'And lead us not into, uh, change': 12-13-17
December 13, 2017
Perhaps you noted a story a few days ago about Pope Francis suggesting a tweak to what Protestants usually call "The Lord's Prayer" and what Catholics often call the "Our Father."
Here is America Magazine's version of that story. (I've added The Telegraph's version of the story in the "Related Articles" section below.)
As the story reports, the suggested rewording would try "to clear up the confusion around the phrase 'lead us not into temptation.'
“'That is not a good translation,' the pope said in a interview on Wednesday night with Italian television, according to published reports."
Some of this has to do with how particular Greek words in the New Testament have been translated into English. It's what scholars wrestle with every day as they work to understand how the original readers (or, more likely, hearers) would have understood what was written.
But some of it also has to do with our concept of God. The phrase "lead us not into temptation" presumes a God who, for reasons not altogether clear to us, tempts us. To many people, including me, that vision of God is troubling. Indeed, the role of "tempter" in Christian theology traditionally has been left to Satan. (And, for now, let's not get into whether there really is a personified devil.)
A modern translation of the prayer that I prefer -- one often used by Episcopalians -- changes that temptation line to this: "Save us from the time of trial."
That translation seems more in concert with the next line, "and (or "but") deliver us from evil."
That supposes a God who, rather than dragging us toward temptation and evil, is actively working to move us away from such trials and evils. Which conforms much more closely to the God to whom the scriptures bear witness.
One reason I returned to this story today is to suggest that these kinds of proposed changes are terribly difficult for faith communities to adopt. Even if they come from the top. People of faith, in my experience, tend to want things to remain as they were when they were children. Change upsets them, even though the God worshiped by followers of the three Abrahamic faiths is in many ways a God of change whose nature, nonetheless, never changes.
God seeks to change our hearts, change our understanding of divine things, change our behavior so it lines up with what we say we believe, change the evil being done to other humans. And on and on.
Why so many people of faith are, in response, so resistant to change will always be a mystery to me. I pray to be led away from the temptation to box the ears of some such folks.
(Notice that the version of the prayer pictured here today uses "debts" and "debtors" instead of "trespasses." That's because that's the way we Presbyterians say it -- and I have no interest in change on that matter. I wish I had an irony emoji here.)
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TRUMP AS AN INSTRUMENT OF DIVINE REVELATION
I trust you will not be shocked to learn that white Christian evangelicals who support President Trump through thin and thin are thrilled that he has formally recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital. The problem is that many of them tend to see current events through the eyes of the mysterious book of Revelation in the New Testament. The book is the account of a vision by its author, one that half-baked theologians have turned into precise prophesy, especially about Israel and the end times. And that's how they're viewing Trump's declaration. Maybe it helps to know that the brilliant reform leader John Calvin (who wasn't right about everything) declined to write a commentary about Revelation because he just couldn't quite make a lot of sense of it. That's a pretty good and careful way to approach that fascinating book.
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