Tyndale Chapel Podcast

Dr. Paul Franks
Well, good morning, everyone. Welcome. It's great for you to join us today on this special chapel service commemorating the 500th anniversary of William Tyndale's translation of the New Testament. Before I share a little bit about other things we have going on to commemorate this anniversary, I'd first like to welcome those prospective students who happen to be with us today. This is a good day for you to be joining us as you're looking for a bit more information about what Tyndale has to offer to you as you consider your university options. So welcome, we're glad that you are here. As I mentioned, this is just the first of several other kinds of events that we have going on. Later today, this early afternoon, the Canadian Bible Society is hosting a presentation and lecture at their facility, and will provide a tour of their Bible collection that showcases some of the historically important Bibles that they have, and also highlight some of the work that's been going on to translate the Bible into so many other languages. This evening, the Sophia Society is hosting their first event of the school year and this is, though ran by some of our arts and sciences students, it is open to all, so you're welcome to join us. This evening's topic is "The Cultural and Societal Impact of Tyndale's Bible Translation". This will be a panel session that features three of our own Tyndale faculty: Dr. Paul Arsenault from our Linguistics Department, Dr. Jen Gilbertson from the Biblical Studies and Theology Department, and Dr. Scott Masson from our English departments. We're also having on the panel two external guests: Dr. Wesley Hill, who you'll hear more about momentarily, and Dr. Amanda Pullen from Knox College. So that is tonight at 7 p.m. We're also hosting on October 30th a one-day colloquium focusing on Tyndale's work and its influence across a variety of academic disciplines. Dr. Jennifer McNutt, the Dyrness Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Wheaton College, will be our keynote speaker for that evening. Now, before our time of prayer, before our time of worship, I'll just open with a quick word of prayer, join me. Dear heavenly Father, we thank You for all the good things that You have brought to us. We're grateful that there was someone like William Tyndale who had the courage to translate the Bible into English that we now benefit from each and every day, we're grateful for that. We're grateful for this institution, Tyndale, that allows space and opportunity to hold a commemoration like this. We invite You to be part of our worship this morning, and we just ask that all that we do and say is for Your glory and honor. Amen.

Patrick Franklin
Would you pray with me? Father God, we give you thanks for this day. Give you thanks for Your goodness, Your mercy, Your love, and the promise that You make us new. We invite You to do that even here and now. Come and speak to us by Your servant, Wes. Come and speak by Your word and Your spirit. In Christ's name, we pray. Amen. Please have a seat. It is my great honor to introduce our speaker for today. The Reverend Dr. Wesley Hill is an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, he's a New Testament scholar who has a deep commitment to the theological interpretation of Scripture. Something close to my heart as well. It's a way of reading the Bible as the Word of the Triune God, centered on the person of Jesus Christ. His doctoral work was published as "Paul and the Trinity: Persons, Relations, and the Pauline Letters". And for any theology and Bible nerds out there, he worked with Dr. Francis Watson and Lewis Ayres, which I think is pretty incredible, pretty cool. Dr. Hill is regularly published in popular publications such as Christianity Today and The Living Church, as well as serving as a contributing editor of Comment magazine. He won Christianity Today's Most Beautiful Orthodoxy Award of Merit in 2016 for his book, "Spiritual Friendship". Other books include, "Easter: the Season of the Resurrection of Jesus", "The Lord's Prayer: a Guide to Praying to our Father" and, "Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality". Dr. Hill has numerous books under contract, including a theological commentary on the Johannine Epistles, that is, the Epistles of John, and a book on reading Paul's letters through the lenses of later Christian theological interpreters. On a personal note, Dr. Hill moved to Canada recently, just this past summer, from the country south of us, on the other side of the lake, Lake Ontario, that is. He says people here have been very welcoming, and it's been a delight for him to be here. I have known Wes for a number of years, and I have been deeply impressed with him as a theologian, a scholar, and a pastor. He is a bridge builder and brings a healing presence and witness to spaces often neglected by the church. He is someone who knows the costs and sacrifices, but also the delights and wonders of following Jesus with all one's heart, mind, soul, and strength. Would you join me in welcoming Dr. Wesley Hill?

