Jesus vs. America
A Gen X attorney sits down with a millennial and a member of Gen Z to untangle the Christian faith from the influence of the American culture.
For over two decades, we have collectively watched young adults walking away from their faith at an alarming rate. Most Christian resources focus on this exodus from a sociological lens, and we have benefited from the work that has been done in this area.
But as three people with on-the-ground experience working with young adults every day, it is increasingly clear that young adults are not so much reacting to Jesus, his message, or even his plan for the church. Instead, many young people are being repelled by a counterfeit and enculturated version of Christianity, a version of Christianity that commingles the American culture and political ideology with the Christian faith. Jesus told us we could not serve two masters, and yet so many Christians have tried to serve both the teachings of scripture and the dictates of the American culture. Young adults have taken notice, and they want nothing to do with this tainted form of religion. Many may bemoan the loss of so many young people, but we have often given them the reasons they cite when they leave.
Our podcast is designed to first and foremost untangle the teachings of Jesus and the will of God revealed throughout the scripture from the enculturated version of the gospel that has spread to many corners of the church in 21st Century America. In doing so, we hope to validate what young adults have long suspected, while challenging them to go deeper with Jesus rather than bail out on a counterfeit gospel. We want to demonstrate honest questions and to wrestle with doubts while also encouraging young adults to do the work of seeking answers and working to rebuild their faith.
Jesus vs. America
You Asked: Would God Allow His Word to Be Mistranslated?
In this episode, we answer a viewer’s question about what the work of Bible translation involves, and whether God would allow the scriptures to be inaccurately translated. Our conversation begins with an acknowledgement that even the most conservative views on the inerrancy and infallibility of scripture affirm that these views only apply to the original manuscripts, and not to translations, and those original manuscripts are no longer available to us. For that reason, even before we consider translation, we need to be familiar with the scholarship involved in the transmission of the text, the field of study that seeks to recover the text of the original manuscripts by studying the thousands of copies that we do have. Contrary to the common notion that the books of the Bible have been changed so many times that we cannot be sure of its original text, we reference those scholars who do not subscribe to the Christian faith but who nonetheless attest to the remarkable care in which the Bible was transmitted. We then consider the challenge of translating from the foreign languages in which the scripture was written by the biblical authors, and acknowledge the interpretive decisions that need to be made anytime we translate any writing into a different language. Those decisions and the implicit theological positions of the translators can result in slightly different translations of certain words, some better than others. Finally, we conclude with a genuine note of thankfulness to God for the fact that we have so many translations available to us, even while acknowledging that some people groups still have none in their language.