Episode 16: Bible Translation and Extreme Contextualization

[MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to Theologically Speaking, a podcast of BJU Seminary. I'm your host, Eric Newton. How do we think about the ideas arising within us and swirling around us? And how do we minister in a world like ours? If the chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever, we have to know God and think his thoughts after him. Therefore, the mission of Theologically Speaking is to have conversations that help listeners cultivate theological habits of mind and heart and ministry. [MUSIC PLAYING] We're grateful that you have joined us today. And our topic actually is Bibles International. We're going to do a few episodes related to the global church. And I am really privileged to have with me today, Dr. Troy Manning. Troy is the chief language consultant at Bibles International, which is based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Troy's an old friend, and it's really good to be able to connect with him virtually. Troy, thanks so much for being on the podcast today. Well, thank you for having me on. Glad to be on us. Troy, could you introduce yourself? Tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and then what you do with Bibles International. OK, my name is Troy Manning, as he said. And Eric said, I got my PhD at Bob Jones University and wanted to get involved in theological education in Africa. I've worked there for two years, kind of, during my seminary training and wanted to go back there. But then God led me to Bibles International to be the head consultant over the text production department. And I saw that God actually was bringing everything together for me to do this. And I'm thankful that I'm in missions, and I'm thankful that I can use my theological training and also language study and so forth in this very important kind of ministry. As I think about our desire really to accelerate world missions, I can kind of, I think we can boil it down to two key ministries. And one of them is Bible translation. And the other is theological training. If we can help people know how to minister the Word of God in their context, and we can provide them with the Word of God in their language, we are equipping them to take the gospel and to reach their people in a way that is really just going to accelerate the advancement of world missions. And the logic education like I said was what I wanted to do. And God led me into Bible translation. And I'm very thankful that I can be a part of this. And it's an exciting time to be a part of Bible translation because there is a lot of work that's going on in Bible translation around the world. Bibles International is involved in 46 projects in 16 countries. We've completed really around that many projects as well so far in our 40 year history. So there's a lot of work that's been done by us and by many different organizations. People are familiar with maybe just a few names, but there's quite a few organizations that are doing Bible translation around the world. So a lot of work is being done, but there's still actually a lot of work that needs to be done. There's still almost 4,000 languages that don't have the word of God in their own language. And that's out of around 7,300 languages. And when you consider the number of those that people who don't have the whole word of God, all 66 books, it actually represents around 1.5 billion people who don't have the whole word of God in their language. So that's almost 20% of the world. Yeah. And people might say, well, they have access to the word of God. I've seen tracks that say that most of you have access to the word of God. 95% of people do have access to the word of God. They say in some language. And that is true. But as I travel around the world, I find that the language that they supposedly know, which would be English or French, or even I am married to a Russian speaking Ukrainian. And I'm learning about the Russian speaking world. They don't really know Russian either. So they may say they know officially the language may have adopted that language as a national language, but on the streets, they're not really using those languages. And there is urbanization going on in missions that are causing a mixing of languages. But there's still people, the many people that depend upon their own language to really know the word of God and to walk with God. And considering the educational systems around the world, it's often very weak in these international languages. And so they really need to have the word of God in their own language. Yeah. That's really good. And how long have you been at Bibles International? This is going on my 13th year. Wow. So I've been doing it for a while. But one of the wonderful things about Bible translation that makes it so enjoyable is that there's always new challenges. There are always new challenges. There's always new linguistic issues to deal with. And so if anyone out there is listening and they know their theology, they enjoy biblical languages, and they have a heart permissions, then this is a really good possibility. And if you're one of those that has the logic education, and you have an understanding of-- or you have a heart permissions, but you don't actually know the languages. We actually have a place for you too. And our new Scripture Engagement Department, which is now just starting up. And it's to take the translations that we are producing, either in process or done, and trying to help people use it more effectively in their life and ministry. A lot of times we're providing them with the very first book in their language. And they've then very much used to not having anything in their language. So it's not really easy for them to just suddenly start using a book in their language when they're pretty comfortable without it. So yes, they are waiting for it, and they're glad to have it, but they're not always ready to just start using it. So we want to help them with that with Scripture Engagement. Well, what a discipleship opportunity. That's right. Yeah. Well, that is a helpful overview. We're going to talk a little bit more specifically today about something called the Arlington Statement. And I'd venture to say that a lot of our listeners probably haven't heard about this. And that's one of the reasons why we wanted to do this. I'm so glad, Troy, that you were willing to come on. And I'll tell us a little bit about it. So it probably would help to start