Wycliffe and SIL Suspend Efforts to Remove 'Father' and 'Son' from the Trinity

Wycliffe and SIL Suspend Efforts to Remove 'Father' and 'Son' from the Trinity

By Hussein Hajji Wario | Yahoo! Contributor Network


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COMMENTARY | Bowing to a groundswell of pressure among supporters and within the organizations themselves, Wycliffe Bible Translators and Summer Institute of Linguistics have announced they will temporarily suspend their plan to produce Bibles geared toward Muslims that remove "Father" and "Son" from the Trinity. In a news release, SIL announced it "will put on hold" the "approval of publication of translated Scripture." It is not clear if the action is aimed at calming the storm of worldwide opposition or a sincere attempt to correct the trend.

The controversy was put in the spotlight by a petition that Biblical Missiology, a ministry of Boulder, Colo.-based Horizons International , had orchestrated.

The main issues of the petition are Arabic and Turkish Bible translations. In the Arabic translation, "Allah" is substituted for "Father" and "Messiah" for "Son." The Turkish translation substitutes "protector" or "guardian" for "Father" and "proxy" or "representative" for "Son."

Wycliffe Senior Vice President Russ Hersman, in an interview before the news release, acknowledged it was possible Wycliffe experts had inadvertently misled Wycliffe leadership into publicly defending the translations. But he did not return calls for comment after SIL news release.

The issue at hand was an Arabic word "Rabbi," which means "Lord." Wycliffe and SIL experts had argued using an obscure and disputed Muslim source rendering "Rabbi," which referred to "Allah" as "Father." Thus they justified the use of Allah in place of "Father" in Matthew 28:19.

The petition also asked Phoenix-based Frontiers USA to reconsider its position on the Turkish translation, which was done in partnership with Wycliffe and SIL. When reached for comment, Frontier's director Bob Blincoe defended the Turkish translation stating, "If it has the Turkish-Greek interlinear, it is faithful to the original Greek." When pressed further how "protector" and "guardian" could be equivalent to "Father" and "proxy" and "representative" to the "Son" in the translation, he said, "It has the original Greek, it is true to the exact Gospel of Matthew."

Blincoe contradicted his earlier statement on the translation. In a May interview with the World Magazine, he stated Frontiers would not "play loose with the terms of the Bible," and denied Frontiers did any Bible translations. But after SIL and Wycliffe issued their statement suspending the translation, he stated Frontiers would stand by "its Turkish translation."

The new translation has stirred significant controversy in Turkey. In a post recorded on the petition site, Carlos Madrigal, a pastor who has been in Turkey for 27 years, stated he " did not know any Turkish pastor or believer that likes this translation." He added, "the worst thing in this translation" it "started with a quote of the Koran … as if it was the highest authority."
When reached for comment via email, members of Biblical Missiology said they were "pleased with the progress of the petition." They are "cautiously optimistic but expect Wycliffe and SIL to explain previous denials."