Print this articleKerux interview: Eugene Peterson
Pastor, theologian, and translator of The Message (Part 1 of 2)
Over 10 million people have read The Message, Eugene Peterson’s rendition of the Bible in contemporary English language, since it was first published in 1993. The Message has won wide acclaim from pastors and lay people alike who have praised its readability and clarity. U2 lead singer Bono said The Message “brought the text back to the tone in which the books were written.” Peterson served as pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland for 29 years and is Professor Emeritus of Spiritual Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. In addition to translating The Message, he has written several books on discipleship and pastoral care, and is currently in the middle of writing a five volume series on spiritual theology.
Kerux Editor in Chief Christian Bell sat down with Peterson for nearly an hour prior to his January Series lecture earlier this year to discuss Biblical translation, preaching, seminary education, and church growth. This is the first of a two-part series.
Kerux: C. S. Lewis once said of translation, “It is our business to present that which is timeless – the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow – in the particular languages of our own age.” Do you agree with Lewis?
Peterson: I agree. For me, the context in which I have done my work has been as a pastor; I started out as a professor, but then I became a pastor. Not that I spent my life doing scholarly work, but when I became a pastor I realized that they weren’t interested in that, so I had to start listening to them. They taught me the language of where they lived, and so the formation of the idiom, the syntax, the tone of The Message was developed in pastoring. This was the language they lived with.
I was fortunate in a way with The Message, in that I was the organizing pastor of a new church and I had this mix of people. Some of them had been Christians all their lives, but they were soon outnumbered by new Christians or non-Christians – people who thought Calvin was Calvin Klein. They knew nothing about the Bible; didn’t know the language of the Bible. I was forced to stay in touch with the old-timers and at the same time include the new people, and it was basically through language. So instead of trying to teach the new people the old language, I tried to make that bridge between the language of the Bible – which was basically a vernacular language – into their language. So yes, I totally agree.
But see, pastors do this all the time; official Bible translators don’t. They’re usually scholars, so they’re more tightly tied to the original text and the ancient language than they are to contemporary language. But pastors have been doing this in their sermons all the time – trying to get that re-imagined and re-spoken. I could never have done this without being a pastor.
Kerux: Another thing that Lewis said was that by trying to translate our doctrines into vulgar speech, we discover how well we understand them ourselves, and that often our failure to translate – though it might be due to our ignorance of the vernacular – more often exposes the fact that we don’t know what precisely we mean ourselves. Have you found that to be true? Has translation been helpful in clarifying doctrines?
Peterson: Oh yes. I always try to avoid technical, theological language, so I was forced to re-understand it, recapture it.
I remember there was a couple in my study once, and they were having marital problems. They weren’t parishioners of mine. The man was Jewish and the woman was Southern Baptist, and he always paced back and forth as we talked, he just was restless. At one point he just stopped in the middle and he said, “Do you hear what he [Peterson] said? That’s what grace is.” This is a secular Jew. She then heard grace in a context she’d never heard it before. They were trying to reconcile their basic language difficulties, but it came out of a context where we were wrestling with "how does this work right now."
I avoided the word “grace” whenever I could in The Message. You can’t always; it’s such a prominent word. But in Greek it doesn’t have the same religious and pious associations. We’ve got, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,” and that kind of colors the context. Grace much more has to do with, “Thanks. Thank you. Thanks a lot.”
Kerux: When you were doing the translation, my understanding, having read previous interviews of yours, was that your sense was to try to capture the spirit of the text, rather than doing a more literal one-word-for-another translation. How difficult did you find it? Were you intentionally setting out looking for phrases in the vernacular, ways of phrasing things that would capture the original spirit, were you trying to keep a poetic style, or…?
Peterson: I don’t want this to sound esoteric, but I really didn’t try that hard. This is the way I talked, this is the way I lived. I learned all this language from my teenagers, from my youth groups, from my congregation. I really wasn’t trying to find the right word. I use this illustration: I felt like I was walking through an orchard, and every once in a while I’d see a pear or an apple that was fully formed, and I’d just pluck it off the tree, and there it was: a metaphor, a way of seeing things.
