Avoiding the Seven Demons

I've always been perplexed by the passage in Luke 11, where the Pharisees accuse Jesus of using the power of Satan to drive out evil spirits.

It's not so much Jesus's refutation that confuses me. In the discussion, he coins the phrase that Abraham Lincoln borrowed - a kingdom divided itself cannot stand - to show that Satan's forces can't survive if they war against each other. He then uses a parable about robbing a strong man's house to explain to that although our enemy has a formidable powers, he is easily bound and overtaken by his maker.

I'm good up to this point, but it gets a little trickier in the teaching moment afterward, when Jesus turns away from the immediate treatment of good vs. evil and begins directing criticism toward the Jews' unbelief.

The Interpreter

Ever since Babel's tower, learning languages has been the main hurdle in cross-cultural communication.

At that time, man's pride was so audacious that he felt he could do anything, even build a stairway to God's dwelling place. It's interesting that God recognized man's nearly limitless potential, and to hear the Bible tell it, he had to twist their tongues to keep them from reaching it.

Generations in the future, even with all our advances in computers and technology, our inability to talk to each other still limits our capacity to work together across borders.

In college, I thought I'd take a step toward fixing that by learning Chinese. I had been on missions trips to China and felt I'd have a better chance at communicating with sensitivity on future journeys if I used the people's heart language. Not to mention that it would help me travel, and it wouldn't hurt my job prospects if I could speak a language that almost a sixth of the world's population uses every day.

It's been hard. Chinese is a tonal language, and a word like ma can have 5 different meanings depending on the inflection of the voice. Chinese is also monosyllabic, meaning one word is usually one syllable, represented by one character. But today's Mandarin Chinese employs a lot of compound words like feiji, the word for airplane. "Fei" means to fly, and "ji" means machine, forming the literal and quite logical "flying machine."

Even with my struggles, I've had one strength in Chinese that a lot of foreigners don't have (and I'm only saying this because people have told me so): I can keep myself from imposing a standard of what the language should and shouldn't do based on my English-tinged mind.

The point of learning a foreign language is that it's foreign, something outside the realm of what your mind has processed before. This is both the maddening and the beautiful part of tackling the task of conversing in a different tongue. Getting there can be tough, but even in little victories you feel like you've opened up another identity, taken up a new self and joined an exclusive club.

Following God is like that, too. He's so holy, set apart, so other, that everything about his character is incomprehensible to us, infinitely more difficult to understand than Greek or Chinese to the English speaker.

I think it's pretty obvious that spiritually, weakness, sin and selfishness are our vernacular, and it's going to take some hefty studying in life to get to the point where our conversations are seasoned with salt and productive for his kingdom.

I like to say I'm "studying Chinese," probably because it makes me sound impressive and exotic (to people who don't already know better). Truth is, I rarely pick up my many Chinese books, and I've failed to get a language partner who can help smooth my conversational skills.

The same goes for learning God's language. The vocabulary of forgiveness, grace and peace pop up in my head too infrequently. The textbook is often too heavy on unfamiliar themes. I rarely speak to God on his terms or listen when he pronounces how I should order my steps. A language is a way of life, and I disregard with my actions that which I desperately desire to master in my head.

Good thing God sent an Interpreter who makes plain the complex realities of who God is. His Word is my spiritual dictionary.

Living Water

America has two obesity problems. Along with our bellies, our billfolds are getting fat, flabby and out of shape.

Just as eating good food isn't bad, padding our pockets isn't necessarily a negative thing. But gorging ourselves leads to weight gain, causing health problems that could be avoided with exercise and a smart and disciplined diet.

Financially, it's the same principle. Hoarding our wealth is a symptom of selfishness, a stem that sprouts out of the roots of pride and selfishness. Building a fortune to serve ourselves, to prop up our comfortable lifestyles, causes clogs in the arteries that lead from our heart to God's and undue strain on the system that circulates his love and ideas throughout our lives.

Today I've been listening to the audiobook of "Revolution in World Missions," a semi-autobiography by the founder of a ministry I support called Gospel for Asia. The ministry seeks to mobilize native missionaries throughout Asia to bring the name of Jesus to their own people.

