Building Bridges

Whenever we share the gospel with someone we need to build bridges of friendship first. In sharing the gospel with those from other cultures we have to build a bridge of friendship and also a bridge between our culture and their culture, and more importantly between biblical culture and their culture. Our world-view affects the way we see things. It can be thought of as the spectacles with which we view the world.

Certain things appear more clear, other things may not come into focus at all. In building bridges we are ideally trying to find concepts and practices in their culture that match biblical ones. Often mismatches occur and these have to be explained. For instance in the Bible sacrifices were part of the worship of a believer’s life. They also had certain functions like removing sin. In many parts of the world sacrifices are carried out to ward off the evil eye and make sure nothing unfortunate happens to a person and their family. This is very different! Therefore we can’t simply use the word ‘sacrifice’ and assume it will be understood. The good thing about Bible translation, of course, is that words are usually explained in the context of stories. It is pretty obvious that Abraham offered sacrifices as part of his spiritual life, not because he was afraid of evil spirits or the evil eye or whatever. In the project we work in we have sometimes found some very nice bridges. One is the word for Yahweh. We translated it as Biribar (the One who is) in Exodus 3. This is very close to the biblical meaning of Yahweh in that passage, which is the derived meaning of the name in the language, its ‘etymology’. Another bridge is to try and use a better term for ‘peace’ than one that means lack of war. We used ‘salamat’ which means ‘healthy/whole’, but it also sounds like the word used in greetings, ‘salam’. So ‘Peace be with you!’ at the end of John’s gospel has been translated ‘Be whole!’ but sounds quite natural as a greeting.