Martyn Iles, please take the time to reconsider your reasons for avoiding saying an Acknowledgement of Country, because you believe it is based on paganism. I hope I address you respectfully in your important role in leading the Australian Christian Lobby. I trust Christians can disagree agreeably.
An Acknowledgement of Country (AoC) is a form of words often heard at meetings. An example given on the Australian government website is ‘I begin today by acknowledging the <insert name of people here (e.g. Ngunnawal)> people, Traditional Custodians of the land on which we <gather/meet> today, and pay my respects to their Elders past and present. I extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples here today.’
A Christian version – one of many – from Neville Naden and the Bush Church Aid Society (BCA) is “We acknowledge the triune God, the Creator of heaven and earth and His ownership of all things. (Psalm 24:1) We recognise that He gave stewardship of these lands upon which we meet to the First Nations Peoples of this country (Acts 17:26). In His sovereignty, He has allowed other people groups to migrate to these shores. We acknowledge the cultures of our First Nations Peoples and are thankful for the community that we share together now. We pay our respects to (please insert name of the nation here) and their elders/leaders, both past and present, and those who are rising up to become leaders.”
Martyn, you give an accurate definition of paganism, identifying it as a belief in a god or gods that exist as part of the universe. In “The Truth of It” episode 100 you say “Pagan gods are part of the universe. Pagan gods are of the same order of things as the heavens and the earth of creation itself. They are the same stuff that the universe is made out of. They are like created things in that sense.”
You add, comparing Babylonian myths “Or the dream time narratives like the rainbow serpent. And you will be familiar with that part of the staff of creation and animal, in fact, which is significant in indigenous, um, dream time. This rainbow serpent created more life as in of the same kind for the world.”
You correctly say of paganism “…The God of the Hebrews gives meaning to the world. Whereas the pagan gods do not. In fact, they cannot, the meaning of the system will not be found inside the system. Professor [John] Lennox says, look, to identify whether something is paganism. One, matter is eternal and it existed before the gods. Two, You need t basic state matter was formless, unorganized and boundless chaos. Three, some God imposed order and form on the basic stuff of the universe and the process. And this process is what is meant by creation for even this God, like all others arose out of the original matter and is part of the stuff or one of the forces of the universe. Five, everything in the universe emanates out of this, God-like Sunbeams out of the sun.
The question is whether this model applies to First Nations’ traditional beliefs as a whole.
John Harris, the eminent historian of the First Nation’s contact with Christianity takes a contrary view. In the paper “Seeing God: understanding and misunderstanding the Dreamtime” he lays out the history of what has become known as the “Dreamtime” pointing out that anthropologists got it wrong while early missionaries got it right.
He explains that two early anthropologists struggled with translation. “Altjirra is one such very complicated word that is very context-dependant,” Harris writes. Its context here was in the form of altjirringa. Spencer and Gillen translated altjirringa as Dreamtime and the word has caught on.”
We need to question what modern Australians assume they know Dreamtime to be.
“The common Australian understanding of the Dreamtime, however, is only a very small part, a very simplistic and incomplete part, of the meaning of the Aboriginal concept from which it came,” Harris writes. “But it is somewhere to start. It is good that non-Aboriginal people want to know about Aboriginal cultures and worldviews. A respectful view of Aboriginal people’s intelligence is so very important, particularly an acceptance that Aboriginal people have always had a profound sense of the non-physical world.
“The Dreamtime, however, refers not only to events in the distant past but to very deep spiritual understandings, to Aboriginal people’s theology and cosmology, to their understanding of themselves and how they fit in the universe. The Dreamtime labels a far deeper consciousness of a spiritual world than this article can possibly do justice to. Sadly, the Dreamtime also labels deeper ideas than many Aboriginal people themselves now grasp since their culture and language was forcibly taken from them.”
So does the Dreamtime fit paganism? Harris recounts the story of two Lutheran missionaries, Hermann Kempe and Wilhelm Schwarz, who founded Hermannsburg in 1877.
“It was not long before these Lutheran missionaries found what they thought they were looking for and what they found encouraged them. In 1880, Kempe wrote that the Aranda people spoke of a ‘good’ being who dwelt in the sky. They said that the Aboriginal people called that being altjirra (often spelled altyerre in modern linguistics). They explained, for example, that the Aranda people thought that children were a gift from altjirra.
“Future Lutheran missionary linguists would discover a lot more depth to the word altjirra. Carl Strehlow lived and worked at Hermannsberg for 28 years. His son T.G.H. Strehlow was born there and spoke Aranda from his childhood. Father and son both came to the conclusion that the root meaning of altjirra was connected with what was eternal or uncreated. But they never backed away from the conviction of their Lutheran forbears that Altjirra with a capital ‘A’ was an appropriate name for the Christian God.
