Anti-Climacus

Quote for the day: Rowan Williams on translation and the KJV:

We have all suffered from a mindset in the last couple of centuries that has assumed there is an end to translating and understanding and thus that there is something wrong with any version of a text that fails to settle disputes and to provide an account of the truth that no one could disagree with. But what the 1611 translators grasped was that hearing the Word of God was a lifelong calling that had to be undertaken in the company of other readers and was never something that left us where we started.

Of course they believed, and said so robustly in that same preface, that the essential lines of Christian belief were clearly laid out – belief in God the creator, God who makes covenant with his people, God who becomes flesh and creates a new and universal community of believers by the death and rising again of the Word made flesh and the gift of the Holy Spirit, God who justifies us in freedom, not as a reward for good works. But this is not so much the revelation of a series of self-contained truths as an inundation of vision, a flooding of human language that can be strange and extreme and bewildering; it is a vision whose presence makes the sacred writers stumble and search for words at least as much as it makes them fluent and persuasive. Doesn't St Paul say just that in 1 Corinthians 2? "My speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power."

That "demonstration" may be most powerful when it is most inarticulate by normal standards, and Paul himself illustrates this again and again. "What shall we say then to these things?" he asks, as he lets himself be swept along lyrically by the joyful mysteries of Romans 8; and "O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!" he exclaims as he lays out the sorrowful mysteries of Romans 11, his agonised meditation on choice and rejection in the history of Israel and humanity and each human soul. His tortuous path towards the celebration of grace is no easy argument but a wrestling with the shattering implications of the events of Jesus's life and death. And a good translation is one that leads us through Paul's wrestling in all its clumsiness and passion.

And think, too, of how the Old Testament prophets cope with this shattering of their world; of Ezekiel trying to evoke the vision of the chariot of the Almighty filling the sky, awkwardly qualifying everything he says with "as it were", and "the likeness of", or "the appearance of". "Above the firmament that was over their heads was the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone: and upon the likeness of the throne was the likeness as the appearance of a man above upon it … This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face, and I heard a voice of one that spake." (Ezek.1.26, 28b).

What makes the translation a good translation is that there is no attempt to smooth over the stumbling of the original: it was if it were like the impression of something, as it were … This is the precision of revelation because it is language showing the weight it bears, the weight of a Word from outside ordinary categories. And the 1611 translators never let us down in this, never seek to make it easy. It is one of the things that gives this version its abiding importance. It remains an invitation to work, to open up our own language to this weight of presence and gift.