K.P. Yohannan, the author of the book and the founder and president of GFA, describes the vision as a cost-effective and timely way to reach the most unreached peoples of the world with culturally relevant Gospel teaching. He pits this idea against the paradigm of Western missions, sending "blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white people" to areas throughout the globe where their presence is often unwelcome or forbidden.

In these situations, Mr. Yohannan argues, it often takes years to learn language, secure the requisite immigrant status, build relationships, learn cultural mores, and finally, to plant churches. Gospel for Asia operates by cultivating trained native missionaries who are ready to go to their own people for a fraction of the cost of Western missionaries, if only someone will send them.

A native of the Indian state of Kerala, Mr. Yohannan didn't come to America until he was college-aged. He didn't speak English until he was 16. He'd always heard about American affluence but finally experienced it when he came to study on scholarship at a seminary in Dallas. To make a long story short, he was appalled by the way that U.S. citizens went about their days with little idea of how filthy rich they really were.

One day's meat for us was enough to feed an Asian family for a week, he said. A $3 latte at Starbucks is the equivalent of three days' wages for more than a billion people living in poverty. After meetings where he spoke about the lost and dying, he was shocked to note that the after-church meal he ate often cost more than what he had collected in his love offering for the support of native missionaries who were suffering for Christ.

In fairness, Mr. Yohannan isn't all self-congratulating. He grapples with these issues in the text, and he admits the failures when he fell into the same traps. But his message is clear and unabashed: The Church in the U.S. and other wealthy Western nations has been financially blessed so that it can help faithfully bankroll the work of reaching the lost for Christ in some of the most untouched places.

GFA has grown tremendously out of this vision. A turning point in the ministry was creating $30/month (about a dollar a day) sponsorship plan so that a believer here can support a believer there. That remains a cornerstone of GFA's fundraising efforts.

The problem is that it's hard to get Americans to sacrifice anything. If the current financial crisis tells us anything about ourselves, it's that we haven't yet begun to loosen the grip that materialism has not only on our culture, but on our hearts as Christians and our churches as well.

I propose a way to combat this, and in the process, waistlines will likely slim.

We spend tons of money going out to eat every week, some of us more than others. For many, getting a drink with a meal is second nature, nevermind the fact that it usually adds about $2 to the bill and hundreds of calories that our waistlines are fighting hopelessly against.

Maybe we should try to only drink water (offered free at most establishments) when we eat out and put the money that we saved away so that we can support GFA or ministries like it. I think we'd be surprised at the millions we could raise so quickly and easily. Jesus said that there would be untold blessings for anyone who gives a cup of cold water to nourish his disciples. With this plan, we can even drink the water ourselves and still reap the spiritual benefit. It's dying to self in a small way. Starting here, it's possible that we could begin to walk the path of true, sacrifical giving that invests in God's kingdom rather than our own.

What does anyone out there think?

Click here to support a Gospel for Asia missionary.

Download "Revolution in World Missions" after you sign up for email updates.

Every Tribe and Tongue

A new ministry is building an online community to expedite Jesus' goal of making disciples from every tribe and tongue.

Using open-source wiki technology and an army of volunteer translators, Gospel Translations is looking to provide online access to Gospel-focused books and articles in a variety of languages.

Wiki is a code framework used for collaborative Web sites like Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia where registered users can contribute and edit articles.

Gospel Translations builds its English library by partnering with ministries that allow the use of their copyrighted content (See list here). Then, volunteer translators convert the resources into other languages on the site.

The goal is to quickly and efficiently provide a knowledge base for Christian leaders in parts of the world where there is a dearth of suitable theological materials or where traditional print distribution hasn't kept up with the demands of the rapidly growing church.

The leaders of the effort say the Christian center of the world is shifting away from its traditional seat in the West as the evangelical populations of Africa, Asia and Latin America multiply exponentially.

In some of these areas, the Bible is the only Christian literature available. In places like China, many resources are published, but they're regulated by complex rules.

The emotional fervor of Christianity can spread like wildfire, but if a spiritual movement is not based on true discipleship, it's ultimately an exercise in fanaticism. Yes, God's Word has everything we need for the process of discipleship, but a broader base of knowledge provides protection against heresy and a check against the temptation to interpret difficult passages based on presupposition rather than truth.