here. What is the Arlington Statement? And how does that relate to Bible translation? And then why is it important? OK. We can go to Arlingtonstatement.org. It's named after the city Arlington, Texas, which is where a group of us met in October 2019 to draft the statement. We started working on it then, then met virtually and by emails and continued to work on it until the website was launched in October 2020. And so you can go there and you can read it. And you can read actually the frequently asked questions, which include why is this necessary? If you have any understanding of this issue, it really-- let me just say, first of all, has to do with what's called extreme contextualization. And it has to do with what could be called religious idioms translations. Most often related to the Muslim world, so it used to be called Muslim idiom translations. So basically, you have people that are trying to-- I think with good intentions reach these people who are followers of Islam, but it also could be Hindu or whatever. And they're trying to figure out a way to make them want to read the word of God. And so the concern is if they see things that are just very much contrary to their theology, then they won't even want to pick up the Bible. They want to at least pick up the Bible and try to-- and to read it and hopefully to be changed by it. So there was some development of this issue back in 2011 in 2012. In fact, the Eucharist wrote a book about this Son of God controversy. And it addressed this one issue, the Son of God, basically. The book addressed that. And that's really-- it was in connection with World Evangelical Association's efforts to try to establish some guidelines for what Bible translations, organizations should and shouldn't do in relation to the Bible. to this issue called Divine familial terms, which is basically son of God, how to handle that, how to handle the word father, that kind of thing. And so they established some guidelines. And they were good, but they were actually insufficient for three reasons. They, first of all, applied only to a few organizations. They actually had some loopholes, and then they really only dealt with one issue. And there's a lot of other issues that those who favor and promote extreme contextualization are encouraging. And maybe if you've never looked into what's going on in the Bible translation world, you might assume that all of us are just trying to help make sure people get toward a God in their own language. Right. And that in essence is what we're doing, but the question is, is what principles are we following to do that? And what do we say is okay to do? And so contextualization, it's been in mission circles for quite a while, became really popular in the 1970s. And then 1987 it started to be applied to a Bible translation. And so extreme contextualization is like pushing it to its limits and really beyond. And so the Arlington statement is intended to try to establish some limits. And this is not a fundamentalist only effort. This was done by people across the spectrum in terms of even gelical. And it really was done by people who would be across the spectrum in terms of translation philosophy, whether they're more meeting based or functional equivalents, dynamic equivalents, or the other end, which would be formal equivalents. All of us may differ, each may differ in various other areas, but in these areas, we all came together and said, we can agree to this. And these ought to be guiding principles in relation to extreme contextualization. And so we want people to be aware of it. And then if you're considering getting involved in organization or supporting a Bible translator, you can ask them these questions, how do you handle this issue? So you can determine whether or not you want to be a partner with us or not. So we want people to spread the word about this because it's going on all over actually in various places in the world. It's not just one or two. This is going on a fair bit in about the bubble translation world. We want pastors, churches, everyone really who has any contact and has any consideration of involvement to be aware of this. Yeah. So probably the best thing that folks could do would be to actually go to the website and read this for themselves as sort of what they're appetite a little bit. You mentioned this kind of extreme contextualization in relation to religious idiom, particularly to names for God. Can you give us an example? Maybe it does have to do with the Son of God or another example where this is kind of a prevailing idea and those of you who drafted and have signed Arlington statement have said, this is a problem, theologically, regardless of our approach to translation in terms of equivalence. Yeah. So the big issue actually that we would say wasn't even totally settled with the WEA guidelines has to do with how do you translate Son of God, Jesus being the Son of God. So one of the things they said would be acceptable would be to say that Jesus was the, he's the spiritual Son of God. Because obviously in Islam they find a very offensive that the Messiah will be called the Son of God because Son in English as well as in Greek and Hebrew and so forth, it has connotations of procreation. There's no way to get around that. And we of course understand that it's not literal, he's not the literal physical in the sense of the physical Son of God but metaphorically he is the Son of God and the metaphor is based upon the physical relationship between a father and a son. And so we have to ask ourselves, is it okay theologically to say that Jesus is the spiritual Son of God? Well, Dei Carson is going to help us understand that but basically we have to consider the theological issues involved. Jesus was a real person so there was procreation involved and he is the descendant of David and you can't lose that link between the fact that he is the physical descendant of David and therefore he is more than just the spiritual Son of God. He is the Son of Adam, the Son of David, the Son of Mary, of course through Virgin birth but there is physical procreation connected to his being the God man. And so that may help avoid offense to the Muslims but it destroys some important theological links to who Jesus is. Can you, you know, for those of us who are not as well, nearly as well versed in this area, put you on the spot a little bit here? Can you give us an example of translation contextualization that is not extreme, it is the kind of thing that actually