Responding to Split-Level Christianity and Folk Religion

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178Split-Level Christianity and Folk Religionand their potential of becoming gods.Self-possession, not demon possession, isthe greatest danger facing human beings.It is hard for Christians to move from feelingthey need to be in control of theirlives to entrusting themselves completelyto God’s mercy and totally submittingtheir lives to his will.The results of self-centeredness in thechurch can be devastating. It leads toauthoritarian leadership, competition,divisions and spiritual pride. Even thoserenewed in spiritual movements oftenlook down on those not involved, andhave a judgmental attitude toward thosewho disagree with them. Christcenteredness,in contrast, leads to humilityand a desire for the unity of thechurch, as well as a willingness to hearand speak (Rom. 15:1-2; 1 Cor. 10:12).Experienced-based TheologyFolk religion. including split-levelChristianity, is existential and experiencebased.The result is a pragmatic concernfor power rather than truth. Differentmethods are tried simultaneously to solvehuman dilemmas, with little concern thatthese often contradict one another. In suchsettings it is easy for Christians to basetheir theology on experience. From thispoint of view the test of truth is success.The sign of spiritual life and vital worshipis feelings of excitement, health, and prosperity.As Jonathan Edwards pointed out,experiences are not self-authenticating .7They must themselves be tested for theirreality and cause. Christians need to avoidreading their experiences and theologiesinto Scripture—focusing on their experiencesrather than on Scripture itself.A corollary of experience-based theologiesis confusing reports with reality.In folk religions there are many stories ofspirits, visions, miraculous events, magicalpowers, witchcraft, fulfilled prophecies,guidance through divination, and thesuccesses of amulets and rituals to protectpeople from calamities. It is important totake these seriously, for they reflect thereality as the people see it and upon whichthey act. It is equally important not toequate all phenomenological reports withontological reality. Careful, sensitiveinvestigation of these reports is needed,and independent verification sought whenpossible. Christians must also test thesources of these events when they proveto be real. Certainly not all that is attributedto God is his doing.Reinforcing SecularismContradictory as it may seem, byoveremphasizing miracles Christians canreinforce secularism. For instance, bylooking for supernatural events as manifestationsof God’s presence, they implythat God is not directly at work in naturalphenomena which in the West are studiedby science. As the knowledge of sciencegrows, God is increasingly pushed to themargins of life. Moreover, as miraclesbecome routine, they no longer appear tobe extraordinary, and people look for newand more spectacular miracles to reassurethemselves that God is with them. The neteffect of these dynamics is the secularizationof everyday life. The answer lies neitherin seeking miracles, nor in denyingthem. It is to reject the dualistic dichotomyof miracle and natural together, andto see the naturalness of God’s extraordinaryhealings and the miraculous natureof his ordinary ones. The church mustavoid making miracles the signs of God’spresence—making the phenomena thecenter of its attention and ministry.Christians rejoice when God works inextraordinary ways to heal the sick,deliver the bewitched, and bring justice tothe oppressed. What about those who arenot delivered? Too often they experiencea false sense of guilt and despair, but whoare in the greatest need of ministry. Toattribute sickness and death to a lack offaith or to spiritual defeat is too simple ananswer—nor is it biblical (Job; John 9:2;2 Cor. 12:7-9). Even more than a theologyof healing, the church needs a theology ofsuffering and death—one that does notsee these as failures, but as part of God’sgreater redemptive work in a fallen world.It is important to be biblically balanced(Matt. 23:23-24). It is easy toemphasize one truth at the expense of others.It is easy to begin with Christ as thecenter of a Christian’s life, but in the businessof life to unwittingly move the centerto one of the expressions of the gospelsuch as healing, justice, peace, or deliverance.The pitfall is that in time Christbecomes peripheral and the justifier ofwhat is now the Christian’s real concern.Balance is maintained only if Christ, not aparticular cause, remains the true centerof believers’ lives.In folk religions leaders are oftencharismatic authoritarian prophets, whodevelop personality cults. People who donot understand what is going on in life areattracted to a big leader who claims toknow the way. Such leaders often appearin young churches, but this creates problems.It encourages most Christians to befollowers, who have an uncritical trust intheir leaders. They attribute healings,prophecies, and miracles to the leader.The leaders are tempted to take credit forthe work, and encourage the adoration oftheir followers, and not be accountable toothers. We must see that leadership, healing,guidance, exorcisms, and other ministriesin the church belong to the congregation.Some members may haveparticular gifts, but they use these asmembers of the body.We now return to the critical contextualizationmodel to follow through on anunderstanding of the first two steps withtheir emphasis on local phenomenologyand biblical understanding.Step Three:Discerning the TruthThe third step in the process of “criticalcontextualization” is to evaluate oldbeliefs and practices in the light of biblicaltruth. It is important to recall that ouraim is not to destroy folk religions and toreplace them with formal Christianity. Itis to develop a vibrant Christianity religionthat is rooted in the gospel. The life ofthe church is found in a laity for whomInternational Journal of Frontier Missions
