Setting the Word in “Stone”

Juan, a ten-year-old Chachi boy in Ecuador bought a large, spiral-bound notebook as part of his school supplies. Then, someone stole the notebook, a significant loss in terms of the local economy.

After the incident became known, one of the teachers talked with Juan to see how he was dealing with the situation. Juan said he would let it pass. Having viewed the JESUS video, he related how Jesus had said that if someone takes something from you, that’s what you should do. He reasoned that the thief needed it, so he himself was not going to worry about it.

I have no quarrel with the boy’s reasoning, for it clearly represents a Chachi cultural trait that we have observed over the years. Conceding something to another because he says he needs it or wants it is one way a Chachi person demonstrates consideration for the next person.

Juan’s reaction clearly illustrates the power that Jesus’ message can have on “one of these little ones.” The thoughtful youngster made a remarkable personal application in real life on the basis of what he had heard and seen in the JESUS video.

He also processed this part of Jesus’ message through the grid of his culture. We all do that. It is both legitimate and inevitable. No one lives in a cultural vacuum, just as no one speaks without an accent of some kind. Often we are unaware that we interpret or apply things according to our culture, whether for good or ill.

This leads us to wonder what would happen if an ethnic group like the Chachi were to retain only an oral record of the Scriptures. We can imagine that in retelling Jesus’ teaching on not asking for the return of confiscated goods, it might often be accompanied by a comment or an implication that the thief should be allowed to keep the goods because he needs it.

Perhaps after a few oral transmissions of the teaching, this particular element would be considered an intrinsic part of the story, possibly attributed to Jesus himself because it corresponds so closely to Chachi thinking. Thus in time the content of the message, or even the main point of the message, would tend to change.

This corresponds to an account we read by a missionary-anthropologist on the development of one people group’s religion—a distorted understanding of the gospel. It was based entirely on oral tradition that had begun through contact with a missionary centuries earlier.

Oral transmissions of the message clearly have their place, but in no way do they obliterate the need for one or more reliable means of access to the foundational document that we have received from others. God himself felt it important enough to inscribe the Ten Commandments in stone with his own “finger.” That encourages us, in turn, to make reliable facsimiles on paper, CDs, audiotape, videotape and DVDs—that nothing valuable and true be lost.

—An excerpt from Wiebes’ newsletter, December 13, 2003