Tim Challies, who frequently writes about the state of the Christian bookselling industry, talks about how to use Scripture in books:

The goal in prooftexting or quoting from the Bible is to accurately represent and interpret God’s Word. We do not use the Bible to prove what we want it to say. Rather, we turn to the Bible to learn from God Himself, and then share what we have learned with others. We must have our priorities straight.

He then goes on to define an “essentially literal” translation.

Formal Equivalence (also known as Word for Word, Literal Translation or Essentially Literal) – Formal equivalence attempts to represent each word of the original language with a corresponding word in the English language. This allows the reader to know, as closely as possible, what God actually spoke through the authors of the Bible. The merit of this method is that it allows intimate access to the originally inspired words for those who do not speak the languages the Bible was written in. The downside is that it is possible for these translations to be awkwardly worded and follow difficult sentence structures. Examples are the New American Standard Bible and the English Standard Version.

Finally, he lists four guidelines that apply just as much to preaching sermons as they do to writing books. Here are two of them. To learn the rest, you’ll have to read his post.

• Use a default translation that is essentially literal
• Use translations that are familiar to readers

Several of Tim’s points (coincidentally) dovetail nicely with our recent video.

Full disclosure: Crossway regularly provides free review copies to Tim for one of his other sites.

We’ve released a new video geared toward churches that talks about why we think they should adopt the ESV as their primary Bible. Even if you’re not considering the ESV for your church, you’ll still find that the video shares insight into the history and purpose of the ESV.

Watch or read a transcript now.

Tessa from Cool, but weird… but cool shares her dilemma:

So here I am in a quandary. I love old books. I love new books. I love buying Bibles. And I was about to start work this morning (honest) when I decided to briefly visit the ESV Bible homepage. I had a vague notion of looking up a psalm or something to set me up for the day, when I noticed a link to ‘Purchase a copy’. Because it was me, I had to know what kinds of ESV there were in stock, just so that I knew.

Oh, what a mistake-a to make-a. They have shelves, they have stacks, they have heaps, they have mountains of ESV Bibles, of every different hue and texture under the sun. Consider my excitement about stationery, and then multiply that by the number you first thought of. They have hardback, paperback, leather bound, thumb indexed, gold leaf edged, “thinline” editions, metal cased, black, tan, burgundy, textured rubber covered (that’s “TruGrip” to you), blue, lime green, orange, pink, olive, blue, charcoal, chestnut, cranberry, goldenrod, nutmeg, teal… the list goes on and on and on — http://www.gnpcb.org/catalog/bibles/

Tell me, please… how can I resist such a wealth of potential?

Her whole post has more.

We suppose that as dilemmas go, she could be doing worse. Do you wonder how (or whether) she resolved her quandary? So do we. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find any way to contact her to find out.

If you have a blog, please consider posting some way to contact you (like a disguised email address). If you know Tessa, please tell her that, just for ourselves, we could use some resolution.

Update August 1, 2005: Tessa lives! And responds! Entirely without exclamation marks! She succinctly sums up her post with the following picture: