Dynamic Equivalence - Is there such a thing?

At present we are seeing a sudden flurry of comment about bible translation and its various principles and objectives, stimulated this time by the appearance of a new version of the NIV. Bible translations are of course big money, and so the comments extolling the virtues of literal translations, and trashing the less literal (or vice versa) are far from being ‘merely academic’ (as is said, usually with the trace of a sneer). So here’s my merely academic pennyworth of a contribution to all this.

Of course all translation involves compromise. But since the Christian revelation presents itself as the truth of God, the preservation of truth, cognitive equivalence, literal accuracy, should be the translator’s goal, even at the expense of immediate intelligibility. If the result of translation which aims at keeping to the original as faithfully as can be results in some puzzlement and ignorance when the text is read, so be it. It is the task of the Christian ministry to explain the Scriptures, as Philip explained them to the Ethiopian eunuch.

I take it that a literal translation has the best chance of preserving truth. I shall say no more in defence of this here. Nor am I proposing to comment on whether or not paraphrasing the Bible, instead of translating it, is the best method of conveying its message to culturally-remote peoples. Nor am I concerned with the theology at work in some of these translation practices, the idea that the Bible is prior to the church, for example, and that Bible study is an individual and isolated activity, and the allied assumption that it is an unquestionably good strategy for new translations to be parachuted into cultures that are totally lacking in churches or ministers of the gospel trained to ‘give the sense’ to the Bible.

Instead I want briefly to comment on the phrase ‘dynamic equivalence’ offered as a principle or goal of translation, and to argue that the only sort of as ‘dynamic equivalence’ there can be is cognitive equivalence. To suppose that there could be two translations that differ in cognitive meaning but are dynamically equivalent is incoherent. Dynamic equivalence is not a goal that can be achieved.

To begin, consider the phrase itself. It has its home in physical mechanics. Two differently-designed engines are dynamically equivalent if, say, they provide the same performance – acceleration, top speed, steadiness etc. – to two equivalent vehicles. Such an equivalence, or its failure, is precisely measurable. It is possible to achieve this equivalence to some degree, and to achieve it exactly.

When the phrase is used to mark out a goal in translation is clearly metaphorical, for here we are talking not about physical dynamics, but about the effect that apprehending the meaning of a word or phrase or sentence may have, an ‘equivalent effect’, And what I claim is that there is no such thing as ‘dynamic equivalence’ achievable other than cognitive equivalence, and certainly it is not achievable through paraphrase, however ingenious and skilled the paraphraser may be. Why? Because the response of the reader is via his or her beliefs about what they read, what they take what they read to mean. The impacton the human mind of single words, phrases, and complete sentences, is obviously not physically mechanical, but it comes through the meaning or the perceived meaning, of the words. And so we should stick to the original words, translating or transliterating them as best we can.

To this there is one objection, that since all translation fails, a literal and exact translation fails as much as does a papaphrastic translation. The Message is no more or less a failure than the KJV or the ESV. It is true that translation always fails. But it is not always a complete failure.All sorts of nuances are lost in translation. But if translation were a complete failure then there would be no gospel, since Jesus’ teaching as we have it in the Greek of the Gospels is already a translation from Aramaic. And if translation were impossible there would be no Christian theology, since that is predicated on the assumption that the meaning of Scripture is Scripture. And what this means is that it is possible to give the meaning of Scripture in words other than the very words of the original text. The trouble is that paraphrases take greater risks with the original, and they confound translation with commentary, leading to expectations on the part of the reader than are not borne out by the original text.

There cannot be exact equivalence in translation, granted, but there can be cognitive equivalence. For example, it is possible to translate a sentence which when it is true, the translation is true, and when it is false, the translation is false. And it is cognitive equivalence that the translator should aim at. Anything less than this as an aim confuses translation with paraphrasing and commentary. . Commentaries and paraphrases on a text have their place, have a vital place, but they are not translations of an original text. For if two assertions, or questions, or commands, A and B have a different meaning, as they must if B is a paraphrase of A, or a commentary on it, then - quite simply – the belief that A is either true or false is a different belief, has a different cognitive content, than the belief that B is either true or false. So paraphrasing, or producing ‘translations’ of a colloquial or up to the minute kind, cannot produce sets of beliefs in their careful readers that are equivalent to the beliefs produced by a text that keeps close to the original. For beliefs have content, they are beliefs that what A states has such and such a meaning. It is the cognitive content that gives the corresponding belief its unique character. A different account of A means that a belief that this different account is true (or false) is a different belief. A different account, a different meaning, a different belief.

