Executive Summary

Why it matters

Romans is the theological backbone of the New Testament, and Vietnamese carries a risk profile shaped by three overlapping religious currents at once: Mahayana Buddhist rebirth cosmology, folk hero-deification and spirit worship, and Confucian-shaped ancestor veneration and filial duty. Six doctrines (Incarnation, Deity of Christ, Sonship of Christ, Resurrection of Christ, Salvation, and Prayer and Intercession) each have a fluent, culturally weighty Vietnamese word or practice that actually imports reincarnation, folk deification, or ancestor-mediated petition.

Key findings

• The registry tracks 40 doctrines across Romans 1-16; 19 require mandatory human theologian review before any translated segment ships (6 Critical, 13 High).
• Resurrection and Salvation are Critical because Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist cosmology’s rebirth cycle (luân hồi) and liberation goal (giải thoát) offer fluent, tempting substitutes that invert both doctrines from a historical rescue into a self-attained cyclical escape.
• Prayer and Intercession is uniquely dangerous in Vietnamese because cầu xin tổ tiên, petitioning deceased ancestors at the family altar, is one of the most frequently practiced religious acts in Vietnamese life, observed at every death anniversary and during Tết.
• Only 3 of 40 doctrines (Thanksgiving, Mutual Edification, Christian Fellowship) are Low-risk and clear for automated review alone.

Risks

• Rebirth-cycle collapse: đầu thai/luân hồi for resurrection and giải thoát for salvation would each fold Christ’s unique, historical, one-time acts into Buddhism’s recurring cycle of death and rebirth.
• Folk deification substitution: bare các thánh for “saints” risks evoking Vietnam’s tradition of deifying historical heroes (such as Thánh Trần) and worshipping them at temples, rather than describing every ordinary believer.
• Ancestor-petition substitution: cầu xin tổ tiên is structurally similar to intercessory prayer and is a far more frequently practiced act in ordinary Vietnamese life than direct prayer to God, making it the most likely unconscious substitute for biblical intercession.

Opportunities

• The established 1926 Bản Dịch Truyền Thống already provides settled, non-ambiguous core vocabulary for the highest-priority proper nouns (Đức Chúa Trời, Đức Chúa Giê-xu, Đức Thánh Linh), removing ambiguity for translators and reviewers alike.
• Romans’ argument for a salvation that rescues rather than a liberation that is self-attained offers a clear, teachable contrast with Buddhist soteriology once the vocabulary is handled correctly.

Recommended actions

• Route every Critical and High risk segment (19 of 40 doctrines) through human theologian review before publication; do not allow automated-only review to touch these terms.
• Brief native-speaker reviewers specifically on ancestor-veneration and folk-deification vocabulary (cầu xin tổ tiên, các thánh, đền), which automated glossary enforcement alone cannot catch.
• Reuse this Language Package’s translation_memory.json for every Romans lesson in Vietnamese rather than re-deriving terms per document, per the two-phase pipeline design.