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RE: Back to Greek



I worked four years employed by Norwegian among Africans 
of a variety of religous and educational backgrounds.  My
job was to make messages meaningful to both insiders and
outsiders to local societies.  In every place, it was my
amusement to have my own background and presuppositions
unique to all theirs.  The task entailed brief encursions
into new perceptual and conceptual worlds.  Each message
had to be painted in new colours and hung in a new frame
in order to secure from our interlocuters the kinds of
response in speech or behaviour, which showed that some
similar meaning had been ceated in their minds or their
experience.  In approaching the Bible, I try to do the 
same thing: discern the psycho-cultural milieu of the
biblical writers, interpret their statements in words,
sentences, pericopes, and discourses, and then to 
experience whatever it was that had become so important
to them.  Thereafter, having come to some sense of God
in my experience, I seek to enter, at brief moments,
the often very different conceptual world of others and
so to act, speak and pray, that they too may come to
the experience of God which has become so important to
me.  Whilst I may not subscribe to the Hellenistic
philosophies into which Luke attempted to write his
prologue, I can seek to understand it and to come to
the realities to which he was pointing.  I find it 
unnecessary to adopt as my own the conceptual world
of others to avoid the cutural conditioing of
my home society, although it may be helpful to gain
insight into several such worlds (religions, philo-
sophies, worldviews) in order to begin distinguishing
the reality from the cultural dressing.

Galen Currah
currah@iclnet93,iclnet.org