So what if reading an exact translation fails to communicate the meaning of the passage, perhaps because the language has no exact equivalence, and as a result words like ‘Rabbi’ or ‘Messiah’ have to be retained, or because of some other cultural difference? What if there’s no word for ‘righteousness’ or ‘atonement’ or ‘resurrection’? Maybe the best translation strategy in such circumstances is the transliteration of the word with the addition of a marginal note, which is the practice of the Study Bibles of today, and of the Geneva Bible of the Puritans.

It is at this point, where there is failure in translation due to the inadequacy of vocabulary, that an informed and faithful ministry of the word of God is indispensable, to take the time and trouble to explain and expound the idea of righteousness or atonement in the receiving language. Such explanation will no doubt use apt illustrations, metaphors, analogies etc. But most of all it will develop the biblical idea of righteousness or atonement or Messiah, by this means encouraging hearers and readers to enter into the biblical framework of things. In other words, ‘translation’ is a two-way street. Translaors must do their best to translate the original as faithfully and exactly as possible into native languages. But the speakers of those languages have also to be prepared to re-situate themselves in the world of biblical concepts and biblical claims. 'I want to know what the Bible means, and I want to know NOW' is no way to carry on.

[Michael Marlowe’s ‘Against the Theory of Dynamic Equivalence’ (http://www.bible-researcher.com/dynamic-equivalence.html) offers wise comment and telling evidence of the slippage that occurs in the search for dynamic equivalence.]

September

The September posts include the third Analysis in which Bishop Tom Wright's latest views on justification are discussed. In it I discuss his charges that the Reformed doctrine of the imputed righteousness of Christ is 'legalistic' and that it fails to brake free of medieval Augustinianism, since it involves the transfer of 'moral righteousness', and is thus a variant of the medieval idea of the transfusion of grace. If the first charge sticks, then Wright must also plead guilty to 'legalism' (whatever exactly that is), and the second charge is based either upon misunderstanding or (as the lawyers say) on bad drafting.

You'll also find a further draft short section from the forthcoming Calvin at the Centre (O.U.P.), 'Providence and Puritanism'

Those who follow the offerings of Helm's Deep may also be interested in a review of Charles Partee's new book on Calvin, and in a short piece on what is usually called 'Definite Atonement'.

Wright and Righteousness

In the third Analysis on Bishop Tom Wright’s new book on justification we shall be considering his ideas about the imputation of righteousness.

As we have seen, by now Wright’s account of justification commits him to the following: to substitution, and to imputation. (194, 196) Christ acts as our substitute, and justification involves imputation, but the idea of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness continues to be ruled out and even to be ridiculed by the Bishop.

The chief positive element in Wright’s account of justification, and the discussion that follows, turns upon his idea of justification as a law-court concept. He thinks that this has nothing to do with moral virtue, or ‘righteousness’ in the sense that mistakenly stems from Augustine, but it is simply that the court has found in an individual’s favour and thereby ‘justifies’ him. (180) He sharply discounts the classic Reformed view of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. In justification a new relationship is reckoned – faithfulness to the covenant . But there’s a world of difference, Wright thinks, between a new relationship and the imputation of a new moral status. He thinks that the imputation of righteousness is a ‘blind alley’. (204)

Why is that?

Part of the answer is that Wright sees Pauline imputation in negative terms. It is the not reckoning of sin, it is pardon for sin, and acquittal, but not anything positive, such as the imputation of righteousness , because to speak in such positive terms moves us back into the medieval world from which the Reformation tried unsuccessfully to extricate itself. (187)

The rest of the answer is because the Reformed idea of justification by the imputed righteousness of Christ suggests to Bishop Wright that in justification a person receives an ‘implant’ of Christ’s merit. (70) This is because righteousness is not , in the original Pauline context (as he sees it), a moral character trait, nor a virtue capable of being infused or imputed. So at the heart of the gospel there is no imputation of moral righteousness, but rather a ‘judicial sentence on sin’. (180-1) (It is at this point that the little word ‘moral’, mentioned in the first post, comes to take centre stage. Watch how it continually appears in Wright’s formulations against the Reformed view.)