folks like you do all the time that actually is contextualization in terms of language or idiom but it is very appropriate and remains faithful to what God has breathed out. Yes, that is a good question. The truth is, Bible translation is all about contextualization. When you think in terms of linguistics, we want to put the scriptures into the linguistic context of the recipient's language. So we're very much into linguistic contextualization. In other words, using the words of the recipients language, using the language structure, the grammar, the discourse. And we do believe that it's okay to do some cultural contextualization. So even if it's in a national, we do, like for weights and measures, we use the modern equivalent for weights and measures. So instead of referring to Stadia, we might, we would, you know, use their equivalent for like miles or kilometers. And you see that even in English modern English translations and so forth. So, of course, King James, I think, is going to use the British equivalent. So these things, so we're going to unpack certain things like they speak about the Jordan. In the Bible a lot, well, it's not often described as being a river. So we may explain that this is, we may add the implicit information that this is a river because people in outside the Israel context are not going to maybe won't know that the Jordan was a river. And so we would add these things. These are really cultural contextualizations to help the modern day reader far removed from that geographic context, understand what the author is talking about. So those are some of the different ways that we do that. Quite a few others too. And is that kind of contextualization that much more important and necessary? The more obscure languages or if they haven't really had written language is more of that required or not necessarily so? Yes, we find that a lot of implicit information needs to be made more explicit. Although we try not to load the translation down either with too much information. We do find that if the language group does not have much exposure to Christianity, if they have very little exposure to the word of God in a bigger language, then we may have to do a little bit more for them. And then maybe come back to it later on and say, well, these people now are pretty well established in the Bible and the word of God. And so maybe some of these things we can take out because it's understood. They understand that Jerusalem is a city. They understand that Egypt is a country and so forth. And we can take these things out. But we may do a little bit more with that. But again, we do try to be careful as much as possible. We try not to add anything unless we feel like it would give us a lot of attention. give no meaning or wrong meaning. And then we just inch out a little bit and add just a little bit. And then we try that out. That doesn't work. And we go out a little further. So we have to do a lot of testing, a lot of talking to the people, traditions to let people see it and see if they're receiving it and so forth like that. - Yeah, that's helpful. You mentioned that, obviously the Arlington statement is a response to certain trends in the Bible translation world. Can you give us any kind of sense of what we're talking about here? I mean, is the Arlington statement responding to kind of an outlier position or a very small minority? Is this sort of a big tussle? I don't know if that's too political of a question. I don't mean it to be. But what are we talking about here in terms of the translation world generally? - Yes, I don't really want to mention any names of organizations, but I will say that some of the big organizations are in favor of this. And when we try to approach them, our group, the Arlington statement group, we try to approach them to have public debate. They were not in favor of that. There's very much a squelching of any comments to the contrary. There's certain organizations that you'll, if you go there and look, you'll see they're noticeably absent from saying we agree with this, which ought to tell you something. There's sometimes maybe they have other reasons, but it very well could be that they're opposed to it. And we've received some public statements from some of these organizations, at least one in particular, and they said that they do not support what we put here. So if you've got big organizations that are in favor of this, then that means it's going on in numerous different places around the world. So this is not just one or two different little projects. When I travel over there in the Russian-speaking world, I hear of a fellow missionary saying, they're doing it again. They're taking this because he's trying to reach the Muslims and they're providing the word of God for them. And he sees these things where they're changing how to translate Son of God, they're trying to put Allah in, which makes you think that Allah is the name of God, not Yahweh and so forth. And so they do these things in various places. And so we're trying to put the brakes on that through positive pressure. Like if you do this, you're gonna face some backlash from your supporters. We're really just trying to inform the church, in general, saying, this is what's going on. Be aware of this. Encourage people to stop doing these things so that they're gonna give them, we want them to give the people the truth in its purest form possible. That's what people need. People, we don't need that in a sense, play God and be some sort of mediator and somehow make it easier for people to receive the truth of God's word. The truth is if you go back to the first century, Son, Kuyos would have been offensive to the Greek polytheists. They would not have liked hearing this about Son of God. They would have had wrong connotations in terms of their own, polytheism and so forth. And God knew that. And God put the truth as he did because it's such a beautiful representation of the relationship and the Trinity, let's say for that example. And then how we can also be adopted sons of God brought into God's family, where Jesus is the first born. We are among his brethren as Hebrew says. - Right. Yeah, I was thinking of even Greek speaking, Hellenistic Jews, and they're understanding monotheism, if they were not yet converted in how they would have responded to what the New Testament reveals. Jesus says, God's Son. - Anything else about the statement that you think would be helpful to mention? - Well, we focus mostly on the one