As Christians who confess sola Scriptura, i.e., that Scripture is the sufficient and final rule for the Christian faith and the Christian life, we affirm both things. God tempts no one and our Lord taught us to pray, “bring us not into temptation.” James 1 is a Holy-Spirit inspired commentary on the first clause of the sixth petition. We are utterly dependent upon the Lord’s preserving grace, on which we dare not presume and, at the same time, we are the source of the corruption against which we struggle. The Lord is not corrupt. He neither tempts nor sins.

Francis, the Roman Bishop of Rome (who claims to be the universal vicar of Christ on the earth) has recently announced his opinion that the translation of the sixth petition of the Lord’s Prayer should be revised. Anthony Esolen has published a terrific reply at First Things but I want to address an underlying problem that Esolen does not.

Francis’ suggestion, already adopted by French Romanists and mainline Protestants, that the translation of the Lord’s Prayer be revised to say, “Let us not fall into temptation” gives the impression that the relation between the text of Holy Scripture and translation is more or less arbitrary. This implication fuels what I perceive to be a widespread view, particularly among unbelievers and perhaps also among believers, translations of Scripture or other authoritative statements are essentially arbitrary and may be changed at will.

This suspicion, which is part of the spirit of the Late-Modern age, assumes a sort of nominalism that is simply untrue. The nominalists argued (and their late-modern successors continue to argue) that the relation between the sign (e.g., a word) and the thing it represents, the reality, is arbitrary, a convention, an agreement, and sometimes even the product of a conspiracy. This is why people accept the claims of writers like Dan Brown. They suspect that someone, somewhere is just making up things and imposing their will on the rest of us. These are all symptoms of a profound loss of confidence in the existence of objective reality.

In earlier phases of the Modernity, the essence of which has always been the assumption of human autonomy relative to all other authorities, there was a shared agreement that there is such a thing as objective reality or truth. The debate concerned which account of reality is of correct. One of the defining characteristics of late-modernity is the loss of confidence that there is any such thing as objective reality. Of course, the same people who deny that there is any such thing, who assert that all claims to truth and reality are nothing but a will to power also stop at stop signs.

Objective reality is. Should you jump from a bridge (please do not!), gravity will do what it does. Gravity is not a convention nor is it a conspiracy. The standard, prevailing translation of the Lord’s Prayer, is not arbitrary. The relation between the original text and the traditional English translation is not merely nominal. The translation says what it says because the original text says what it says. As Esolen explains the Greek text of Holy Scripture says what it says: “καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν” (Matt 6:13; Luke 11:4). The most direct translation is probably that of the old American Standard Version (1901), “And bring us not into temptation.”

You can see for yourself that, out of the dozens of English translations only a few (e.g., the New Living Translation) adopts a rendering approaching that suggested by Francis. The two most important terms for this discussion are bring (εἰσενέγκῃς) and temptation (πειρασμόν). This verb occurs 8 times in the New Testament. This is the verb used in Luke 5:18 in the narrative of the paralytic lowered through the roof. They “were bringing” the paralytic to Jesus. This is the verb our Lord used when he said, “And when they bring you before the synagogues and the rulers and the authorities” (Luke 12:11). After his discourse before the Athenian philosophers at the Areopagus (Acts 17), Paul was charged with “bringing” strange teaching (Acts 17:20). When Paul says, “we brought nothing into this world” (1 Tim 6:7) and when the writer to the Hebrews (13:11) wrote of blood being brought into the holy places” they used this word.

The translation “to lead” or “to bring” in the first clause of the sixth petition is not arbitrary. This is what this word means. It is true that petition may be troubling. That is often the nature of Jesus’ teaching. He said deliberately difficult things. Anyone who thinks Jesus’ teaching is simple has not considered it very deeply. As to the intent of the petition, Heidelberg Catechism 127 is just right:

127. What is the sixth petition?

“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” that is: Since we are so weak in ourselves that we cannot stand a moment, and besides, our deadly enemies, the devil, the world and our own flesh, assail us without ceasing, be pleased to preserve and strengthen us by the power of your Holy Spirit, that we may make firm stand against them and not be overcome in this spiritual warfare, until finally complete victory is ours.

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