George W. Bush famously said, “When I was young and foolish, I was young and foolish.”
Me, too, Mr. President.
We used the Revised Standard Version of the Bible in the classroom at the seminary I attended, and I used it also in my weekend preaching in rural Indiana. The parishioners never questioned this. Since they had a steady contingent of student preachers from Louisville, I’m sure they were accustomed to this particular translation.
We moved back to Alabama after graduation. I continued to use the RSV on Sundays, but I got some pushback.
“The Bible you use doesn’t sound like mine,” several people said.
Soon we began to publish the RSV and the King James Version of my chosen text side-by-side in the Sunday bulletin.
I don’t know why I didn’t relent and switch to the KJV, simply calling attention to other renderings as necessary in explaining the texts. Now, of course, this would be easy with screens and projection. I should’ve handled this matter in a different way and not insisted on the version I preferred.
Later I had a predecessor who put a massive KJV Bible on the pulpit and called it “the church’s Bible” from which he read every week. I preferred to use my own Bible and had the audacity to move “the church’s Bible” to another location. By this time I was regularly using the KJV on Sundays, but was using my own “portable” Bible.
I don’t hear as much argument now about Bible translations since there are so many. I imagine at least a dozen are represented in a typical congregation on any given Sunday. And most Bible apps put 30 or more at our fingertips.
I know we yet have some “King James only” folk who insist it alone should be used for study and preaching.
It's interesting that the Pilgrims who came to America in 1620 didn’t bring a King James Bible with them, at least on purpose. It was new and untrusted, so they brought the Geneva Bible. A crewman brought a KJV, but it wasn’t what the Puritans preferred.
The King James Bible was published in 1611, and this was about the time Shakespeare retired. Though it’s been updated several times, traces of Elizabethan English remain. The Bible was written to be read and to be understood. I believe modern translations help us do this better.
But if a particular congregation is accustomed to a particular version of scripture, a modern pastor should be wiser than I was as a young buck and choose another battle that makes a difference.
Whatever version we use, we should strive to be “doers of the word and not hearers only” (James 1:22). -
