Inculturation & the gospel

...But if taken seriously, the emerging theology of inculturation promises a new Pentecost for the church...

...Rooted in Shona custom, the Zimbabwe funeral rite is as foreign to the Masai of Kenya and Tanzania as an Irish wake...

...if nonWestern peoples were encouraged to express their Christian belief through the idioms, styles, and gestures of their own indigenous systems of communication...

...After all, this was the model of the patriarchs of Israel, was in accord with the Mosaic law, and although prohibited by pre-Christian Roman law, was not specifically proscribed by the New Testament...

...An applied theology of inculturation, based on a renewed understanding of the Incarnation of the divine Word, could make the ecclesiastical transformation attributed to liberation theology look modest by comparison...

...In fact, I was reminded of the Ellison work numerous times as I read this book, and not just because of Shelby Steele's occasional references to it...

...He is not a propagandist, as Ellison was not and as almost every other writer on this subject in recent decades has been to some degree...

...Even the widely hailed Zaire Mass and the often mentioned Zimbabwe funeral rite are tokens, reluctantly approved by higher authority because of the persistence of rare personalities like Cardinal Joseph Malula of Zaire...

...And it is "the music of innocence and power that we hear in affirmative action that causes us to cling to it and to its distracting emphasis on representation...

...much less can they divine how it might be corrected or developed...

...Doing so means facing up to major obstacles, not only in Africa, Asia, and the Islands, but in Europe and the Americas...

...His most recent book is Many Paths: A Catholic Approach to Religious Pluralism (Orbis...

...To those who feel threatened by new or different expressions and celebrations that "might possibly contradict what we [Europeans] have formulated and practiced up to now," Arrupe replied that "real pluralism is the most profound unity...

...A major obstacle to inculturation is the naive belief that the higher ranks of ecclesiastical officialdom mean what they say about the church's will to assume the cultural flesh of all the peoples of the world...

...To dramatize the meaning of inculturation, Rahner asked some sharp, rhetorical questions: Why must the church insist upon a specifically European form of marriage for all African Christians...

...The contribution of Peter Schineller, who is currently working in Nigeria, has the character of an introduction...

...Is the historico-cultural experience of Christianity universally normative for all Christians always and everywhere...

...Peter Schineller is a theologian...

...It is more radical than liberation theology, and its implications are further reaching...

...But the trap, Steele argues, is that these intentions have been translated largely into requirements for racial representation, not racial development...

...Innocence and power, Steele believes, are the nub of modem race relations...

...But, of course, they only energize what is repressed with more and more negative power, so that we are victimized as much by our own buried fears as by racism...

...Martin's, $15.95, 175 pp...

...Their application is needed urgently...

...Black students in predominantly white colleges, black professionals in integrated work situations, black homeowners in comfortable, integrated, middle-class neighborhoods--all show in various ways the effects of buried racial fears and seek refuge in what Steele considers dubious and destructive solutions, like affirmative action...

...Just why that is has been demonstrated over the last year or so, as parts of this book appeared as articles in various publications, from the New York Times Magazine to Harper's to the Wilson Quarterly...

...and that only blacks themselves can overcome that barrier...

...They manifest themselves in the perverse and confused self-images and attitudes of both the victims and the beneficiaries of that history...

...This failure, he noted, was the result of BOOKS those "fears that arise to block inculturation or to diminish it...

...But it was Pedro Arrupe, then superior general of the Jesuits, who put his finger on the urgency of dealing openly with the church's retarded growth in cultural catholicity...

...Among the nation's so-called black leadership, Shelby Steele's name now is mentioned in company with those of Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, and others who have dared dissent from what Steele calls the "party line" on matters of race and civil rights...

...Denial, avoidance, and repression intervene to save us from this risk...

...Like Ellison, Steele is a graceful, elegant writer...

...Why must the principal outward signs of faith in Jesus Christ be so insistently European, from the structures, forms, and accouterments of worship to the very names given at baptism...

...During the 1977 Synod of Bishops in Rome, as during the previous synod, the European monoculturalism chronically afflicting the church was addressed eloquently by various bishops from Asia and Africa...

...preference replaces prejudice, inclusion answers exclusion...

...What the church needs today is not more stifling conformity but greater liberating pluriformity...

