New Pentecost, New Babel

A reader, Dan Glover, sends the following reflections concerning my quotations from John Mbiti on the "Pentecostal" experience of getting the Bible in the vernacular:

"Your comment from John Mbiti got me thinking of what the Bible in the vernacular of a culture does. It ignited the reformation as well thanks to the work of Wycliffe, Luther, Tyndale, etc. I love how Mbiti describes this as an outpouring of God’s Spirit through the availability of the Word in a way not previously available to so many in Africa, an African Pentecost.

"Taking Mbiti's comments and combining them with the article by David Mills in the latest Touchstone ('Preaching Without Reaching,' about the tendency of many preachers to attempt to make the biblical language of a passage relevant and accessible, nearly always unsuccessful), I think what is happening in our culture is the reverse of this 'pentecostal' event in Africa. In our culture, there are publishers who have printed the Bible, or at least the New Testament, in formats and language that resemble teen magazines, novels, graphic novels, comics, and there are versions that have removed gender, theological terms, etc. I wonder if what we are experiencing in our cultural context is a 'Babel' period, a time when God has let men warp and edit (from the pulpit if not in the actual book) His Word so far and we as a culture are entering into confusion. If Pentecost was an undoing of the confusion that happened at Babel (redemptive-historically speaking) and that this has continued throughout church history with the Bible being translated by godly men into more and more languages, then when a largely godless culture (ours) and a largely disobedient church (ours) says to God, in effect, 'the Bible we have is understandable but we want to take the edge off or remove or reinterpret those parts we don't care for,' and we warp it and abuse it, maybe God is giving us over to the confusion of Babel again until we split apart and our Western Empire is scattered over the face of the earth. Hence, a new Pentecost in places like Africa and the global south."

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, July 04, 2007 at 10:22 AM

Permission is given to use material on this site, provided the source is cited, blog entries are republished in full, and the author is notified in advance.