The Impoverished Language of English: Why the Word of God Cannot Survive in Translation Alone.

A message to The Uninformed….

There is a devastating poverty in the English language, a poverty so subtle and normalized that most don’t even realize they’re living in it—let alone being shaped by it. But when that poverty becomes the lens through which the sacred is read, taught, and weaponized, it transforms from ignorance into malpractice. The Bible, written in the languages of Hebrew and Greek—languages of covenant, architecture, movement, metaphor, breath, and depth—was never meant to be flattened into the one-dimensional tongue of a colonial empire. English is not neutral. It is diluted. It is mechanical. It is static. And when used as the sole medium of divine communication, it does not inform—it deforms.

The difference between reading the Bible in Hebrew and Greek versus reading it in English is the difference between walking through a living forest and staring at a map printed in black-and-white. The English Bible is like a topographical sketch that claims to represent the terrain of God’s mind, but offers no elevation, no texture, no climate. It tells you where the mountain is, but it cannot make you feel the wind at the summit. It names the river, but it cannot let you taste the current. It points to the city, but it cannot describe the rhythm of its breath. The Spirit wrote in Hebrew and Greek because those languages move. They bend. They spiral. They pull the reader into the mystery. English, by contrast, is reductionist. It prefers boxes to mysteries. It demands answers where God offered invitations.

It’s not just that English lacks nuance—it lacks the capacity to carry the divine. Hebrew is built from roots and pictographs that unfold like living scrolls. Every letter carries a number, every number a concept, every word a picture, every picture a truth. Koine Greek, meanwhile, is surgical in its syntax, weaving tense, voice, and mood to indicate not just what is said but how, when, why, and with what spiritual implication. English turns this into mush. Entire theologies have been constructed—and entire generations deceived—because someone read a word like “love” or “forgiveness” in English, not realizing the source language held five, ten, even twenty layers beneath it. To trust an English Bible without question is to live on the surface of a deep ocean and call yourself a diver.

Let’s speak plainly. Anyone who stands on a pulpit and quotes an English Bible as though it were the final say in divine truth is not preaching—they’re parroting. Any teacher, preacher, theologian, or “clickbait Christian” who has never grappled with the original languages has no business speaking on behalf of God. These are the tools of indoctrination. These are the seed-carriers of counterfeit faith. These are not the voices of depth—they are the floorboards that the flatness walks upon. Indoctrination, like English, is shallow. It cannot sustain spiritual nutrition. It replaces revelation with repetition and sells spiritual starvation as discipleship.

The tragedy is this: when you read the Bible to someone in the impoverished tongue of English and act as though it is the full counsel of God, you are not just misleading them—you are misrepresenting God Himself. And that is not a mistake. That is a spiritual offense. A fatal one. People have been judged for less. Do you understand the weight of that? This isn’t about language preference. This is about bearing false witness against the Word Himself. You are declaring the thoughts of God through a tongue that cannot even distinguish between covenantal loyalty and emotional affection—between a spiritual release and a polite apology—between the works of the Spirit and the works of the Law. You are pretending to speak for God using the vocabulary of a language that never knew Him. That is not preaching. That is perjury.

And yet, most never even question it. They were raised on English sermons, English devotions, English Bible studies, English podcasts, English theology. They’ve been so thoroughly domesticated by translation that they no longer recognize they’re being fed processed spiritual food. And then they repeat it. They teach it. They defend it. They weaponize it. All without realizing they’re fighting battles with plastic swords. This is why I do not, cannot, and will not trust anyone who reads the English Bible as though it were the last word. The English Bible is not the Word of God. It is a translation of the Word of God. And a translation is only as trustworthy as the depth of the soul translating it. Most modern preachers don’t even know this. They’ve never heard the root word for “forgiveness” is aphesis—a release from bondage. They’ve never been told that “faith” (pistis) is active trust, not intellectual assent. They don’t know that “shalom” is a condition of wholeness, not just a lack of conflict. And yet they preach with boldness, as if God Himself signed off on their English-only ignorance. That’s not courage. That’s recklessness.

What’s worse is that the people receiving this spiritual fast food are dying of malnourishment and don’t even know it. They’ve never tasted real bread. They’ve never known that the Hebrew word for “soul” (nephesh) includes your breath, your appetite, your desires, your entire living essence. They’ve never seen how chesed—translated poorly as “mercy” or “kindness”—is actually covenant faithfulness that holds the world together. They’ve never experienced what it means to be animated by the ruach—the breath, wind, and life force of the Most High. Why? Because in English, all of those have been neutered, flattened, sterilized, and repackaged as church words with no spiritual weight.

And so I say this: the sons and daughters of God must rise up and take accountability for the source material that is feeding their spirit. You are responsible for the Word that enters your soul. You are accountable for whether that Word is alive, or whether it’s a dead copy of something once living. We were never told to memorize translations—we were told to eat the scroll. But if the scroll has been filtered through the linguistic sieve of empire, sterilized by committees, and rebranded for cultural comfort, then what you’re eating is not the Bread of Life. It’s the illusion of nourishment. It’s religious plastic wrap. And it’s killing you slowly.

If you believe that God breathed the Scriptures, then you must care about the breath. And that breath was not exhaled in English. It came forth in the thunder of Hebrew and the fire of Greek. It carried weight. It carried rhythm. It carried reality. And we cannot afford to live in a world where pastors pride themselves on being “Bible-believing” while ignoring the very languages the Bible was written in. That is not faithfulness. That is fraud.

So yes—I reject the English Bible as the final authority. Not because I reject the Word, but because I honor it too deeply to accept a flattened version of it. I do not trust men who preach from English without reverence for what lies beneath. I do not follow teachers who declare doctrine without ever having descended into the root languages. I do not listen to voices that treat divine utterance like it’s been permanently bound to the King’s English. I trust the Spirit of God. I trust the Word beneath the word. I trust the voice that still speaks from the fire.

Because if I am to represent God, I must not misrepresent His voice. And if I am to feed others, I must not feed them processed doctrine wrapped in denominational packaging. The world does not need more Christian parrots. It needs voices from the wilderness who have eaten the scroll and emerged transformed—who do not just speak the Word, but become it.

And the Word can never be truly known—until it is read, heard, and lived in the language He chose to speak it.