’s vision of a self-inflicted black genocide? I could be wrong—I could always be wrong—but I don’t think so. Whether he would have shifted rightward with his friend the Rev. (and later Fr.) Neuhaus on economic issues is an imponderable, but I believe the man who stood so powerfully for the civil rights of people with dark skin would have stayed with Fr. Neuhaus in standing powerfully for the civil rights of the unborn. It may well be that the greatest loser in the Rev. Dr. King’s assassination was the pro-life movement then still unborn.

Speaking of conservative idolatry

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here’s an example that’s every bit as sickening, in a different but equally serious way, as the Obamadolatry we’ve been seeing: the “Conservative Bible Project.” What an astonishing fusion of conservative Bibliolatry with conservative patriolatry . . . just look at this:

As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias . . .

4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop; defective translations use the word “comrade” three times as often as “volunteer”; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as “word”, “peace”, and “miracle”. . . .

7. Express Free Market Parables: explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning

8. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story . . .

10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word “Lord” rather than “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” or “Lord God.”

Several things are clear at this point. In the first place, these people clearly know little or nothing of what they would need to know to produce a useful translation of the Bible—just enough to be dangerous, at best. (I’ll duel any of these fools—and I use the term advisedly, in its full biblical sense—over the authenticity of John 7:53-8:11, the story of the woman caught in adultery; there is no good reason to call it inauthentic, though on my judgment, it was probably originally a part of the gospel of Luke.) In the second place, their work is—deliberately—every bit as agenda-driven as the “liberal” work they condemn (much of which isn’t liberal at all).

And in the third place, their professed interest in the Bible is a sham and a delusion. They may well believe it to be sincere—they may well be self-deluded—but it’s a sham and a delusion nonetheless. Their whole approach demonstrates that they only care about the Bible as a tool to be used for their purposes; and that’s about as unbiblical an approach as there is. It’s also, I confess, an approach which I find completely intolerable. As I wrote recently,

If we have indeed been given birth through God’s word of truth, then to know who we are and how we should live, we need to under-stand that word of truth; which is to say, we need to stand under it, to place ourselves in position to receive and accept it. We must be quick to listen and slow to speak; we must receive and absorb the word of God, chew on it and swallow it and let it change us, rather than spitting it out whenever we don’t care for the taste.

Too often, however, we reverse this—we’re slow to listen and quick to speak. Too often we see ourselves not as the receiver but as the judge, standing over the word of truth to critique it. There are, for instance, those who feel they have the right to disregard or reject the parts of Scripture that say things they don’t like; but really, you can’t do that without rejecting all of Scripture, because the Bible itself won’t let you do that. Once you start doing that, you have rejected the word of God as the word of truth, and have instead set it up as something to be used when convenient to support what you already believe, or would like to believe.

I suspect from their comments that the folks doing this “conservative Bible” would assert that their project is necessary because liberals do this; but while I agree that liberals very often do, the answer is not for conservatives to do the same! That only worsens the problem, it doesn’t help it. This sort of exegetical obscenity is intolerable in the service of any agenda. The Bible isn’t “conservative” or “liberal” in the sense that it’s about any human agenda, for any person or group of people; the Bible is about God’s agenda, and his agenda alone, to which we’re called to submit ourselves. To do otherwise isn’t to “translate” the Bible but to distort and deform it.

One wonders why these fools can’t get this. Rod Dreher does, calling the project “insane hubris”; so does Ed Morrissey:

However, if one believes the Bible to be the Word of God written for His purposes, which I do, then the idea of recalibrating the language to suit partisan political purposes in this age is pretty offensive—just as offensive as they see the “liberal bias” in existing translations. If they question the authenticity of the current translations, then the only legitimate process would be to work from the original sources and retranslate. And not just retranslate with political biases in mind, but to retranslate using proper linguistic processes and correct terminology.

The challenge of Christian believers is to adhere to the Word of God, not to bend the Word of God to our preferred ideology. Doing the former requires discipline and a clear understanding of the the Bible. Doing the latter makes God subservient to an ideology, rather than the other way around.

It can’t be that difficult to understand that replacing liberal bias with conservative bias doesn’t make for better Bible translation, doesn’t it? Is “two wrongs don’t make a right” really that hard a concept? For my part, I’m with the Anchoress (whose post is a must-read) on this one: This is where I get off the boat.