Rev. Dr. Wesley Hill
Thank you, Patrick, for that very warm introduction. It's really wonderful to be with you, and I bring greetings from your sister institution across town, Wycliffe College, where I've just joined the faculty this summer, as Patrick mentioned. So it's it's been wonderful the past few weeks getting to know your city a bit, and I look forward to hopefully many years of exploring this great part of the world. So would you pray with me once more as we begin? Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be pleasing and acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer, Amen. Almost 30 years ago, Rowan Williams, who was the Archbishop of Canterbury, gave a lecture about William Tyndale, and he said this, "Tyndale spent his greatest energies in framing a vernacular language for speaking of God, or rather, for God to speak. Tyndale is searching for words that will be capable of being owned by the poor, and dispossessed as words of promise and of transfiguration. By common consent, Tyndale achieves a vigor and a music in his translation work which no one has really rivaled in our language". Friends, I'm here with you today to honor that legacy, to honor Tyndale's, your institution's namesake's, memory in this 500th year celebration of his translation of the New Testament. Now, as a New Testament professor myself, I primarily think of Tyndale as a translator of the Bible, and I'll say more about that in a moment. But as I was rereading Rowan Williams' lecture on Tyndale yesterday, I was struck by his appreciation of Tyndale not only as a gifted translator, but first and foremost, as a preacher of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and because of that, an advocate for social reform. Tyndale cared about the language of the Bible because he believed that God's voice was audible through the Bible. God is the one Tyndale strained to hear speaking in the text of the Bible, and what he heard God say first and foremost was that His love is infinite and available to anyone and everyone. You, whoever you are this morning, God loves you, and rather than be without us, God gave up His only Son on our behalf to bear our sins and to bring us back into fellowship with Himself; so that He might lavish His abundant generosity on us for all eternity. Tyndale's passion for making the Bible available in a commonly used language flowed directly from his conviction that all human beings, everywhere, from the lowliest to the greatest, are the objects of God's infinite love. So I'd like to try to talk about both of those things this morning; the nitty-gritty job of translating Greek into English, and the existential pastoral job of helping human beings hear the good news that God is for us, God is for you. So let's start, by thinking very concretely together about one of Tyndale's translation choices. I sent Patrick a title a few days ago for this talk called "The Benefits of Slow Reading", because I want to show you what it looks like when a translator slows down and pays attention to every single word and makes choices about how it's going to be rendered in the target language. Here is how Tyndale rendered one of the key verses from Paul's letter to the Galatians. And if you want to follow along, this is Galatians chapter five, verse six. Here's how Tyndale translated that, "For in Jesu Christ, neither is circumcision anything worth, neither yet uncircumcision, but faith which by love is mighty in operation". Faith which by love is mighty in operation. That's the phrase that I want to camp out on this morning. As Tyndale knew better than most of us do, although I do hope there are a few of you students here who are in Greek class who will track with me here as we get into the weeds. As Tyndale knew better than most of us do, this is one of the possible ways to translate that phrase in Galatians 5:6. The Greek participle, which Tyndale translates as "mighty in operation", could actually be translated differently. It could be that love is really the acting subject of the sentence, not faith, as Tyndale has it. The Greek could go either way. In which case, we might translate it like this, "faith operated by love", or "love operating on faith", or something along those lines. Now, I suspect that that way of translating, which is different than Tyndale's translation, I suspect that that way of translating the phrase resonates a lot more for a lot of us here this morning. Because a lot of us in the modern world, when we hear the word faith, we tend to hear that as something that's cheap and not necessarily very durable. So it makes more sense to us to say "love mightily operates" rather than "faith mightily operates". Faith is something that it's very easy to say that you have, and saying you have it may earn you some points in certain social circles, like a Christian university. But faith is also easy to lose, isn't it? I've known many, many people over the years who have been excited about having faith, but who nowadays don't claim any faith at all. And I know how flimsy and fickle my own faith can be. Furthermore, faith also seems a lot of the time not mighty in operation, as Tyndale says. Think of all the recent memoirs and documentaries that have reminded us of how abusive and harmful faith can seem to be. Think of how so many people talk a lot about their faith, but seem to be sadly lacking when it comes to love. So for a lot of us, love, in contrast to faith, seems a whole lot more measurable, a whole lot more publicly accessible. So why does Tyndale translate this phrase, "Faith is mighty in operation by love". That may not strike you, may