Schleiermacher – Classic Theology

One of my personal pet peeves is when pastors bust out the weird words for Hell. “You can see here that they’re talking about Gehenna, which is different than Hades and certainly much different than Hell.” Huh? Hades and Gehenna aren’t English words. You’re just leaving words in their original language and insisting that it’s somehow different and deeper for not having been translated. Can you imagine if any other theological subject took the same approach? Imagine talking about the Gospel and someone said, “well, let’s be sure to speak about the evangelion, which is different from the gospel or the devar YHWH.” Or imagine if we were talking about prophets and someone insisted that we needed to start talking about prophētēs and navi’im if we REALLY want to be serious about all of this. Not all of these conversations are wrong-headed. There absolutely is a place for learning more about cultural attachments to different words and the art of translation, but when a single theological subject (Hell) is the only one that people ever want to debate, I start to wonder if it’s out of a misled curiosity or a deep-seated need for the text to say something other than it does. Ironically, when I looked at the players involved in those translation decisions, both intellectual wanderlust and deep discomfort with Hell seem to be present in the Hades/Sheol/Gehenna conversation.

On one side, you have evangelical pastors that seem to see conversations about Hades and Sheol as the work of serious scholarship unburdened by the assumptions of previous tradition. The logic goes something like this: do you really want to know what the biblical author was trying to tell you? Then you need to get back to the source of the book itself! What did these words mean in the original Jewish setting? The authors didn’t even know the word “Hell,” and if you read passages about Sheol while thinking about a burning pit full of devils, you’re going to totally misunderstand what they were getting at. If you want to be accurate, you have to accept that there are no clean, accurate translations of these concepts into English. We need to leave these words in their original language and let people learn what Jews thought about the afterlife in those timeframes if we want people to understand what those passages mean.

To some extent, I respect the thought process. It’s sincere and genuinely focused on the Bible. It is, however, a little misled. It tosses out the contributions of historic Christians in the effort of uncovering something “more accurate,” but what’s uncovered is almost always much, much less so. After all, it implies that there is a reasonably simple, non-scholarly way for people to comprehend what Jewish religious thought was about the afterlife over thousands of years, and that’s totally unreasonable. Just look at the three-year stretch that Jesus spent in public ministry! Throughout the New Testament, we see the Saducees and the Pharisees. Were they on the same page about the afterlife? No! For a Sadducee, any talk about the afterlife would have been absurd. They believed there was no afterlife at all. The Pharisees, on the other hand, there was a bodily resurrection at the end of time after which some would go on to everlasting life and others would go on to eternal torment. That’s a pretty big difference in the way they thought about the afterlife! Do you think they agreed on the meaning of the word Sheol? And remember, we’re only looking at two groups that were active in the three years that Jesus was involved in public ministry. The Old Testament covers THOUSANDS of years of history. If we’re convinced that words like Sheol and Gehenna are so wildly unlike our modern words that we need to leave them untranslated, we also need to accept that we can’t offer up one explanation about what the afterlife REALLY was to Jews for thousands of years and claim that this is a penetrating work of scholarship that finally explains the concept. If Jewish religious scholars couldn’t agree during the life of Jesus, they certainly weren’t all miraculously on the same page before that. No, we would need a study that’s far deeper and wider than we’re really interested in to seriously embark down this road. In describing what Jews “really thought” about Sheol, you’re inevitably picking one interpretation and blanket applying it for a broad swath of history.

Beyond introducing a level of complexity that is both not scholarly enough to be taken seriously and too scholarly for the most people to understand, there’s a bigger, simpler concern that ought to disqualify the use of these terms in an evangelical setting: is Sheol a real place? It’s usually described as a a spooky, neutral realm of the dead, so is that an actual possible landing place for people that die? What about Hades? And is Hades a different place than Sheol? After all, it is similar, although the Greeks had some moral distinctions to their Hades. You could make it to Elysium or sink to the depths of Tartarus. Oh, but those aren’t explicitly mentioned in the New Testament, so do they count? Or was the New Testament Hades different from the Greek Hades? And how does Gehenna fit into all of this? And how does ANY of it fit in with Christian orthodoxy? The simple truth is that it doesn’t fit into Christian orthodoxy. These places, if imagined as anything other than Hell or Heaven, don’t fit within a cohesive Christian framework. Our Christian forebears recognized this. Bibles didn’t leave those words in their Greek and Hebrew forms until the 19th and 20th centuries and none of those words appears in any historic doctrinal standards (unlike Heaven and Hell, which are pretty standard fare). Leaving the words untranslated doesn’t just risk confusing people! It also risks adding non-existent places to Christian’s understanding of the cosmos. The hundreds of years of resources where our ancestors in the faith translated those words as “Hell” actually help us to understand how they contribute to a consistent worldview. In ditching them for a “more accurate understanding,” we’ve ditched a tremendous aid.

