Well-known author and theologian David Bentley Hart sat down with Indigenous pastors Ray Minniecon from Sydney, and Gabriel Bani from Thursday Island during his recent Australian tour for Gospel Conversations. In this piece, we report some highlights from their discussion which can be viewed online.
Songlines
Ray Minnicon explains “For indigenous theologians, our starting point is in Genesis one, not in Genesis three because everything that God created is good, including us.
“And that’s our starting point. If you look at that particular passage there in the beginning, or as I’d like to think of it is among the beginnings, inside the beginnings God created. And for us, that fits into the ways in which indigenous people see what you fellas call the dreaming or what we call our creation stories, how all of these things came into being through our creation heroes and created our songlines created all the sacred sites that we see…”
“Everything there is part of who we are, and we are a part of it, and I’ll let Gabriel go on about totems and how they reflect us. But just to mention that Jesus also had totems. He was an indigenous man, and so he came from the tribe of Judah. He was a tribal man. He lived under oppression as well. He was a colonised Jew.”
Facilitator Tony Golsby Smith asks Ray Minniecon, “I’d like you to say something about [how, as a] western Protestant, I tend to individualise the gospel, whereas the indigenous mindset sees the gospel as a relation with a cosmos, the whole cosmos.”
Minniecon: “Yeah, I think that’s the greatest crime of Western theology or Western Christianity, is that it has reduced the whole notion of for God’s so loved the world, for God so loved me as an individual.
“And that bringing the whole of the cosmos into me only has, I think, been the most challenging, difficult concept for all indigenous people to grasp because we believe that God created it all. He loves it all; he continues to love it. And because we are his children, we’re supposed to love it too. But we seem to hate it, hate God’s creation or … it’s [merely] mechanical.
“We look at it through scientific eyes and not through the eyes of a spirit. So yeah, Western theology and Christianity have reduced the message of the gospel to me. Jesus just loves me. And I think that’s a crime against the gospel, and it’s a crime against God’s story to all of humankind.”
Gabriel Bani adds, “As I’m listening to the discussion and I’m thinking about the scriptures, especially Genesis about the environment and also reflecting on the scripture from Colossians chapter one, where speaks about Jesus and his preeminence, all things, he created all things and for him through him and in him, all things all together, just those scriptures going through my mind.
“But the environment in our culture is really important. ” relates to Genesis, how God made sure he prepared the environment before putting man in that environment.; And it’s all about relationships, our relationship with God, but our relationship with things that we have around us and how we relate to those things and how we relate to God. So in that sense, Uncle Ray just mentioned some of our totemic affiliations, but it’s all to do with everything around us. And it’s that relationship that through those relationships with the environment and with people and ultimately with who is behind all of that, I think that’s where the spirituality comes from.”
Maximus
David Bentley Hart responds by describing the Christianity of the colonisers and contrasts it to an earlier Christianity.
“What was the Christianity that came to these shores in the late 18th century? It was a Western, largely reformed Christianity that came in the aftermath of the 17th century, which probably was the single most spiritually disastrous century for Christian self-understanding in Europe, right? You talked about nature as a machine. That was in the 17th century [when] the mechanistic philosophy was born. That there’s a project for the sciences, right? That we could investigate nature as if it weren’t a story being told or a coherent order of spiritual and rational relations with an intrinsic beginning, middle, and an end in Aristotelian terms without formal and final causality, rather simply as a series of brute events, machines without any intrinsic meaning, mechanistic processes.”
Bentley Hart contrasts the colonisers thinking to the thought of the Byzantine Theologians and Monk, Maximus the Confessor (c. 580 – 662), drawing a link to the two Indigenous pastors’ theology.
“For Maximus, yes, the story begins in Genesis one because God creates not a machine that he’s then going to populate with ghosts, but rather expresses himself in infinite variety and beauty and calls forth into being a cosmos that as a whole is destined to be glorified in him. And in the midst of this, he creates living souls by breathing his own spirit into them … And all of it is destined for union with him. That’s the story he thinks is the centre of the Christian tale, not the belated rescue of a few miserable children who’ve wickedly broken the rules…
Bentley Hart adds, talking of the use of “logos” in John 1: “Within the logos, according to Maximus, are all the logoi, [the plural of logos], all the little words that are creation. Each of us and everything is a logos within the logos, a story within the one story, which is the true story of God and the true story of creation.
