Christianity and Animism in Melanesia

Kenneth Nehrbass

Description

In this book, Kenneth Nehrbass examines the interaction between traditional or animistic religion (called kastom) and Christianity in Vanuatu. First, he briefly outlines major anthropological theories of animism, then he examines eight aspects of animism on Tanna Island and shows how they present a challenge to Christianity. He traces the history of Christianity on Tanna from 1839 to the present, showing which missiological theories the various missionaries were implementing. Nehrbass wanted to find out what experiences in the lives of the islanders distinguished those who left traditional religion behind from those who held on to it. In the end, he contends that there are twenty factors of gospel response and cultural integration that determine whether an animistic background believer will be a mixer, separator, transplanter, or contextualizer.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Philosophie et théologie
• Growth
• Christian Church

Informations

• Publié par: William Carey Publishing
• Date de parution: 26 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781645080251
• Langue: English

Extrait

Christianity and Animism in Melanesia

Ken Nehrbass has given the churches in Melanesia a wonderful gift. We desperately need ethnographically rich studies like this that help us understand how Melanesians can become fully followers of Jesus while expressing their faith in culturally appropriate ways. Christians from animistic societies around the world live with the terrible tension of dual religious systems which creates a split-level Christianity. They are “Christians” at one level but their underlying animistic worldview has yet to be transformed by gospel values. We know that the gospel affirms most of culture, critiques some of culture, and transforms all of culture. Nehrbass has demonstrated how this has happened from the earliest days of missionary contact to the present on the tiny island of Tanna in Vanuatu, in the South Pacific, but his study has important implications far beyond Melanesia and is likely to become a classic in the literatures of gospel and culture.
Darrell Whiteman, Author of Melanesians and Missionaries Vice President and Resident Missiologist, The Mission Society Atlanta, Georgia

Christianity and Animism in Melanesia
Four Approaches to Gospel and Culture
KENNETH NEHRBASS


Copyright © 2012 Kenneth Nehrbass Christianity and Animism in Melanesia: Four approaches to gospel and culture
All Rights Reserved . No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording—without prior written permission of the publisher. The publisher does not maintain, update, or moderate links and/or content provided by third-party websites mentioned in the book.
Scriptures marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. Contemporary English Version, 1995. New York: American Bible Society. Used by permission.
Published by William Carey Library 1605 East Elizabeth Street Pasadena, CA 91104 | www.missionbooks.org
Kelley K. Wolfe, editor Brad Koenig, copyeditor Carl Crooks, graphic designer Rose Lee-Norman, indexer Kenneth and Mendy Nehrbass, interior photos David Ringer, back cover photo Gordon Russell, author photo
William Carey Library is a ministry of the U.S. Center for World Mission Pasadena, CA | www.uscwm.org
Digital eBook Release Primalogue 2015 ISBN 978-0-87808-874-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nehrbass, Kenneth. Christianity and animism in Melanesia : four approaches to gospel and culture / Kenneth Nehrbass. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-87808-407-4 1. Tanna Island (Vanuatu)—Religion. 2. Animism—Vanuatu—Tanna Island. 3. Christianity—Vanuatu—Tanna Island. 4. Christianity and culture—Vanuatu—Tanna Island.
I. Title.
BL2620.M4N44 2012 261.2’9925—dc23

To my parents, Dick and Marilynn, who encouraged me to be a lifelong learner.

“Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and burn their Asherah poles in the fire; cut down the idols of their gods and wipe out their names from those places. You must not worhip the Lord your God in their way. But you are to seek the place the Lord your God will choose from among all your tribes to put his Name there for his dwelling.” ~ Deuteronomy 12:3–5, NIV
~
“When I preach, I encourage people to hold on to kastom . . . The house of prayer should promote tupunas [sacred stones] and tamafa [incantations].” ~ Joshua, a pastor from Tanna

Contents
Note on Vernacular Orthography
Abbreviations
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1: Biblical And Anthropological Models Of Animism
Chapter 1: Folk Religion for the Bible and Early Church Fathers
Chapter 2: Folk Religion and Modern Anthropology
Part 2: Kastom On Tanna
Chapter 3: Kastom and Knowledge
Chapter 4: Cosmology (Ghosts and Spirits)
Chapter 5: Magic and “Goodness”
Chapter 6: Healing “Badness”
Chapter 7: Ethics and Taboos
Chapter 8: Cargoism
Chapter 9: Ritual and Exchange
Part 3: Kastom And Christianity On Tanna
Chapter 10: Mission History and the Integration of Kastom and Christianity
Chapter 11: The Gospel-response Axis
Chapter 12: The Cultural-integration Axis
Chapter 13: Mixers, Transplanters, Contextualizers, and Separators
References
Appendix A: Glossary of Frequently Used Terms in the Southwest Tanna Language
Appendix B: History of Resident Missions on Tanna
Appendix C: Gospel/Culture Assessment Tool
Appendix D: Gospel/Culture Grid
Index
End Notes

