Book Review: Enjoying the Bible by Matthew Mullins
Excerpts from https://mereorthodoxy.com/book-review-enjoying-the-bible-by-matthew-mullins/. Reflecting on how the Bible should be read is relevant for how the Bible should be translated, too:
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“To read with Cartesian eyes,” [Mullins] writes, “is to read with the implicit belief that what’s important about whatever you’re reading is how it seeks to inform you… how it seeks to give you facts or information” (6). Cartesian readers risk stripping the beauty, mystery, and wonder out of a text for the sake of getting answers out of it. We want to “tie it to a chair and beat a confession out of it,” to borrow a phrase from former poet laureate Billy Collins.
Mullins compares this “hermeneutic of information” to reading an instruction manual, emphasizing that while people learn from those, no one loves reading them. Reading for information alone rarely produces the emotional responses that come while listening to one’s favorite song or entering a literary world. That kind of engagement requires a more poetic approach.
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[Mullins] uses Psalm 23 as a launching point to explain that the passage “is not only trying to tell us something about the nature of God and our relationship with him.” Instead, it “creates an entire world we can imagine ourselves inhabiting” (74). By stepping into this world, we not only understand that God is comforter, we experience the emotional reality of God’s comfort. That’s what the scriptures want to do: shape every part of us. Anything less is incomplete. Just because you cognitively ascend to the idea of God as your shepherd doesn’t mean you feel the power of a world where that is true. Whatever passage you read won’t fulfill its total purpose until you’re willing to bring your whole self into the space it creates. Only then will readers begin understanding delighting in the strange, literary world of the Bible.
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It seems to be a very interesting book. I personally feel frustrated when a Bible translation has a poor style, and I enjoy reading translations that sound like literature. In Turkey, I read the New Testament translation named HADI (halk dilinde Incil that is "The Gospel in the People's Language") and enjoyed it much more than the one mainly used in churches, because HADI sounded like real-life Turkish while the other translation sounded more artificial. HADI's style was so enjoyable. It inevitably included more interpretations than the version used by the church, because for the sake of naturalness and good style the translator(s) often had to remove ambiguities and make implicit information explicit. And yet I read the book from the beginning to the end and enjoyed reading it immensely. I even disagreed with some of translator's choices, but I still prefer HADI because it is beautiful and it speaks like most people in Turkey do. But I realize such translations may not be good for a serious Bible study. However, as we read and enjoy, God is working in our hearts through His Word. I believe there should be more than one Bible translation in every language for different groups and purposes, and the aesthetic aspect of the translation text is so important that I think it is necessary to have such literary translations in every language. Let it speak to hearts and make readers desire to read it again and again.