that is the big one that's been dealt with, but one of the reasons why we produce the statement was because other things are actually going on. Like for instance, they have inserted some, they try to insert some of the, basically the key phrases in Islam. There is no God, but Allah, which if you just confess that, you could actually become a Muslim, it's called the Shahada, and then there's the Bismillah, which is basically in the name of Allah. And so they've tried to find ways to insert this into the Bible because it does affirm monotheism, but the problem is it doesn't, first of all, fit the Hebrew, and it doesn't affirm the monotheism of Christianity, the Trinity, the Ternitarian monotheism. So that's another thing that people will be shocked if they even knew, how could you possibly put that in there? Really, it basically does lead you to believe that Abraham and Isaac and Jacob were Islamic, and then the other, the third issue is basically trying to water down any confronting of sin or falsehood. So the Muslim world, they're obviously not in favor of the nation of Israel. And so they might want to change that to Israel, to Jacob, or there's cases where in Luke 15, you have the parable, the prodigal son, and slaughtering the fatted calf, and they may want to change that, so that it's not a calf because this is offensive to Hindus who don't eat beef. And so they want to change some of these things, maybe soften some of the references to shamanism and so forth that are in various false religions, they might maybe make the words more general rather than just saying it like it is in the scriptures. So these are the three key issues. It's interesting in one interesting turn in translation actually happened with the Septuogen in 250 BC. Because of their, really what we would say is probably wrong thinking about the third commandment, taking the name of the Lord in vain, they refused to say the name Yahweh. - Right. - And that actually made its way into the scriptures because what you have in the Greek translation, the Old Testament is Kuryas, is the word for Yahweh and Adonai. And it's, what we would probably just say is not really a good way to do translation, but it's made its way into this, into the inspired New Testament. But the wonderful thing about it is Kuryas then draws together the fact that you have a Trinity, you have three persons and they are all God and really could say in Old Testament terms, they're all Yahweh. So you have some references to Jesus. I mean, you have a passage about Jesus and then they quote from the Old Testament and the Old Testament passage is actually quoting a passage like an Isaiah, Philippians two and it's talking about Yahweh. And it's Kuryas. And Kuryas of the Old Testament is the Kuryas, the New Testament. And so it actually brings together in a beautiful way, the fact that the Trinity is three persons, it's one God in three persons. So God's problems, he allowed a translation mistake, we could say to make its way into this translation, which became the Bible of the first century and before the first century too, of course, but it makes this way in inspired scripture and it draws together the Trinity in a beautiful way. So but in Muslim idiom translations, they may want to bring in Allah and try to separate out and say, well, in this case, it's not referring to, it's Jesus and it's not God. So we're gonna use one term for Jesus, another term for God. But then how do you handle that when you go back to these passages that really converge and say, Jesus is Yahweh, it's not Allah is Yahweh and Jesus is not Allah. It gets really messy and you just, you destroy the whole fabric of the Bible when you try to separate these things out and differentiate these things in a way that the Greek does not allow. And God's sovereignty, he has allowed the inspired text to give us this converging of Adonai and Yahweh and one Greek term, Kuryos. - Yeah, yeah, that's good. As we kinda finish up here, we've got listeners who probably are wondering, All right, I've been intrigued by this. I'm going to go to the website, look at this. But beyond that, how can I pray or even what could I do to help in this great work of Bible translation? Any suggestions you'd give us as we close out? Well, I would say to pray that God will give this website better distribution, better exposure to talk to your pastors, if you are a pastor, talk to your pastor friends and make sure they understand the issues. You know, I actually would hate to see if you're supporting a missionary who does this to see them lose their support, but to sit down and talk to them, I would say, next time they're on furlough or get on a Zoom conversation with them and talk to them and say, let's talk through this because I'm really not in favor of this. Are you in favor of this and why? And let's try to see if we can get something worked out here because we've got to, we cannot continue to support this kind of thing. And then if you're considering going into Bible translation, of course we would like you to come with us if you fit, but find out what other organizations are in favor of this and which ones are not. And I would say for now, stay away from the ones that are not in favor of this because I really don't think, obviously I was part of the one who wrote it, but I don't think there's anything that's, it's all in line with the scriptures as far as I know, and that's where we all want to be. Yeah, that's good. Well, I really appreciate you're taking the time and I want to thank you for what you're doing for the cause of the Lord through Bible translation. It's been neat when I've seen some of your presentations in the past to see video or photos of people receiving scriptures in their own tongue for the first time and just to be able to share in the joy of that. And you know, this is, like you said, along with theological education, so crucial to the advance of the gospel around the world. So thank you for what you're doing. May the Lord bless you and again, thanks for joining me today on this episode. Yes, thank you for having me. I've been an encouragement to be a part of this. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Theologically Speaking. We trust that in the coming days, God will count you worthy of your calling and fulfill every desire for goodness and the work of faith with power so that the name of our Lord Jesus will be glorified in you and you in Him according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ. you