... Seemed like a book 'just up my street': I've found myself pondering a lot lately about the links between justice and love, mindful of the saying that justice is love made social.
And also ... The subtitle also got my interest as a linguist: "How One Mistranslated Word Distorted the Gospel "
Not least because I'm aware that there can be a truth in that sort of a claim but that also many times there are claims about translations of sacred texts that are overblown and don't really stand the test of scrutiny or at least don't prove as much as the claim promises or seems to hope. In this case, I hoped on reading the subtitle that it would indeed be somewhat robust.
The blurb that commended it to me contains this encouraging pre-amble:
... it makes a case that is at once scholarly and devastating in its simplicity: the Greek word dikaiosynē, translated as “righteousness” in every major English Bible, is rendered as justice in every other language — German, Afrikaans, Spanish, French, Dutch. Every single one. The English deviation traces directly to the Norman Conquest of 1066, which severed English legal vocabulary from its Germanic roots, creating a religious word — “righteousness” — that conveyed personal moral status instead of right relationship, inner purity instead of just action, individual salvation instead of communal transformation.
I have myself been playing in my own bible reading with switching 'righteousness' and 'justice' in translation (and checking back to the Koine or Hebrew). The switch has its origins in my first learning of Koine Greek of the NT when our materials and teachers pointed out that it would be used to translate either English term. My more recent reflections have come from trying to get a feel for not separating the terms out so fully in my English language mind but rather to see them as facets of the same semantic field -so that I could withdraw my inner consent for making a sharp distinction between them and see them whole. This is bolstered also be trying to hold together 'soteria' as 'salvation' AND 'healing' (not to mention something about bringing about a situation of justice, peace and healing -in line with Hebrew 'shalom'.
Enough of my a prioris with this. Away with me judging this book by its cover. Does it help me? Or add to or nuance my initial thought experiments?
It has helped me to think about a wider range of passages that exhibit the issue. However, I have been feeling that I wanted more exploration of the relationship between inner, personal righteousness and social justice. It does seem to me that there are passages where the words concerned do seem to foreground the personal and inner. So some exploration of that would help further, I think.
That's not to say it was absent, and perhaps my feeling about it is more about where I'm at than about what is actually presented. To be sure the latter parts of the books do explore being rooted in love and towards the end there is a tie-up with how in the writers' experience and thinking being rooted and grounded in love does support and feed into justice.
I warmed to the testimonies too, it was helpful and good to hear from the writers and their stories in relation to the main theme of the book do help and I would hope would encourage people whose faith is growing in ways that are taking more note of the social dimensions of following Jesus from having a focus trammelled by the western churches' telling of an individualistic sort of gospel where justice has been quieted by a pietist focus on righteousness or 'holiness' that is more like the straining at gnats and missing the weightier matters of the Lore.
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