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Wednesday, 6 November 2013

TEMPTATION?

A friend asked me what I thought of the new French translation of the Lord’s Prayer that, at the end, reads ‘Ne nous laisse pas entrer en tentation’ (Do not let us enter into temptation) rather than ‘Ne nous soumets pas à la tentation’ (Do not subject us to temptation). The reason for this, I have since read, is to let the text reflect the fact that God cannot be, or be thought of as, a tempter. However, the Greek text reads kai mè eisenengkès hèmas eis peirasmon; the verb is a non-temporal aorist of phero, which when it refers to persons means to lead or to bring along with one; and peirasmos is a test or experiment. So however admirable the new translation’s aim is, I’m not sure it clears up the ancient mystery of this phrase in the prayer. 

St Augustine is not much help here: St Thomas Aquinas a little more. The basic idea seems to be that occasionally God tests a person, or allows a person to be tested: Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac is an example of the first, God’s permission to Satan to test Job, of the second. Satan’s temptation of Eve may or may not have been permitted by God. Melanchthon in the Loci Communes said, ‘The hardening of Pharaoh's  heart is a Hebrew figure of speech which signifies permission, not an efficient will; as, Lead us not into  temptation, means, permit us not to be led into  temptation."’
In any case, as someone put it, it seems to be such a scenario that Jesus is thinking of when He includes this petition in the prayer. And the fact that it is there at all may reflect His understanding that most of us would not feel (or, indeed, be) up to the heroic resistance of an Abraham or a Job.

What strikes me most about such an inquiry is the depths and breadths contained in that prayer. Each clause can introduce and sustain hours of meditation, all of them enriching.

2 comments:

  1. I think of the reassurance St Paul tries to offer on the limits of temptation: "God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it" (1 Cor 10:13). That escape certainly isn't always obvious when one is on the cusp of temptation (although it surely can be); I wonder whether the escape also comes in the long term, through the interior reformation that can follow moments of temptation or disaster in the wake of failing to resist temptation---how the blast bares us naked of conceit. Given the timelessness (or ultimate timefulness?) of God, perhaps when the escape comes matters rather less than that it does at all. You mention Job: I think of Job 28 (one of my favourite Scriptural passages) and the images of refining fire spun out from it by the NT authors.

    Okay---inchoate, but it's just turned seven in the morning here. But you're right that there's so much to ponder and pray over.

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  2. I believe you are right, but that the human weakness of most of us, and the magnitude of some of the Lord's provings (Abraham!), justifies Christ's advice to us to ask to be let off........

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