Scott Munger

I came across this website that posted an email by Dr. Scott Munger of International Bible Society. I am truly astonished that Dr. Munger’s could so misrepresent Poythress and Grudem’s arguments. Nowhere did I find Poythress and Grudem arguing equivalence between gender and sex. It is quite true that grammatical gender and biological sex are two different categories, and they do not always overlap. But sometimes they do, and in those cases the connection needs to be taken into account. Moreover, the thrust of Poythress and Grudem’s argument is that certain words like ’ish and aner do have a male meaning component, that that male meaning component should not be lost in translation wherever possible. By using examples such as the neuterness of paidion or the femininity of ruach or the neuterness of pneuma, Dr. Munger is either showing incredible naïveté or being rather disingenuous.

(UPDATE 2005-06-06): “Linguistic naïveté” (or something similar to it) is a phrase that the gender-neutral crowd use to describe their opponents, as if they had the upper hand in linguistics. Not so. Applying their own reasoning, one can easily see that it is totally unnecessary to avoid the generic “he” since the masculinity of it has to do with gender, not sex. If the reader would misunderstand it or take offense at it, it is the reader’s problem, his linguistic naïveté. The solution, then, is not to dumb down the translation, but to educate the reader to make him smarter.

(UPDATE 2005-06-06): My last statement in the original post, using the phrase “either showing incredible naïveté or being rather disingenuous”, shows that I too am guilty of using contemptuous terms in describing my opponent. But I suppose I could justify it because it is the application of my opponent’s own principle to his arguments. That is to say, if by my opponent’s principle such and such is considered naïve, then his own argument is naïve.