Month: April 2016

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Inevitable

While I was home in the US, a church group asked me to speak on issues in translation. They prepared a set of questions they had. One was:

Is contextualization good or bad?

ContextualizeIn missions, contextualization is making the message of the Gospel fit the context. Translating the Bible into the language of the people is a form of contextualization. Translation takes the message and makes it fit that language.

Contextualization is usually understood as a set of deliberate steps taken by the person presenting the Gospel. But it is also what hearers do consciously or unconsciously. When people hear something new, they fit it into their context, clarifying or distorting the meaning.

It also happens for everything, not just for the Gospel. A good example is the push for democracy in Africa. One of my Ghanaian friends has noted that:

We live in a part of the world where the elected become the bosses and the voters become the servants.

So democracy has been contextualized in Africa in ways that my friend and other Africans find undemocratic. No one planned this. It just happened. Those who pushed for democracy didn’t take care to see that it was properly contextualized. Now there needs to be a deliberate process to contextualize it differently.

Ventura quoteThe quote on the right by Michael Ventura gets it almost right. A piece of information is like a dot that floats in the brain of the hearer without meaning until it is connected with other dots. But it cannot stay like that.

It doesn’t float around in the brain without any meaning. Instead the hearer tries to make sense of it, attaches it to other dots and makes a meaning – right or wrong. If the person giving the information doesn’t connect the dot of information correctly to other dots, the hearer will connect it however he or she can. Anyone communicating into another culture who does not pay attention to contextualizing their message is leaving the interpretation of that message entirely in the hands of the hearers. The results might not be what the person wants. You can’t keep the Gospel pure by avoiding contextualization. It’s the other way around.

Some of the translations I have been associated with are being done in places where there was a church for some time prior to the translation being done. When Christians finally have the Bible in their language, they usually find they a number of places where the Gospel message was distorted. The translation effort becomes a process by which the Gospel is contextualized differently – this time more accurately. When they read a passage and exclaim, “Now I understand”, it is often not just that the message is now clear; it is also that the message has now been correctly connected to their context, it now fits; it can now be integrated into their life (context).

In one case, a colleague was working in a language where the people had been evangelized for decades, but they did not have the Bible in their language. He found that the word being used for the manger in which Jesus was laid meant a fancy baby bed. After all, that’s what missionaries used for their babies. The people had nothing like a manger. So the Christmas story got contextualized in a way that distorted it so that Jesus was put in the kind of bed used by the top 1% of the population. My colleague asked what container people used for food for goats or chickens. They responded with a word for a certain kind of basket. When that was put in the Christmas story it had quite an impact. Jesus wasn’t put in the kind of baby bed used by the top 1% of the population, but rather in a bed even poor people would not ordinarily use. It was an eye-opener. Jesus was connected to their context.

That connection is why translations of the Bible into the languages of Ghana have been shown to produce positive changes in behavior even in places where there were churches for decades before the translation.

When I was asked if contextualization is good or bad, I answered: “Yes, but mostly it’s inevitable.”

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Laugh of faith

Warham's article against heretical books

Warham’s article against heretical books

In May last year, a country lifted a ban on the Bible which had been in place since 1969. When I learned about it, I laughed. I was thinking about the futility of banning the Bible. There has been a long history of banning the Bible and all attempts have failed. In one case hundreds of years ago, William Warham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, tried to ban Tyndale’s translation into English as well as other books.

Did you know that China now prints more Bibles than any other country? The Bible is now available in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union. In fact, Russians are translating the Bible into the languages of Ghana.

It is silly to ban the Bible. For one thing, the ban never sticks. Oh, it might stick for a few decades, but history shows that a ban on the Bible is not sustainable government policy.

That’s why I laughed. I was also thinking of God’s reaction to the machinations of governments, recorded in Psalm 2 (emphasis mine):

Why do the nations rage
    and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves,
    and the rulers take counsel together,
    against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying,
“Let us burst their bonds apart
    and cast away their cords from us.”
He who sits in the heavens laughs;
    the Lord holds them in derision.

Because I have spent most of my adult life in Africa, people in the US sometimes ask me how I see my country. One of my observations: Christians don’t laugh enough at the actions of government, officials and politicians while wringing their hands too much.

We need to imitate God more by having a good belly laugh at some stuff that usually has us in consternation.

There are still plenty of places in the world where the Bible cannot be freely distributed, studied or translated. Join me in a laugh of faith in the hope that will change.

