The attempts of missions organizations like Wycliffe to translate the Bible into languages in predominantly Muslim cultures has hit a snag recently. The Insider Movement was an issue at some General Assemblies this past year. The issue is about the interface of translation and cultural context. For Muslims the concept of God the Son is quite troubling and offensive. When we say that they are importing an meaning that is quite different from what we intend. They think of it in a most crass sense, as if God the Father was Apollo cavorting with women.
There is a way in which these concerns seem valid on the surface. If care about success more than faithfulness. They are not mutually exclusive. We should want the gospel to prosper, but not at the expense of faithfulness to the message. This tension plays out in ministry philosophy (I hate using those 2 words together), church growth and more. Translation principles is not the only place this plays out.
As ambassadors of Christ (2 Cor. 5), we are to faithfully relate the message He has given us to proclaim. He is far wiser than us, so we should not presume to radically alter the message He has given us in the name of contextualization. Contextualization is intended to assist meaning, not obscure it.
The late missiologist Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998) experienced similar temptations on the mission field. He viewed the Trinity as an essential aspect of the gospel. The members of the Trinity act together for our salvation which is essentially bringing us into fellowship with the Trinity. The Father sends the eternal Son as the Incarnate Son to make us His Sons thru substitutionary obedience and atoning death & resurrection. The Father sends the Spirit to dwell in us to apply the work of the Son that we might experience all that the Son merited for us.
“The truth is that one cannot preach Jesus even in the simplest terms without preaching him as the Son. His revelation of God is the revelation of ‘an only begotten from the Father,’ and you cannot preach without speaking of the Father and the Son.”
We cannot separate the preaching of the gospel from the preaching of the Trinity because the gospel reveals the previously ‘hidden’ Trinity. Jesus does not come as God but as God the Son. His life is one of sonship in submission to the Father. As Paul says in Galatians, it was also to make us sons of God. We cannot faithfully preach the gospel (and therefore translate the Scriptures) if we are not faithfully communicating the Trinity as expressed in the gospel. We are tempted to think of the Trinity, and here the reality of Jesus as Son, as “a troublesome piece of theological baggage which is best kept out of sight when trying to commend the faith to unbelievers.” This, as Fred Sanders notes after quoting Newbigin, does not mean we keep using the term Trinity. But it does mean we are not to avoid using the very terms Scripture consistently used to identify Jesus: Son of God. We present a truncated gospel that is no gospel at all. It robs us of the Trinitarian understanding (and therefore biblical understanding) of the gospel in its essence and application.
This controversy is not a new controversy as Newbigin shows. We are tempted to ignore the larger theological ramifications of this matter when our only goal is “professions of faith”. We must ask, what is their faith professing? If it is not a gospel consistent with the biblical gospel, we have not really been successful. Sometimes theological correctness has eternal implications. The gospel is offensive to the flesh (in different ways in different cultures). Our task is not to remove those kinds of offenses, but help people to see that their offendedness is a symptom of their greater spiritual problem of rebellion and being dead in sins and trespasses.
Cavman Considers 
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