Must We “Translate” the Gospel?

missional-graphic-2-300x124David Fitch says and assumes, “yes,” but I doubt it. The “missional” movements are not really fundamentally different from the middle-class, pedestrian “church growth” movements of 25 years ago. They all seem to assume that accommodation is something that we do as we reach out to others. This is confused. William Wilimon prosecuted the case against “translation” a long time ago. It is not we who “grow” the church or “build bridges” or “reach out” by accommodating or translating anything. Let’s start where John started: “In the beginning was the Word….” God the Son is the revelation of God. He is the accommodation of God to us. The written Word is accommodated to us. We don’t need to “make it relevant.” It is the Word of God! It is relevant. We just need to speak it. Paul spoke it at the Areopagus. He preached the law by pointing out their religious impulse and how misdirected it was. In effect, he called the idolaters. He pointed out how they confuse the creature for the Creator. Then he preached the gospel. Many there thought it was foolishness. Indeed, to those who are perishing, it is foolishness, but it’s God’s foolishness.

Maybe we feel the need to “translate” and “accommodate” the faith because we’re trying to communicate the wrong thing? David tells a story about a man with a drug addiction who was confronted and walked away. This small group lacked something. David thinks its one thing, not knowing the particulars, I wonder if it’s another: the basic biblical categories of law and gospel. This drug addict (or any sinner) needs to hear two words: the law (God demands perfect righteousness, hates your sin, you are a sinner, and if you are not righteous before God, he hates you) and the gospel: God the Son is the righteousness of all those who believe and that righteousness is given freely, unconditionally to all who trust him alone for their salvation. There’s hope for that drug addict. He need not walk away because he’s not “serious” enough abot the Christian life. He needs to repent and believe. If he’s sorry for his sin and wants our help we should love him enough to help him. If he’s not sorry for his sin, if he’s impenitent, we should tell him the law. It’s that simple.

That’s a message that can be understood in every culture and in any language. We do not need to “modernize” it or accommodate it or translate it. God has his own metaphors and analogies and similies. We need to learn to speak God’s analogies, metaphors, and similies and stop making up our own.

This post first appeared in 2008.

Subscribe to the Heidelblog today!


12 comments

  1. Scott,

    I think the divide may be even bigger than you have stated it. David Fitch writes: “We regularly caution that the gospel is not only about what Jesus can do for me. It is primarily about the transformation of our very way of life into God’s mission for the world.”

    To declare that “the gospel” is PRIMARILY about our transformation rather than the good news of what Jesus has done – is to come perilously close to proclaiming a different gospel which isn’t the Biblical gospel at all.

    David

  2. And, the purpose of the message is not to recruit or to convince per se. It’s to put out an genuine offer of God, a call… in order to gather the lost, by the Spirit – those Christ came to find. The law/gospel message is simple yet hard. Simple to understand for those who believe, hard to accept for those who reject.

  3. I love this sentence and I believe new Christians would do well to dwell on it:

    “He need not walk away because he’s not “serious” enough about the Christian life.”

    and the rest is quite good too

    “He needs to repent and believe. If he’s sorry for his sin and wants our help we should love him enough to help him. If he’s not sorry for his sin, if he’s impenitent, we should tell him the law.”

  4. So good to see someone connecting the dots between the current “missional” movement and its precursor, “church growth.”

    Thank you for a beautiful, simple article stating the truths of scripture for us.

  5. “And, the purpose of the message is not to recruit or to convince per se. It’s to put out an genuine offer of God, a call… in order to gather the lost, by the Spirit – those Christ came to find”
    Observing over the years, I wonder if a large part of the attraction folks have to this sort of thing is because they want to recruit nice upper middle class people for their church, not necessarily the type of people that Jesus seemed to hang out with. In other words, they just don’t want to do what Jack said.

  6. A) “Ignoring the particulars” is revealing.

    B) David Fitch’s response (informally)…As he says it…he did not respond explicitly to this post, “but here is a post that expresses my notion of the way contextual work feeds into theology on the issue of gospel … and I believe it explains why I find this post to be a misread (and a pathetic oversimplification of the issues its dealing with)”…

    http://www.reclaimingthemission.com/?p=4395

    c) (A) was my take, not Fitch’s.

Comments are closed.