Executive Summary

Why it matters

Romans is the theological backbone of the New Testament, and English occupies a unique position in this pipeline: as the source language for every other Language Package, it has no foreign-language translation task, but native English speakers face a real and underappreciated communication risk of their own — modern secular, legal, and denominational drift within English itself has quietly detached several of Paul’s most load-bearing words (justification, election, grace, providence, Lord, church) from their theological meaning, replacing them with confident but wrong everyday definitions.

Key findings

• The registry tracks 40 doctrines across Romans 1-16; 16 require mandatory human theologian review (7 Critical, 9 High) — lower in raw count than most other languages in this batch, but the risk type is unusual: readers are highly literate in the words themselves and therefore less likely to seek clarification.
• Salvation, Grace, Effectual Calling, Providence, Lordship of Christ, Church as God’s People, and Universal Human Accountability are Critical because each has a dominant, confidently-held competing meaning in contemporary English (legal, political, secular-spiritual, or institutional) strong enough to silently displace the theological sense without deliberate correction.
• “Justification” and “election” are flagged as the two single most severe false-friend risks in the entire registry: “justify” ordinarily means to give a reason for an action, and “election” has been almost totally captured by its political-voting sense — both are words nearly every reader already has a strong, wrong, ready-made definition for.
• This registry introduces a governing principle distinct from every other language in this pipeline: false-friend drift (confident misreading) is treated as higher risk than sheer obsolescence (a flagged comprehension gap), since obsolete words at least prompt readers to ask rather than assume.

Risks

• False-friend drift: justification, election, covenant, grace, and providence each have a dominant secular or legal meaning that will be silently and confidently imported by most readers without explicit correction.
• Denominational contest among English speakers themselves: “being saved,” grace-and-works, sainthood, and assurance of salvation are all genuinely disputed among English-speaking Christian traditions (Reformed, Wesleyan/Arminian, Catholic, Orthodox), a risk category with no equivalent in a foreign-language package translating from a single source text.
• Post-Christian cultural erosion: “Lord” and “church” have both lost significant everyday force in a secularizing, institutionally distrustful West, risking that Romans’ most central confessional and ecclesial language will be read with little to no felt weight.

Opportunities

• Because there is no foreign-language translation step, this Language Package can concentrate entirely on precision of explanation rather than lexical selection — the words are already “correct”; the work is restoring their meaning.
• A small number of secular cultural shifts are genuine assets: growing positive awareness of adoption, and contemporary equality/pluralism discourse’s resonance with “no distinction” language, both work in this curriculum’s favor rather than against it.
• Naming denominational disagreement transparently, rather than assuming a single reading, gives this curriculum unusual credibility with a broad, cross-denominational English-speaking audience.

Recommended actions

• Route every Critical and High risk segment (16 of 40 doctrines) through human theologian review before publication, with particular attention to the seven Critical false-friend and cultural-erosion terms.
• Require explicit, non-optional clarifying language on first substantive use of each Critical term in any published document, per 12_ai_translation_requirements.md.
• State transparently, rather than silently assume, this curriculum’s position wherever English-speaking Christian traditions genuinely disagree (grace and works, assurance of salvation, sainthood).