From one culture to another

Bridging Cultures Terry Dashner (www.ffcba.com) Not all cultures think alike. Not all nations speak the same language. But all kindred, tribes, and nations can know the message of Jesus Christ. Think about the difficulty of taking a religion birthed in Judea (Christianity) which expressed itself in Jewish concepts, Jewish language, Jewish culture--expressly stated in the Torah--and carrying that message to pagans, Greeks, Romans, and barbarians who had no understanding of Jewish laws. In order for the message to thrive, it had to be conveyed in the conceptual languages and cultures of the non middle-easterners. And this was no small task. For example, the ecumenical council at Chalcedon in 451 AD which addressed the divinity of Jesus--two natures in one person--also dealt with the difficulties of a new conceptual language for Greek and Latin alike. Mark A. Noll (Turning Points, Baker Book House Co. 2000, p.73), writes the following. "Where the Roman, Western mind-set was concrete, practical, and legal, the Eastern mind-set gravitated toward abstraction, passion, and speculation. The Roman world used Latin, the East used Greek. Tertullian, in the West had not thought it worthwhile to consider what Jerusalem (the Christian faith) had to do with Athens (the traditions of speculative philosophy). By contrast, his Eastern contemporary Clement of Alexandria had promoted the Christian study of Greek speculative thought as a useful exercise for the church. These differences were more tendencies of intellectual disposition than out-and-out conflicts of doctrine, but they had continued to develop from the time of Tertullian and Clement." Chalcedon in 451 AD largely settled the doctrinal issues of the nature of Jesus Christ, but it was not able to bridge the growing divide between East and West. Eventually, as you know from church history, the Catholic Church was never able to reconcile the differences between the Church at Rome and the Church at Constantinople. Thus, there is to this day a rift between Roman Catholism and Greek Orthodox. Nevertheless, the message of Jesus Christ as the only Begotten Son of God who "took upon him flesh," dying for the sin of the entire world and being raised from the dead to be raised to the right hand of God is believed and preached by both. (Consider the Nicene Creed of the fourth century and the Chalcedon Creed or the fifth century the content of the creeds are essentially the same.) The ecumenical council at Chalcedon in 451 AD marked an especially critical turning point in the history of Christian conveyance of ideas from one culture to another. Again Mark A. Noll writes, "Although it telescopes much history to put it this way, Chalcedon may be said to have marked the successful translation of the Christian faith out of its Semitic milieu (where words and concepts were shaped primarily by the revelation of the Old Testament) into the Hellenistic milieu (where words and concepts were shaped primarily by the traditions of Greek thought and Roman might). "Part of the great series of convulsions that stretched from before Arius's heresy through the time of Chalcedon was a problem of translation in the narrow sense. How could the church find ways of translating words from the Bible (written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and simplified Koine Greek heavily under Semitic influence) into Latin and more formal Greek? Immense confusion, for instance, reigned for nearly a century over the question of whether the Greek terms ousia and hypostasis should be used for the essential 'God-ness' shared by the Father and the Son, or whether they should refer to the particular 'God-ness' embodied in Father, Son, and Spirit more distinctly." Finally, a standard grid of translation was finally agreed upon in 362 at a council in Alexandria, so that the Greek ousia would equal the Latin substantia (the generic God-ness), and the Greek hypostasis would equal the Latin persona (the specific manifestation of God-ness). Only with that clarification having been made could the Nicene formula be finalized. And that finalization set the stage for the road to Chaledon (Ibid., p.79). As you can see by reading this document, transferring and translating ideas and concepts from one culture to the next is difficult but it is, nonetheless, possible. When you consider a lonely Jewish male of 33- years-of-age dying over two thousand years ago on a criminal's cross in a land that is nothing more than a speck on the world map, it boggles the mind to think how his life's story could have spread across the earth--transforming lives and changing whole Continents--for the Glory of God. It blows my mind to think how this could happen because he died alone, leaving his legacy of Life to be spread by a handful of fearful, distraught, and thick-headed disciples. That fact alone tells me that Jesus was not just another prophet, counselor, or wise teacher of the age. He is God's only Begotten Son, Messiah. That fact prompts me to rejoice in knowing what God can do with the Gospel (Good News) message being declared in faith by anyone of any culture to everyone of every culture in the whole-wide-world. It's the same message in all languages--Jesus saves! Keep the faith. Stay the course. Jesus is alive and coming again. Pastor T.