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Stories say more

Uriah dying

Uriah dying

The biblical story of David and Bathsheba (II Samuel 11-12) is one of the more well-known stories in the Bible. In the story, King David desires the wife of Uriah, one of the officers in his army, arranges to have Uriah put sent on a suicide mission, then takes his wife. The passage tells us: “The Lord was angry at what David had done.” (II Samuel 11:27 CEV) So the Lord sends a prophet to face David and announce a terrible punishment for his murderous selfishness and his lack of care for Uriah. One of the lessons of this story is that the righteousness of kings, and thereby all governments, consists not in their right beliefs, but in how they treat their citizens.

If the king or government has full power over its citizens, as some have believed and unfortunately seem to still believe, then this story makes no sense. This story only makes sense if kings and governments are responsible to treat their citizens rightly and God himself shows concern that they do. This story points to the rights of citizens.

The chairman of the board of the Ghanaian organization for which we work once told a group:

We live in a part of the world where the elected become the bosses and the voters become the servants.

Scepter of a Ghana chief

Scepter of a Ghana chief

The push for democracy in Africa has resulted in a kind of “democracy” that he and other Africans do not find democratic. The story of David, Bathsheba and Nathan is a potent antidote wrong ideas about government. The story clearly makes the king responsible for his citizens, not the other way around. One author has noted that the Old Testament is rich in stories of kings who did the wrong things and ended badly. Maybe that’s why Yale professor Lamin Sanneh finds a connection between having the Bible in one’s language and human rights.

I find it most interesting that it is the stories in the Bible that point to the responsibilities of government leaders most clearly. In fact, based on teaching passages in the New Testament especially Romans 13:1-7, some have concluded that the Bible teaches that we should obey government no matter what. It seems to me that the stories of the Old Testament kings directly contradict some interpretations of Romans 13:1-7.

Akan chief being carred to a funeral in Kumasi, Ghana

Akan chief being carred to a funeral in Kumasi, Ghana

It is a mistake to see the stories of the Bible as something relevant only to children, or as something less helpful or interesting than teaching passages. It seem to me that some Bible truths are most clearly present in stories and that stories often offer a context for interpreting the teaching passages of the Bible.

Let’s not marginalize Bible stories, make them secondary to teaching passages, or stop efforts to make them available to everyone.

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Under girding positions

John Wycliffe

John Wycliffe

John Wycliffe was the first person to translate the Bible into English. Christianity had been present for a long time, but no one had thought it important to translate the Bible into English. The Bible in Latin, accessible only to the educated, was thought enough by educators, church leaders, theologians and pastors. Wycliffe was himself an educator, theologian and pastor. So, why did he think that a translation was useful when his peers did not? Well, Wycliffe held ideas which were quite different from those of most of the elites of his day. He wrote:

the New Testament is of full authority, and open to the understanding of simple men

He also believed that everyday men and women can make a positive impact in their families, churches and communities if they are armed with God’s Word in their language.

The translation of the Bible into the language of the ordinary person flowed naturally from those ideas. Then Wycliffe organized a group of men who traveled around reading and teaching out of the new translation.

Wycliffe, as an intellectual, took a position that elevated non-intellectuals. This rings true of the Gospel and of Jesus life. Jesus worked with disciples who had no formal education. Translating the Bible into the language of everyday people follows in that tradition.

If we think that only the most educated can have an impact in our churches, we err. Both those with little education and lots of education had a significant impact on the early church. Both should have an impact today.

Church in Abetifi, Ghana

Church in Abetifi, Ghana

We are working with churches in Africa with the goal that they would run and support their own translation programs. But support for translation by a church in Africa must also flow from Wycliffe’s ideas.  Furthermore, without those ideas, there will not be long term use and impact of the translated Scriptures.

When people or a church restricts its conception of who can have significant, positive impact to the educated, it follows that translation into the mother tongue and reading Bibles in the mother tongue will become marginal activities. This is because the educated in Africa can read their Bibles in English or French, languages mastered only by the elite. If only they need the Bible, then English and French are enough.

The church in Africa will succeed in promoting the Bible in the heart language when it embraces the positions that the Bible is the final authority, that anyone can understand it, and that ordinary people armed with the Bible in their language can change lives. Of course, a church must not just espouse those positions, it must also align its practices with them.

So, we work with Ghanaians who hold those same ideas to get them heard in places where they have not yet firmly taken hold.