Month: August 2016

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As serpents

I recently developed a new understanding of a saying of Jesus that I’ve always found a bit odd:

“Look, I am sending you out as sheep among wolves. So be as shrewd as snakes and harmless as doves. (Matthew 10:16 ESV)

APN front page - colorizedI am serving as interim Director of translation and language development work in Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast). A few weeks after arriving, I started getting small indications that there was something not quite right in our cooperation with churches in some of the languages where translations are in progress. I found that we have written agreements those churches. In some cases, we have written agreements with local associations that represent the churches. On a hunch, I started studying the articles of incorporation of those associations. My head was full of phrases about Annual General Meetings, Executive Committees, Internal Auditors, quorums and so on. I also got a copy of the standard articles of incorporation and by-laws recommended by the government for the sake of comparison.

The articles of incorporation for the association for the Nghlwa language (cover pictured above) are exemplary. But in a couple of cases, while the associations pretend to represent their members (churches and interested people), key parts of the standard documents had been changed so that the associations are effectively controlled by a small number of individuals and in one case by only one person. No wonder some churches and key people were starting to say that they were being frozen out.

Dedication of representative translation committees in three Ghana languages, 2014

We have known for a long time that involving local churches in decision-making is a key element in the success of a translation. Yet I found that we are working with associations purporting to represent churches but which in reality are controlled by a small number of people who are making all the decisions. If allowed to continue, this will limit the use and impact of the translations, perhaps severely. I guess that being “shrewd as snakes” includes checking to see if articles of incorporation have been carefully crafted to be something other than what they appear on the surface.

Now, I need a substantial shot of serpentine circumspection to set things straight.

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Two Theologies

Theologie et vie chretienne en AfriqueA couple years ago, African theologians and church leaders got together at a conference. One of the realizations that came out of that conference was that there are two theologies developing among Christians in Africa. One is an official and academic theology. It is taught in Bible schools and theological seminaries. But it often doesn’t spread beyond those. The other is a people’s theology. It is found among ordinary Christians. The official and academic theology happens in the official language, but the people’s theology is created and discussed in local languages. So the two don’t interact. The people’s theology is created when people talk to each other about how to deal with issues coming out of their traditional beliefs such as spirits, sorcery, and their fears The official theology often fails to touch those issues or to take them seriously.

Unfortunately, few missionaries taught on such things other than to quickly issue a general condemnation. In that gap, people filled in their own theology. They sit in church and listen, and not hearing something that answers their questions, they may leave church and go to a practitioner of traditional religion where they do find answers, not good answers, but answers nevertheless.

Reading the Bible in a language of northern Ghana

Reading the Bible in a language of northern Ghana

My Congolese friend and theologian, Bungushabaku Katho, has been experimenting with what he calls “The Village Academy”. He gets ordinary people in Congolese villagers to read the Bible in their languages, then he and other theologians interact with them about what they read and what they think that it means for them. Of that experience he wrote:

“Very often we realized that the experience of villagers became much more enriching for our understanding of the Bible; well above the bookish methods of the seminary hall.”

The experiment of the “Village Academy” is teaching us that a theologian must keep his ear tuned to the community in which he lives.

KathoWhat kind of Christianity will we find in Africa in 25 years, or 50? Will it be split in two with a academic part stuck in theological seminaries and a people’s part in the pews and the streets but which is less and less recognizable as the Good News taught by Jesus and the Apostles? I hope not.

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Feeding birds

Around Abidjan Center

A view of the area around the building where we work in Abidjan

A man living around the place where we work in Abidjan feeds the birds morning and evening. When one of our office staff asked him why, he said that it brings him good luck and increased income. In fact, he spends 2,000 CFA francs per day feeding the birds, which is about $3.50, or about $105 per month. Many Africans believe in mystic or magic causality. In this way of thinking, the causes of good and bad things in our life is solely related to what happens in the spirit realm. It is not dissimilar to ideas like karma.

These beliefs would be quaint, but they keep people from what really creates wealth as recommended in the Bible. The book of Proverbs teaches hard work, honesty, being wise in relationships, getting good advice, being generous and trusting in God.

Unfortunately, many churches in Africa are getting caught up in the Prosperity Gospel. Some forms of the Prosperity Gospel teach purely mystic causes of prosperity. In this teaching financial stability or success comes from tithing, blind faith, and direct divine intervention, but not from hard work or the other teachings of the book of Proverbs. In some cases prosperity teaching effectively erases the teachings of the book of Proverbs. It’s another reason to translate that book into more African languages.

I have a small collection of humor about the mystic prosperity gospel as one finds it on Facebook. Here’s one.

Fill out this to get money

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Transcendent language

At Vatican II, the Catholic Church decided to start saying mass in local languages. Until then it had always been said in Latin. I was only 13 when Vatican II concluded, but a Burkina Faso friend of mine said that many of the more educated Catholic lay people in that country were unhappy with the change. They felt that hearing in everyday language removed the mystery, the transcendence, indeed the religiousness of the experience.

A woman leads a worship song in a local language during a gathering of believers from northern Ghana in a city in the south

A woman leads a worship song in a local language during a gathering of believers from northern Ghana in a city in the south

This feeling about language is widespread. Indeed, proponents of the King James Version cite the grandeur of its words. Many want their religious experiences to be infused with the feeling of transcendence so they like cathedrals, liturgy, clergy in special clothing, and stained glass windows. They may also want the Bible read from a translation that also seems transcendent. I identify. I love the poetic passages from the Psalms and from Isaiah. They send my spirit soaring. When they are sung in English that is out of date, as in The Messiah, they become all the more spiritual to me. Africans have more exuberant ways of experiencing transcendence.

Official_Languages_-_Africa_HL colorsI occasionally meet Africans who object to translating the Bible into their languages because they want to keep the mystery and the religious experience of reading and hearing in the official language (French, English or Portuguese depending on the country.) To them, the Bible in their language just seems way too simple and down-to-earth to be truly religious.

But what are we to make of this common human yearning for special religious language? After all, not all human religious yearnings are endorsed by the Bible. Is this yearning good or bad?

My favorite statement on this issue comes from C.S. Lewis. Writing about the objection to modern translations that their language is too “everyday”, he wrote:

A sacred truth seemed to them to have lost its sanctity when it was stripped of the polysyllabic Latin, long heard at Mass and at Hours, and put into ‘language such as men do use’—language steeped in all the commonplace associations of the nursery, the inn, the stable, and the street. The answer then was the same as the answer now. The only kind of sanctity which Scripture can lose (or, at least, New Testament scripture) by being modernized is an accidental kind which it never had for its writers or its earliest readers. The New Testament in the original Greek is not a work of literary art: it is not written in a solemn, ecclesiastical language, it is written in the sort of Greek which was spoken over the eastern Mediterranean after Greek had become an international language and therefore lost its real beauty and subtlety.

If God himself thought that it was okay to have the Apostles leave classical Greek aside and write the New Testament in the common language of the day, why would we think that we need something else? God’s big concerns appear focused on something other than provoking blissful awe through the use of religious-sounding language.

Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you. (James 1:27)

I still listen to The Messiah and it still transports me, but I don’t expect that it will do the same for everyone else, or consider them less if it does not. I certainly do not expect that such transports fulfill my obligation to practice true religion nor that they replace listening to God in the everyday words of my heart language.