“If I do not know the
meaning of the language… the speaker [shall be] a foreigner to me.” (1 Corinthians 14:11)
In one of my favorite cartoons from Leadership magazine (I have lost the reference), two choir members seated behind the pulpit of
a church are looking over the shoulders of the pastor who is preaching to his
congregation. To their right as they
look out onto the congregation, they see the sea of somber faces of the audience
who is listening to his sermon. But to their left, as they are peer over the
shoulders of a deaf interpreter signing
the sermon to the remainder who cannot
hear, they notice that they are rolling over in the aisles with
laughter. The very sight leads the one
choir member to whisper to the other, “I
think the deaf interpreter is adlibbing again.”
Of course their contrasting responses to the same sermon
hint that the original message was either lost or confused somewhere in the
transmission. While certain people that
morning may have enjoyed the hilarity of the moment, something stood between
them and the capturing of the main point!
To my point, while translators
from one language may partially convey
the original message to speakers of a different language, they cannot do so
exhaustively. Something will be lost in
that communication. This reality should
not disturb us. My point in writing is
not to decry the challenge of speaking cross-culturally. To the contrary, we have good reasons to do
the hard work that celebrating differences between members of differing
languages and cultures demands. So I
write instead to encourage recognition that these challenges exist so that we
give the required attention to assuring we understand the speaker of another
language as best we can. Attitudes both
of haste and laziness can easily get in the way of successful communication
cross-culturally.
For Christians, the endeavor to understand the opening chapters
of Genesis is a significant cross-cultural challenge. My purpose in writing this, I repeat, is not
to discourage my readers. Of the two
main original languages of the Bible, Hebrew and Greek, I am far more
comfortable with the latter. I have had
formal study of both, but far less so of the former. Indeed the benefit I gain from my comfort
with the Greek New Testament makes clear how much I have yet to learn from the
Hebrew Testament. Nevertheless, with the
aid of books, articles and essays by Hebrew speakers, commentaries, an
inter-linear Hebrew Old Testament, and serious research, I have matured in my
understanding and respect of the language of the opening chapters of Genesis.
To be continued…
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