According to Pope Francis, the way we’re saying the Lord’s Prayer doesn’t sit right, and he suggests we change it up so that it sounds more fitting with the Lord’s ways.
The most recited prayer in Christianity has us here in America using the line “lead us not into temptation.” According to Pope Francis, the translation the west typically uses seems off for God, and instead says we should use a different translation, specifically the one used by the French.
From the BBC:
The pontiff said France’s Roman Catholic Church was now using the new wording “do not let us fall into temptation” as an alternative, and something similar should be used worldwide.
“Do not let me fall into temptation because it is I who fall, it is not God who throws me into temptation and then sees how I fell,” he told TV2000, an Italian Catholic TV channel.
“A father does not do that, a father helps you to get up immediately.”
According to the Guardian, Rev Ian Paul, an Anglican theologian, said that making any official change to how we say the prayer in the west would spark a theological debate.
“The word in question is peirasmos [from New Testament Greek] which means both to tempt and to be tested. So on one level, the pope has a point. But he’s also stepping into a theological debate about the nature of evil.
“In terms of church culture, people learn this prayer by heart as children. If you tweak the translation, you risk disrupting the pattern of communal prayer. You fiddle with it at your peril.”
At this time, however, there have been no plans to make the change official.
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