Dear Dr. Dobson,
Although we have never met personally, I hope you don’t mind that I consider you a “spiritual father”. My childhood experience did not provide a good role model for parenting and I felt as though I was starting from scratch. My husband and I attended the “Focus on the Family” film series at a local church in the early 80′s when we were just starting our family, and I am so very thankful for your input there and through the “Focus on the Family” radio program (To this day, I remain a regular listener). You basically discipled me in how to parent. I have been a long time reader of the magazine and a financial supporter of your ministry, and I have a whole library of tapes and books and even our popular annual Christmas tradition- the cloth advent calendar, complete with Velcro figures to add daily- which all came from your ministry. On occasion I wrote to you to ask for advice, and I remember how I felt surprised by the individual attention and well cared for when a counselor from “Focus on the Family” called to talk me through a distressing episode which had happened in my neighborhood and about which I had written to you.
For a long time, I have wanted to write and express appreciation for the ways in which you have ministered to me and my family. I love and appreciate you very much. I’m sorry; I regret that what finally motivated me to write today is a deep sense of disappointment and betrayal about something I have discovered. 
Because I have such high regard for you, I figured that I shouldn’t just write you off. I should trust you enough to tell you the problem and hope that you will make an effort to correct the injustice. Maybe you will hear me and respond and maybe you won’t. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt. I want to trust you that your heart is in the right place and you make mistakes like the rest of us. You are a powerful, important, high profile man who doesn’t really have to listen and care about the input of someone as insignificant as me. But, I see you as a father figure. And I see you as a good and trustworthy Christian man who has done my family great good. So, I forgive you, even if you ignore my concerns and even if you aren’t sorry. I forgive you.
WHY do I feel so disappointed and betrayed? Well, I suppose I should share a bit of personal testimony here as background. My family of origin had alcohol and abuse issues going on and I had some unhealed wounds, unmet needs, unresolved issues which I have been wading through for the past 3-4 years in something of a “midlife crisis”. Some of the issues have to do with assault on my femininity which left layers and layers of self-rejection and the sense of not being heard, respected, nor protected. As a long time Christian, I turned to the Lord in a deeper way with all the pain and hurt. Doctor Dobson, some Scriptures sounded to me like another assault upon my womanhood, another blow of rejection- this time by God.
Here is a verse which felt to me like a slap in the face. The link goes to several modern versions in parallel: “God our Savior, who wants all men to be saved” 1 Tim 2:3-4 Do you see how that verse- as translated- appears to exclude women? I became very conscious, sensitive, and I confess- I became OVERsensitive- to every assignment of gender as I read the Bible. I questioned every instance where the Bible uses the word “brothers”. What about “sisters”? Was God excluding us? I felt betrayed by translators and commentators who seemed so biased. I became distrustful of Bible translations.
GOD is ever so gracious and merciful toward me. HE showed me HIS character through various tender intimate moments and miracles which I believe were tailor made to show me that He loves me and is my protector. I realized that GOD and HIS Word as intended was not the problem. The problem was the translations- as I was hearing them- simply were not consistent with the character of the God I know. I began to use online Bible study tools to do Word Study for myself in the original Biblical languages.
And I began to realize that I am not alone. I am not the only one who has struggled with the way Bible translations come across. Katharine Bushnell noticed the bias in translations a full century ago. From God’s Word to Women
13. … The world, the Church and women are suffering sadly from woman’s lack of ability to read the Word of God in its original languages. There are truths therein that speak to the deepest needs of a woman’s heart, and that give light upon problems that women alone are called upon to solve. Without knowledge of the original, on the part of a sufficient number of women to influence the translation of the Bible in accordance with their perception of the meaning of these truths, these needed passages will remain uninterpreted, or misinterpreted….18. In the study of God’s messages to women, I wish you to approach His Book as though, like a pagan, you had never seen it before, and knew nothing about it. Will you endeavour to cultivate this spirit of fresh inquiry? When we have heard, over and over again, with unquestioning belief an explanation of a thing, even though the explanation be grotesque, it comes back to us with all the force of natural fact…19. Therefore, we will accept no views as authoritative simply because that book, so valued among the Jews, the Talmud, teaches them,–not even because Christian tradition teaches them. We will test matters by the general trend of Bible teaching itself. … always remembering that we bow to no authority as final but the Word of God, as illuminated by the Spirit. We will endeavor to “interpret the Bible by what the Bible says, not by what men say that it says.”
1. The object of these lessons is at least three-fold:
(1) To point out to women the fallacies in the “Scriptural” argument for the supremacy of the male sex.
(2) To show the true position of women in the economy of God.
(3) To show women their need of knowing the Bible in its original tongues, in order the better to equip themselves to disprove these fallacies, and also to show that such a knowledge of the Bible would have great influence for good on the progress of the Church and womanhood.
Here is a link to a post by blogger Suzanne McCarthy answering the question from a reader: “How does an ordinary person who doesn’t know Greek trust the scriptures anymore?” Suzanne has also posted a compelling expose (click here) about Grudem’s misuse of primary sources. I can understand not wishing to take Suzanne’s word for this without checking. I don’t have access to the references which she checked. Don’t you have a team of 100′s (?) of crack researchers at your headquarters there in Colorado Springs? You could check the references for yourself and see if Grudem’s research is really as academically sloppy and deceptive as Suzanne’s expose makes it sound.
