Abstract
In the last few centuries, Christianity has grown noticeably in the Asia-Pacific region. The New Testament as a collection of texts taken from another time, another place, and another culture is therefore no longer relevant only to the “traditional West.” This chapter argues that if a diachronic historical text is used for teaching life and values, then the curriculum orientations and contents will be shaped characteristically by the translation paradigm that is applied to the translation of that text. The author will substantiate this argument by drawing upon the practical translation and teaching experiences derived from working with The Epistle to the Romans of Apostle Paul. The epistemic and spiritual differences conveyed through the Linguistic Translation Paradigm (LTP) and the Cultural Translation Paradigm (CTP) will be contrasted. We will also demonstrate the principles of intercultural curriculum design and intercultural pedagogies that can magnify the educational and inter-perspectival impacts of using a classical text. The aim is to show religious curricula based upon a canonical text can all the same be inquiry driven and concept based, rather than dogmatic in orientations. Since the study of a diachronic historical text can engage the learners deeply with inter-perspectival value clarifications, the ability to reflect and free oneself from “borrowed values” is at least part of the achievable joys for most learners. When so taught, The Epistle to the Romans can help learners to appreciate God’s Grace and simultaneously do their own inward philosophical “housekeeping” as sovereign subjects scripting their own lives and choices. The CTP path is not easy. It is, however, possible. It shall be of some liberating and ethical benefits to the Asia-Pacific region in general, if more educators are becoming aware of their essential role as intercultural translators when they teach.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Needleman remarks, “The essential work of man is to cultivate access to the interior self.”
- 2.
The theologian Karl Barth (1968, p. 5) says in the preface to the second edition of his commentary to The Epistle to the Romans, “For us neither The Epistle to the Romans, nor the present theological position, nor the present state of the world, nor the relations between God and the world, is simple. And he who is now concerned with truth must boldly acknowledge that he cannot be simple.”
- 3.
In this chapter, we will use the 26th edition of Nestle-Aland as the Koine Greek source text (Douglas 1990).
- 4.
For instance, Wills (p. 177) observed in “Appendix: Translating Paul” that “Krister Stendahl and John Gager both tell us that modern translations, even those that seem most ‘objective’ distort what Paul was saying. Paul’s writings are the first to reach us from a follower of Jesus. It is hard to avoid anachronism when we try to reenter Paul’s world – to avoid terms that did not exist for Paul, terms like Christian, church, priests, sacraments, conversion. All such terms subtly, or not so subtly, pervert what was being said in its original situation.”
- 5.
As the theory goes, it is called “dynamic equivalence.”
- 6.
In Derrida’s own view, “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” should be understood as nothing is apart from context (Smith 2007, p. 23 & p. 41).
- 7.
Chen (2012) has elucidated on the nature of Shklovsky’s “Defamiliarization” and Brecht’s “Alienation Effect” and the differences between “Defamiliarization and Alienation Effect.”
- 8.
Caird and Hurst (pp. 19–20) have remarked, “To descend into the past is to travel in an alien culture, with the traveler having to guard against two opposite temptations: the temptation to modernize, to regard everything as though it were part of one’s own familiar world, ignoring the underlying strangeness; and the more insidious temptation to archaize, to be so impressed by obvious superficial differences as to ignore the underlying similarity.”
- 9.
Slattery (2006, p. 21) has a sharp observation which says, “I believe that many people are spiritually immature and religiously illiterate. Some live in fear of a vengeful god, a demanding parent, or cultish religious leader. Some have seldom moved out of their psychological comfort zones and physically insular communities to engage people of diverse beliefs, cultures, and perspectives. Others have been indoctrinated by family, spouses, or pastors into destructive behaviors and materialistic lifestyles. Many believers (and nonbelievers) are very sincere, but they have never studied or embraced philosophical investigation, critical evaluation, spiritual meditation, and historical analysis, which are the hallmarks of a theological curriculum in the postmodern era - in contrast to indoctrination and blind obedience to a militant theocracy.”
- 10.
“To engage a work of culture is to participate in an event, in the play of tradition” (Higgins and Burbules 2011, p. 374).
- 11.
Peterson (1997, p. 202) observed, “It [i.e., Language] becomes functionalized when it is used just for information or in getting someone to do something for you. Or, in getting someone to buy something. As Christians we get caught up in that culture, and we start using language, albeit necessarily, in its lowest sense…. I think it’s time for a great recovery of language. We have to recover the nature of our language because words are holy.”
- 12.
See footnote (9).
References
Barth, K. (1968). The epistle to the Romans (trans: Hoskyns, E.C.). London: Oxford University Press.
Bennett, K. (2007). Epistemicide! The tale of a predatory discourse. The Translator, 13(2), 151–170.
Brague, R. (2007). The Greek idea of divine law. In The law of God: The philosophical history of an idea (pp. 19–29) (trans: Cochrane, L.G.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Branick, V. P. (2009). Understanding Paul and his letters. New York: Paulist Press.
Bryanton, R. (2013). Imagining the fourth dimension. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = MN3C_zlW4g
Buckland, W. (1969). The Roman law of slavery: The condition of the slave in private law from Augustus to Justinian. New York: AMS Press.
Caffarella, R. S. (2002). Planning programs for adult learners: A practical guide for educators, trainers, and staff developers. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Caird, G. B., & Hurst, L. D. (1994). New Testament theology. Oxford: Clarendon.
Chen, L. (2012). Alienizing translation: A study on Xu Zhimo’s verse translation. Beijing: China Social Sciences Press.
