Speaking in (the world's) tongues

Sojourners, Nov/Dec 2000 by Howard-Brook, Wes

"Jesus is bangala!" proclaims Rev. Nathan Price, an American evangelist, to a group of confused Congolese villagers in Barbara Kingsolver's novel The Poisonwood Bible.

Their confusion stems from Rev. Price's failure to catch the nuances of the local language's use of tone and cadence. While he meant to say something like "Jesus is supreme," what came out was "Jesus is poisonwood" -the name for a local plant with horribly irritating qualities. Throughout this powerful novel, Price never budges in his determination to preach the gospel out of his King James Bible, stubbornly oblivious to indigenous traditions and needs.

Price's 1959 missionary approach reflects a long tradition in which the goal was to "save the pagans" by preaching a white European Jesus. As we know, much of this "evangelizing" was backed up with imperial weaponry through which slaughter became a tool of "conversion." The modern, liberal tendency is to shrink from this horrific history and instead to engage in ecumenism and interreligious dialogue with those of other traditions. However, whether as God-andcountry conservatives or nonviolent radicals, we may often replicate Rev. Price's method when offering up our "good news." Like Price, we accept rejection of our message as the cross we are to bear in Jesus' name.

But what if our rejection is not because our audiences are stiff-necked but because we, like Price, have arrogantly refused to translate the gospel into local languages? And where is the line between, on the one hand, speaking the language of "the other" and, on the other hand, merely saying what people want to hear in order to succeed?

This struggle is one at the heart of the Acts of the Apostles. As the sequel to Luke's gospel, its author is likely a person well-educated in the Hellenistic culture of his day. His circle includes the elite women and men whose status makes things happen in the cities. They, perhaps like many of us, have become exposed to a variety of philosophical and religious belief systems. Why should they put their trust in the story of one man executed by the Romans in the boondocks of Judea whose friends claim he rose from the dead? Also within Luke's world are the multitudes of gentile country peasants and urban day laborers struggling to make sense of their lives within the disruptive world of imperial cult and commerce. How is the gospel to be "good news" to them?

FOR JEWS, THE STRUGGLE to maintain identity amidst the forces of Greco-Roman culture was largely one internal to the Jewish community. Judaism has no history of proselytizing. Like most peoples of the ancient world, Jews were satisfied in being allowed to practice their own traditions -what other people did was their own business. Yet in the multicultural world of the Diaspora, Jews had to deal with the diversity of traditions practiced by their neighbors.

One group responded by practicing the ancient exhortation to stay as far away from gentiles as possible except in emergencies. Others, like the Alexandrian philosopher Philo, tried to make Jewish traditions sound "rational" to the Hellenistic mind. Yet another approach, exemplified by the Pharisee Josephus, was to rewrite the scriptures to sound like a Roman history book, putting the Jewish journey alongside those of other noble peoples. Still others succumbed to pressure and gave up the ancestral ways in favor of local practices. But all these options were in some ways defensive measures designed to assure one's identity within a wider world.

Christianity, though, gave rise to Paul the apostle-a Jew who believed with every fiber of his being that the resurrection of Jesus opened the door to the gentiles' admission to membership in God's people. With Paul and his traveling companions, the gospel writer Luke had a fabulous hook on which to hang his story of the gospel's struggle to reach to the ends of the earth.

Luke begins the story in Jerusalem, the Jewish omphalos-the center from which life flows. The movement is launched by the powerful Pentecost wind/spirit that sweeps over the apostles and those Jews from throughout the Mediterranean gathered there for the feast. The curse of Babel (Genesis 11) is to be reversed, and all peoples are to hear God's Word in their own tongues.

The first chapters of Acts portray this message being announced to Jews who, Peter and Stephen believe, are prepared by their scriptures to hear it. All we are saying, they insist, is that our hope has been fulfilled in the resurrection of Jesus, and the times of jubilee, of starting over refreshed and renewed, have come upon us. This "good news" gets Peter thrown (twice!) into jail and Stephen stoned to death by an enraged crowd in Jerusalem.

If the gospel gets this kind of reception among those who speak the language of scripture, how will it be heard among those who speak other languages? Acts narrates a series of encounters outside Judea in which Paul struggles to be heard. The issue in Acts is not primarily the literal question of translation any more than learning the proper intonation of bangala would have generated real dialogue between Rev. Price and the Congolese villagers. What Paul faced, and we continue to face, is the bigger challenge of making the gospel comprehensible to people whose worldview is different than our own without watering it down.