not strike us as a very compelling claim, and we may find ourselves wishing that the translation were different. Much better, a lot of us might think, is is the alternate translation, "love is mighty in operation on faith", or maybe "love enlivens faith", or "love completes faith". So, if we translate it like that, putting it into a complete sentence, we might translate Galatians 5:6 as, "what matters is that acting in love fulfills or completes our faith". This we think is a better translation, a better way of understanding Paul's meaning, because it means that how you treat other people is the acid test of whether what you say you believe is actually valid. Love is more important, we think, than faith. Caring about people and actually treating them well matters more than what you claim to have faith in. But Tyndale had theological, not just philological problems with that way of translating it. Here's the theological problem: If we think that love is what forms or completes or energizes faith, or that love makes faith genuine, then what happens when we recognize our failure to love? We all know, if we're honest with ourselves, that we do not live up to our ideals of love. We know, whether we want to admit it or not, that to try to stake our faith, our our identity before God, on being people who love, will always mean that our standing with God is on shaky ground precisely because we don't always love. We want to say that love is all we need just love; love without the encumbrance and the distortion of doctrines and traditions and institutions. But we always run up against our own failures to love. We don't live up to our own goals. And what do we do then? Where do we go with our betrayal of love, our failure to love? The Protestant reformer Martin Luther, who Tyndale read very carefully, is at this point at his most insightful, as far as my money goes. Luther said that if we think that our standing with God depends on our being loving, then in a very paradoxical way, we won't actually be able to be loving toward other people, because we will inevitably end up trying to use our efforts to love as something to salve our own consciences before God; and in that way, we'll be distracted from the very people we're trying to serve. Our efforts to love our neighbors won't actually be about loving our neighbors for who they are, because they'll ultimately be instead about our need to prove to God or to ourselves that we measure up. So Luther says, "if you try to put love before faith, you'll end up distorting love and losing faith altogether". But, Luther said, if you start with faith, with the trust that you are loved completely, totally, unendingly by God, if you start there; if you put your trust in God's promise in His Son Jesus Christ, that your failures to love are seen for what they are and forgiven, if that's where you start; then you can begin to love your neighbor as your neighbor, instead of trying to use your neighbor and your service of your neighbor to get right with God. Then you can start to love your neighbor for their own sake, not because you want to earn brownie points with God, but because you want to pass on the love that you have so freely been given. And that's exactly, I think, what Tyndale meant to convey when he translated Galatians 5:6 to say that "faith is mighty in operation in love". Faith is mighty in operation because when you have faith in God's unwavering love for you, then you can start loving others not out of insecurity but out of an overflow of joy, out of sheer gratitude and delight. Another great translator and interpreter of Paul once said about this verse that our calling to love does not stand under the slogan, "I must and I shall", but it stands under the banner of, "I may and I can". Rowan Williams says in his lecture on Tyndale that," Tyndale was interested in examining what the behavior is, what the behavior looks like in respect of God and the neighbor that naturally flows from this faith conviction of the causeless, unearned love of God for us; which is to say what it is for faith to be mighty in operation. Through faith, through trust, through hearing the word of the gospel and putting our future on it; through faith, we grasp God's deep, unending, unwavering love for us; and because of that faith, we are now liberated, we're set free to pass that love on to everyone whom we meet regardless of their deserts or undeserts. So, friends, this morning, may your and my faith in the undeserved love of God for us be mighty in operation, as it expresses itself in love for others. May our trust in Jesus Christ work itself out in 1000 different deeds of love and compassion, and may our faith show itself in countless acts of love by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Patrick Franklin
Just before our benediction, I want to read a passage to tie up our time of worship and hearing of the word together, this is Paul writing in Romans 5. "Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us." Did you notice that Paul starts with faith, and he ends up with the love of God in the person of the Holy Spirit being catalyzed and poured out in our own hearts. I'd like to close with a fairly traditional benediction, and it goes like this: I'm going to say it before I actually say it. "May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all." Those three things go together, and so as I say the benediction, think about that, God's movement of love towards you, His welcome of you, and His promise of fellowship within you and through you, partnership. So, may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen. Go in peace.