The one spiritual commodity the West has available for export is biblical knowledge. What would my spiritual intellect be without the insight of C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity? How would I have started to understand the supremacy of God in day-to-day life without John Piper's Don't Waste Your Life? If not for Donald Miller's Searching for God Knows What, who would have colorfully explained the mystery and wonder of finding identity in the person of Jesus?

Resources like these need to escape the stuffy libraries of ungrateful and complacent hoarders like me. This new platform gives them a chance - through telephone lines, underground wires and fiber optic cables - to really spread their wings.

Projects have already begun in Arabic, Russian, Bahasa Indonesian and other languages, including an entire portal in Spanish. See the complete list of languages on the homepage.

Click here to become a translator.

Watch Gospel Translation's intro video below. It is an initiative of OpenSource Mission:

Balancing with the Book

Beijing-branded Bibles distributed in China will highlight the government's volatile stance on civil liberties.

China's human rights critics have had ample fodder for attacks in the run-up to the Olympics in Beijing. Concerns over the handling of riots in Tibet, arms deals with a genocidal regime in Sudan and arrests of key religious leaders in unregistered churches and groups all seem to indicate that China has not lived up to the human rights promises it made when awarded the bid to host the Games.

China's defenders, however, have a picture of their own to paint. The government's swift and effective response in aiding grieving citizens the aftermath of the devastating Sichuan earthquake, its designated areas for approved protests during the Games and handling of supposed terrorist threats in remote areas have all been lauded as signs that the country is moving in the right direction. All this, and the fact that China’s economic situation and the daily degree of personal freedoms have improved dramatically since the country opened its borders three decades ago.

The challenge for those examining these conflicting portrayals of the world's most populous country is to figure out whether one is a mirage distorting reality, or whether both have semblances of truth that fuse to form an entirely new image.

In light of a few recent developments and conversations, I can only support the latter idea. With a land as huge, dynamic and varied as China, nothing is set in stone, and the only thing it's safe to be dogmatic about is that dogma here is the height of arrogance and a sure precursor to a lesson in intellectual humility.

The question of the dissemination of the Bible and the treatment of underground Church leaders in China highlights this unpredictable environment. Last year, the Catholic News Agency reported that Bibles were on the government's list of banned items for Olympic athletes. That article, which was actually false, ignited a firestorm of criticism from Christian groups. Authorities quickly denounced the rumor, saying that athletes were allowed one Bible in the language of their country.

Now, in an apparent effort to allay concerns that China is not friendly toward religion, the government has made an extra step that at least looks like freedom. A recent China Daily article announced that thousands of Christian texts will be distributed freely to athletes and visitors to the Olympic Village. Some 10,000 bilingual Bibles, 30,000 New Testaments and 50,000 books featuring the four Gospels have been ordered, as if to scoff at those who warned of China’s intolerance.

This sounds encouraging, but as I kept surfing the Net, I came across an article that noted the crackdown on unregistered house church pastors and foreign missionaries over the past year. According to the article, which cited experts on the subject, the Chinese government expelled more foreign missionaries in 2007 than in the entire 59 prior years of communist rule combined. Voice of the Martyrs, an organization that tracks persecution of Christians around the world, is asking supporters to buy bracelets that remind them to pray for the mistreated Christians of China during the Games.

Only a nation as complex as China would leave us to reconcile the conundrum of a government that simultaneously persecutes a faith and disseminates its texts. The danger from a Western perspective is to chalk the Bible plan up to a ploy and completely ignore its potential for helping to spread the Gospel. And the government would be well-advised to realize that Christians can’t be duped into thinking that printing the Word erases trespasses against it. As a Chinese friend from Shanghai told me tonight, “In China, there are many sides, and you have to look at them all.”

Photo: Mao keeps watch over tourists at Tiananmen. Copyright Trevor Williams, 2006

Bible Translation - Getting the Word Around the World

The Bible says that faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God, but the Babel debacle threw a wrench into the process. Since that linguistic diaspora, believers worldwide have been left to figure out which translation of this Word to rely on.

As is the case with most American Christians, I have more than a few Bibles lying around the house. I bought a few for different translations, but most are simply the product of years of accumulation in a culture where more is better and a scriptural surplus exists. This is not the case in many other parts of the world. Even where the Word is widely published, translations are sometimes disseminated with faithful intentions but little cultural knowledge or concern. (A domestic case in point: warm-hearted, suit-clad Gideons who continue to distribute King James New Testaments on college campuses in America.)

