Shadow Boxing: The Missionary Encounter with Christian Theology in World Religions
I can add more on the issue of respect. I would certainly not like to be known for advocating a drop in respect levels by Christians to others. I could perhaps talk of true-respect. That is, to respect a person for who they actually are, not for who they are portrayed as being by what we have now discovered to have been faulted reasoning. There is probably something to be gained here by going back to pre-19th century classificatory systems mentioned by Masuzawa (2005:47) in which “the rest”, who were yet to become Christians, were considered to be heathen or pagans. They were seen as having a lot in common all around the world. More recently some have alluded to such by referring to folk religions,[8] e.g. folk Islam, folk Hinduism, folk Buddhism, etc. It is this ‘folk’ element to people’s ways of life that I am here referring to. Very often, if not typically, the ‘folk’ element is dominant.
What does this ‘folk’ nature of world religions mean? Let us look at an example. Many people in the west may well say that they are short of money. Alcoholics, people living on the streets because of a broken marriage, people who are unemployed because they are not dependable in the workplace, people suffering from TB – may all be short of money. Yet in every case something else underlies such shortage. Resolving their problem or helping them to get on better in life may well not involve giving them cash in hand. Any shortage of money may actually be caused by alcoholism, marriage breakdown, not being able to hold a job down, the presence of the TB virus, and so on. True help for these people requires getting to the underlying problems what they communicate as their issue (a shortage of money). So also adherents of various world religions present a particular face to the West. That face invites a particular response. The face is one that resembles western Protestantism. The wise Christian missionary must see through and beyond such face, to the hurting hearts and souls of people who God loves. That is what, in the interests of true justice, we as Western Christians should be respecting and responding to.
Recognition can be empowerment. People are defined by others. It is evident from what we have already discussed above, that world religions were formed in the course of their being recognised by the West. It follows that they are further empowered and confirmed by further recognition given by the same West, especially Western Christians. Biblically, empowering of other-than Yahweh is idolatry. This is where the whole world religions discourse can be considered to be foundationally idolatrous. In the Kenyan Bible college I taught at mentioned above, we taught ‘world religions’ to help Christian students know what they are ‘up against’. This might have been a two-edged sword, because we were reifying non-Christian religions to a status of being comparable to Christianity.
A key to the solution of the above, albeit relatively unrecognised in the literature on world religions, is in choice of language. I have already illustrated the dependence of African ‘religions’ on English above. Because Hinduism as a belief system was created by the West, we would expect Hinduism to hang together as a coherent religion when articulated using English and other Western languages. It is unlikely to come across as a coherent religion when articulated in native Indian languages. Being an external creation, Hinduism as a coherent body of beliefs and practices is likely to be largely absent in the languages indigenous to India. Hence, missionaries’ use of indigenous languages can, through bypassing Western creations, facilitate deep penetration by the Gospel to the hearts of people. At the same time, empowering the idolatry inherent in the world religions discourse can be avoided. Using indigenous languages can enable a much more helpful grasp of the actual issues being faced by the majority world. Therefore, Christian mission should, if at all possible, be carried out using indigenous languages.
Advocacy for dialogue has been widespread in discussions of world religions. The aim has often been to bring different world religions together. This project requires one to presuppose the substantiality of what has reified into existence by colonial and Western scholars. In the light of the above discussion we need to ask ourselves, if the dialogue partners represent different branches of Western invention, then what actually happens in the course of inter-religious discourse? When such formal dialogue occurs it is typically subsidised from the West and dominated by Western languages. For poor countries and people, subsidy of a dialogue can itself be sufficient cause and justification for perpetuating the reification of the religious content that has been invented for them. The use of Western languages in the dialogue will be with respectful to ‘religions’ that have minimal roots in functioning human communities.
Harries (2008) identifies more detailed factors that complicate and can delegitimise inter-cultural and religious dialogue. Issues of translation are much more consequential than is often imagined. To illustrate translation foibles, let us look at truth. In Western languages truth suggests an equivalence between words and what they describe. Amongst Muslims however, this equivalence may not be required, i.e. it is acceptable to tell a non-Muslim untruth.[9] Whereas in Western Christian circles one may be encouraged to ‘speak one’s mind’ to do such as a Muslim can, according to Asad, quickly get one into deep water. Asad explains that a Muslim is free to think or believe whatever they want to. But they should not express anything contrary to Muslim faith (2011:289). This study of just one word, truth, that must be key in dialogue between Christians and Muslims points to deep problems in inter-religious dialogue. What would a study of additional words turn up, when in dialogue between more ‘religions’?