Mid-faith Crisis 316: The neurodivergent church

We had lots of interesting feedback this week, including a question about whether the statement ‘Jesus is Lord’ still works for us in our democratic, post-feudal society.

I was reminded of a piece I wrote in a book called God’s Dangerous Book, which talked about the first translation of the Bible out of Greek and into the Gothic language by a cleric called Wulfila. Here’s an excerpt:

There were three immediate problems. First, the Gothic language had no alphabet. Wulfila had to invent an entirely new alphabet, which he based on the Greek alphabet, mixed with some runic signs.

Second, Gothic lacked words for some of the concepts in the Bible. The Goths were the first race from outside the Græco-Roman world to have the Bible; so some concepts in the New Testament were simply unknown to them. They didn’t use crosses so Wulfila used the word ‘pole’ instead. Other unknown concepts he solved using compound words (e.g., the word ‘altar’ was made up of the Gothic words for ‘place of sacrifice’) or simply introducing the untranslated ‘Christian’ word (e.g., ‘gospel’).

The third problem was the Gothic culture. For a warrior race, prone to hitting people with various weaponry, some concepts needed careful translation. For example, he used the word fráuja for ‘Lord’ instead of the alternative draútins. Both meant Lord or master, but fráuja denoted the lord in the peaceful context of his household, whereas draútins was used to describe him a warrior-lord, or leader of a war-band.

These problems – and solutions – are exactly the same problems which have faced Bible translators ever since. Alphabets have to be invented, concepts taken from the local culture and altered, and certain key Christian terms imported into the culture. What Wulfila started by the Danube goes on around the world today.

This connects with what I was writing about last week: the need to find relevant metaphors which unlock truth for our audiences. I don’t think there is an easy alternative for ‘Jesus is Lord’ but maybe ‘Jesus is head of my household’ is something to hold in the background.

Part of the issue is that our society is an individualistic one; the idea of giving anyone command or control over your life is alien to us. And, anyway, is that really the kind of Lordship Jesus asks for? He rejects that kind of leadership pretty definitively.¹

Perhaps ‘master’ as in master and apprentice? But that has slavery overtones. Or ‘teacher’? But that lacks the authority and ‘King’ is even more anachronistic. I quite like the idea of Jesus as Liberator, but that is certainly stretching the Greek word kyrios a bit.

In the end, perhaps the metaphor just has to stand. As I say in the podcast, sometimes metaphors become their own thing, their own, unique word. See? I told you metaphors were difficult.

Listen or subscribe here