TNIV

Just ordered a copy of the new Bible translation TNIV (Today's NIV). among other updates, it uses gender neutral language. Tim Bednar has a great post on the new tranlation here.
I'm a little wary of the translation because of the difficulty one often finds in expressing the third-person singular in a gender neutral way. "each one must give account of himself" becomes "we must give account of ourselves" - this gender neutral rendering makes it much less clear that it's people individually who must give account, and not a collective group...maybe that's my western individualism getting in the way, I don't know.
i find it interesting that on Tim's site and the TNIV site, the argument is being made that the TNIV more acurately represents the English language as it is currently used among young adults. in other words, young people who loosely fit the description "postmodern" are increasingly using gender neutral language to express themselves. this would not be true of most of the people i know, although most of the people i know are not "postmodern", though they are young. in the small subsection of english evangelicalism to which i'm currently connected in London, men are still very much dominant. i find myself correcting my use of male dominated language, and my collegues react with a kind of mild amusement. i like the idea of a translation that confronts men and our lust for power and control.
on the other hand, i may have reservations about removing the culture-bound elements from the text. i suppose you always do this when you translate from one language to another, but we can't (and shouldn't) erase the patriarchal nature of society in the Ancient Near East. It's often this culture that allows the egalitarian gospel to shine with such dramatic contrast.