The first in a series of questions being asked to the ESV translation oversight committee has been posted on Adrian Warnock’s blog today.

The following questions was asked to the committee.

It is of note that the group of scholars who wrote the ESV include some great giants of evangelicalism. I wonder how important to the accurate translation of the Bible is an evangelical faith. How much does the doctrine one believes in influence the act of translation and the philosophy which lies behind it?

If you want to, you can read the text of the reply, or watch a video of a member of the committee answering it.

In short, the answer is: no. But the reasoning given is solid.

My thoughts:

It seems that the question that is being answered here is a question of trust.

Can we trust the translators to be faithfully transmitting God’s word, or should we be suspicious that they are pushing some doctrinal agenda.

I feel that plurality on the translation oversight committee really helps guard against pushing a doctrinal agenda, but then, I am coming at this from an evangelical viewpoint.

I can see where it would be difficult for those outside of the evangelical community to trust that a translation committee that contains some “great giants of evangelicalism” would not be pushing an agenda.

Whether or not such an agenda actually exists is another question entirely.

How’s that for a postmodern view on the issue ;)

Incidentally, in order to spur discussion, the ESV publishers are offering a chance to win a free ESV bible. You are entered every time you comment on the site. However, this topic is dear to my heart and fascinating to me anyway. I hope I’m not participating solely for selfish reasons :)

Well, PlanetRock and Wombat (aka, the notourhome.com server, which also hosts this site, and the Borseth’s site, and Z37, and a myriad of other sites) are finally both back online after being hacked to pieces.

Interesting that in the last two months, every server that I deal with on a regular basis have been hacked to their knees… sometimes I think I’m to blame, but… naaaah.

Hope it wasn’t too inconvenient for all of you, we are looking at better security/hosting options now (combinging forces, pooling resources, etc…) to make things better for the future.

But my question to you all is, did you miss us?

Oh, and do you like the new pics on the sidebar? what about the “Recent Site-ings”? Or are they just clutter…

After several random links to robot news stories (there seems to be a lot of them lately, and they are increasing in frequency), I came up with what I believed was an original new word, hoping that I’d coined what someday soon will be a famous, commonly used word.

Robophobe

Unfortunately, it looks like it’s already been thought of. sigh.

This affects PlanetRockISU. (it will be down).

An announcement from his Web site that may not stay up for long:

Hacked. :( Apparently, this computer has gotten hacked and is now serving more data than any other computer on ISU’s entire network. Since I won’t get a chance to rebuild the machine until Monday, that means I need to take this computer off the internet for a few days to prevent illicit activity on this box. I hope this message stays up long enough for many of you to read it, because very soon this computer will be going offline, and won’t come back until Monday.

In other news, the notourhome server (Wombat) was recently hacked as well. We are still limping along, serving up your favorite blogs, but we’ll have to transition to a new server soon. Some down-time is expected.

Well, here ’tis…June 7. Tomorrow is my last day of school. Yowsers! It’s been kind of crazy…finishing up things at school while most everyone one else is in the full summer swing of things. However, tonight was different.

First of all, I got a random call from a good friend who just found out that she worked with another friend of ours. (Sorry for the vagueness!) I think that just reminded me that even when I am not even paying attention to the world around me, God is moving, like it or not!

Later on, Matt and I were enjoying a lovely date night, cruising through town in search of Tropical Snow (btw, where did the one that was in Campustown go?) but when we didn’t find one nearby, we decided to cruise through campus. Ahh…campus in the summer…drummers drumming in front of Music Hall…new students walking around with red orientation bags…everything is super green…’twas lovely. We had the brainstorm of getting alternative frozen fruity dessert at the UDCC (quality smoothies!) so we turned around and parked in ye ol’ Friley lot. Wow. I don’t think I had been on campus since move out. But, wow, guys…it made me so excited for fall! And honestly, I don’t know if I’ve even been this excited for fall kick-off!

At the Rock leaders’ gatherings lately we’ve been doing a lot of evaluating of the past year, and so I think that my brain has been cranking on a lot of that. Last week, someone brought up the thought/concept of how the amount of “heart” we put into anything affects the outcome. I’ve been thinking about this a lot…and a couple days ago read this verse:

“Be sure to fear the LORD and serve him faithfully with all your heart; consider what great things he has done for you.” 1 Samuel 12:24

I’m not sure how to define the “heart” thing, and I almost think that the “heart” in the verse is slightly different (but yet not…) than the “putting your heart into it” “heart.” But it seems to me like it might be kind of a combination of two things: 1) yielding to God and his overall will for our lives, and Him changing us through the Spirit to be more like him, 2) I think it’s also like “putting ourselves out there” for God and making ourselves vulnerable to serve him and to see him get glory.

Probably part of this “change in heart” (oh my, I’m sorry English majors…I’m really wearing out this word…) is due to the focusing of my heart that is due to me finishing my time teaching band full-time in order to be able to focus on helping my Matt and supporting the Rock ministry. I have so dearly loved my time at school but am so super excited to be able to not have my time, energy, focus, and heart split in so many different areas.

I know that a lot of our Friley team is in Chicago for the summer, and ya’ll are just trying to survive the chaos of things there, and a lot of us here are still just trying to get the summer figured out, but I am going to be praying that God will be giving out team a ton of “heart” for people and preparing us for the stuff he has planned for us this fall…

Thoughts?