...Steele has an appreciation of complexity and ambivalence, as Ellison did...

...it is an admirable integration of the relevant historical, theological, and anthropological themes...

...Their works are complementary...

...Anthony Gittins approaches inculturation from the specific vantage point of a professional anthropologist with missionary experience in Sierra Leone...

...In some cases, why not allow the plural marriage model (simultaneous polygyny) congenial to Africans still living within traditional cultures and subsistence economic systems...

...This is the issue of pluralism raised by Paul against the Judaizers, by the Jesuits in China and India against the Europeanizers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and by African and Asian Christians today in the wake of Western colonialism...

...While relevant research in Africa is almost nonexistent, local bishops remain hostile to it...

...EUGENE HILLMAN, C.S.Sp., professor of liberal studies at Salve Regina College, Newport, Rhode Island, served in Africa for twenty-five years...

...Wilfred Cantwell Smith, the distinguished historian of religion, has noted that "the fundamental flaw of Western civilization in its role in world history is arrogance, and ...this has infected also the Christian church...

...But to undermine the indigenous cultures of subjected peoples, thereby attenuating their traditional self-understanding, identity, values, and dignity, is an even greater injustice...

...Anthony Gittins and Aylward Shorter are anthropologists...

...In his address to the bishops, Arrupe argued that "the present crisis of 22: Commonweal unity in many cases is due to insufficient pluralism which fails to provide the satisfaction of expressing and living one's faith in conformity with one's culture...

...For one people to dominate other peoples politically and exploit them economically is a great injustice, a form of slavery...

...he question is therefore both anthropological and theological...

...On this issue a contemporary Nigerian priest has argued in a doctoral dissertation at Louvain's Catholic University that if church leaders were really serious about the catholicization of the church, elements other than bread and grape wine could and should be used...

...As Bernard Lonergan noted in Insight: "One might as well declare openly that all new ideas are taboo, as t~ require that they be examined, even evaluated, and approved by some hierarchy of officials and bureaucrats...

...Don Wycliff Steele's view is that racism, while far from eradicated, is not the monster that it once was...

...In theory, he says, "affirmative action...has all the moral symmetry that fairness requires--the injustice of historical and even contemporary white advantage is offset with black advantage...

...Or is it but one among many valid ways of understanding, practicing, and celebrating the meaning of Christianity...

...And a risk is involved in exploring it: the risk of discovering the ways in which we contribute to, if not create, the reality in which we live...

...He writes lucidly and practically, yet profoundly, about the cross-cultural communication of Christianity...

...of appropriating to yourself those kingdoms and all their possessions for your own use and that of your successors...

...And most important, he is relentlessly, ruthlessly honest, as Ellison was and as it is so difficult for any black person to be when writing on race...

...They have become like steps in a minuet that Americans dance in their relations across racial lines...

...For a great many reasons, that has become impossible to do any longer...

...Nor are these particular instances relevant to a wide variety of ethnocultural groups in either Zaire of Zimbabwe, let alone in other African countries...

...Imagine what Christian worship would look like if believers were permitted to celebrate their faith through the traditional symbols, art forms, and social structures of their respective worlds...

...REAL PLURALISM IS THE MOST PROFOUND UNITY" Inculturation & the leaven of the gospel EUGENE HILLMAN n 1979, Karl Rahner delivered a famous lecture at Weston School of Theology on inculturation...

...One prominent African bishop told me that fewer than half a dozen of his episcopal colleagues--Africans themselves--had any positive interest in inculturating the Christian faith experience in African cultural forms...

...There is much they can learn from the inculturationists...

...Inculturation, called "incarnation" by Vatican II, is the dynamic principle by which Christianity grows in cultural catholicity by allowing the leaven of the gospel to act in culturally diverse ways of being human, religious, and holy...

...The obstacles to authentic inculturation are formidable...

...Papal rhetoric is quite the opposite these days, but the destruction sanctioned by Nicholas continued into the present century, albeit with methods gradually less brutal than those employed by the conquistadores...

...In the past, what has followed that is ridicule and shunning...

...The implications of the inculturation movement are similar to, but broader than, the work of those liberation theologians who stress the socioeconomic and political aspects of liberation...

