Eugene Peterson has the abysmal brazenness to desecrate the Scripture in this manner. What is shocking is that seminary professors are actually endorsing this guy! Look at what he does to the precious Lord's Prayer:
"as above, so below" (The Message, Peterson, Matt. 6)
That is Satanism! The witches pray the same prayer.
Going from the more general to the more particular: the original Greek is hardly the rather polite and middle class that readers of many English translations might think. Well, except perhaps Luke, though even there we don't really have classical Greek. And as for John's Greek, and Paul has his rather impolite moments too ... The problem here is reading the scriptures as if they were written to be high culture. They were written to communicate largely to ordinary people in ordinary language. In fact, Paul even tends to make free with non-religious or even other-religious vocab to convey spiritual ideas. So I can quite imagine him being somewhat envious of Petersen's translation which seems to me to capture the idea quite well. And for the record, in any case, Wiccans have borrowed the term from medieval Christian mysticism, as far as I knew. And, more importantly, Wicca is not Satanism, that kind of equation is dead-set to prevent us helping people in Wicca to understand the gospel because they get so worked up that they do not want to know what those who are so ignorant and arrogant have to say.
I'd go one further; 'Amen' might be well translated as 'so mote it be', if I wanted to put it in the 'Merrie England' vocab that certain Wiccans seem to be over fond of.
Lighting The Way International: Eugene Peterson's Satanic "Lord's Prayer"!:
Filed in: Lord's-prayer, paternoster, The_Message
2 comments:
Andii
I am in agreement with the substance of your post. You are correct to remind readers of the grammar and syntax of the NT. The whole exercise of bible translation work is itself a work of contextualisation in every era given the dynamic of languages.
I also agree with you on the sheer silliness of the attack on Peterson. The attempt to dissuade people from using Peterson's The Message tells us much about those who are patrolling the boundaries. The argument (if it can be dignified with the word) is a form of reality construction that seeks to nihilate anything that does not "fit" in with the preconceptions of those who have already decided to reject Peterson's work.
I also agree with you that there is a gratuitous calumnification of Wicca as "satanism". Indeed as my colleague and former student John Smulo has shown, much of what goes by the name "satanism" is itself an atheistic pathway (no god, no devil) based on elements borrowed from Ayn Rand, Ragnar Redbeard, and Nietzsche. There are a few "theistic satanists" around but so few and far between, and anyway what is meant by satanic philosophy/belief is not the same as the earth-based nature religiosity of Wicca. In this regard the calumnification of Peterson and also of Wicca is a species of that well-known Sinaitic statement: "Do not bear false witness against your neighbour".
Just a wee techical point (a mild disagreement with you): the "As Above, So Below" maxim actually originates from The Hermetica those second century AD tracts attributed to the mythic figure Hermes Trismegistus, and that were reappropriated in the 15th century Renaissance when the hermetic writings were rediscovered. It is a maxim that finds its way then into modern esoteric spirituality in Masonry, Rosicrucian movements, and Theosophy, and each of these streams of thought have helped to shape Gerald Gardner's approach to Wicca. On those points you can see Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of The Moon (Oxford Uni Press 1999).
However, the fact that the Hermetica uses the expression "as above, so below" does not give it a fixed and firm usage or even meaning. Jesus' "on earth as in heaven" is parallel to the what Peterson is driving at in "as above so below".
grace and peace
Thanks Phil, as ever, a value-added comment which is most appreciated. I must admit that I had a suspicion that the 'as above so below' saying was actually older. In a hurry I decided to make a slightly lazy rhetorical point because I was fairly certain that it was the renaissance that had released the tag back into the wild. Okay, we might argue as to how far that was Christian, and there's no doubt that esotericists grabbed at it with gusto, but for the most part it was esotericism out of Christianity ... But that said, I appreciated the extra information and fuller explanation.
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