Abstract
In the January 2018 issue of the IBMR, R. Daniel Shaw introduced the concept of hybridity to define how the Christian faith can connect meaningfully with people’s local rituals and practices. I researched how mature Lele Christians in Papua New Guinea evaluate their traditional concepts of sickness and healing. In this article I argue that hybridity provides a useful theoretical framework to understand how Lele Christians relate their Christian faith to their tradition. I also show that the concept finds good biblical precedent and is significantly moving forward the discussion about the relationship of Christianity and culture.
Among the Lele people of Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, spitting ginger at a sick person is a common traditional way of healing. According to the Lele worldview, the hospital, Western medicine, and health personnel can provide help for some sicknesses. But for others, only traditional healers are competent to treat. These sicknesses have their cause in the unseen world. A spirit that lives in a huge tree, in a cave, or near a waterfall might have harmed a person, or someone might have used sorcery against another person, who then fell sick. In such cases, the ginger of a traditional healer may help. Not just any ginger will do—it must be ginger in which the power of spirits is present. The spirits in such ginger, so the Lele believe, will fight against the unseen powers that have caused the sickness.
In my doctoral research, I wanted to find out how mature Lele Christians evaluate traditional concepts of sickness and healing. 1 The focus of my research was how these believers connect their experience with their Christian faith. How do they deal with the unseen world? Are the traditional ways of healing acceptable for them as Christians? What guides them in making their decisions? 2 In January 2017 I conducted three focus groups involving a total of twenty participants. In the groups I invited these mature Lele Christians to share their perspectives and discuss their viewpoints with each other. 3
In this article I connect my research findings with the concept of hybridity that R. Daniel Shaw has outlined in an article in this journal titled “Beyond Syncretism: A Dynamic Approach to Hybridity.” 4 In that article Shaw seeks to overcome the impasse that the concept of syncretism has caused in missiological discussion. If syncretism is the mixing of beliefs “in ways that distort the power and the truth of the gospel,” 5 Shaw rightly questions who sets the standards and defines what constitutes “distortion.” He then argues that a mixing or blending of beliefs and practices is a necessary process for the Christian faith to become meaningful and relevant for people’s lives. He writes, “Hybridity, then, is not only inevitable but is also a positive force for change.” Because God is already present in any cultural context, each cultural expression “is capable of incorporating God in its context.” 6 Referring to work of Paul G. Hiebert, 7 Shaw notes that “the criteria for judging syncretism must not be cultural, but rather a view from above, revealing God’s intent in any cultural environment.” Therefore, “people must be given the right and the opportunity to process Scripture in light of their own socioreligious experience with its variety of expressions, both oral and written, and thus interpret God in a vital and meaningful way.” 8 Shaw builds on his expertise in the field of cognitive studies to contribute to a growing field that could be labeled cognitive missiology. The findings of relevance theory especially support Shaw’s position that people in their respective contexts need to process their experiences in light of God’s revelation. 9 As a result of God dealing uniquely with people in different contexts, people will come to various expressions of truth that are closely related and deeply relevant to their lives.
In this article I consider the findings of my research in light of the concept of hybridity and also show where the concept itself needs to be further developed. I first show how hybridity is at work among the Lele, just as it is in the Bible. I then highlight two critical issues that need to be considered in an overall model of culture and Christian faith when utilizing the concept of hybridity. Finally, I show ways this concept has moved us forward in missiological discussion.
Hybridity at work
In working with mature Lele Christians, I came to value their Christian understanding as more appropriate and faithful than my own would be for their context. I therefore treat their comments favorably, evaluating various biblical texts with their arguments in mind.
In a number of cases in the Bible, people experienced healing in ways that are difficult for Westerners today to understand. Some of these healings include aspects that could be understood as magic rites 10 or as involving fetishes. 11 They are excellent examples of hybridity at work. I briefly reiterate four of these stories: one from the Old Testament, one from Jesus’ ministry, and two from the apostles’ ministry. 12
The Bronze Serpent—Numbers 21:4–9
When the Israelites grumbled over their long journey in the wilderness and spoke against Moses, Yahweh sent venomous snakes that bit and killed many people. The narrator leaves no doubt that it was God who sent the snakes. After the Israelites repented, it was again God himself who told Moses to make a bronze serpent and erect it so that everyone who looked at it would recover. Yahweh is presented as the one who is in charge of what is happening: he sends the snakes, he talks to Moses, and he specifies the remedy.
