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<\/a>It is the 4th of July, and in the United States, we often find people mixing Christianity and nationalism in ways that are at best ironic, and at times downright contradictory. The 4th of July is thus an appropriate day for reflection on Christianity, nationalism, and what might have been different had the colonies in the New World not fought for their independence.<\/p>\nFirst, we should remember the ways that Jesus challenged the nationalism of his time. There has been some interesting discussion of Bible translation in the blogosphere<\/a> lately. If we\u2019re going to translate so as to make the meaning intelligible to any reader in a language today, then we have to effectively translate the impact of the story or saying, and the shock<\/i> it would have caused to its original hearers.<\/p>\n I wonder how many American Christians would value their Bibles as highly as they do now in theory, if they contained such dynamically equivalent translations, and said things like \u201cMany will come from Iraq and Afghanistan and take their place in the kingdom of God, while many Americans will be cast out.\u201d Ouch!<\/p>\n We also need to remember that today we celebrate our declaring our independence from a \u201cChristian empire\u201d, and our independence surely contributed to the weakening and downfall of that empire. With the wealth and potential for expansion that ended up in the hands of the United States rather than Britain, presumably England\u2019s empire would have remained powerful for much longer. Its holdings also included the Middle East, and so all those lines that the British drew when they withdrew, creating nation-states that separated people who wanted to be together and lumped together people who wanted to be separate, would perhaps not be there even today.<\/p>\n Where would the Baptists and others who valued religious freedom have fled to?<\/p>\n