Gender Inclusion in Bible Scares Conservatives

Silly wimminz! Religions is for the menz! Now stop looking for enlightenment and make me a sammich.

Via Fannie's Room comes a link to a not-surprising-in-the-least article of a conservative Christian group protesting gender inclusive changes to the New International Version Bible (NIV). The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood fear that the language changes will alter their interpretations of theological messages. Those interpretations include divine justification on how God totally likes men better and wants them to push the women-folks around. Or as they put it: women should submit to their husbands in the home and only men can hold some leadership roles in the church. (Also mentioned for having a problem with NIV translations is the Southern Baptist Convention. Surprise, surprise.)

This is the most problematic aspect of believing that the Bible is the literal word-for-word voice of God; those words have to change to be understood by multiple readers in multiple languages. The Bible was not written in King James English from Jesus' hand, and translating a work that comprises the vowel-less written Hebrew and colloquial Greek into a text universally understood by all English speaking peoples (not just those in America, where Biblical phrases sneak into our vernacular and pop culture) is a daunting, dedicated task made possible by academic research and study.

The changes aren't even radical; God is still referred to as He and the Father, when there are ample mentions of God as the Mother in the Old Testament, and comparisons of God as a woman in the New. (Some examples here, from a professed skeptic.)  Even some supporters of the Catholic Church recognize the feminine descriptions of God. The NIV translation isn't doing anything more than changing "man" to "person" in accordance to the source word. As the article states, "At issue is how to translate pronouns that apply to both genders in the ancient Greek and Hebrew texts but have traditionally been translated using masculine forms in English."

As Fannie points out, there are some passages in the Bible are inarguable sexist and oppressive towards women. Despite this, millions of women are still a part of the Christian religion. By choice. For an organization to go out of it's way to further oppress those who would seek to have spiritual fulfillment and inclusiveness is one of the least Christian things I can think of.