Lane gives a generally acerbic reaction to the rewrite of Biblical text in Hoyt et al out of Oxford and in the Yale POSTMODERN BIBLE.
A few choice quotes:
ON THE NAME OF THE DEITY: "Words that are sticky with racial, sexual, and physical prejudice have bleared our vision for too long. Clear a pathway, therefore, and we shall see God, for the first time, in all His glory. Correction: in all *God's* glory. The pronoun "His" suggests a masculine presence, whereas the true deity is neither male nor female--it encompasses and goes beyond both to find a higher, genderless perfection, like RuPaul. The problem for the editors of the Inclusive Version is that they have a much nicer time finding fault than correcting it." (98/9) Lane goes on to tell us their new name for God is "Father-Mother."
[PROGRAMME COMMENT: We marvel that the masculine comes first in line--an alphabetical decision, perhaps. Deleuze and Guattari, in A THOUSAND PLATEAUS, expound on the concept of The Body Without Organs. There is a relationship between their concept and the concept of God. The postmodern God is above gender definition, one might say, because God is above having organs and above being a collectivity of organs, that is, an organism. This comparison of concepts needs to be extended through a closer reading of Deleuze and Guattari.]
ON STYLE: Lane recalls William Tyndale, who was burned for heresy for his 1526 New Testament translation. "...unlike Tyndale's, their work is not really worth dying for....it is bare of artistic merit--its rhythms hobbled and halting, its variety of tone slightly below that of a mudflat." (99)
ON THE FUNCTION OF BELIEF IN THE MAKING OF TEXT: Lane observes that Tyndale and the subsequent King James version (16ll) are rich in style because they arose "at a time when society was most tenaciously rooted in the faith. There was a world within the Word." (99) By contrast, Lane says, "The queasy, unbalanced sensation that rocks you as you read the [Inclusive Version] comes, I think, from the sight of...immutable spiritual guidance being overrun by a squad of temporary secular ambitions." (100) Example: they change Phoebe, who bears Paul's Epistle to the Romans, from "a servant of the church" to "a deacon," for contemporary feminist reasons.
LANE'S JUDGMENT ON THE INCLUSIVE VERSION: "I read through the new, clean-living Gospels and felt not purified but rather desperate to put these earthly grammatical squabbles behind me." (100)
ON THE POSTMODERN BIBLE: Lane quotes the Bible and Culture Collective, which produced the work, as follows: "'We need to be liberated from the oppression of racism, classism, and sexism, that is, from patriarchy,' argues the Collective. 'The attention paid to Jesus' death diverts attention from that oppression.' You wonder why they bother to read the Bible at all. Tyndale was killed for trying to spread the Word; these guys make a living out of deconstructing it to death." (100)
[PROGRAMME COMMENT: This review scarcely scratches the surface of an important engagement for the postmodern perspective, language in religion. The traditional Biblical texts, pre-modern, served well enough into the modern period. We think that was so because people in a modern frame of mind continued to have an allegiance to overarching structures of explanation. This was so even though they might have been able to assert that God was dead. Something of the shadow of a comprehensive apprehension was not dead in their minds; that made it possible for the older Biblical texts to appear to be relevant to their lives. The shift (slide?) from a modern to a postmodern temper changed that. The committes that rewrote the Biblical text in a postmodern mode were obliged to give unprecedented privilege (that word!) to plateaus of striation, as Deleuze and Guattari might call them--the definition of gender, the problem of race, the divisions of class (economic, we assume). Their agenda is linguistically confrontational. They are revolutionaries on the ramparts, throwing stones or Molotov cocktails at the regular troops. We understand the motivation for the attack. We have less of a vision of what the town, or the world, will look like after the battle ends and they are the victors. --This dilemma seems to lie deep down in the critical attack of Lane on the editing committees for the two new books. Religion, Christianity in particular, elevates a totalistic vision of the human condition to the highest place. Anyone in a postmodern frame of mind is, almost by definition, unable to take a totalistic stand. Therein we see why the field of religion offers such a promising place for a really bloody battle when postmodernism is seeking its rightful territory.]