Translating Salvation

[Brad Fox]

"Preach the Gospel always, and if necessary, use words." 

Saint Augustine

 

Sometimes we have difficulty explaining our Christian experience to people who don’t know God, or possibly don’t even have a world view that includes a possibility that God exists.  Try explaining the love of our Father-God to a youth who has been abused or abandoned by their biological father.  Try using sheep and shepherd parables to explain divine love and care to an intellectual.  Try explaining a sacrificial life-style to someone who’s lost everything, and everyone.

 

Missionaries in foreign cultures run into this problem all the time.  Sometimes their host culture has an unknown language which must first be learned before any significant progress can be made.  This process can take precious years of a missionary’s life; years away from their own culture, language and families.  As the language is increasingly understood, the missionary will look for cultural analogs (similarities) between the host culture and the culture of Bible peoples.  This gets hard when the host culture has never seen a sheep, for instance!

 

Don Richardson ran into such a problem with an isolated culture of Sawi cannibals in Indonesia. 

 

 

Briefly, what he found was a culture that valued lying very highly.  Tribal natives considered it to be the height of sophistication to deceive one’s enemy to the point of lulling them into a sense of security, then killing them.  When Don tried to relate the story of Christ’s betrayal leading to his crucifixion, natives idolized Judas because he had so successfully tricked Jesus.  Ouch!  Not exactly your finest moment in sharing the salvation story.  As time went on, Don came to know more about the peculiarities of the tribes he was working with.  As it turned out, they had a tradition of retribution  ("payback") which is common to many primitive and even modern cultures (capital punishment for instance in Western societies; the eye for eye tradition in Middle Eastern countries).  Apparently, the tribes didn’t have simple, effective ways of stopping the exchange of violence, and tribal wars could rage for months or even years.  However, Don found out that there was a particular custom that wasn’t used much but that did have the power to stop inter-tribal wars.  If a chieftain exchanged sons with a chieftain from an enemy tribe, the two tribes would not war with each other as long as the boys lived (how can you attack another tribe and risk having your son die in the process?).  Such a child was called a “peace child.”  Using this real-life analogy, Don was able to explain that even though all “tribes” of mankind had been at war with Don’s God, He had sacrificed His own son as a “peace child” and given him to humanity to stop the dying.  Don had discovered a powerful metaphor, a culturally meaningful story, to help his native tribe begin to understand the unconditional love of the Savior.  Such a story is called, in Don’s terms, a redemptive analogy.  In his case, Don used a real-life experience derived from the native culture itself and related it to the Gospel (good news) story of the Bible.  As you might guess, this is a highly effective way to reach people in a different culture, right where they are.  But it is expensive.  It requires the sacrifice of time and effort to get to know the target culture to the point where you can draw a parallel like this.  Don spent years of his and his young family’s life just learning the language and culture of these peoples, giving up a comfortable living in America. 

 

Another way to reach people with the love of Christ is to demonstrate what His love looks and feels like, rather than use words.  Mother Teresa, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate of Calcutta India used this method effectively in that city. 

 

She came to that complex society as a young Polish nun with the intention of becoming a high school social studies teacher.  As related in the book, City of Joy by Dominique LaPierre, she was employed in her job as a teacher when one night she was walking on the grounds of the Medical College Hospital in Kolkata (then Calcutta) when she tripped over an “object” on a darkened sidewalk.  Stopping to investigate, she was startled to discover that it was a dying street person, a woman discarded and uncared for in this highly overpopulated society.  Scooping her up in her arms (a considerable feat for such a small nun!) she hustled the woman to the hospital emergency room only to be told to take her away, as there was nothing that could be done for her.  While frantically carrying her to another nearby hospital, the woman died in Teresa’s arms.  Then and there she lamented that even dogs were treated better than the dying on this city’s streets. 

 

The very next day, Teresa stormed the city bureaucracy and demanded that the city do something to help her help those dying on the streets.  She asked for, and surprisingly, was given a building to set up a hospice for them.  Ironically, the building provided by the city was a former rest shelter for pilgrims who had come to visit the temple of Kali, a major Hindu goddess who was the namesake of the city itself.  Teresa realized that this would be an ideal spot because many desperate street people gravitated to the temple grounds in hopes of somehow being cremated on the funeral pyres that were common there.  Initially, the local population of Hindus was curious about this little nun and her sisters who had taken up residence in their neighborhood to do the work that no one else would consider doing.  But their curiosity turned to anger when someone suggested she was there to convert the dying to Christianity.  At that point, the neighbors became confrontational and even threw rocks at the sisters and the ambulances that were tasked with bringing the dying to Teresa’s hospice.  Eventually, Teresa had had enough of the insanity and, falling to her knees, implored the neighbors to kill her instead of hurting the patients under her care.  Although the crowd backed off from her challenge, they nevertheless took their complaints to city hall to see if they could get her removed from the neighborhood.  The chief of police was given the duty of investigating her operation so one day he went to the hospice and watched first hand as she tenderly gave first aid and care to a filthy, dying man.  He was transfixed by her genuine love and self sacrifice in the midst of such hopelessness.  Politely declining her offer to tour the rest of the facility, he emerged from the hospice building to assure the neighbors that he would, indeed, have her removed “on the day you persuade your mothers and sisters to come here and do what she is doing.”  At this the crowd reluctantly retreated once again, but the irritation of the tiny European white nun continued to bother the neighborhood. 

 

One day, Teresa saw a circle of Hindus outside in the street and went to investigate further.  What she saw was a Brahmin Hindu priest lying on the ground in physical distress.  His eyes were rolled back and he was motionless.  Apparently, he had contracted cholera and no one wanted to take the risk of touching him.  But Teresa did.  She carried the priest back to the hospice and nursed him back to health over quite some period of time.  Finally, when his health was restored, he returned to his priestly duties.  But he was quick to tell anyone who would listen, that he had served the goddess Kali for more than 30 years, but “she was a Kali of stone.  But here (pointing towards Teresa) is the real kali, a Kali of flesh and blood.” 

 

Never again were stones thrown at the little Sisters in the white saris (robes).

 

So here we have yet another example of a redemptive analogy, a story that explains who the Christian God of love really is.  But in this case, no evangelistic words were ever exchanged.  Mother Teresa simply let her actions speak for themselves.  She was God's nature in flesh and blood.

 

We need to keep these two examples in mind when we are sharing the gospel with others who might not be from our culture.  Culture, in this sense, may not mean a people group in another country speaking a foreign language and having many strange and different traditions.  It could be the culture of another student at your school who has never had any exposure to the Jesus of the Bible.  Or a student who is into drugs, or self-mutilation, or an alternate lifestyle very different from yours.  The point is, you can use words or actions to relate the nature of a loving God; both methods are valid and effective.  You just have to use some wisdom in knowing which style will be appropriate for the person you are trying to reach.  And like Don Richardson and Mother Teresa, it really takes a lot of personal sacrifice to get to know a person well enough to predict how they might respond.  That’s the point; God drives us into relationship with the world He is trying to reach.  Printed words and programs don’t necessarily get the job done.  Our obedience to reaching out to all people on God’s behalf is what empowers the Gospel good news for people who don’t know it!

  

Kali is one of India's most popular goddesses. Her picture hangs in many homes. Calcutta is her temple city and derives its name from the Anglicized phrase Kali-Ghatt or "steps of Kali." The Goddess of Cemeteries was thought to thrive on blood. Goat blood rather than human blood was sacrificed to her and is still is in some parts of India.

The Dark Mother and her children share a loving and intimate bond. The devotee is Her child and Kali is the ever-caring mother.