Will the Last Evangelical Please Turn Out the Lights? (Con’t)

In my ongoing series, pointing out the impending evangepocalypse, I bring you this news from Christianity Today:

Gender Debate: SBC Pastors Denounce NIV

Southern Baptist delegates passed a resolution criticizing the 2011 update and asked LifeWay stores not to sell the Bible translation.

Bob Smietana | posted 7/26/2011 10:02AM

Southern Baptists have asked their denomination-owned retail chain to stop selling a best-selling Bible translation, saying it contains errors when it comes to language about gender.

Church delegates—known as messengers—passed a resolution at their June annual meeting in Phoenix criticizing the 2011 update to the New International Version (NIV) as an “inaccurate translation of God’s inspired Scripture.” They asked LifeWay Christian Resources not to sell the NIV 2011, which avoids using male terms in passages where context suggests that both genders are intended, except where the pronoun in question has messianic allusions. [READ THE REST]

OK, let’s get this straight: evangelicals are rejecting an evangelical translation of the Bible, after they already buried another evangelical translation of the Bible because it wasn’t evangelical enough.

Zondervan, who holds the exclusive license to but does not own the NIV translation, has got to be nervous.  In the last couple of years, they have cut loose authors like Rob Bell and Doug Pagitt because those authors aren’t evangelical enough.  They’ve already taken it in the shorts after a long and expensive campaign to win support for the TNIV failed.  Now, the NIV itself us under attack.

Once this starts, the end has begun: you can’t be evangelical enough, because someone will always be more evangelical than you. It reminds me of a novel I’m currently reading about Vietnam — it’s an unwinnable war.  The only winning move is not the play:

How about a nice game of chess?