Faith, Science, and the Role of the Translator

An adapted excerpt from my upcoming book, Mere Science and Christian Faith.

In a 1945 letter, an admirer expressed admiration for the immense gifts of the noted twentieth century Christian apologist C. S. Lewis, especially at the way Lewis made 

Christianity comprehensible to an increasingly unbelieving public. Lewis responded,

People praise me as a “translator,” but what I want to be is the founder of a school of “translation." I am nearly forty-seven. Where are my successors?

Translators and translation--I often think of these themes when I ponder how to bring together faith and science and how to communicate their interaction and integration. I also know that translation into the vernacular is God's way of doing things. It's even the essence of Christianity: Jesus, God's very Word, spoke in the simple language of stories (or parables). He translated the message of the kingdom of heaven into earthly language.

And God did the same thing at Pentecost: The Spirit used the church to speak in languages that all the listeners could understand, the languages they dreamed in. This is the essence of translation. Whenever I’ve had the opportunity to preach on Pentecost, the birth of the church profoundly moves me. Ponder God’s strategy: one of most surprising element of Acts 2 is that everyone who heard the message that day knew Greek, and so God could have let Peter preach in that language. But to most it felt like alien--indeed it was a foreign tongue, which had forced on them by the oppressive Roman imperial government (and before that by the Hellenizing efforts of Alexander the Great). So instead of the common language of Greek, the Holy Spirit brought the message in their own native tongues. 

What is our native tongue? It's the languages of our dreams; it's the tongue we use to cry with despair and pain (and to swear, frankly), as well as to shout with joy. 

“Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language?” (Acts 2:8). 

As we take in the power of Pentecost, we realize that need to bring the Gospel in the vernacular, in native languages. And this leads to a question: What if we worked harder preaching the Gospel in the language that people work and dream in? For so many today, that’s the language of science and technology. We live in a science- and technology-saturated world. That’s the water we swim in. That's the air we breath. That's the language many of us dream in. 

And that's why the church needs translators.