You’ve got to remember I’d been doing this kind of thing for 35 years before I was doing The Message, so it was really a cumulative kind of thing. In some ways I would think, “How can I replace this metaphor, which has gone dead?” I think when I did the mustard seed, I changed it to a pine nut; nobody’s ever seen a mustard seed, except ground up, but pine nuts we usually have. But I didn’t do that very often, and I didn’t think “How can I replace this?” Usually it was there; it just appeared.
Kerux: It’s the case in The Message, as with many modern translations, that there are metaphors, terminology, and slang used that go out of style because language is always fluid. How can we update The Message – or will we need to? Some of the phrases in there have already started going out of style, and of course that will continue as the years go by. Is this a process that is continual?
Peterson: It is. The primary people responsible for this are pastors, preaching and praying. They’re the ones who have the responsibility Sunday by Sunday by Sunday to keep this language current and alive. What I did in The Message probably will need to be redone in another 20 years. I’d be lucky if it lasts for 20 years. [J. B.] Philips did the best paraphrasing translation in my lifetime, and he’s still pretty good. As you say, there are things that are not quite on the front burner anymore in The Message, but we’re still close enough to them that they work. But I’d say in 20 years that somebody’s going to have to do this again.
Kerux: Who do you envision that would be – another pastor who has several decades of experience under their belt and who is very accomplished at this?
Peterson: I think so. I can’t imagine a scholar doing it; I really can’t. And I depend on the scholars – I love the scholars – but their commitment is to something that happened 2000 years ago. We need that; I’m not dismissing that. We need to know that as accurately as we can, and I certainly depend on them enormously, but that’s not what they’re good at.
I think it needs to be people who are listening, listening, listening to the language, working through language situations. You quoted C. S. Lewis quite a bit. We’ve had a lot of attention being given to translation language in the last 20 or 30 years; George Steiner is one of the best, and Northrop Frye. There’s also been a lot of snobbish condescension towards translation among some people; you know, “Every translation is a dilution,” or “Translator? You’re a traitor.” There’s an African theologian, Kwame Bediako; I quote him in The Message. He says, “The Bible is the most translatable language in the world, because it was incarnate in Jesus. Every time it’s translated, it gets fresh life in a new setting.” So translation, rather than diluting the Bible, amplifies and expands it through new cultures and new situations.
By the way, the Wycliffe translators have been the most affirmative as a group of what I’ve done, because that’s what they’re doing. They’re saying, “What word do I use? These people don’t have a word for that…but they have an experience for it.”
Kerux: Do you think it’s a mistake trying to do literal translations of the Bible? Are we in a sense altering the meaning of it by not seeking appropriate metaphors but just trying to do substitution as we go along?
Peterson: Well, there’s a place for it. When you’re learning Latin or learning Greek, it’s useful to have what some people call a “pony,” just so you learn the language. You learn the syntax of Greek, you learn the syntax of Hebrew, so that you’re familiar with it, and until you do that, you really aren’t competent to do translation. It’s like doing calisthenics or practicing scales as a violinist. Until you learn the scales, you can’t start improvising.
When I was in college, there was a young man who was a musician, and he was a classical musician. He played Bach and Mozart and Heydn, and he was very kind of dismissive of all of us because we didn’t know “good music.” One day we were sitting around drinking coffee, and there was a piano nearby. One of the kids said [to him], “You know, you’re all stuck with this Bach stuff; you don’t have any idea what jazz sounds like, do you?” And he went over to the piano and he played improvised jazz for 10 minutes, and it was brilliant – absolutely brilliant! We said, “How did you learn how to do that?” [and he said] “I learned it from Bach.” You realized he’s not playing Bach because he doesn’t know how to play jazz, he’s playing Bach because it’s better than jazz, at least, more to his taste. But it wasn’t out of ignorance.
Kerux: One of our professors at the seminary is fond of reminding us that “every translation involves interpretation.” He says that almost every day in class. When we’re translating Scripture as pastors, whether we’re doing it in writing or doing it for preaching, how do we prevent our interpretation from becoming superimposed on the text?