The most interesting aspect in this story is the kind of remedy God provided for the Israelites. Images or models of snakes were used in nearby cultures in cultic ways. The Israelites were told not to make any images lest they be pulled into worshipping them (Exod. 20:4; more precisely later in Deut. 4:17). In addition, “the function of the image resembles a form of homeopathic and apotropaic ritual, whereby a votive form of the source of the disease (homeopathic element) is used in a ritual to ward off evil (apotropaism)—here, death from snake bite.” 13 Although the resemblance to magic is close, Gaiser clarifies what distinguishes the story from forms of sympathetic magic: it was God himself who established the means for healing. “It is not a story of magic; it is a story of grace and faith—not manipulation of the deity, but genuine dialogical interaction with the deity.” For Gaiser, the story teaches that God enters the world and deals with people on a level where they are receptive, but he also transforms people’s understanding. Pointing to today’s world, Gaiser notes, “God may, indeed, heal through the forms of contemporary tribal cultures, but biblical theology will joyfully proclaim to such cultures, where necessary, that God is not in need of human appeasement. Healing comes as grace. No human form of healing is, in itself, God’s form of healing. God may be able to use human forms, some more than others, but no human form will capture God or remain free from evaluation by the biblical perspective that wholeness involves the worship of God, the care of others, and the integrity of self.” 14
In the later history of Israel, the serpent that Moses made was destroyed by Hezekiah (2 Kings 18:4) because the people had started to venerate it, and thus it had become an object of idolatry. For many neighboring peoples, snakes were important religious symbols that were connected to the gods that these people worshipped. 15 It is likely that both the place of the snake in Israel’s history and the influence of other peoples had contributed to its abuse. The story shows the danger of turning what God gives into something that is reckoned to have power in and of itself. In the apocryphal book of Wisdom, the lesson is made very clear: healing did not come from what they looked at (the bronze snake) but from God, the Savior of all people (16:5–7).
Jesus heals a man born blind—John 9:1–41
Out of the many healings of Jesus, I briefly discuss here the restoring of sight to a man born blind as reported in John 9. In verse 6 of this episode, Jesus spits on the ground and applies the mud to the blind man’s eyes. Gaiser discusses this event in a chapter entitled “Jesus, the Shaman?”
16
demonstrating that Jesus’ action is very much comparable with what other healers in his time had done. Shorter argues along the same lines. He points out that Jesus did not do medical examinations when he healed people but “conformed to the type of itinerant healer-exorcist of his own day in rural Palestine,” even “imitating the ‘mumbo-jumbo’ of contemporary healers.”
17
One of these practices was the use of saliva. Wilkinson lists some examples of curing through saliva around the time of Jesus. However, he does not want to bring Jesus’ healing in too close connection with these practices because he sees the connotations of magic as unfitting to the Gospel record, stating that Jesus would certainly have avoided anything coming close to incantations.
18
Gaiser agrees with Wilkinson that a distinction exists from our perspective between magic and Jesus’ healing but also rightly points out “Jesus’ willingness to partake of the methods of his own day, including their magical overtones.”
19
He then asks: What will we make, then, of the fact that Jesus seems clearly to make use of common shamanic healing techniques while the stories themselves spend little or no time exploring this methodology? Once again, we learn something of the incarnate nature of Jesus’ life and ministry. Of course Jesus makes use of first-century healing methods; he is a person of the first-century. Of course God is willing to embrace the methods of Jesus’ day; God has embraced that day as the kairos in which he will do particular saving work (Mark 1:15; cf. Rom. 5:6; 2 Cor. 6:2; Eph. 1:10). The New Testament takes the methodology for granted, with no further comment.
20
Gaiser notes that the method itself seems to have been of little interest to the writer of the gospel. What is of interest is that the author points to Jesus, who has come as the light of the world (John 9:5).
The shadow of Peter— Acts 5:15; the handkerchief of Paul—Acts 19:11–12
The stories in Acts of healing involving Peter’s shadow and Paul’s handkerchief are closely related. In both cases the apostles do not take action themselves in order to heal people, but those who seek healing hope to find it through their own efforts, which do not directly involve the apostles’ will. The healings here remind modern readers of magical rites.
In the first incident, the sick were brought to Jerusalem so that Peter’s shadow could fall onto them. The actions taken relate to a quasi-magical understanding, very similar to when a woman was healed by touching Jesus’ robe (Matt. 9:20–22). P. W. van der Horst notes that in antiquity the idea was common that the shadow of a person or an animal was filled with the healing or harmful power (some commentators use the word “mana” here) of that person or animal. 21 People believed that the shadow had a magical impact. The people of Jerusalem evidently had similar expectations. If Peter, in the name of Jesus, could heal a man through his words (Acts 3:6), why should healing not also be effected through his shadow? In any case, a stronger power had won the victory over a weaker power. Luke makes no effort to correct this view, and nowhere in the story does he suggest that these actions were false or ineffective. Luke’s emphasis is not to critique the magic beliefs of these people but to demonstrate that God was working in mighty ways through the apostles. For Luke, as the story in Acts 3 and 4 shows, there was no doubt that God healed the people—and not Peter’s shadow in and of itself. It is not clear whether the people who were longing for healing made the same distinction.
