Categories
Observations

The Bible, Orality and Theology

theology – as a passionate engagement with the God who became incarnate in Jesus Christ, who seeks to be the giver of life for all people of all cultures and the head of local communities of the church across a diverse world – deserves a broader definition that will allow oral expressions of theology to find their place.

Categories
Observations

The Gutenberg Parenthesis

Preachers who have been trained to turn Jesus’ parables into logical, alliterated, three-point sermons are going to have to learn to take Paul’s epistles and present them as stories.

Categories
Church: UK

Things Home Mission Can Learn: Stories

Taking one of Jesus’ amazingly creative parables and turning it into an alliterated, three-point, logical sermon has to be the ultimate in literate processing.

Categories
Quotes

Moo On Bible Translation

The Proclamation Trust blog has four nice, concise points about Bible translation taken from a talk by Douglas Moo (you can find the whole presentation here): it is important to read theology out of the text rather than the temptation to read it into the text all translations have to think about meaning – you […]

Categories
Do Not Use

Bible and Mission Links 9

Over the last couple of weeks there have been some interesting blog posts on the issue of reading the Bible in oral and post-literate societies. With his usual subtlety, David Ker proclaims that Minority Langauge Bibles are An Endangered Species. I wish I could come up with snappy blog titles like that: the content is […]

Categories
Bible Translation Languages

Sacred Texts in an Oral Culture

One of the difficulties of Bible translation is that many of the cultures that we work with are essentially oral. Stories, poetry and song are the ways in which information is conveyed, not the printed page. This makes for a real challenge when trying to get across the message of a rather large written document. […]

Categories
Language and Society

Stories

One of the things which links my interests in Bible translation and missional church issues in the West is the power of stories. Story telling is a wonderful way to introduce people to the Scriptures in a minority language or to the claims of Christ in post-modern Britain. I’m interested to see the launch of […]