I read Spe Salvi the first day it came out, and I’m still digesting it. It’s longer by more than 3,000 words than its predecessor, Deus Caritas Est and takes more than two hours to read (unless you’re speed reading, of course).
I’ll try to blog some about its contents, and the first thing I thought I’d note is something that lept out at me when I was making my way through it the very first time.
You see, I’m not a big fan of the New American Bible. It’s a squishy, lame, tin-eared translation. Even the people who worked on the translation (like Raymond Brown) complained about what the stylistic editors did to their work (though that applies more to the original edition than the current one).
The NAB also happens to be approved by the U.S. bishops for use in liturgy, and so occasionally I get someone who is more-bishopier-than-thou looking down his nose at me for finding fault with the translation, as if the U.S. bishops personally translated the document–as a body–under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. (Instead of approving as a conference the work of a set of interlocking committees of iconoclastic translators who were determined to desacralize the language of Scripture. Under those circumstances, an individual bishop had virtually no chance of getting substantive changes made in the document, especially in the heady atmosphere of the early 1970s, when the first edition came out.)
Well, in Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict is very diplomatic about it–in keeping with his position as pope–but he finds fault with a translation approved by the conference of bishops of his homeland, Germany.
Discussing, Hebrews, 11:1, he writes:
To Luther, who was not particularly fond of
the Letter to the Hebrews, the concept of “substance”, in the context of
his view of faith, meant nothing. For this reason he understood the term
hypostasis/substance not in the objective sense (of a reality present within
us), but in the subjective sense, as an expression of an interior attitude, and
so, naturally, he also had to understand the term argumentum as a
disposition of the subject. In the twentieth century this interpretation became
prevalent—at least in Germany—in Catholic exegesis too, so that the ecumenical
translation into German of the New Testament, approved by the Bishops, reads as
follows: Glaube aber ist: Feststehen in dem, was man erhofft, Überzeugtsein
von dem, was man nicht sieht (faith is: standing firm in what one hopes,
being convinced of what one does not see). This in itself is not incorrect, but
it is not the meaning of the text, because the Greek term used (elenchos)
does not have the subjective sense of “conviction” but the objective sense of
“proof”. Rightly, therefore, recent Protestant exegesis has arrived at a
different interpretation: “Yet there can be no question but that this classical
Protestant understanding is untenable.”5 Faith is not merely a
personal reaching out towards things to come that are still totally absent: it
gives us something. It gives us even now something of the reality we are waiting
for, and this present reality constitutes for us a “proof” of the things that
are still unseen. Faith draws the future into the present, so that it is no
longer simply a “not yet”. The fact that this future exists changes the present;
the present is touched by the future reality, and thus the things of the future
spill over into those of the present and those of the present into those of the
future (Spe Salvi 7).
Ultimately, it’s about what translation best captures what’s in the original, not who produced it or who approved it.
This is not to discount the importance of episcopal approval of Scripture translations. I’m not in the least suggesting we do away with that. But it is to note that even when we have episcopal approval of a translation, that doesn’t mean that the translation is infallible or the best one that could have been produced.