I recently read an article about the World Bible Translation Center, a 34-year-old organization based in Arlington, Texas, that focuses on getting the scriptures out to literate but little-educated people around the world on a conversational and culturally appropriate level. According to the article, the center has translated the Word into more than two dozen languages - including Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Yi - and has completed New Testament translations in 20 more. Such widespread production and distribution is an enviable achievement, considering the fact that the World Center's translations take almost seven years of painstaking study to complete. The Center puts in the effort for clarity on the front end so that those receiving the scriptures aren't forced to do all the work, i.e. making interpretations they aren't educated enough to make. "Responsible translation means communicating the meaning, the ideals, as opposed to the literal words," Ervin Bishop, the senior translator for the center, says in the article.

But some aren't so sure that this is the way to go. King James Only advocates believe that the Authorized King James Version is the closest approximation we have to the inerrant word of God. A translation that has been so well accepted for 400 years should never be put to shame, these critics say. No matter that scholars have shown the King James to emphasize the oratory aesthetic more than literal translation, and don't worry about the fact that it's hard to understand. God doesn't change, so why should the scriptures? they ask.

I see more than a few problems with such a view, almost to the point that I almost don't want to dignify this movement with a response. The first thing to notice is the xenophobia it fosters. One Web site says snidely that a team of scholars were assembled by God "to translate His word into the world's most popular language, English." This statement comes packed with all manner of insincerity, implying that English is the language of God and the Western world is privy to some degree of spiritual privilege. The author of the same article "debunks" the myth that we should go back to the original Greek and Hebrew to translate. One wonders about the lineage of the texts used by the King James translators. And by the way, although English might have been popular at the time, it's arguable as to whether or not it was the world's most popular language. Also, despite the fact that English has already started along the path to becoming the lingua franca of global trade, Mandarin Chinese boasts the most native speakers of any language in the world, and China has its own translation issues, as I point out in a recent post.

Another problem is one I think the World Center nails on the head. King James advocates, and anyone else who makes one translation their sole epistemological resource, value soliloquy more than the soul, the message behind the words, which are the skeleton upon which God adds the meat. Check this quote from the World Center's Web site, from Bishop again, "The Bible is the Word of God. 'Word' in this usage, however, is not the same as 'words.' The Word (logos) of God is His 'Message' conveyed to us, the people of the world using our 'words,' that is, whatever human language we use. This means it has to be expressed differently for different people."

The article cites an example that I think drives home the need for a reasonable degree of innovation in the field of biblical translation. The center's Arabic translation takes the word "Christian," which has a negative connotation in Islam, and makes it "Christ follower," capitalizing on the respect that Muslims have for Jesus while more accurately relating the true meaning of Christian discipleship. If such cultural concern can be replicated throughout the whole of scripture, why should we place unnecessary impediments to understanding in the way of those who could be seeking God?

In fairness to the King James folks, who I think are well-meaning but grossly misguided believers, the center of the debate is the extent to which we can become all things to all people (1. Cor. 9:20-23) without watering down or completely changing the essential message of the scriptures. With the wealth and prosperity message catching fire as yet another American Christian aberration, enough of that is going on already, and the issue is that more translations breeds less uniformity and more confusion. While I believe this may be a valid concern in a liturgical setting, it's hardly a problem in translation. Easier translations will give more people access to the message of Jesus, which at its core has to be received like a child anyway. And with more people reading, more people will discuss the Truth, and the every believer can be pleased with the end: God gets more glory.

Jesus came to fulfill the Law and the Prophets by loving the world. He reserved his sharpest critiques for those who were the most well-versed in the letter of the law, but had little regard for the spirit behind it. Although sometimes he spoke in parables to avoid being understood (in alignment with prophecies about him), he also used everyday illustrations so that common people - like fisherman, farmers and tax collectors - could understand the deep truths of God's kingdom. And many times, Jesus is cited as using Aramaic, the vernacular, rather than Greek, Latin or even Hebrew, which were all in use at the time.

The World Center distributed 2 million Bibles last year through missionaries and foreign outposts, but they don't only deal in languages other than English. The government of Uganda, the national language of which is English, is helping distribute 283,000 of the World Center's user-friendly translations to be used in elementary schools, the article said. As long as the Word is not compromised, I welcome the efforts of the World Center and pray that they will be used effectively for the spreading of the kingdom abroad and at home. I continue to collect Bibles from each country I visit to remind me that my language does not have a monopoly on the Word, and that (gasp!) Americans have no divine right to scriptural superiority.

