New Tools for Translation Present Opportunities (The Faith Received)

Last week, Mere Orthodoxy released a powerful, free online tool for reading old Christian books. The Faith Received (TFR), though still in beta mode, is a moon shot for theological retrieval, a giant leap for evangelicalkind. Without major funding and within a narrow window of time, the team there has leapt over numerous hurdles and started something deeply significant.

To see why my outlook on this project is overwhelmingly (but not, I hope, naively) positive, it might help to get a little perspective on where we are as 21st century Christians.

Locked Behind Language

Back in 2014, I was on the advisory board for an organization committed to retrieving the riches of the Christian tradition for the edification of Protestant Christians. As we strategized about what was needed and what was possible, we kept coming back to one particular bind: deep and rich resources already existed plentifully in the Christian heritage, but they were not in print or in English. Some of the most important sources that could inform and guide contemporary church life were in Latin. This includes not only vast stretches of the patristic and medieval heritage (which we expect to be in Latin), but even the most elaborate and sophisticated Protestant works (which we sometimes forget were also in that not-just-ancient language). We had the good stuff in abundance, but it was locked up behind a language barrier.

How could that barrier be scaled? Either we needed a large team of highly skilled translators to get a lot more productive, or we needed a truly vast army of pastors and seminarians to learn enough Latin to read for themselves. Or both.

Read the rest at TGC.