“So everything we’ve been talking about would’ve been perfectly intelligible to Maximus as entirely, not only consonant with but a necessary foundation for an understanding of the gospel.
“So how did we reach the point where it seemed something alien, strange, or if nothing else, a kind of quaint pagan patois that has nothing to do with the real matter of Christianity, which is, do I get to go to heaven?”
Maximus, Bentley Hart warns, is very difficult to read.
More on Totems
Gabriel Bani explains that the early missionaries misunderstood what totems meant. “But in our culture, we refer to our totems, our language word is alga or so it’s an animal or a plant, and it’s a major and a central part of our culture, these totems because they operate the law and the order and they organise our society. It looks at how our society is set up, the social organisation, the different clan groups, their responsibilities and even their behaviour and their practises, our relationship with other clans, and even things like marriages in our clan boundaries.
“We listened to that scripture from Acts when Paul writes about how we all came from that one through one blood, we came about, and then he placed us in our locations and he set the boundaries. Well, our totems, are all responsible for identifying our boundaries. And that when the missionaries came in the 18 hundreds, they thought that the totems were objects of worship, their interpretation was that… anything that was to do with our culture was seen as pagan.”
Bani explains that totems were symbols representing various people groups in the Torres Strait Islands. Minniecon then describes his view of totems in mainland indigenous cultures.
“Now in Aboriginal philosophy, they represent law and teaching the ways in which the Bible is law and teaching for the Israelites as well as for Christianity, law and teaching. Now they’re the two things you’ll find on Parliament House, the kangaroo and the emu. So you can imagine the confusion that our people have when they use our totems, those two totems to represent law and teaching, yet practise something completely different when it comes to us. And so it confused us. Why are they stealing our totems and then using them or weaponising them against us? So totems are very important for us. We know who they are, we know what they are. Even Jesus had totems, he called himself the water of life, the bread of life, the light of life, and all of these other things that he recognised were a part of him. So he could share all of those things with all of us.
“I know one of my totems is water. I have a responsibility towards that. If I was living in some parts of this country, I would have to make sure that our community had rain and water so that they could survive. I’ve got to protect the water. I’ve got to make sure that our people live with good clean water, a bit difficult these days, but with all the mining going on. But that was my responsibility and still is. And so that’s what totems are to us. They’re not just something that we worship, it’s not a common image. It’s responsibility.
“It’s everything that we are in order to make sure that our community can function and survive. And I must say this is a very dangerous conversation here in the Anglican Church because I know if you’re a conservative Christian, we’ll be talking all kinds of false doctrines and stuff. And yet when I look at the Western culture, it’s more pagan than we are, but it won’t admit to its own wrongdoings and its own crimes and its own ways in which it’s destroying.”
Genesis 1 again
After a discussion about how some missionaries, but only some, tried to make other cultures fit into the West, Bentley Hart summarises Maximus’ Genesis 1 vision of mankind leading creation in the worship of God. Bani has talked of the island clans with their totems feasting together and celebrating community, and Minniecon has spoken of the Kookaburra’s song reminding him of his place in creation.
“It’s very much the same as what Ray was saying, his understanding of the gospels that creation as a whole is theophany; the manifestation of God in infinite varieties of beauty. And that humanity’s unique role within this – he called it being called it the role of the Methorios, the borderland between the spiritual and the physical – was as a kind of priesthood in which humanity was to be the voice of creation, to offer up the praise of all things to God in articulate and rational worship.
“And that in failing that high vocation, all things were enslaved to death and violence. And for Maximus, this leads to certain great estrangements, the estrangements of heaven from earth, of paradise from nature, of humanity from creation, of man from woman, of humankind from God. These are the great divisions, all of which are healed in Christ, who restores the unity of all these things by retelling the original story, so to speak, as the incarnate one, reordering all things to their proper ends again.”
Image: Gospel Conversations’ Leisa Aitken introduces the speakers: (from left) Ray Minniecon, David Bentley Hart, Tony Golsby Smith and Gabriel Bani