To support the World Bible Translation Center, click here.

For recent posts on Pastor Bill Shorey's blog about the importance of using different English translations to hear the meaning behind the words, click here.

Photo: An Arabic New Testament given to me by a Jordanian believer who had been persecuted for his conversion from Islam to Christianity (left) and a Chinese Bible I bought at a rare Christian bookstore in China. Copyright Trevor Williams, 2007

The Word on the Chinese Bible

According to a recent article on Time.com, a publishing company specializing in printing Chinese Bibles has produced 41 million copies in the last 20 years, and the total is growing every year as the number of Christians grows in China.

Amity Printing, which prints at a factory outside of the old Chinese Nationalist Party capital of Nanjing, is set to produce 3 million Bibles in the coming year, and the company is planning to expand into a 515,000-square-foot facility, according to the report.

Austin Ramzy, the author of the article and a contributor to Time's China Blog, which I follow, asks a variety of experts to estimate the number of Christians in China, a task that's next to impossible given the government restrictions on churches.

One thing they did all agree on is that the numbers, however difficult to calculate accurately, are getting larger.

An interesting nugget that Ramzy doesn't mention is which translation of the Bible Amity is producing. The standard, government-approved version is called the Chinese Union Version, a rigid, high-brow translation published in 1909, which some say even most university students have a hard time understanding. Since Ramzy mentions that Amity's operations are entirely legal, meaning that they're distributed through government-sanctioned three-self churches, I have to assume that the Union Version (known as the he he ben) is what's being churned out.

Although there are other translations in the works that I've never heard about, I've come in contact with the New Chinese Version, the xin yi ben, on trips to China. I don't think it's quite as colloquial as "The Message," but university students have responded to much better to it than the CUV in my experience. Click here for a more extensive description of Chinese Bible translations.

As with everything else in China, a strange paradox is that the Chinese factory can produce and export Bibles (Amity has the sole license, according to some reports), but people can't bring more than just their own into the country. Word on the street is that a new rule is in place to combat Bible trafficking leading up to the Olympics. Tourists coming into China can only carry one Bible for personal use, not backpacks-full for "distribution or propaganda."

On the official site of the Olympics, the travel page "recommends" that foreigners bring no more than one Bible into the country, and officials galore have made comments expressing the idea that they won't be suppressing any foreigners' religious freedom during the games.

On the other side, Christian soldiers from all over the world are gearing up for what they see as a 16-day evangelical siege on the Chinese capital. Web sites touting plans to reach China during the Games are making missionaries all over the Middle Country cringe. If they struggle to reach their communities while living there, what good will haphazard Americans do on a two-week tract-bombing mission? Newcomers shouldn't think that the Chinese government won't be prepared. They read the Internet (Hello, Big Brother!) and they won't be playing nice. But then again, your biggest risk is probably a light beating or deportation, and if you're looking to make a splash, that's one way to do it.

In all this chaos, one thing is for sure: Next year, people will actually watch the Olympics for once. Let the games begin.

Do Ethiopians Have the Lost Ark?

I stumbled upon an interesting article today in Smithsonian Magazine about the possibility of the Ark of the Covenant residing in Ethiopia, hidden and guarded in a small church in an out-of-the-way city called Aksum.

I won't ruin the story for you, but it's interesting how the mystery of the Ark still intrigues so many people, even those who stake no claim to Judeo-Christian religious heritage. The mystique of the Ark still tantalizes investigators and historians, and I think the reporter in the article did a great job capturing the Ethiopian believers' reverence for it and balancing that aura against history.

Equally interesting are the comments at the bottom of the article, where armchair historians tout their arguments for or against the existence of the Ark and the merit of even investigating the claims of the Ethiopians. It's surprising how dogmatic some of the people get, clinging to their epistemology and debasing others. Although it would be absolutely astounding to find the Ark, I think the bickering at the bottom of the page is the electronic precursor to a much more overblown international conflict that would occur if the Ark were actually found. Besides, if faith is the evidence of things hoped for and the certainty of things unseen, then maybe the Ark is better left undiscovered.