{"id":32973,"date":"2015-03-06T10:01:57","date_gmt":"2015-03-06T15:01:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=32973"},"modified":"2015-03-06T10:03:12","modified_gmt":"2015-03-06T15:03:12","slug":"grace-is-not-gods-backup-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2015\/03\/grace-is-not-gods-backup-plan\/","title":{"rendered":"Grace Is Not God’s Backup Plan"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Romans<\/a>I’ve published a new little book,\u00a0Grace Is Not God’s Backup Plan: An Urgent Paraphrase of Paul’s Letter to the Romans<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>It’s an experiment both in reading Paul and in self-publishing.<\/p>\n

My family and I were reading N. T. Wright’s “Kingdom Translation”\u00a0of Romans and the kids were having a blast. Paul’s a great read in contemporary English. They loved, especially, Paul’s rhetorical questions (“Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? Certainly not!”) and I loved, especially, the force of the letter when read out loud.<\/p>\n

I enjoyed it so much, I tried my own hand at it.<\/p>\n

As a philosopher, both my doctoral dissertation and my first book<\/a>\u00a0featured work on Paul. And I’ve been chewing on Romans, in particular, for a long time.<\/p>\n

Here’s a\u00a0basic description of the book.<\/p>\n

———————————————————<\/p>\n

Romans is a rare thing in religion: an explanation.<\/p>\n

Scripture is full of stories, visions, parables, proverbs, genealogies, poetry, prophecy, and even history. These are priceless. But beyond an occasional gloss, interpreted dream, or decoded parable, we\u2019re never given anything like what Paul offers. We\u2019re never given ten thousand words of raw explanation. With extraordinary insight and psychological precision, Paul lays bare the underlying logic of the gospel. He explains what sin is and why we choose it, the relationship between sin and grace, how sin abuses God\u2019s law and subverts religion, how Jesus saves us from death and sin, and what a new life in Christ looks like, both individually and collectively.<\/p>\n

The view is staggering. But it\u2019s hard to keep the big picture in focus. This has partly to do with the quirks and conventions of Paul\u2019s writing\u2014but only partly. A lot of it is us, not him. The King James Version, for instance, renders Paul\u2019s letter with uncanny beauty but is opaque as an argument. Modern translations tend to have the same problem. Their overriding concern is with the letter of the text, not with its logic. As a result, Paul\u2019s forest is always getting sacrificed for the sake of his trees. But Paul\u2019s work is too important, his good news too urgent, to leave so much of him locked in the first century. We need our renderings to do more than mimic the original, we need them to bleed and breathe.<\/p>\n

What follows is not a translation in the ordinary sense of the word. It\u2019s more like a paraphrase. Rather than worry over the letter of the text, my goal has been to illuminate the large scale patterns that structure it. With little hesitation, I\u2019ve sacrificed some concern for details to a more urgent need for persuasion and clarity. At several points, I\u2019ve cut some details for the sake of fluidity. At other points, I\u2019ve expanded the material with additional explanation. Overall, I\u2019ve purposely adopted a brisk, contemporary idiom. Rather than aiming for a respectable English version of Paul\u2019s winding Greek syntax, I\u2019ve aimed for a forceful presentation of Paul\u2019s good news.<\/p>\n

In all this, I\u2019ve worked more like a sound engineer than a translator. Take Paul\u2019s letter as an old analog recording, full of background noise, suffering from distortion and disrepair. The older it gets and the more times it\u2019s copied, the fainter Paul\u2019s voice becomes. I\u2019ve remastered the recording, cleaned up the sound, dropped the background noise, foregrounded the melody, added a beat, clarified the transitions, and looped some elements for emphasis and effect. What results is a kind of Pauline house mix.<\/p>\n

I have not, to be sure, produced the one true translation of Romans. I\u2019m aware as anyone that some things have been lost along the way. But in itself, this is no objection. This is always true. And it would be just as true if I had, instead, chosen to be respectable. The question is never whether<\/em> something was lost. The question is always what <\/em>was lost. I\u2019ve lost some fidelity to the letter of the text and, with respect to history, some verisimilitude. But I hope my live rendering of the Christian life Paul so boldly describes will cover some of the cost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve published a new little book,\u00a0Grace Is Not God’s Backup Plan: An Urgent Paraphrase of Paul’s Letter to the Romans.\u00a0It’s an experiment both in reading Paul and in self-publishing. My family and I were reading N. T. Wright’s “Kingdom Translation”\u00a0of Romans and the kids were having a blast. Paul’s a great read in contemporary English. They loved, especially, Paul’s rhetorical questions (“Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? Certainly not!”) and I loved, especially, the force of the letter when read out loud.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":32974,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-politics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Romans-Front-Cover.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32973","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32973"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32973\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32984,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32973\/revisions\/32984"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}