The Calvinist ESV: Titus 3:3
I am breaking the "A Random Verse That Destroys Calvinism (And 'Is the ESV a Calvinist Bible'?)" post up into shorter segments so that each verse (or two) gets it own post.
KJV: "... deceived, serving divers lusts and pleasures ..."
NASB: "... deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures ..."
CSB: "... deceived, enslaved ..."
But the ESV is one of the very few versions that puts it this way: " ... led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures ..."
In the other translations, "deceived and enslaved" are verbs, something that happens to people before they become believers. They were (allowed themselves to be) deceived and enslaved by their former passions and desires.
But the ESV changes it to a noun, not saying that the people were enslaved by their desires but that they were slaves to their desires. (See here that, in the Greek, "deceived" is a verb. And there is no word for "slave.")
How does this fit with Calvinism?
Because, in Calvinism, we are not free to make our own choices among various options ... or to pick which desires we want to satisfy ... or to decide for ourselves whether we want to reject God or believe in Him. In Calvinism, we are "slaves" to the nature God gave us, to the desires that come with that nature. And as slaves, we cannot desire/choose anything other than what our God-given nature forces us to desire/choose. And we cannot choose to change the nature He gave us. It is up to God to change our natures/desires for us.
And He does this when He gives the elect people (those predestined to heaven) the Holy Spirit to "wake them up inside," causing them to believe, changing their nature from "unrepentant sinner" to "repentant believer," which causes them to desire to do good and to obey God.
But those who have the unrepentant nature (either because they haven't been regenerated yet or because they are one of the non-elect, predestined to hell) are "slaves" to the unregenerated nature. And they can never free themselves from this "slave to sin" condition. And so they can only always desire to sin and only always choose to sin ... unless and until God gives them a new nature, which He only gives to the elect. This means that the non-elect will always be slaves to the "sinner nature," unable to ever choose to do anything but sin and reject God all the time.
Changing it from a verb to a noun changes it from what a person does to who a person is. Changing it from "enslaved" to "slave" changes it from a person who is simply caught up in their sinful desires (but who could turn from their sinful desires and choose to seek God instead) to a person who is doomed forever to follow their sinful desires unless God regenerates them, freeing them from their slavery.
[And the Bible tells us how we become slaves to sin, and it's not that God predestines who will be slaves to sin (the non-elect) and who won't (the elect).
Romans 6:16: "when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey" (NIV).
Calvinism would say that we sin because we are slaves to sin. But the Bible says that we are slaves to sin because we offer ourselves to our sinful desires. (If you pay careful attention, you'll see that Calvinism often takes biblical truths and reverses them, flipping the truth on its head, such as by saying the elect get the Spirit before they believe, to cause them to believe, whereas the Bible says that first we believe and then we get the Spirit. Same kind of phrases, just backwards, completely changing the Gospel. But because Calvinism still uses the Bible's words, we don't notice the reversals.)
We choose what we want to be enslaved to - by what we offer ourselves to, the desires we give in to.
Contrary to Calvinism, we don't sin because we are slaves to sin (which means, in Calvinism, that we can't get set free from our sin-nature unless God regenerates us), but we are slaves to sin because we choose our sin over God (which means that we can decide to choose God over our sin and that we have full responsibility for our choices).]
A note about the ESV vs King James:
If you really want to get into the nitty-gritty, read these articles about the men who wrote the Greek texts that the ESV is based on: "Westcott and Hort: Translator's Beliefs" and "Westcott and Hort and the Greek Text." The ESV is based on the RSV, which is based on the Greek Texts of these two men (who, it sounds like, rejected the infallibility of Scripture, despised evangelicals, questioned Jesus's divinity and an eternal hell, did not believe Genesis and the creation story was literal, affirmed Darwin and evolution, etc.), which is based on two corrupted manuscripts which differ from the majority of the more reliable manuscripts that the KJV is based on.
So when something says that the ESV has only made 6% changes, it means "from the RSV," meaning that it's 94% the same as the RSV it was based on, a translation which was based on two corrupted manuscripts that disagree with the majority of the manuscripts available. It would be like if a journalist interviewed 100 people about an event ... and 95 of them said the exact same thing, but 5 told a different story ... and they journalist decided to side with the 5 and print their story as fact. Raises some red flags, doesn't it?
In the course of researching this issue, and after not knowing for decades what to think of the whole "which translation is most accurate" debate, I now side with the King James. I mean, I have several other translations, and I think different ones are good for different reasons, such as readability, compare and contrast, to hear God's Word in a fresh way, etc. But when having to decide which one is more reliable and accurate, especially considering the significant differences like those above, I have to side with the KJV (not the New King James, just the King James). And I've never been more sure of it than now, after all this research.
