Quarreling, yet without sin

From time to time, while translating or checking a passage of Scripture, it happens that one little rascal  of an idea escapes the heady, intellectual nature of our task and makes a mad dash toward our hearts, audaciously applying itself to our personal lives. Ok, it doesn't happen as often as it likely should, and we sincerely ask for your prayers in that. After all, we have been given the privilege of studying God's Word at a depth that many only dream of, and we OUGHT to come out of the process radically changed! Eelanaaŋgo? (That's a Gmz tag question meaning "Isn't it like that?" It's used in impassioned speech to emphasize a point.)

Not that it never happens. Last year, I had a front row seat as the Gmz Christians wrestled with some of Jesus' radically counter-cultural statements such as "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you," (Luke 6:27) and " Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery." (Luke 16:18). A Gmz culture that abided by these two principles would be very different than what we see today. More recently I had the privilege of standing with the Gmz translators in awe of the great things God did through the early apostles in the book of Acts. What a powerful example of BOLD witness that book gave to a young church poised on the edge of its own expansion efforts! And now as we move into working on several of the New Testament epistles, I ask for your prayers that our hearts would be convicted more and more and lives be changed accordingly. The letters to the Thessalonians have already shown us, among other things, the need to stand for Christ in the face of opposition, living lives worthy of our calling, working hard so as to have good testimony before others, and being children of the day as we await the return of our Lord Jesus.

As we have continued on into Paul's letters to Timothy and Titus, we have begun to wrestle with some of the qualifications and responsibilities of those in church leadership. I'm reminded of one verse we encountered in 2 Timothy, where the transfer from academic translation into application into our lives led us not so much into conviction, but into laughter, rather a hushed snickering as we couldn't find any way around its identification of our own sin! 2 Timothy 2:14, in the NIV, states, "Keep reminding them of these things. Warn them before God against quarreling about words; it is of no value, and only ruins those who listen."

Quarreling about words received such a harsh command? There isn't a day that goes by in the translation office where we don't stumble into this practice of "no value" which "only ruins those who listen." Call it what you will, quarreling (NIV, ESV), wrangling (NET, NASB, NRS), disputing (RSV), striving (KJV), fighting (NLT), we do it all every day even before our morning tea break! We confess to being blatant, unrepentant, repeat offenders and so if there is such a thing as hierarchy of sin, we hope this one doesn't rank very high. For arguments are a necessary part of the translation process. I firmly believe that the Gmz language is just as capable of communicating God's Truth as any other language is, BUT its language and its worldview haven’t yet been shaped by the gospel message so as to have ready-made terminology we can just pick up off the table and plop into the text. Rather, we "quarrel about words"  in order to tease out the different possible translations, thinking long term for how the words themselves will be shaped by the Biblical context as it enters and transforms the Gmz culture. Take, for example, the list of 14 different types of sinners listed in 1 Tim 1:9-10. Trying to differentiate near synonyms like some of these is fertile soil for disagreement. And so, writing on our table-top white board, we wrote the NIV choices, the words used by two of the Amharic texts (of which only 5 of 14 agreed), and then, possible Gmz renderings. The result is what you see here:

Some quarrels last over months or even years. This isn't new news to those of you who read the "I Saw Satan Fall…yet again" blog entries from Feb 2014, but the point can be further made in giving the update that two of those three "decisions" have since been overturned and changed. In all reality, some arguments will never end, there are just milestones along the way every time we hit the print button to publish a portion of Scripture. But, even in these marathon quarrels, the discussion itself shows movement in the right direction, leading us to hope for and run toward the now-invisible carrot of total consensus.

Just last Thursday, much to my amazement, one of the translators popped up with a new word for the idea of "encouraging " – a phrase which literally means "to push down on/plant someone's chest."  I can't tell you how many times we've quarreled in the past two years over the differences between comforting someone, encouraging someone, pleasing someone, and causing someone to become strong/mature, but with unanimous agreement on this new "chest pushing" concept, we can move beyond yet another argument, at least for now.

Lord willing, our quarreling will decrease as we continue in this work, but honestly, I'm not sure I look forward to that day as much as my non-confrontational nature might suggest. For truly, the wrangling part of the process has a certain appeal, like an archaeologist digging in the sand for years before finally unearthing something of historical value. The joy in discovery is that much greater with every ton of earth moved in order to arrive at it. And I'm becoming more and more convinced, God's work takes place in the processes we quarrel our way through, more so than in the outputs we revel so much measuring.