Philip Sampson is the assistant pastor at New Generation Church, a Baptist church in Christchurch. He recently submitted a PhD in theology at the University of Otago.
How should we reach New Zealanders with the gospel when our gospel language can be so foreign or misunderstood?
I’ve spent years pondering this question. Some of the language we use to share the gospel sounds foreign, if not straight-out weird, to many outside the church. I think of the mother who told my friend she didn’t want to take her kids to church because church is “always talking about blood”.
Our Bibles say Jesus is our redemption (1 Corinthians 1:30), however, New Zealanders are more used to thinking of redemption in terms of sports, whereby an athlete or team wins after a loss or poor performance and so ‘redeems’ their reputation, or when we redeem a voucher and collect a prize. While there is an overlap in meaning, it’s a far cry from the biblical meaning of a price paid to purchase our freedom from slavery to sin and death.
The disconnect hit me when I was labouring at a building site during Christchurch’s post-earthquake rebuild. A co-worker recounted a recent conversation he’d had with some guys on the street about Jesus. It turns out they were my friends, whom I would often join for street evangelism. But what my co-worker heard during their conversation was condemnation, guilt, and not much hope, not what I knew they were trying to convey.
As I read the New Testament, I’m struck by how Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Paul and the rest generally use everyday, well-known words to communicate the gospel. But many of our English gospel words—redemption, atonement, substitution/participation, propitiation/expiation, and even the word gospel itself—have become rather technical in a way they were not for the earliest church.
I’m convinced that the same biblical gospel is a message of hope for people in Aotearoa New Zealand today. Through it, Jesus has changed my own life, and I want to share that with others in ways they can readily understand. That sometimes requires updating our language, and the key question is how to do that well. We must avoid tampering with the gospel and ending up proclaiming ‘another gospel’ (Galatians 1:6–8) and avoid becoming so paranoid about protecting it that we revert to using first-century Greek (or a Greek-ified English/Māori/etc).
Through my thesis, I’ve been developing a model for contextualising atonement language, a model that can help us distinguish between biblical and unbiblical ways of talking about the gospel.
My research highlighted three key insights. First, the gospel has an objective shape, but the only way we can understand it is through a particular human language that is influenced by a particular human culture, so there is a degree of subjectivity to our knowledge. Scholars call this ‘critical realism’ — there is reality out there, but we can only know it from our cultural standpoint. For example, first-century Greek speakers were very familiar with the concept of slavery and capture in warfare and the hope that someone would pay a redemption price to purchase their freedom. This meant they easily understood Jesus giving himself to redeem them (Titus 2:14). Their cultural knowledge of slavery enabled them to understand the gospel.
The second insight is that we need to make a sharp distinction between translating and illustrating the gospel. A translation of the Bible seeks to remain faithful to the original cultural context. A translation should not say Jesus went to the Ara Institute of Canterbury’s carpentry pre-trade course or that he rode into Wellington on a Lime scooter. No, Jesus was a first-century Jewish carpenter in Nazareth who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. So, where there are cultural differences between first-century Judaea and Aotearoa New Zealand today, we explain them. That may mean updating some of our translated language to reflect changes in the English language. The English words ‘ransom’ and ‘redemption’ had roughly identical meanings in the 1600s, but ‘redemption’ (and redeem) has since taken on new, non-biblical meanings (such as my sports team or voucher examples), making it potentially confusing. Perhaps instead we could use the word ‘ransom’ in future English Bible translations, as it’s still used to talk about paying a price to free a kidnapped person.
In contrast, an illustration draws upon our own personal and cultural experiences to describe what the gospel means. For example, New Zealanders struggle to connect with the biblical language of blood, animal sacrifices, and washing away sins, because we find it baffling and even offensive. However, animal sacrifices made perfect sense to the ancient Jews and were even comforting. Through sacrifices such as the Day of Atonement, the uncleanness of their sins was washed away, and the burden of their sin was carried out into the wilderness. However, while this blood language is biblical and explains cultural differences, perhaps we could find an illustration within our cultures that expresses similar meanings. Might we say that Jesus is the Rubbish Truck of God, who takes away the sins of the world?
My third insight is that any illustration we adopt needs to communicate biblical meanings. My thesis identifies several practical guidelines for how to do this well. In a nutshell, finding biblical illustrations for the gospel requires:
1) a thorough study of the inspired gospel language of scripture and
2) how the biblical authors drew upon and subverted their own culture and cultural practices as they proclaimed the gospel;
3) a comparison of these underlying cultural practices used in scripture and somewhat similar cultural practices in Aotearoa New Zealand today; and
4) a careful consideration of whether we can draw upon and subvert local words and cultural practices in our own proclamation of the gospel in a way sufficiently like that of the biblical authors.
Returning to my Rubbish Truck of God illustration,
1) Hebrews says that Jesus came to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself (Hebrews 9:26) because 2) in the Day of Atonement, the scapegoat removes sin by carrying it out into the wilderness to make the Israelites clean. 3) Rubbish trucks carry our rubbish out to the dump to clean up our homes. Therefore, 4) the partial similarity of cultural practices and meanings suggests we could proclaim Jesus as the Rubbish Truck of God, who takes away the sin of the world.
Of course, rubbish trucks do not do everything sacrifices did, and we need to be careful, as there are always pitfalls and limitations to any illustration.
The goal in my research has been to equip people with the tools to communicate the one biblical gospel in ways that New Zealanders can easily understand.
I wonder what language you find unhelpfully foreign in your context, and how you are addressing that? What illustrations have you found helpful? How can we think carefully about our illustrations to make sure they are communicating biblical meanings?
Photo: by Kevin Martin Jose on Unsplash
