|
Annotated Outline: Much of Mark's labors in Kwongland from about 1998 to 2002 were consecrated to the development of a Biblical theology in Kwong consisting of 6 booklets divided into over 100 lessons and built around the theme of the Kingdom of God (the reasons for which are explained in Volume 2). Here, for your perusal, is an annotated outline of the first three volumes of this theology in English. (Don't hold your breath for the next three). A couple points bear mentioning. First, this is not a translation of the the Kwong theology, nor even a paraphrase or it, which would be almost unbearably boring for an English reader. In the interests of readability I have chosen rather to embellish the English version with the reasoning and suppositions behind what I have written in Kwong, while keeping the general flow of thought and lesson titles as they appear in the Kwong. (This had the added benefit of making the writing of the English version more more enjoyable for me too.) Some parts are heavily embellished, while other parts are a bit closer in their rendition of the Kwong. Second, It is worth pointing out that many Scripture references are given. I doubt everyone is going to look them up (though I often give a few words to jog the reader's memory) and their inclusion will seem rather prosaic, unless you realize that every single one of these references needed to be painstakingly exegeted and translated into Kwong over the last 4 years, and then checked and rechecked before publication. Including a “proof text” when you are writing a Kwong theology is not lightly done - it involves a very significant investment of time and effort. In the Kwong theology , these verses are printed in their entirety. In fact, these Kwong theology booklets are the only place a Kwong believer can find the text of these Scriptures at present. The origins of these booklets was a series of 6 lectures on the Kingdom of God which I asked a colleague, Larry Gray, to deliver at our Kwong Bible and Language conference in April of 1998. Larry prepared his lectures ahead of time and sent them up to Chageen so we could prepare ahead of time, but somehow in the preparation, he forgot that the Kwong had essentially no Scripture in their language, and so quoted the Sacred text left and right with all the liberality and abandon of a Dallas Seminary grad. As I recall, we were somehow supposed to translate over 120 passages in the weeks before he came! Well, the amazing thing is that we DID translate about 80 of them (not terribly well, but at least it was something) and the lectures were a hit. Such a hit, in fact that it seemed good to publish them afterwards - especially since we had invested so much effort in those 80 passages. The long and short of it is that those 6 lectures became the six volumes and 72 lessons of the present Kwong theology. In the process of editing Larry's sermons for publication I was time and time again faced with a gap in the logical sequence of things that needed filling, or a concept which, because of the limitations of time could not be developed in Larry's sermons, but was nevertheless key to understanding the whole picture, or some background material that it was not fair to assume a Kwong person would understand. The end result was that Larry's sermons metamorphosized beyond recognition as I continually added more and more material to plug the gaps and develop under-developed themes. It is no longer fair to him to say they represent his sermons (since that would mean assuming responsibility for the folly I have introduced). Nevertheless, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to him for the initial impetus his lectures gave us and his audacity in asking for the sky with those 80 passages (which have since ballooned to something like 300 passages).
|
