The beauty of the Internet is that it expands theological dialogue beyond a local body of believers. A global perspective is helpful in correcting our own myopia. Today I got an email from a guy named Scott who is a Bible translator in Asia. He had some very insightful things to say about our experience having glazed donuts for the Lord’s Supper. Leave it to a Bible translator to have both deep theology and a passion for contextualization!

I help an indigenous church in Asia translate the Bible into their language. Their staple food is rice. They are familiar with bread, but only as an uncommon snack food, and a foreign one at that. So there is a potential problem with the connotation of bread as a spiritual symbol. Likewise in other cultures where corn, tortillas, yams, etc. are the staple, and bread may even be unknown.

Nevertheless, the translation principle is to maintain “bread” as a key term. Jesus didn’t say “I am the rice of life” and he didn’t break tortillas at the Last Supper. To substitute another term would be anachronistic, violating the standard of historical accuracy according to the original culture and text.

So the deeper meaning needs to be taught, adapted to the needs of each culture. In some cultures such as Asia the empty “foreign-ness” of bread needs to be linked with the heart level significance of rice. In others such as the West, the bleached “habitualness” of bread needs to be brought back to conscious significance. We have failed our duty if we leave it as foreign in the one culture or as habitual in the other.

Well said.