Book Review

The TNIV and the Gender-Neutral Controversy

by Vern Poythress and Wayne Grudem

The main reason I wanted to review this book, as well as the companion, Why Is My Choice of a Bible Translation So Important? (see my review of it), is that the textual/translation issue has been a serious study of mine for over 16 years.

This book is a mammoth work on the issue of the “Gender-Neutral Controversy,” which the authors get to quickly on page 1: “In hundreds of verses the TNIV [Today’s New International Version] translates only the general idea of a passage and omits male-oriented details” (emphasis the authors’). The authors then do a good job of demonstrating the dangers of this translation, such as its removal of any kind of male-oriented meaning in the English even when the original Hebrew or Greek clearly indicate such meaning. (And if I may interject, to defend this practice is one of the most ludicrous things I’ve witnessed in 32 years of ministry.)

While I do recommend this book, I have some problems with it, mainly because it just doesn’t go far enough, which is obviously due to the authors clear defense of the NIV. It grieves me more every day that the NIV is lauded by the majority of the Church, when it is glaringly apparent that it was merely a steppingstone to the TNIV. In point of fact, the principle translators of the TNIV, Ronald Youngblood and Ken Barker, were likewise two of the principle translators of the NIV (which the authors thankfully mention, p. 132). Does no one see a pattern here? The TNIV is not a surprise! It was, indeed, inevitable and simply completed what the NIV started. (See my other review for more on the NIV.)

It was also interesting to me that Bible scholar D. A. Carson is one of the chief defenders of the TNIV, as the book mentions several times. This was not at all surprising to me, however, because in my view his 1979 book, The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism, was the seed that bloomed into this very defense. When you make comments such as, there is no “dividing line between” literal translation and a paraphrase (p. 87 in Carson) and “why a literal translation is necessarily more in keeping with the doctrine of verbal inspiration, I am quite at a loss to know” (p. 90), it is but a small step to omit male-gender references. I am surprised, however, how many supporters of the NIV do not support the TNIV (note lists on pp. 21-2, 103-9) simply because they actually should out of consistency. To say, for example, “The TNIV translation inserts English words into the text whose meaning does not appear in the original languages” (p. 102), is totally inconsistent because the NIV does the same thing constantly.

It also bothered me that in a large book on Bible translation, Verbal Inspiration is never defined, much less expounded, when it is the central doctrine in question on the whole textual/translation issue. It is the WORDS, the TEXT that matters.

Moreover, the authors stumble into the same trap that scholars have been falling into since B. B. Warfield, namely, they use the term “inerrant” (pp. 160-63) instead of “infallible.” What the majority of scholars today refuse to recognize is the historical fact that until Warfield, the word inerrant was NEVER, NOT EVEN ONCE used to refer to the Bible, rather the word infallible was ALWAYS used. This is easily verified by just reading Francis Turretin, The Westminster Confession, The London Baptist Confession (1689), Charles Hodge, and others. As a result of the influence of rationalistic German critics (who argued that textual variants prove that the Bible is not infallible), Warfield borrowed the term “inerrant” from astronomy, which refers to the planets as they orbit “inerrantly,” that is, without deviation. From there on Warfield no longer defended infallible existing apographs, rather he now defended only inerrant non-existing autographs. And that is what virtually every evangelical doctrinal statement has regurgitated from that day to our own.

The bottom line on this book, in my view, is that it is quite good, as far as it goes, but doesn’t go nearly far enough. In the final analysis, the TNIV, as its predecessor the NIV, is simply the next inevitable step in the ongoing “dumbing-down” of God’s Word in Bible translation philosophy, just another attack on Verbal Inspiration, and this book helps that situation only minutely.

Dr. J. D. Watson

Pastor-Teacher

Grace Bible Church

Meeker, CO

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