But let’s jump to the other side of the theological spectrum. What about more liberal theologians? Why are they in favor of Hades and Gehenna instead of Hell? This one doesn’t take a lot of explaining. Universalism in both it’s soft and hard forms, are much more common in mainline churches and expectations for doctrine tends to be more pluralistic. In the tradition of Schliermacher, the Bible is often seen as a compilation of ideas about God that are bound by a very different time and culture, rather than a singular authoritative voice illuminating any objective truth. Removing instances of the word Hell from the Bible is generally seen as a good thing, since eternal suffering is supposedly incompatible with the idea of a good God. To use terms about Hades and Gehenna instead helps establish the foreignness and pluralistic nature of the Bible. It becomes more of a cultural curiosity, rather than something serious that needs to be addressed.

My belief is simple enough: people deserve to have Bibles where EVERY word is translated into their language, not just the convenient ones. For over well over a thousand years, Hades, Gehenna, and Sheol were normatively translated to “Hell.” The Vulgate used the Latin word for Hell. The Wycliffe Bible used Hell. The King James used Hell. Hell is the best English rendering of those Greek and Hebrew words, and using them creates a theological consistency that’s necessary to have any honest understanding of the faith. At times, I see people blame the shortcomings of Latin and English for a translation as “shallow” as Hell. The Latin word for Hell, Infernum, is pretty close culturally to our understanding of Hell, so maybe that’s where things fell apart! They claim, “we just don’t have the same vocabulary available to us as the Greeks and the Hebrews did! The Latins mistranslated those word, and English kept those wrong connotations, but now we’re getting back to a purer understanding.” The argument sounds good on paper, until you realize that Latin and Greek were both spoken in the New Testament era and there were no ancient Greeks disgusted by the Latins use of their filthy word Infernum for being too far from their pure Hades. If similar translations were good enough for the Greeks, how they it be too poor for us? A mountain has been made out of a molehill. These words can be reasonably translated! We just don’t like the translation, either because it bores us or because it scares us.

By no means do I say any of this to imply that serious cultural and word studies ought to be off limits. Of course Christians should learn more and continually try to understand what the Scriptures say. But we ought to ask ourselves, why is Hell the single word subject to this intense modern scrutiny? Nobody is scrambling to know the cultural nuances behind ancient and modern understandings of Heaven or implying that a purer understanding of purgatory is just beyond our grasp if we stopped using English. Why are the words for Hell mysteriously the exact words we can’t translate? Why are some of the explanations for those words popularly offered up by detractors actively incorrect (no, Gehenna was not a garbage dump outside of town and not a shred of archaeological or historical evidence has ever implied that it was)? Why has an uptick in interest in universalism coincided with our unwillingness to use “Hell”? Why are the untranslated words mysteriously absent from all historical doctrinal standards? We could go on and on with pointed questions, but the point is that we’re being horribly inconsistent when we use Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna, and our inconsistency isn’t random. It’s the product of very particular thought processes, all of which are skeptical of historic Christian tradition. The evangelicals want to abandon tradition to get back to a “true sense” of the text, and the liberals want to abandon it because they just don’t like it, but they’re both missing out. The things we were handed down from our Christian forebears may not always be perfect, but in this particular instance, they’ve given us clear direction on how to reasonably translate words into our language, and their translations offer doctrinal clarity that you simply can’t find without it. Next time you come across a Sheol, Gehenna, or Hades, be a little spicy and just say “Hell.” The choice isn’t just defensible; it’s better.

A few years back, I read a really helpful article by a sociologist about different cultural communication styles. Communicational norms were rated on two axes: direct-indirect and formal-informal. The first axis (formal-informal) is mostly about structure. Formal communication involves certain levels of decorum, contains some form of hierarchy, and moves at a slower pace. Informal communication is freer and quicker, but it leaves a little more room for error. The other axis (direct-indirect) has a little more to do with efficiency and manners than form. A direct communicator says exactly what they mean, but it’s not always pretty. An indirect communicator dances around the point a bit, but they don’t run much of a risk of offending anyone.