Paul G. Hiebert, R. Daniel Shaw, Tite Tiénou179the gospel is a reality that reconciles themto God and one another, and touchesevery area of their lives.It is important to note, too, that thereis no standard formula for dealing withfolk religions. They vary greatly from culturesociety to culture society, and a differentresponse must be made to each ofthem. There is not one kind of witchcraft.Practices loosely labeled witchcraft arefound around the world. Similarly, thereare many varieties of ancestor veneration,ways of seeking guidance, and beliefs inspirits and possession.Given this diversity, it is important toprovide churches with broad theologicalprinciples for dealing with the specificbeliefs and practices they face. It is evenmore important to teach them how to dotheology and how to do contextualizationin their own contexts. Only as churchestake this task upon themselves will theybecome mature and learn to live as Christiansin their particular socio-cultural contexts.Only then will they learn to preachthe gospel in ways that are understood bythe people, and respond to needs withoutcompromising the church’s prophetic call.Answers to the questions raised by folkreligions must be hammered out in thecontext of the local beliefs and practices,and constantly be reformulated as timesand cultures change. This is best done bylocal Christians who understand and livein these settings.Today young churches around theworld are formulating their own theologies.Severe tensions often developbetween daughter and parent churches,but the young churches can no longer turnback. If they are to make the gospel relevantto their own people, they must dotheology in their own cultural settings.Attempts to export theologies developedin the West and to preserve themunchanged have to a great extent failed.Developing a Meta-TheologyIf believers are free to do theology,what are the theological absolutes? Evangelicalshold the Scripture to be true, for itis God‘s revelation, but how can Christianspreserve that truth if they allow allbelievers to read and interpret the Scripturesin their own cultural settings? Theanswer lies in a meta-theology—a biblicallybased way of doing theology thatsets limits to theological diversity. Whatfollows are some principles for a biblicallybased meta-theology.The vital continuityand expansion ofChristianityaround the worldrequires both atrue gospel and atruly transformedchurch.Rooted in Divine RevelationThe first principle of a biblicallybased meta-theology is that theologicalreflection must be rooted in the acceptanceof Scripture as divine revelation.The Bible is not a record of humanssearching for God, but of God revealinghimself to them in the particular contextsof history, culture, and society. It is thesource not only for finding answers tohuman questions, but of defining theworldview through which they shouldlook at reality and live their lives.Guided by the Holy SpiritThe second principle of a biblicallybased meta-theology recognizes that,believers must seek the guidance of theHoly Spirit in when interpreting Scripture.They must study it on their knees, in aspirit of humility, willing to listen andlearn rather than with traditional dogmaticself-assurance. Christians must recognizethat their theology is an understanding ofScripture—not Scripture itself. Consequently,although they must hold theirtheological convictions strongly, to thepoint of being willing to die for them, yetmust not equate these with Scripture.They must admit that their understandingof truth is partial, biased, and possiblywrong, needing correction. They must testtheir convictions by returning to Scriptureand to the God of Scripture. They mustrecognize that the same Holy Spirit thatthey seek to guide them in their understandingof the Bible is also at work inother believers. They must allow othersthe greatest privilege they allow themselves—tomake mistakes.Done by the ChurchThe third meta-theological principleemphasizes the need for Christians to beopen to the checks of the larger Christiancommunity. Interpretation and applicationof Scripture in everyday life are not justpersonal matters based on one’s privateand personal opinion. Ultimately thechurch as a whole must interpret theWord and act as an hermeneutical community.On the global level, when peoplefrom different cultures study Scripturetogether, they can help one another checkcultural biases. It is almost impossible forindividual Christians to see the culturalgrids they bring with them to their understandingof the Bible. These are betterseen by other worldviews. For this reason,missionaries and church leaders fromoutside play important roles in helpinglocal churches to do theology, not by dictatingthe answers, but by acting as catalystshelping the people to understandScriptures better, and to gently remindthem of their cultural biases. It is moreimportant that Christians learn to taketheir questions to Scripture and the Godof Scripture, than that they get all theiranswers right from the start.Evaluating the ContextA fourth principle of meta-theologyhighlights one of the hermeneutical tasksof the church which is to evaluate andrespond to the socio-cultural and historicalcontexts in which she finds herself.Here it must undertake the process of“critical contextualization”. Missionariesand church leaders can help localchurches work their way through the processby encouraging the congregations toVol. 16:4, Winter 1999/2000
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