...The psychological realm is murky, frightening, and just plain embarrassing," he writes early on...

...THE CONTENT OF OUR CHARACTER Shelby Steele St...

...The work of Aylward Shorter, who was many years in Kenya and in Tanzania, is more comprehensive than the others...

...The three volumes reviewed here say almost everything that needs to be said on the subject...

...Even today in Africa, where a growing number of politicians and some churchmen are now identifying themselves by their traditional cultural names instead of the European names given them at baptism, names such as Patrick, Pasquale, and Amadeus proliferate as though there were something wrong with names like Nagudana, Lemalali, or Oltimbu...

...11 January 1991:21 ally packaged product: the historically-conditioned European e x p e r i e n c e of Christianity...

...they never know whether or not the new idea will work...

...It is his public questioning of that policy, as much as anything, that accounts for the heartburn that Steele causes his critics...

...Another of Rahner's questions concerned the use of European food and drink in the eucharistic celebrations of people for whom bread and wine are totally alien...

...Deep scars--political, economic, social, cultural--remain today in many areas colonized by Christian Europe...

...it is quite readable and could serve as an excellent outline for a course preparing people for cross-cultural ministry anywhere...

...and since the one thing they dread is making a mistake, they devote their energies to paper work and postpone decisions...

...And imagine what their traditional ethical systems would be like if the gospel were honestly allowed to function within them as a leaven, rather than being told, in the name of Christ, that they must conform their behavior to the mores of Western civilization...

...It is reformist and corrective, even repentant and redemptive...

...Whites seek to be shriven of a guilt that 11 January 1991...

...23...

...While the rhetoric is edifying, the concrete achievements are few...

...for members of this hierarchy possess authority and power in inverse ratio to their familiarity with the concrete situations in which the new ideas emerge...

...that "the barriers to black progress in America today are clearly as much psychological as they are social or economic...

...of reducing their inhabitants to perpetual slavery...

...Likewise, African and Asian Christians need to take to heart the lessons drawn from the socioeconomic and political insights of the liberationists...

...The minuet of racial politics his brief collection of essays is the finest literary exploration of the mindscape of black America since Ralph E l l i s o n ' s classic novel Invisible Man...

...It deprives them of their most fundamental means of self-assertion and defense against exploitation, leading them to gradually internalize the most problematic values of the culture imposed...

...Instead of allowing their hearers to experience the meaning of Jesus Christ in their own historico-cultural terms, missionaries acted like the agents of a European export firm (Rahner's simile), supplying the rest of the world a fully developed and cultur"'That's the Prodigal Son--I understand he's planning a comeback...

...Christian missionaries failed to distinguish between the gospel message of Christ and the Western accretions of Christianity...

...It's hard to persuade ordinary black people nowadays that having doubts or a different reading of their situation is the same thing as treason...

...Affirmative action "fosters a confusion of these very different needs," he says...

...Add to this Shorter's carefully nuanced remarks on the ambivalence detected in some of the otherwise positive and encouraging statements of Pope John Paul II about non-Western cultures, the pope's repeated warnings against the danger of syncretism in any effort to apply the principle of inculturation, and Cardinal Ratzinger's skepticism regarding thirdworld cultures, described by Shorter as "a position not far removed from monoculturalism...

...And I would never sneer at these good intentions...

...Evangelization becomes problematical when the acceptance of Jesus Christ is inseparable from this European interpretation of the Gospel, or when acceptance entails renouncing even the possibility of fully experiencing, interpreting, and celebrating this faith in specifically nonWestern ways of being human and religious...

...All are priests with some years of direct missionary experience in Africa...

...And it is in his discussion of affirmative action that he demonstrates how perceptive he is about the psychological traps involved in the issue of race...

...Some have been slow to appreciate the concern of Africans and Asians with Western Christianity's insults to their cultures, and have failed to address the perennial cultural predicament of their own indigenous populations in Latin America...

...For all their superficial differences, there are powerful and important similarities between the two authors and their works...

...The crudest expression of this is found in the 1452 papal bull of Nicholas V, Durn diversas, authorizing the king of Portugal "the full and entire faculty of invading, conquering, expelling, and reigning over all the kingdoms...of the Saracens, of pagans, and of all infidels, wherever they may be found...