Steven Wedgeworth: Keep Christmas King James

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. And finally today, WORLD Opinions contributor and Anglican rector Steven Wedgeworth says when it comes to the language of Christmas. the church should not neglect centuries of tradition and expression.

STEVEN WEDGEWORTH: Our family has a lot of annual rituals we like to do each December. One of these is the daily Advent calendar. The countdown to Christmas is a highlight of every morning. But we got a new calendar this year and I couldn’t believe my eyes, or my ears. One of its scripture readings went like this: “Listen,” the angel said, “You will become pregnant and have a baby boy.”

Listen? ... Pregnant? ... And then came another unwelcome visitor…the bible verse said “Caesar sent out an order, that everyone’s name must be put on a list.”

Put on a list? And wasn’t this Caesar formerly known as Augustus? It leaves me asking, whatever happened to Christmas?

The crown jewel of English literature is the King James Bible. It remains a top-seller in the Bible markets, and it is still the most widely used by English-speaking churches. Its prose is classic, a stabilizing feature of not only literature but of culture. It formed the English nation, and then it migrated to North America where it found its way into the mouths of John Witherspoon, Abraham, Lincoln, Johnny Cash, and Linus Van Pelt. Every year in December, millions of Americans have used the text of the King James in their Christmas carols, their seasonal devotions, and in their Christmas Eve services. It is part of who we are. But now we seem to be giving this heritage away.

We all know the excuses. It’s old-fashioned and hard to understand. But of course, when it comes to Christmas, being old-fashioned is a strength and not a weakness. Auld acquaintance and all. The whole point is to remember, to place our focus backwards. If at no other time, surely the Christmas holidays call for “that glorious song of old.” The context is familiar, and the virtue of seasonal repetition and public religion has quite simply drilled the second chapter of the gospel of Luke into our bones. For Christmas readings, we know what we're hearing.

The worst argument of all comes, as it not infrequently does, from the religious academy. It argues that the newer translations, while admittedly tinny and unlikely to endure, are still nevertheless “more accurate.” And so instead of “only begotten Son,” we should use “one and only” or “unique.” Your hymns and creeds and heirlooms might all have to go, but at least we will have accuracy. Mercifully, this particular example has already started to lose ground. “Only begotten” is currently enjoying a renaissance among historians and linguists, and so the rest of us can be spared.

The poet W. H. Auden once offered some famously curmudgeonly remarks about religious language revision. In the process he also gave one of the best defenses of the KJV. Auden puts it this way:

Our Church has had the singular good-fortune of having its Prayer-Book composed and its Bible translated at exactly the right time…late enough for the language to be intelligible to any English-speaking person in this century and early enough…when people still had an instinctive feeling for the formal and the ceremonious which is essential in liturgical language.

The King James Version really is intelligible, certainly in its most famous parts. Your grandparents managed it. As a Mississippi schoolboy in the 1990s, I could sort it out. Countless working-class communities still make it work today. And the Christmas season is one of the last cultural artifacts that can make a credible claim to being a public liturgy. As such, it deserves an appropriately liturgical language. Even if you can't bring yourself to use it for regular bible study, at least use the KJV for your pomp and ceremony.

The King James Version is the only Bible that can be called the English and American family Bible. It’s what you are used to hearing this time of year. It’s what the season calls for. It just sounds better. If for no other reason, do it for the holly and the jolly. Do it for Old Blue Eyes. Do it for your forefathers and do it for your grandchildren.

Please, for Christmas this year, stick with the King James.

I’m Steven Wedgeworth.

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