According to him, what is allegedly imputed according to the Reformed view of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness is his moral righteousness . Wright takes this to be a reference to a subjective moral state. Repeat, He takes this to be the reckoning to the believer of a new subjective state, Christ’s subjective state, which through imputation is now possessed by the believer. He thinks that the oddity of such a view is another reason why it must be rejected. Note, this rejection has little or nothing to do with the exegesis of Paul. It is not that Wright alone knows what St. Paul really said and everyone else in history has misheard. He is perfectly content to write (in purely conventional language) of the ‘grant of the status as righteous’. (70) But he thinks that ‘righteous’ here is a judicial state, whereas for the Reformers the righteousness imputed is an implanted – Wright havers on this - virtue.

For Wright, for some strange reason, a reason which he never overtly identifies, discusses or explains, the term ‘moral’ cannot imply merely a standard of righteousness (as in ‘the moral law’ or ‘a moral issue’), but the subjective, personal possession of a set of qualities or ‘virtues’. This is what he objects to what he takes to be the Reformed view, the counting or reckoning or imputing to a person of such a subjective moral state. He seems to think that the Reformed view is that the believer has Christ’s righteousness in the way in which it may be said that I have your toothache. And, Wright believes , such a thing involves a ‘category mistake’. You and I can have the same (sort of) toothache, but it is impossible for me to have the very toothache that is your tooth ache.

But this logical impossibility is not, and never was, the Reformed view. The imputation of righteousness never was the imputation of Christ’s righteousness in the sense that his very subjective righteousness is transferred to me. That is utter confusion! (How could there be such an imputation? How could a person have reckoned to her the very subjective state that is Christ’s righteousness or virtue? And who ever said such a thing?) Wright diligently uses Paul as a source, but where are his sources in the history of doctrine for making such an allegation? Has he researched the point? Could he provide us with chapter and verse?

Does not Bishop Wright not know this how off-centre (‘crazy’ would be a more accurate word) his views about the Reformed view are? Does he not know that as a matter of bare, clear fact, this is not the Reformed view? Does he not realise that he is, to put the matter colloquially, making it up, spinning it out of thin air?

To repeat. According to Wright the Reformed view is that a person is morally righteous to a degree only if he is subjectively righteous to that degree. Christ may give Peter his sandals, or some fish, but he cannot transfer to Peter the very character that he has, any more than he can give to Peter the pain that he suffered. Similarly a person’s act of sinning cannot become Christ’s act of sinning. Therefore, since (as is obvious) the moral character of one person can no more be imparted or transferred to another than can his feeling of pain, no one can come to possess the very moral condition that is Christ’s moral righteousness, nor can Christ come to possess the very condition that is a person’s act of sinning. It can’t be done. Such a state cannot be his very own moral state. To propose such a view is not simply as Wright puts it, a ‘category mistake’, it is utterly incoherent.

It is this piece of apparent confusion in Wright’s mind over what constitutes imputed righteousness in the classic Reformed view that is the reason why, (apparently), the ‘Augustinian tradition’ which famously included subjective renewal as part of justification, continued to dominate the Reformation despite its clear view of justification as a forensic act. That’s why (according to Wright) the Reformation has not in its doctrine of imputed righteousness thrown off Augustinianism, since it still thinks of justification in terms of receiving the merit of another, and receiving the merit of another must mean (Wright appears to think) receiving a moral state, a moral (in his sense) change, merit from the treasury of merit, the imparting of moral virtue, a change that is – impossibly – he thinks – imputed to the believer. But this is deeply and crucially factually inaccurate.

To show that I am not making this up, it might be helpful at this point for the reader to have a short index of phrases that Wright uses of Reformed theology and the ‘Augustinian tradition’. As I stated in the first post, he fails to make a clear distinction between these two versions of Augustinianism in the book:

47. ‘Here we meet, not for the last time, the confusion that arises inevitably when we try to think of the judge transferring, by imputation or any other way, his own attributes to the defender’.
60, ‘Ever since the time of Augustine, the discussions about what has been called ‘justification’ have borne a tangled, but only tangential relation to what Paul was talking about’.
65, ‘Justification.…has regularly been made to do duty for the entire picture of God’s reconciling action towards the human race….everything from God’s free love….through final judgement….’
70, ‘That always meant, for Augustine and his followers, that God, in justification, was actually transforming the character of the person, albeit in small, preliminary ways (by, for example implanting the beginnings of love and faith within them). (See also 71, 81)
153-4 ‘There has grown up ‘in the Western church a long tradition of (a) reading God’s righteousness’ as justitia Dei, then (b) trying to interpret that phrase with the various meanings of justitia available at the time, and (c) interpreting that in turn within the categories of theological investigation of the time (especially to make ‘justification’ cover the entire sweep of soteriology from grace to glory).
167, ‘A doctrine that has attempted to construct the entire soteriological jigsaw on the basis of a medieval view of ”justice”’.
170 ‘The problem with the “old perspective” on Paul is that it has followed the medieval tradition (to which it was never more thoroughly indebted than when reacting to some of its particulars)….it has de-Judaized Paul’.
205 ‘It is therefore a straightforward category mistake, however venerable within some Reformed traditions including part of my own, to suppose that Jesus ‘obeyed the law’ and so obtained ‘righteousness which could be reckoned to those who believe in him. To think that way is to concede, after all, that ‘legalism’ was true after all – with Jesus as the ultimate legalist. At this point, Reformed theology lost its nerve…’legalism’ itself was never the point, not for us, not for Israel, not for Jesus’. ((204) Emphases are Wright’s)

