Thoughts inspired by perhaps the most important Christian that you haven’t heard of.
Search: “The Gospel and Culture”
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It is the Incarnation itself which ultimately makes it possible for God’s revelation to be transmitted in human languages.
Acts: Mission and The Margins
People on the margins are uncomfortable for churches. They do dangerous things like preaching to Gentiles in Antioch and running Bible studies for Ethiopians in chariots. But they are the ones out there meeting people!
Mission History and Theology
Christianity lives – one might say it survives – by crossing the boundaries of ethnicity, language and culture. Without that process, it can wither and die.
I simply cannot conceive of a reason why any mission leader or agency board member would not read this paper.
Bible Translation and Colonialism
It is one of the interesting ironies of the Western missionary enterprise that the evangelical motive actually helped to shield indigenous populations from the unmitigated assault of the West and that through the elevation of the vernacular in translation, missions furnished the critical language for evaluating the West in its secular and religious impact.
One of the by-products of the long sojourn of the gospel in Western culture is the false assumption that all potential questions have been canvassed and answered and that there are fundamentally no new questions to be answered. Thus, Christian theology becomes static within certain fixed categories.
The Gospel and Racism
Evangelical history includes positively many voices for justice and pioneers of abolitionism, such as William Wilberforce, but also negatively those who assimilated the values of their surrounding unjust culture. Yet the basis of evangelical faith is Scripture, climaxing in the good news of Jesus Christ.
In short, believing men and women are called to tell the world in which they live that God is loving and merciful and that He gives deliverance from sin and death to all who in faith surrender to Christ.
Committing a language to writing and translating the Bible is incredibly ennobling of ethnic identity. Grammars, dictionaries and books have played a vital part in the formation and survival of ethnes/nations. What Bible translators do is give ethnes, however small, an enhanced possibility of survival and growth into full nationhood.