Toward Understanding World Christianity’s “Translation Principle”

This paper examines the driving concerns behind Andrew Walls and Lamin Sanneh as they developed what became World Christianity’s “translation principle”: as Christian scriptures can be translated into any language, Christianity can be “translated” into any culture. For instance, they shifted scholarly attention from “Western” missionaries to the agency that new Christians (often in the majority world) exerted in “indigenizing” Christianity into local cultures, making Christianity their own. Arguing that this is how Christianity had always spread (even Europeans had “indigenized” Christianity into local cultures millennia ago), they contended that new, indigenous forms of Christianity were authentically Christian. This paper offers three brief examples that Walls and Sanneh give of how Christianity was “translated” into new cultures. It also explains why Walls and Sanneh considered Christianity’s translatability to be *sui generis*, detailing the facet of the “translation principle” that this panel places into a comparative perspective.