Peterson: It takes a lot of discipline, a lot of submitting yourself to the text, and a lot of care. You need to know what other people have done. Commentators are great, they’re necessary, they’re part of the community, but I don’t think our translation should be at variance with the community. We have a community to support, we read in Scripture, a worship and community. One of the advantages of being a pastor, although it can be a disadvantage, is you’re listening to people all the time – you’re singing the hymns, reading the Scriptures, and praying. That’s a big advantage. The disadvantage is that you’re also an authority, so you can impose yourself on them and intimidate them and say, “Well, the original Greek says this...” I hate that. [Laughs]
But no, it is interpretive; all language is interpretive. And you know, when we’re saying that, literal translation is almost always wrong, because we’re going from one culture to another. We’re going from one language to another, and languages are not the same, there are no literal equivalents. If you’re ever in a foreign country and you’re trying to speak French, and you’re using a little handbook, you’re going to make some bad mistakes.
It’s interesting; literal is often an excuse for disobedience. I have grandchildren now, so I’ve got a lot of experience. At Thanksgiving, our grandchildren were there. Three little kids: Hans, who is 8; Anna, who is 6; and Mary, who is 3. We finished the meal and they had been dismissed so they could go play. Then all of the sudden they came through the room running lickety-split, Hans in the lead and the two little sisters after him. And their father said, “Hans, there is no running in this house!” and Hans shortens his stride about two inches and says, “I’m not running, I’m jogging!” [Laughs] Well there’s a classic case of literalism in translation. And you see, that happens a lot in the church – when people want to avoid obeying it, they can find a loophole by being literal.
Kerux: Was The Message intended to be a gateway translation to other English translations, or was it intended to stand on its own? In other words, was it something that people who were unfamiliar with the language of the Bible could start with, but then – I hate to use the term – graduate, so to speak, to a different Bible?
Peterson: No, to be honest with you, I didn’t have any scheme or plan about this. What I wanted to do was provide a reading guide. I wanted people to be able to read the Bible, not study it. There’s a difference. When you’re reading, you’re receiving. When you’re studying, you’re controlling it. And I wanted to introduce them to a Bible you could read. So I took out the verse numbers. You know, there were no verse numbers in the Bible until the 16th century. Why did we do that? Because we wanted to control it. We wanted to know that we could study it, and you never get the story; you never get the story.
For a long time, they didn’t even put spaces between the words, which means then the only way you could read it was to read it orally, and you’ve got to be familiar with the language so you know when to make a little pause. Well that keeps you listening. See, the minute you’ve got it under control you’re not going to listen anymore. You can just figure it out. That’s not the way to become an obedient servant of Jesus Christ. You’re married?
Kerux: Yes.
Peterson: The minute you get your wife figured out, you don’t have to listen to her anymore, right? Then one day she says, “We’ve been married 20 years. You’re not listening to me.” And you haven’t been, because you know what she says and you know what she means. Except you don’t; you’re missing all of it. Well, there are a lot of people who have been reading the Bible for 20, 30, or 40 years and they quit listening at some point along the way because they know it. They know its doctrine, they know its history; they know too much.
So I guess I would hope that The Message would be – depending on people’s needs and where they are – their basic reading Bible. But there’s also a place for study Bibles, and I think probably everyone ought to have one of each – whether it’s The Message or Tyndale or Philips or Hopp – but a reading Bible, where you’re reading just to listen to it. You know, there’s also a lot to know about the Bible which can germinate and become obedience, so you ought to have an RSV, an NIV, or a King James.
Another thing is, if you live in a community where the primary Bible being used is a King James Bible, you’ve got to have one, because you have to be in conversation with those people. If you live in a community where the primary Bible is the NIV, you need to know that Bible, because you’re going to be in discussion groups, reading the Bible in church, and hearing the Bible read in the pulpit. The difficulty in America and in the Protestant church right now is that we’ve got 20 easily-available Bible translations, and that interferes with community hearing. I’m always a little skeptical of people who say, “I use five Bible translations; I put them all side-by-side.” Just… no; no. You’re listening for the Word of God. Pick one.
Personally, I don’t read The Message, I still read it in Greek and Hebrew, but I don’t read it out loud in Greek and Hebrew – nobody else knows it! So when I’m preaching in church, I use the RSV. If I’m in somebody else’s church and they use the NIV, I use that.
In terms of learning the Truth of the Bible, there’s not much difference between the translations. In terms of being in communion with your hearers or listeners, there might be strategic reasons for choosing one over the other, but it depends on the place, the people, the setting, and the age. If I’m in a nursing home, I almost always use the King James version. They know that; that’s part of their psyche. They live those rhythms.
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