An Incarnational View of Translation

Don't miss reading Henry Neufeld's blog post today, An Incarnational View of Translation.

I have always been fascinated by parallels between how we can view the human and divine sides of Christ, as well as the human and divine sides of the authorship of the Bible. As my theology professors emphasized, our belief in the inspiration of the Bible does not mean that God dictated the Bible to human authors. It does not mean that the human authors were robots writing down God's words. Instead, in some way that is a mystery, just as the incarnation of Christ is a mystery, human authors wrote in ways that fully engaged their individual writing styles. And yet God was pleased to have it said of what they wrote that it was theopneustos (2 Tim. 3:16). Writing the books of the Bible was some kind of incarnational process. Translating the Bible into other languages is also some kind of an incarnational process.

How fortunate we are to be the beneficiaries of God clothing himself and his revelation in human form!