I took at course at Fuller Seminary for my masters in theology degree, called Theology of Religious Encounter, which was, on the surface, about religious pluralism, or how Christianity interacted with other religions or cultures over the centuries. As I was re-reading my notes from the 1985 class, I would say that Christianity wasn’t very good at getting along with other religions. What I mean is that it had a persecution complex (justified or not) in the beginning and then when it became part of the state and had power, it forgot about how poorly it had been treated and set about to subjugate the rest of the world right up through the colonization period. A friend once joked that the indigenous Americans who continued to identified as such were the ones whose ancestors weren’t marched into bodies of water by Catholic “missionaries” assisted by soldiers for mass or group baptisms. The ones marched into bodies of water became “Mexicans” and the others were hunted down and forced into reservations or just killed on the spot. Basically, Christianity hasn’t had a great track record recognizing or honoring the traditions of the lands they’ve claimed for King or country. 

But wasn’t that the way of things going all the way back to ancient Israel where the Canaanites would defeat the Israelites in battle and steal the Ark of the Covenant, but then wake up the next and find their idol to Baal in ruins before the Ark? It was a matter of whose God was greater that would get to claim the territory, as in whoever wins the war gets to write the history of the battles. Thus, the battle between religions was more about the actual military victory than a battle of ideas or ideology. So the story of the New Zealand Maori having a mostly losing battle to protect their customs or cultural way of life is hardly a new issue, that was sadly fought having to first agree that the terms or cultural understanding was prominent or superior. That they saw no division the physical environment (the Whanganui River) and their cultural traditions, such that they didn’t even have a word for “religion” made the dispute unintelligible to the colonizers. 

I like Green’s notion that we (in the “Christian West”) need to expand our understanding of the myriad ways that humans have understood their relationships with the Divine, Personhood and the Environment. Enjoy. 

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Tags: Crash Course Religions, Fuller Seminary, indigenous traditions, pluralism, video Tuesdays

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