Starving for the Word

Mark Twain is reported to have said that a classic is a book that everyone praises but no one reads. By this standard the Bible is swiftly becoming a classic. How could this possibly be happening? I found at least a partial answer in Amos 8:11 (NRSV)  The time is surely coming, says the Lord God, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. A famine for hearing the words of the Lord! We live in the midst of a society that is starving for the Word of God.

We understand physical starvation. We used to see pictures of starving children almost every night on our television sets. We saw the bloated bellies and the malnutrition bleached hair of children in sub-Saharan Africa. It made us want to turn our heads. But what if this famine for hearing the Word of God had similar physical affects? Our neighbourhoods would be filled with the spiritually malnourished.

How could this be happening in a country that took a phrase from Psalm 72:8 to describe its founding? How could this happen in a country that seems to have a church on every corner?

As I have traveled across the province of Saskatchewan and recently the province of Manitoba I have brought up this observation with denominational and congregational leaders. My observations have always been affirmed – there is a lack of Biblical knowledge in the people in the pews of our churches.

An observation that has been made is that Biblical knowledge doesn’t always translate into Biblical behavior. That is absolutely correct but I think that there is some correlation between the two. For the purposes of this article and a few to follow I am going to focus on the lack of Biblical knowledge. Perhaps we can begin a conversation on how knowledge can be translated into action.

I have identified at least three reasons for this famine of hearing the Word of the Lord. The first is a lack of translation. There are something like 6,700 languages spoken on our planet. The latest statistics I have available tell me the entire Bible has been translated into 371 languages, the New Testament into 960 with some portions in 902 and 1500 languages in which work has begun. That still leaves over 3,000 languages where no work has been done. Pam Smith, a Choctaw woman working on a translation into her mother tongue said that the English Bible speaks to her head but the Choctaw to her heart. That means that at least 3,000 people groups cannot hear the Word of God in their heart language. They are starving for the Word of God.

Through the Canadian Bible Society and other organizations like Wycliffe Bible Translators this number is being chipped away. Translators from around the world come to Kitchener Ontario to our translation department to receive training in using Paratext, a software program that helps them in their work.

It had been hoped at one time that computers would be able to do all the work. Simply key in the original languages and instruct the computer to give it back to you in the language you had chosen. Do you remember when we were told that computers would make our lives so much easier, that we might have to work 10 -15 hours a week and our biggest problem would be trying to figure out how we would use all our extra free time. That didn’t exactly work out, did it?

There is a story about translation that disproved the theory that translation could all be done by computer. Matthew 26:41 “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” was translated by a computer into Russian. The resulting translation was “The vodka is good but the steak is lousy.” There is no magic bullet for translation, it is plain hard work.

The Canadian Bible Society is continuing to translate the Bible into First Nations languages. We are doing our part to reduce the number of people who are starving for the Word.

In my next entry I will address another reason for this famine – lack of accessibility.