“Here is Genesis 1 verse 1 from the Aranda Bible:
Tjontintjala Atjirrala alkira etnanha
In the beginning God skies these
Alha erinha turta arrpmarna-ka.
Ground the and created.
“You don’t have to be a linguist to notice some important differences between Aranda and English. The main thing you should notice is that the word order is different from English. In English, word order matters greatly. Whoever is doing the action comes at the beginning of the sentence, immediately before the doing verb – ‘The dog bites…’, ‘John said…’, ‘God created…’. In the Aranda Genesis 1:1, God is at the beginning but created is at the very end.
“You will notice that the God-word is capitalised but you might also notice that it has an extra ending on it, it is not Altjirra but Altjirrala. The ‘-la’ suffix tells us who is doing the action because the word order does not tell us. You might think it is obvious in this sentence but it is not always obvious, so Aranda speakers simply mark the doer of the action (the subject of the sentence, if you like).
“This is indicative of a very significant point that partly caused the confusion that led to the word Dreamtime being coined. Altjirra is frequently found as part of a compound word. In the first chapter of Genesis, we find Altjirrala, Altjirraka, Altjirrantama and Altjirralantama. These compound words are formed from Altjirra plus a suffix that can mean things like of, to, from or then. In English, these kind of words normally come before the noun – of God, to God, then God.”
Harris explains that the Spencer and Gillen research was written in English. But Carl Strehlow’s works were not available in English until recently. Harris goes into some detail about why the missionaries got the meaning right and the anthropologists, who spent less time with the Aranda people got it wrong.
He explains how the Lutheran missionaries dealt with translation issues. “Long ago at Ntaria, the place they named Hermannsberg, the Lutheran missionaries Kempe and Schwarz felt they had found the way of naming God. These earliest missionaries did think Altjirra was a being. The later missionaries realised its true connection with what was eternal or uncreated.
“This did not mean that Altjirra was not a good name for God. Naming God as ‘The One who is Eternal’ or even as the ‘Uncreated One’ has a very long and sacred history. It is the basic meaning of the Hebrew word Yahweh, God’s true name, which means ‘the One who is’. The Lutheran missionaries understood and accepted this meaning. They gave it a capital letter and declared that capitalised, it meant God.
“The English word God is itself a good example of the effect of capitalisation. In English, there is a big difference between the meanings of God and god. To a Christian reading the English Bible, there is a big difference between LORD, all in capitals (which means God), and Lord, with only an initial capital (which means Jesus), and lord, with no capitals (which means a human dignitary).
“By discovering that the Aranda people had a concept of the eternal, of the divine, and using it for the name of God, the Lutheran missionaries did a very meaningful thing. They declared that God did not arrive in Central Australia with the missionaries. They declared that God was not just the European God but also the God of this ancient land. God had always been here. Altjirra was eternal and uncreated.”
The idea that First Nations people were necessarily pagan, needs reconsidering.
Martyn, you deal with the many Christian forms of AoC by saying “People will say, are they not Christian versions of welcome to country? Yes, there are I not gonna go through all the Christian versions out there and say, whether one is completely free of ideology or whether one’s completely pure, I’m not gonna do that. There are versions. And I accept that there are statements out there that people use that replace welcome to country that are pretty good statements. Okay. I’m not gonna go into all of that. What I’m talking about here is that practices, people are encountering it in the public squares, in their work, in their play, in their studies and so forth. That’s what I’ve been asked about. Churches will have their own ways of dealing with this personally. I’d rather just not because, I just feel like it’s not coming from a good, for a good reason from the very beginning, but that’s me.”
It is worth mentioning that unless you are Aboriginal, no one will expect you to say a “welcome to country” which is said by someone who belongs to the traditional custodians of that particular place.
There will be forms of AoC that you may not wish to say, that endorse non-Christian spiritualities. And people do encounter them at work and in the public square.
But you are leading a Christian organisation, and hold meetings that are identified as Christian. Orthodox and Bible-believing churches have used what you describe as “pretty good statements.” Para-church groups should respect what churches are doing. Surely para-church groups exist to serve the church, not lead separately from them. The Bible has the church as the fundamental gathering for Christians.
And as Dr Harris demonstrates the categorisation of pre-settlement Aboriginal beliefs as necessarily pagan is not sustainable.
Please reconsider.
John Sandeman
John Harris’ paper “Seeing God: understanding and misunderstanding the Dreamtime” was in the September 2019 edition of Zadok Perspectives
Great article John and really well researched.
That’s a really good article John. Although you could almost have just ended it after the first paragraph. The very first Acknowledgement you quote, from the Australian Government, contains no religious content at all, simply an acknowledgement of historical fact. Nor does the second one contain anything pagan. If the problem is paganism, use one of them.
An excellent article, John.
Thank you so much for your careful research and the respectful way you have addressed Martyn’s video.