Cheng, S. L. (2010). Book review: On the son of God loves me. In Translation paradigms and a historic-critical reading of the Epistle to the Romans [by Ho, O. N. K. (2013)] (pp. 703–705). Hong Kong: The Hong Kong Institute of Education [Ed.D. Thesis].
Chia, C. (2010). On being human: A theological depiction of man. Johor: Partners Training & Communication Sdn. Bhd.
Connolly, B. (2008). Adult learning in groups. New York: Open University Press.
Cooper, J. (2007). The motivational property of dissonance. In Cognitive dissonance: Fifty years of a classic theory (pp. 60–61). London: Sage.
Costigane, H. (1999). A history of the western idea of conscience. In Conscience in world religions (pp. 6–10). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Donfried, K. P. (Ed.). (1991). The Roman debate. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.
Douglas, J. D. (Ed.). (1990). The new Greek-English interlinear New Testament [with the new revised standard version, New Testament] (trans: Brown, R.K. & Comfort, P.W.). Wheaton: Tyndale House Publishers.
Du, B. R. (2013). On methodological approach to Chinese philosophies. Taipei: Commercial Press.
Erickson, H. L. (2007). Concept-based curriculum and instruction for the thinking classroom. Thousand Oaks: Corwin Press.
Hannam, P. (2012). Philosophy with teenagers: Nurturing a moral imagination for the twenty-first century, or, why we need an inquiry based pedagogy for religious education in the secondary school. In J. Schmack (Ed.), Engaging religious education (pp. 107–122). Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Higgins, C., & Burbules, N. C. (2011). Teaching and translation. Philosophy of Education, 369–376.
Ho, O. N. K. (2009). The son of God loves me – A cultural translation of the Epistle to the Romans into Chinese. Hong Kong: Grace & Beauty Foundation.
Ho, O. N. K. (2012). On the challenges of translating culture: The origins of reading Rom 13:1–7 as ‘The doctrine of unqualified obedience’. China Graduate School of Theology Journal, 52, 15–54.
Ho, O. N. K. (2013). Translation paradigms and a historic-critical reading of The Epistle to the Romans. Hong Kong: The Hong Kong Institute of Education [Ed.D. Thesis].
Ho, O. N. K. (2010). How to render νόμος (nomos) of Romans into Chinese: An investigation on the interplays of textual traditions, translation paradigms and the Gospel theory of Paul. China Graduate School of Theology Journal, 49, 45–72.
Malherbe, A. (2006). Paul and the popular philosophers. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
Maslow, A. (1996). In E. Hoffman (Ed.), Future Visions: The Unpublished Papers of Abraham Maslow. London: SAGE Publications.
Mesle, C. R. (2009). Process-relational philosophy: An introduction to Alfred North Whitehead (trans: Zhou, B.X. [into Chinese]). Kweizhou: Kweizhou Remin.
Needleman, J. (2007). Why can’t we be good? New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin.
NIV. (2015). Romans verses. Retrieved from http://www.biblestudytools.com/romans/1.html
Ornstein, A. C., & Hunkins, F. P. (2004). Curriculum: Foundations, principles, and issues. New York: Pearson.
Paul, R., & Elder, L. (2012). Critical thinking: tools for taking charge of your learning and your life. Boston: Pearson.
Peterson, E. (1997). Subversive spirituality. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Plato. (2013). The laws of Plato. (England, E.B. ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ren, D. S. (2007). A cultural study of translating the Bible into Chinese. Wuhan: Wubei Jiaoyu.
Slattery, P. (2006). Curriculum development in the postmodern era. London: Routledge.
Smith, J. K. (2007). Who’s afraid of postmodernism? (trans: Chen, Y.C. [into Chinese]). Hong Kong: Logos.
Tam, Z. X. (1984). Nida on translation. Beijing: China Translation and Publishing.
Taylor, K., Marienau, C., & Fiddler, M. (2000). Developing adult learners. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Economist, T. (Ed.). (2013). The Economist pocket world in figures (2014th ed.). London: Profile Books.
Van Hecke, M. L. (2010). Blind spots: why smart people do dumb things? (trans: Huang, Y.X. [into Chinese]). Taipei: Briefing Press.
van Manen, M. (1990). Researching lived experience. London: State University of New York Press.
Vella, J. (2002). Twelve principles for effective adult learning. In J. Vella (Ed.), Learning to listen, learning to teach: The power of dialogue in educating adults (pp. 3–27). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Wiles, J. (1999). Curriculum essentials: A resource for educators. London: Allyn and Bacon.
Wills, G. (2006). Appendix: Translating Paul. In What Paul meant (p. 177). London: Penguin.
Yang, F. G. (2014). Facing the fact squarely about the growth of Christianity in China. In Newsletter of the Centre for Christian Studies and Christian Study Centre on Chinese Religion & Culture, 22, 1–5.
Yu, H. Y. (2009). Wang Yangming in five hundred years: Wang Yangming in China and the world. Kweizhou: Kweizhou Jiaoyu.
Zhou, N. (2005). Dominia potestas. In The principles of Roman law [Principles of Roman laws] (Vol. 1, pp. 230–237). Beijing: Shangwu.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ho, O.NK. (2016). Teachers as Translators in Asian Religious Education. In: Lam, CM., PARK, J. (eds) Sociological and Philosophical Perspectives on Education in the Asia-Pacific Region. Education in the Asia-Pacific Region: Issues, Concerns and Prospects, vol 29. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-940-0_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-940-0_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-287-938-7
Online ISBN: 978-981-287-940-0
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)