The Unintended Power of the Word of God

"The Luther Bible was to the modern German languge what the works of Shakespeare and the King James Bible were to the modern English language.  Before Luther's bible, there was no unified German language.  It existed only in a hodgepodge of dialects.  And Germany as a nation was an idea far in the future, a gleam in Luther's eye.  But when Luther translated the Bible into German, he created a single language in a single book that everyone could read and did read.  Indeed, there was nothing else to read.  Soon everyone spoke German the way Luther's translation did.  As television has had a homogenizing effect on the accents and dialects of Americans, watering down accents and sanding down sharp twangs, Luther's Bible created a single German tongue.  Suddenly millers from Munchen could communicate with bakers from Bremen.  Out of this grew a sense of a common heritage and culture." - in Metaxas, Bonhoeffer, p20

And so the power of the Word in more ways than one might expect.  Cultures are brought together or formed and reformed around the Word translated into a common tongue.  This should be a great encouragement to the ongoing work of translating the Bible into languages, some of which do not even have a written alphabet at this time.