Over the course of the past year or two, I became more aware of who Wayne Grudem is, what he teaches, and I was able to identify the rise of adherence to his brand of theology even among the members of traditionally female friendly denominations (such as Wesleyan and Nazarene- I have been members of both of these denominations) and then I heard that Wayne Grudem was a guest on your radio program (which I missed). I think of you as supportive of women. I know that you have a long heritage with the Nazarene denomination which I know encourages women to follow the Lord wherever He leads and does not teach nor promote gender based restrictions against women in ministry. When I read the article at this link is when I felt that sense of betrayal I mentioned above: Today’s New International Version: The Untold Story of a Good Translation by Craig L. Blomberg Distinguished Professor of New Testament, Denver Seminary.
I remember hearing the scare stories about the TNIV, that God was being emasculated, that it was a “liberal” “feminist” interpretation. I have been a long term subscriber to World Magazine, and I used to trust them too. ALL of the outcry from you, from World Magazine, from Wayne Grudem… Zondervan backed down and NOW one cannot buy a copy of the TNIV in a Christian bookstore in the United States of America! I remember feeling relieved that God’s Word had been protected from such an “assault upon it’s integrity”. I trusted the messengers. I believed their judgments. Recently, I was telling some women friends in my Bible Study group about the untold story I read in the article of why this version is not published in America and one of them expressed shock “That is so ironic! I thought this was a ‘free country’. Are we now reduced to Bible smuggling if we want this version?”
I dearly hope that you will click the link and read the article (TNIV: The Untold Story of a Good Translation . You and “Focus on the Family” are prominent in the article. The part of the article with which I most identified is yet another testimony of yet another little girl who has closed her ears to hearing the GOOD news because of the bad translation of GOD’s Word and GOD’s intentions which she heard in church
Prof Blomberg writes:
I also wish to close with a plea. Though I am sure it is not anyone’s intention, the critics of the TNIV are making it harder for me to bring up my girls in the Christian faith and to be a faithful witness for Christ in a postmodern culture.81 For one thing, many people see Christians once again squabbling about something they should not be and are repulsed.82 Even more seriously, it is becoming harder to differentiate complementarianism (which I endorse) from the anti-inclusive language movement, because so many leaders of the former are joining the latter. For the majority of folks who do not understand the fine differences, it is becoming too easy simply to reject complementarianism altogether, assuming that the hostile polemic against translations like the TNIV is a necessary consequence of that position.
This was brought home to me dramatically, shortly after the NIVI came out, when we had an evangelistic service at our church that included a performance by our children’s choir. At that time my older daughter was ten years old and sang in the choir. She invited an unsaved girlfriend of hers to come, and the girl seemed to enjoy the concert and follow our (now retired) Children’s Ministry Director as she concluded the service with a very tasteful appeal to trust Christ. In so doing, however, she quoted 2 Cor. 5:17 out of the KJV (the translation she had used almost all her life): “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creation; old things are passed away; behold all things are become new.” At that point, my daughter’s friend, who was sitting between my wife and me, leaned over to my wife and asked with disgust, “Does your church always use language like that?” Of course, we could have explained that the term was generic,83 that even in the NIV which we normally used, “man” and “he” were not present, but the moment of spiritual openness was gone. She knew, from public school upbringing and from common parlance, that such language was neither common nor necessary, and therefore smacked of chauvinism. The woman who read the Scripture I’m sure had no clue what happened and I knew of no effective way to bring up the topic with her, because of her attitude over the years on this issue.
The incident is not an isolated one. This summer, in Ireland, after a presentation at a local church on the gender roles debate, I had a man who must have been at least in his thirties come up and object to my very “moderate” complementarian approach by pointing out how common masculine language was throughout Scripture, following the NIV, and that it seemed large parts of it were addressed only to men. In Colorado, as a guest teacher in an adult Sunday School at a nearby evangelical church, a woman who must have been in her fifties but was a new convert, asked me why the Proverbs were almost exclusively about and addressed to men. In another church, a long-time Christian challenged me when I suggested that there were some leadership roles appropriate for women in the church, by quoting Heb. 13:17 from the NIV: “Obey your leaders and submit to their authority. They keep watch over you as men who must give an account.” I pointed out to him that there was no word for “men” in the Greek, only a generic masculine participle. He was surprised and agreed to reconsider his position. My girls, now fifteen and eleven, understand the gender-inclusive debate (in more detail than they care to given their father’s work on this paper!) and can recognize gender-inclusive masculines in the NIV (or NASB which is our current pastor’s version of choice), but it continues to sound both odd and exclusive to them whenever they hear it, because that is not how either their friends or their teachers talk.
Please pray about this issue Dr. Dobson. I know you care about people. You have compassion. You don’t want to propagate anything which will shut up the kingdom of heaven against anyone. I hope you will reconsider your support of Wayne Grudem’s teachings and your opposition to the TNIV. Speaking for myself, my trust would be restored if you would at least maintain neutrality. In that spirit I suggest that you consider inviting Stan Gundry and his wife Pat to your radio program to talk about their views on the TNIV, marriage, women’s roles, women in ministry. Stan is a VP at Zondervan (which caved to the pressure to squelch the publication of the TNIV) . I am very impressed with Stan’s testimony which you can read here From Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers to Woman Be Free: My Story by Stan Gundry Clearly, he is a man who loves and respects his wife, and I think his attitude reflects Christlikeness.
Respectfully,
your long time listener, fan, and spiritual daughter
Tags: Bible smuggling, Dr Dobson, Dr. James Dobson, equal time, Focus on the Family, James Dobson, Nazarene, Open Letter to Dr. James Dobson, Pat Gundry, Stan Gundry, TNIV, Wayne Grudem
