Linguistic Gap Analysis

Where Vietnamese has no equivalent

• Justification (forensic declaration): Vietnamese has sự xưng công bình (“being declared righteous”), which captures the forensic sense reasonably well through the xưng (to declare/confess) root, but the underlying legal-verdict concept still benefits from teaching support given the surrounding karmic-merit intuition.
• Imputed righteousness: sự công bình được kể cho is a constructed phrase describing a status credited apart from one’s own action — the opposite of the merit-accumulation intuition (công đức tích lũy) reinforced by Buddhist practice.
• Covenant: giao ước exists but functions more like a formal, negotiated pact than the relational, God-initiated bond Scripture describes. Every occurrence needs surrounding context to carry the relational weight.

Where Vietnamese has a false friend

• Hóa thân: the standard Buddhist term for a bodhisattva’s or deity’s manifestation into a body, describing one instance among many possible manifestations; a serious false friend for incarnation if used without the fuller phrase.
• Các thánh (bare): names deified historical folk heroes worshipped at temples; a false friend for “saints” unless the fuller các thánh đồ is used.
• Đầu thai / luân hồi: rebirth/reincarnation into a new existence; the most serious false friend for resurrection.

Where Vietnamese already has strong equivalents

• Đức tin (faith) functions well for trust in a person, once the object of trust is specified.
• Tội lỗi (sin) functions well as moral transgression, provided it is anchored to offense against a personal God rather than left as impersonal bad karma (nghiệp xấu).
• Hội Thánh (church, literally “holy assembly”) is an established, unambiguous rendering that already avoids both temple-building and Buddhist-institutional connotations.