Note on Vernacular Orthography
Many vernacular terms in this book are represented in the Southwest Tanna orthography. Special characters are explained below. (Note that Appendix A contains a short glossary of vernacular terms that appear frequently throughout this book.)
ə Schwa; sounds like the “u” in “cut.”
ɨ High central unrounded vowel; sounds like “e” in “roses.”
g Voiced velar nasal; sounds like the “ng” in sing.
v High central unrounded semivowel; sounds almost like “w” in “we,” but unrounded.

Abbreviations
AG Assemblies of God
CCC Campus Crusade for Christ
LDS Latter Day Saints
LMS London Missionary Society
NT New Testament
NTM Neil Thomas Ministries
OT Old Testament
PCV Presbyterian Church of Vanuatu
PRC Presbyterian Reformed Church
SIL Summer Institute of Linguistics
YWAM Youth with a Mission

Foreword
T his book deals with issues that are of great concern to missionaries and local peoples across Melanesia and the world at large. While the focus is on the Island of Tanna in Vanuatu, the issues are the same across the length and breadth of Melanesia, stretching from Fiji in the east to the Moluccas Islands (in Indonesia) in the west. Understanding traditional experience in contrast to the missionary response to spirituality is a crucial missiological issue in our day. Despite over a century of mission dominance and an apparent acceptance of the gospel message, churches throughout Melanesia quickly become nominal and people continue to rely on traditional sources of power. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how contemporary churches can maintain a dynamic interface of culture and biblical awareness. Dealing with Scripture in the contemporary reality of living life as God intended provides the rationale for the case study in this book.
On Tanna, as in much of Melanesia, two religions now reside side by side; traditional animism and missionary-introduced Christianity (Tippett 1967; Trompf 1987). Both religions reflect the cultural environment that spawned them; thousands of years of interaction with spiritual forces and their influence on enabling people to survive in their physical, social, and psychological world; and two thousand years of Christian expansion structured to reflect Greco-Roman philosophy in categories that reflect missionary understanding but have little relevance to local peoples. It is this tension between local and Western worldviews that structures Dr. Ken Nehrbass’ excellent book. Sadly, the missionaries encouraged people to abandon kastom and embrace Christianity. This forced people to make unfortunate choices resulting in “split-level Christianity” (Hiebert, Shaw, and Tienou 1999, 15ff). This dual perspective creates a dynamic syncretism which enables people to separate Christianity from the way they live their lives. The result is a lack of understanding of Scriptural perspectives—God’s perspective. The Bible is all about God enabling people with whom he communicated to worship him appropriately in contrast to performing ritual to get something they want. God gave Israel many “kastoms” all with the focus of acknowledging and worshiping him. Nehrbass clearly presents this development in Chapter 1. This is closely juxtaposed with an anthropological understanding of animism as a “religion” of the people in Chapter 2. In focus, then, is how people respond to God as a product of their beliefs and values, not which worldview (local or Christian) they subscribe to. How people steeped in the reality of life process Scripture is far more important, for them, than the ideas the missionaries brought, as Trompf has made clear (1987, 5–6).
In our contemporary, globalizing world, the people of Tanna and Melanesia in general cannot—must not—ignore the rest of the world. Like missions in the past, a ubiquitous “globalization” now frames most things people do. However, they still live their lives in a particular context endued with their traditions and lifestyle expectations—kastom. This is the context within which all outside influence must be evaluated. It is this understanding of context and the role of the gospel, encased in Scripture, that Nehrbass seeks to make sense of. Both are critical to the well-being of people who come to church whenever the bell rings and maintain their identity in the context of a spiritually, socially, and emotionally charged reality.
The overall thesis of the book is that “kastom is more than a set of superstitions and rituals; it is a fully developed worldview. If missionaries wish to transform the worldview of people from animistic backgrounds, they first need to attain as thorough an understanding of the particular form of kastom as possible” (25). In one sense, this book is about the problem of syncretism, with four approaches to gospel and culture that reflect on the situation missiologically. But there is another important sub-theme—the problem of missionaries not taking cultural issues (local folklore, etiologies, social relationships, worldviews) that create “kastom” seriously. Instead the history of missions shows largely untrained foreigners relying on their own cultural knowledge to recreate “Christendom as a Western cultural tradition” rather than “Christianity as a belief system” (Whiteman 1983, 411). Sadly, too many missionaries, desp