Everyone has their own expected style of communication based on the norms that they’ve worked within, but when we enter areas with other dominant communication styles, we have to pay really close attention. It’s easy to misunderstand or be misunderstood! An example that was offered up involved a German analyst that was working at a British company. His manager stopped by his desk one day and asked if he’d ever considered doing his reporting a little differently. The analyst said no. The manager gave a bit of a sigh and wandered away. A week passed. New reports were filled out. The manager was back at his desk. “Hmm, I really do imagine we’d all be able to read the reports much more quickly if the format was a little different. Have you ever thought about that?” The German admitted that he hadn’t thought about that before and went back to work. The manager walked away. Again, reports were filled out. Again, they were the same. The manager come to the worker and told him that he would have to be let go. He was shocked! Why? The manager told him that he’d been asked repeatedly to change the way he was reporting and he had failed to do so. The German was legitimately baffled and insisted that he’d never once been asked to change the report! He’d only been asked if he had considered alternative methods. It seemed like a really theoretical question to him, but to the British manager, he was practically barking orders. The German was used to a much more direct style of communication (as Germans tend to be), while the British manager had a comparatively more indirect way of communicating (as is the norm for many Brits). In this case, the difference in expectations cost the German his job.

Was the story true? No idea. It certainly could have been. And I think it highlights how important recognizing communication styles can be. Not that this particular model is the end-all be-all of communication styles. There are all kinds of models out there. This one seems considerably less arbitrary than some others, but I’m sure there are alternatives worthy of consideration and more axes you could add. Either way, it made me think of my work in ministry and how I communicate effectively (or ineffectively) because of these expectations.

My speech style tends to be informal-indirect. This was the dominant way of speaking in the region I grew up (central Ohio), and I think it’s relatively common throughout the midwest. To us, informal language shows that you don’t think you’re better than anyone else. You’re just a regular person trying to get a message across without any bells and whistles. Formal communication seems comparatively stifling. For example, when I worked in banking, I remember people sending e-mails that said, “Please advise on this project’s status,” and rolling my eyes. They could have just swung by my desk and asked, “Hey, what’s going on with this?” I’m no grand vizier. No “advising” seemed necessary. As for the indirectness, it just seems so much more polite than the alternativve. If you dance around the point just a smidge, you can say something without stepping on any toes. For example, if you asked if I wanted a slice of pie that you brought over, I might say, “That pie looks phenomenal! I wish I had room in my stomach, but if I ate one more piece of pie, I’d burst.” That means no. Further asking will not result in a new answer.

My move to Appalachia has thrust me into a region where the most common communication style is a little different. The dominant axis of communication down here is informal-direct, and my words require some translating at times. I remember someone asking me in my first few weeks if I wanted them to do some task around the church that I didn’t really want them to do. I responded with the perfect informal-indirect response: “Gosh, I love your energy! We need more of that kind of passion! And you’re looking to address something that’s so needed around here. My only concern is… is this the right time for that? Because if we do the right act at the wrong time, it may well be worse than no action at all. Why don’t we hold on that for a while and wait until we can really find that perfect opportunity.”

The poor congregant just kind of stared at me. “Soooo… you want me to do it next week then?”

Someone else in the room translated for her: “He says he doesn’t want you doing that.”

I was horrified. How rude! I didn’t say that! I mean, I did, but I danced around and made it way prettier. A “no” in such uncertain terms was practically a gunshot in my mind, but the congregant didn’t seem to mind. “Oh, ok,” she responded. And she went about her day as though nothing had happened.

There’s been a few occasions like that where what I say requires translation from a native speaker. Which leaves me excited as I’m digging into Schleiermacher’s “On the Different Methods of Translating.” This is a classic in translation theory and theology. He opens by acknowledging that translation is far more than just switching one language to another:

Are we not often compelled, after all, to translate for ourselves the words of another person who is quire like us, but of a different temperament and mind? …Occasionally we must translate even our own words, when we want to make them our very own again. And this skill is practiced not only for the purpose of transplanting into foreign soil what a language has created in the fields of scholarship and the rhetorical arts, thereby expanding the horizon of power of the mind, but it is also practiced in business transactions between individuals of different nations, and in diplomatic exchanges of independent governments, in which each is accustomed to speak in its own language to ensure strict equality without making use of a dead language.
”On the Different Methods of Translating,” (ironically) trans. Waltraud Bartscht, Theories of Translation, 36-37.

Translation is a vast project of getting an idea to one person to another in a comprehensible way. How do we do it well? What are its boundaries? And is he stretching the word “translation” further than it should be stretched?

There are massive implications here for our Bibles. More importantly, I think there are massive implications for the way we share our faith. Are we “translating” Christianity to each person when we share the Gospel, seeking to explain it in a way that both honors the original intent, yet can exist within the region’s dominant social imaginary? What constitutes a valid translation of the Gospel message and when has someone left the original intent so far behind to appeal to the dominant social imaginary that their “translation” ceases to be legitimate translation?

Tag: Schleiermacher

Conveniently Untranslatable: Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna

Translation and the Gospel