I’ve been reading books by Yale scholar, Lamin Sanneh, recently (Translating the Message and others). Gambian born, Sanneh grew up in the Islamic faith and later converted to Christianity. When his mentors recognized his academic brilliance they encouraged him to become a scholar of Islam, to teach people about that faith and help in Interfaith discussions.
When he was teaching Islamic Studies at St. Andrew’s University, Aberdeen, Scotland, he was asked to teach a class as a sabbatical replacement — on African Religion. As he prepared to teach the class, immersing himself in statistics about African faiths — traditional, Islam, and Christianity — he was stunned to make a discovery. In cultural settings where Christian missionaries had learned the indigenous language and then translated the Bible into it — a hundred years later there was strong ownership of local, indigenous culture, preservation of the indigenous language, and a thriving church, with strong indigenous leadership.
This finding ran so counter to Western liberalism, with its certainty that any cross cultural contact is damaging to the non-Western side, that Sanneh ran it by his colleagues in the study of religion and they were as stunned as he was. Although Western colonialism had clearly damaged many cultures’ economies and political structures, here was an area where contact had been beneficial, though not necessarily intentional.
Sanneh went on to find that all these cultures, which benefitted from Bible translation uniformly, had the name of God in the Bible translated into the indigenous language. Throughout their renditions, sensitive translators, using the indigenous cultural context, had blended these people’s experience into the biblical text.
Christianity is the only one of the world’s great religions, which doesn’t use the language of its founder. New Testament texts were all written in Koine Greek—a kind of “kitchen Greek,” that could be understood by all.
The sharpest contrast with this is in Islam (no, I’m not saying Islam is bad). V. S. Naipaul wrote two books of his travel through Islamic cultures across the Arabic diaspora and found they became more and more similar—presumably related to the idea that the Qu’uran is not meant to be translated—it speaks in the language of God, from the mouth of God, and if you want to read it, learn Arabic.
These insights about translation seem powerful to me—Christianity is an intensely contextual religion—meant to put down deep roots in different times and places. It is assumed that Christianity will look different from one context to another. And that any given culture will add gifts to the faith. (Perhaps in Grand Marais, depending on who it is primarily focused on, different denominations will look different, “becoming all things to all people.”)
Where is the center of Christian faith right now? It is in the Global South: Africa has far more Christians than the USA or Europe. Anglicanism in Nigeria, of course, is very different from our form of the same here in Cook County. If they weren’t, we would be missing this central Christian doctrine of incarnation, and thus cultural contextuality in our world.
As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, in his poem Kingfishers Catch Fire:
I say móre:
the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps
all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in
God’s eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays
in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs,
and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through
the features of men’s faces.
Each month a member of the Cook County Ministerium will offer Spiritual Reflections. This month’s contributor is Mary Ellen Ashcroft, Vicar of Spirit of the Wilderness Episcopal Church.
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