Why Use the ESV in Your Church?

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

Treasured through the centuries of faith, God’s Word offers every Christian a window into God’s heart and into the light of reality.

On the one hand, you have what might be called “dynamic equivalence” or “thought-for-thought.”

And over here you would have a version or a view that says, “No, let’s not do just ‘thought-for-thought’ or try to get the idea or the gist and put it into our own words. But let’s stay as close to the original Greek and Hebrew as we can, with words that correspond in English and grammatical structures that correspond in English.” It’s “stay as close as you can while having good English.”

Now those are your two alternatives.

But this has not always been the guiding principle of biblical translation.

The rich history of the English Bible begins with the courageous scholars in the Middle Ages. Until that time, the Western church relied on texts in Latin, Greek, and in Hebrew that only priests and scholars could study.

But William Tyndale introduced a radical change.

The move, then, during the second half of the twentieth century, was to translate in ways that went (some less far, some further) in paraphrasing in order to get the dynamic equivalence effect. And that meant, more or less, in the way of losing exact accuracy and certainly losing transparency.

The reader of these versions couldn’t tell half the time what was there in the original.

The King James Version fell in that tradition of “essentially literal” or “word-for-word” translations. So did the 1901 American Standard Version and the 1952 Revised Standard Version and then, more recently, the New American Standard Version. Many of these have been essentially literal translations.

The English Standard Version falls in that stream of essentially literal translations. It’s the dominant stream of translation in the English language. We have inherited, however, the heritage of the King James Version in terms of beauty and rhythm of it, and almost musical character of its language because the English Standard Version was based on the Revised Standard Version of 1952. And that was based on the American Standard Version of 1901. And that was based on the King James Version of 1611.

So we’re the fourth-generation direct descendant of the King James Version, but with English modernized.

The Bible is not all equally easy, not in every verse. But the church gives you resources so that even a beginning believer can say, “OK, here I’ve been reading this passage in my devotions, and I don’t understand this part of it.”

Well, you can go to somebody else who can help you. That’s better in the long run than giving somebody a kind of abbreviated or an oversimplified translation, so he doesn’t even realize there’s a challenge to understand it.

For a long time I preached from a more literal version than was being read by my people. I was preaching NASB for twenty years; most of them had the NIV in their laps. There was this disconnect because I needed all the words there in order to preach. And I couldn’t see any alternative out there. And they wanted something readable and memorizable, and so they were going with what they saw available.

And it was not an ideal situation because our kids would memorize one thing, I’m preaching from another thing, people are meditating on another thing, and it wasn’t cohesive.

When the ESV appeared, I knew exactly what it was—it was a wonderfully improved old friend, and the RSV took on all of its life in an improved form of essentially literal, more word-for-word. What I needed was there, and yet, this is readable.

And so I worked with my elders, and I said, “Brothers, I want you to read this.” They took a year, and they all read it through. And I said, “I want to make this the meditating, memorizing, teaching, preaching, witnessing Bible of this church—without any coercion—nobody’s forced to. I’m just going to talk about it that way and preach from it. And they all said, ‘Amen. Let’s go for it.’”

As a pastor, I wanted my people to have confidence, to be able to have the trustworthiness of what they were reading was, indeed, the Word of God. And the English Standard Version of the Bible fit that particular category so perfectly that I actually decided in January to switch to the English Standard Version from another translation that I’d actually used for twenty-five years.

As I started preaching through the book of Romans, our people really came alive with the clarity and the functionality and the readability of the English Standard Version. And it has been phenomenal.

Choose a version that preserves the Bible. Don’t choose a version that paraphrases the Bible. Let paraphrases be part of your interpretation study—like you use a commentary, use a paraphrase.

But when you go to your Bible, ask that the translator preserve for me as much of the wording, as much of the structure, as much of the syntax and grammar—preserve that for me with good English, and I will be thankful so that I can share it with my people.