Communication in Mission and Development

Relating to the Church in Africa

Harries

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781621896715
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Communication in Mission and Development identifies, unpacks, and articulates fundamental problems in communication in mission and development as it is being carried out in Africa and the majority world today. New technology, unique in the history of mankind, is throwing up vexing issues, to date barely recognized, in communication practice. This book reconsiders:•Previous work by mission scholars on communication. •Questions regarding materialism in Africa. •Widespread understandings on the nature of human equality. •The impact on communication of the holding of monistic vs. dualistic worldviews.•African and Western approaches to hermeneutics. •The use of European languages for communication in Africa. •Issues related to globalization and development.•And more... Underlying differences in philosophical foundations amongst Western as against majority world people influences their respective communication to such an extent that the expectation that both sides simply understand one another because they happen to use the same international language is found to be unrealistic. Communication in Mission and Development concludes that the practice of mission and development will better cope with current realities when the use of local languages is once again given its proper decisive place.

1

A New Communication Model

The basis for human communication is subject to much controversy. The details of what actually happens when people look at each other and converse are widely debated. Sometimes answers provided in the course of such debates can bring more confusion than light.

A new orthodoxy that swept the field of Bible translation in the twentieth century has in the twenty-first century “lost its position of unquestioned dominance” according to Ryken.1 Ryken refers especially to dynamic equivalence theory, the discovery and use of which has impacted Christian mission practice in general as well as Bible translation in particular. This “new orthodoxy” seems to have assumed that translation happens in a context-less world. It has been based on a presupposition that the biblical text should mean essentially the same thing for everyone. The meaning derived from a word or text should, according to this theory, be essentially the same for an African tribesman, as for an Arab trader, as for a Chinese philosopher, as for an Inuit hunter. The meaning that is taken as correct, and that is to be shared with others, is the one ascertained by western scholars drawing on diverse techniques and centuries of study. That is, instead of translating words or phrases in a literal way, scholars in the “new orthodoxy” have been attempting to translate the Bible in such a way as to ensure that every people everywhere will come to the same conclusions on reading the same text.2

Ernst-August Gutt has questioned this new dominance; the dream that “translation by itself, in a totally different culture than the original, can effectively and faithfully communicate the Christian message” was undermined by Gutt.3 Gutt demonstrates that translation according to the new orthodoxy is not always possible. For example, there is no simple way for a people who have only ever known pitch-roofed houses (due presumably to the high levels of rainfall that they experience in their home areas) to grasp what is happening in Jesus’ parable (Luke 5:17–26) in which men climb onto a roof and make a hole in it through which to lower a sick man.4 “If the same clues are processed in a different context they cannot lead to the same interpretation” he emphasizes, demonstrating that Bible translators have in recent decades had “unrealistic expectations of what translation can achieve.” This undermining of prior conventions in biblical interpretation arises from advances in translation theory brought about by developments in the understanding of pragmatics. Gutt’s understanding was heavily influenced by relevance theory.5 Recent research that has led to the development of relevance theory has shown that words acquire their meanings in contexts, and are meaningless without contexts. To state that “any message can be communicated to any audience” is no longer tenable.6 See chapter 7. Words acquire their meanings from the ways in which they are used (Wittgenstein, according to Hanfling.7). This applies to words found in the Scriptures as well as those found elsewhere. Let us say that while a given language used in a particular context will result in a certain word having a particular meaning, a translation of that word in a different context can have a different meaning. This means that a meaning found, say, in English in a western context may not be carried forward to Swahili in an African context. To tell a non-Westerner that the “meaning” of a text in English is also the meaning that they must find in the translation of that text into their language results in at least a dual interpretation—an actual apparent interpretation and an interpretation that is correct according to western scholarship. That is, if a given non-western language in its particular context results in a word having a particular meaning, then how can someone from outside of that context/language system tell them that this meaning is wrong? This kind of correcting of people in their own language by outsiders easily occurs as a result of the implicit translation arising from inter-cultural encounter. For example, translation of a Bible commentary from English to Swahili will effectively be an attempt at imparting impacts of English words that arise from their context onto Swahili terms that frankly have a different context. This is the problem of the use of dynamic equivalence translations inter-culturally (see also Harries, 2011f): they fail to take account of the fact that in the movement across cultural divides the contexts8 in which words are interpreted will have altered; as their context will have altered, so will have their meanings or impacts.

The use of Ecclesial (church) authority to impose “known meanings” onto texts that are read in little known (by the West) languages and contexts, as has happened in the application of dynamic equivalent thinking to Bible translation, has stultified indigenous (non-western) theological activity. At the same time in recent decades there has been a decline in the interest of western people in learning African languages and cultures.9 Western academics being dominant on the scene of global Christian scholarship yet functioning on the basis of false premises, has resulted in indigenous people’s interpretations of the Scriptures being condemned. That is to say—if indigenous translations are evaluated according to whether their readers acquire theology that is orthodox to the West, i.e., whether dynamic equivalence transfer of meaning has been successful, then they are likely to be faulted because in actuality meaning arises largely from the context into which words are received. Christian mission to Africa has had a two-pronged approach, and these two prongs have contradicted one another. On the one hand, Scriptures have been translated into indigenous languages and people have been encouraged to take what they read as being the “Word of God.” On the other hand, Christian orthodoxy from the West continues to be transported to Africa, especially through English language texts and theological institutions that use European languages.

Western theologians’ ongoing invitation to non-Westerners to contribute to their efforts by publishing, providing they use western languages in a western way, can add insult to injury. This is because these very non-Westerners can often only succeed in publishing through denying truths that are commonly held in their home communities. A classic example of such denial would be of the prosperity gospel that is clearly widely followed in much of Africa, yet that is rarely expressed in scholarly writings from the continent. My issue is not whether the prosperity gospel is either “correct” or helpful or otherwise. It is that encouraging non-Westerners to publish i...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Illustrations
• Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: A New Communication Model
• Chapter 2: Review of Four Key Contributors to the Debate on Communication in Mission
• Chapter 3: Materialist Communication in Africa
• Chapter 4: Communication of “Racial”/ Cultural Identity
• Chapter 5: African Christianity and the Love of Material
• Chapter 6: Hermeneutics with Respect to Communication in the African Church
• Chapter 7: Communication in Africa Missed Due to English
• Chapter 8: Understanding Needed
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Bibliography