June 17, 2002

LifeWay stores won't sell TNIV Bible
___ST. LOUIS--The Southern Baptist Convention's publishing house will not carry the Today's New International Version Bible in its LifeWay Christian Stores, Jimmy Draper told a group of pastors June 10.
___Draper, president of LifeWay Christian Resources in Nashville, Tenn., made the pledge at a LifeWay-sponsored breakfast during the SBC annual meeting in St. Louis.
___Several prominent SBC leaders have publicly opposed the new translation, which has been billed by its sponsors as a "gender-accurate" translation for evangelicals. Other evangelical leaders outside the SBC have fallen on both sides of the debate.
___Supporters of the new translation argue it resolves male-dominated language problems created in the past by culturally based translations and yet remains faithful to the Bible's original languages. In some cases, for example, traditional English translations have used male pronouns in passages where the biblical languages imply no gender.
___Critics of the new translation argue it goes too far and is merely a reaction to pressure from feminists and other liberal forces. Critics have expressed particular concern over the need to retain masculine pronouns for any reference, symbolic or literal, to deity.
___LifeWay currently is releasing its own new translation of the Bible, the Holman Christian Standard Version.
___At the LifeWay breakfast for pastors, testimony was given by Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., and a frequent spokesman for the SBC's conservative leadership. Mohler has been an outspoken critic of the TNIV. At the breakfast, he threw his support behind LifeWay's new translation.
___"In the end this is an important thing for Southern Baptists to do, if for no other reason than that we will have a major translation we can control," Mohler said, according to a Baptist Press report.

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