Crikey!

The existence on the planet of such sentences may be hard to credit. Here’s another modest index of the evidence that Wright takes ‘moral’ or ‘virtuous’ to mean a subjective state:

50 The declaration of the court does not mean (primarily) that the defendant is virtuous, but that he is vindicated by the court. (cf. 113)
51 ‘Piper suggests that “it may be that when the defendant lacks moral righteousness’ (where did moral righteousness come from all of a sudden?), “the Judge, who is also Creator and Redeemer, may find a way for his righteousness to count for the defendant”’. (also 69)
71 ‘But “righteousness”, within the very precise language of the courtroom which Paul is clearly evoking, most obviously in Romans 3, is not “moral righteousness’’’.
81 This is the trouble with the great tradition, from Augustine onwards, not that it has not said many true and useful things, but that by using the word ‘justification’ as though it described the entire process from grace to glory….’ (Wright’s emphasis)
114 ‘But this does not mean that he has ‘fulfilled the law’ in the sense of obeying it perfectly and thus building up a “treasury of merit” which can then be “reckoned” to his people. This scheme, for all its venerable antecedents in my own tradition as well as John Piper’s, always was an attempt to say something which Paul was saying, but in language and concepts which had still not shaken off the old idea that the law was, after all, given as a ladder of good works up which one might climb to impress God with one’s own accomplishments’.
187 ‘The idea that what sinners need is for someone else’s ‘righteousness’ to be credited to their account simply muddles up the categories, importing with huge irony into the equation the idea that the same tradition worked so hard to eliminate, namely the suggestion that, after all ‘righteousness’ here means ‘moral virtue’, ‘the merit acquired from law keeping’, or something like that. We don’t have any of that, said the Reformers, so we have to have someone else’s credited to us, and ‘justification’ can’t mean ‘being made righteous’, as though God first pumps a little bit of moral virtue into us, and then generously regards the part as standing for the whole’……..’Imputed righteousness’ is a Reformation answer to a medieval question, in the medieval terms that were themselves part of the problem.
204 ‘But, in line with some (though by no means all) of the Protestant Reformers he [John Piper] insists on arriving at this conclusion by the route of supposing that the perfect obedience of Jesus Christ…is the ground of this security. Jesus has ‘fulfilled the law’, and thus amassed a treasury of law-based ‘righteousness’, which we sinners, having no ’righteousness’ of our own, no store of legal merit, no treasury of good works, can shelter within. I want to say, as clearly as I can, to Piper and those who have followed him: this is, theologically and exegetically, a blind alley…’

(I know that some of this is scarcely intelligible, or credible, but this is what Wright has written. Check it out for yourself.)

To emphasise –

Wright believes that in the matter of justification there is one dominant Augustinian tradition much of which the Reformers uncritically assumed. In particular, they assumed that what is imputed is moral virtue, God’s own attributes, and that such imputation is received by faith.

So when he considers the Reformed view, he thinks of it in a distinctly medieval way, as involving both (what was later called) justification and sanctification, but principally involving the idea that sanctification is justification, because justification involves acquiring righteousness, moral virtue, the judge’s attributes.

Wright thinks that all this Augustinian, medieval, Reformation nonsense, (as he judges it), this ‘legalism’, can be avoided by thinking of Pauline justification in negative terms.

Next time, in the last post, we’ll show two things. First, that whatever the history of the matter, Wright’s own view of ‘reckoning’ as not imputing sin, also commits him to ‘legalism’. If what we all have to do is to escape the baleful influence of Augustinian medievalism, then Tom Wright himself has still to break free. And second, that he has utterly misunderstood what ‘the imputation of Christ’s righteousness’ means. Were he to come to understand it as it is, then his fears about it would be at an end.

And then I shall try to sum up.