Ethnic group hermeneutics

1. "God speaks to men and women always in the vernacular" (Bediako 1995, 60).

2. "The single most important element for building...an indigenous Christian tradition is...the Scriptures in the vernacular language of a people" (62).

3. The Bible is inherently translatable, in both a narrow technical sense, and in a more profound theological sense.

4. "The message" proclaimed by the missionaries does bear some resemblance to and share some continuity with "the message" received in translation by Africans. (Sanneh 1989, 53)

5. The very act of turning to another people's language in order to translate the Bible revitalized that language and culture within which it subsists, thereby enabling that culture and its people to articulate for themselves what the Bible says.

West notes that the fifth element is often suppressed in favor of the fourth... [According to Sanneh] there are two dimensions to this fifth element. The first is the revitalization of indigenous religion and culture. This occurs when the technical processes of translation pushes indigenous respondents to reexamine their culture in order to assist the translators [read foreign missionary] with appropriate language with which to translate the Biblical texts...The second dimension is the potential of the receptor culture to now add their own voice to the voices of many other communities of faith...To put it provocatively, what the gospel is yet to be determined, for not all indigenous voices have yet been heard speaking for themselves.

Gerald West. "Indigenous Biblical Hermeneutics : Voicing Continuity and Distinctiveness." In Postcolonial Perspectives in African Biblical Interpretations. SBL 2012. 93-94.

Kwame Bediako. Christianity in Africa: The Renewal of a Non-Western Religion. Orbis 1995.

Lamin Sanneh. Translating the Message: the Missionary Impact on Culture. Orbis 1989.