Fall 2011 Report

“So then faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God.”

Have you ever stopped to think what part of speech is the word “hearing”? A noun? A verb?

During discipleship with deaf people (as with other people who are ESL) something taken for granted by the majority culture is not so obvious. Think for a minute: deaf vs. hearing? Clearly two nouns: deafness or a deaf person vs. auditory or a hearing person. So imagine the misconception of God’s clear teaching of scripture that is possible: Does faith come only through hearing people? Or does faith only come as a result of becoming a hearing person?

Seriously! A recent visitor to DBC brought this conundrum to my attention because it was being used in a college level text book on Deaf Culture as a means of proving that the Jesus of Christianity did not die for deaf people. A short time later while working through a discipleship book with a deaf man he signed the word “hearing” (meaning a “hearing person” in Rom. 10:17) and I asked him if he thought that the scriptures meant a “thing” (noun) or an “action” (verb)? He replied incorrectly and so I grabbed a Greek Dictionary of the New Testament and showed him the subtext for entry <189> from <191>; hearing (the act, the sense or the thing heard); - audience, ear, fame, which ye heard, preached report, rumor

Then I signed the same verse back to him using the sign of receiving something through the eye, through the ear, or even through the heart. Expanding this to consider that dual meanings (noun or verb) could be achieved with most, if not all, of the words used to define “hearing”, I demonstrated the sense of the verse was that faith did not result if a person did not “understand”. Grab your concordances, the answer of course is both: <189> is a noun and <191> is a verb!

The practical problem is simply this: in the deaf community there are people who are ignorant of truth because they lack the tools or skills to access an English translation and there are those who willfully twist this to their advantage in order to distort the Christ of the Bible to become someone who is unable or unwilling to address the needs of the deaf…except to heal a random few in order to prove his role as “Messiah”. The solution is not so simple.

Attempts have been made to: 1) teach the deaf to become fluent in English so they have access to common study tools, 2) translate the Bible from English into a conceptual “sense” in ASL, 3) prevent/prohibit the deaf from being involved in teaching others lest they misunderstand or misinterpret scripture and face a sterner judgment (James 3:1), and 4) train deaf to be “evangelists” with the priority being salvation of souls and not worrying about “non-essentials” that include the systematic theology underpinning a proper understanding of salvation.

Please pray for us as we continue basic discipleship with deaf believers who have made a profession of faith, who often have been baptized and some have joined our local church BUT still have a long road ahead of them before they are able to rightly handle and divide the scriptures. Why? I want to suggest that the attempts above are not the model put forth in the Bible. Christ came to build HIS church and He chose the foolishness of preaching to regenerate sinners drawn by the Holy Spirit. Discipleship starts then and only then, leading to real growth. In part, this is due to scripture being spiritually discerned (part of the Holy Spirit’s role in a believer’s life) but also it is due to the exercise of application (part of a response to that work).

Read more: The Makis