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 How
does one explain “church” to people who have no concept, or a
completely erroneous concept of the body of God’s people? Well,
this problem is multiplied many times for those who translate the
Bible into the languages and dialects of the world.
I
felt you might be interested in some examples, from “God’s Word
in Man’s Language,” By Eugene A. Nida; Harper & Bros., N.
Y., 1952. And-- in the struggle to accurately express “faith”
for some remote tribes of the world, our “enlightened civilization”
might learn a few things.
“The
Shipibo Indians in Peru say that “to believe on God” is “to be
strong on God.” This phrase does not mean precisely what it might
appear to mean from the literal rendering in English. It actually
means that there is no strength at all without Him. That is to say,
we are strong only in reliance upon God. One cannot be spiritually
strong except by dependence upon God. For the Shipibos, spiritual
strength is a completely derived strength. There is no place for
spiritual pride about one’s personal power. This is ruled out by
the language itself, for strength is “on God.”
The
Piro Indians, who live to the south of their Shipibo neighbors, say
that to believe is literally “to obey - believe.” For them the
verb “believe” is too weak to express belief in God, since such
a “faith” could be about the mere truth of occurrence-- just
admitting that something did or did not happen. This type of
intellectual belief has always been found insufficient to describe
the faith in Jesus Christ, which includes not only
the
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intellectual assent to certain facts about the
Lord but the opening of the heart to communion and fellowship with
one whose Lordship demands complete obedience. Accordingly, the
Piros, by means of a compound word, have tried to express this union
of “faith” and “works”-- believing and obeying, without
which there is no reality to Christian experience and no message in
the Good News.
The
Timorese people of Indonesia have emphasized another aspect of
“faith.” They describe it in the words “to conform with the
heart.” The essential meaning of this phrase would push the
reality of “faith just a step further than some expressions, It
not only implies acceptance of truth, but conformance to truth by
the one whose heart responds to its claims. This is in very essence
the Christian concept of faith, for without conformance there is no
faith. Furthermore, this conformance must not be purely a matter of
external practices, but of the heart. The heart determines action
and not action the heart.
The
Huichol Indians on the western slopes of central Mexico describe
faith in somewhat similar terms, but their expression emphasizes the
objective more than the subjective aspects of conformity. They say
that “to believe” is “to conform to the truth.” This is not
very different from the Timorese idiom. In fact, the truth of faith
might be defined as a blend of both these ideas; “conforming to
the truth with the heart.”
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