Turning to Paul in Acts 19:1–12, we see that when people brought handkerchiefs or aprons that Paul had touched to the sick, the people were cured and set free from evil spirits. In verse 11, Luke notes that these deeds were “extraordinary miracles” and characterizes them as something that God was “producing” (epoiei) and only administered by Paul, literally “through the hands of Paul” (dia tōn cheirōn Paulou). Schnabel notes that “‘by the hands’ is an expression of agency.” As this passage shows, it was clear for Luke that God himself was the author of such mighty deeds and that the apostles performed them “in the name of Jesus” (Acts 4:30). Schnabel then points out that it was a serious misunderstanding of the people when they thought that they could tap into spiritual power that they understood as being transmitted in material terms. However, we do not read that Luke discredits their belief or actions. His purpose was to contrast the Jewish exorcist described in the next verses (13–17) from Paul: “Luke emphasizes God’s powerful presence in Paul’s ministry—indeed, in Paul’s person.” 22
To sum up, in Acts we see that God was willing to connect with people on the basis of their beliefs, which were, without doubt, shaped by their culture and environment. The agency of the apostles connects the mighty deeds to God, a point that Luke makes explicit in both passages.
Reflection on biblical stories and Christian Lele concepts
Collectively, the Bible passages discussed above clearly suggest that God has used ways for healing that were closely connected to the understanding of people in their time and culture. None of the ways described can be explained within a solely biophysical framework. What God was doing came close to what the Bible criticizes, that is, practices related to other gods or perceived to be in danger of drawing people away from him. For example, there are clear prohibitions against creating images in Exodus 20:4 and Deuteronomy 4:17, and the New Testament is clear in warning against any forms of magic. 23 So when God used these practices, he made himself vulnerable to being misunderstood. God seems to take this risk in order to communicate and reach out to people in their circumstances. He wants them to discover his presence in their midst and for them to live as his people. 24
However—and this distinction is crucial for the concept of hybridity—there is always also a transforming element in these biblical examples when compared with that element’s pagan use. The bronze snake was given by God as a means of salvation. When Jesus healed people, John denotes the healing as a “sign” (sēmeion) of God being at work through Jesus. Likewise, the Synoptic Gospels describe healings as signs of the inaugurated kingdom of God (Luke 4:18). Luke made it clear that in the extraordinary healings, the apostles were agents of what God was doing through them.
In all cases, God became the focal point—at least in the biblical interpretation of what happened. What exactly the people involved understood of this emphasis is not always clear (however, see the confession of the man born blind recorded at the conclusion of the story, in John 9:33). In the biblical accounts, then, we see that the symbols used became an avenue to channel God’s healing power, not the source of the power itself. This crucial distinction was not always observed, as the case of the bronze snake in the later history of Israel makes clear.
This biblical analysis opens the door for Christians to include healing practices that have their roots in tradition, as long as these practices are used with the right mind-set, as a number of the participants in the focus groups actually stated. The core issue is that the help desired must be sought first of all from God.
One of the participants in the focus groups who uses ginger in healing people shared the following story. He had loaned his power generator to his wife’s relatives. When they returned it, it did not work anymore. He told his wife to tell her family to fix it. She went to her home village to talk with her relatives about the situation and returned in the afternoon. The next morning, her upper arm had dramatically swollen. When he saw her arm, he immediately suspected that his wife’s relatives had used some means to harm her because of tensions over the generator. He went to get his ginger and recalled, “So I went, dug it out, [but] first I prayed, asked God to make it effective, [then] dug it out, put it in my mouth and said, ‘OK, woman [i.e., his wife], let’s focus on God, directly on him, he will heal.’ So I spit on her, using the saliva from what I had chewed, I spit it on her, and with my two hands I pulled [downward, moving his hands from his wife’s upper arm down toward her hand]. 25 By next morning, she could already take off the arm-sling, and the arm looked normal again.” When I asked what made the ginger work, he said that he had centered his heart, mind, and spirit directly on God and that he had put his faith in the presence of God.
Although the ritual here looks very much the same as in its traditional use, it has been reinterpreted. In the participant’s conceptualization it is no longer the spirits who work but God who uses the ritual and works through it. If God is at the center, many of the Lele Christians find a wide array of healing practices acceptable that are closely connected to their traditional use. In the language of relevance theory, 26 their “right mind-set” is described as their inferences of God’s intent to be their healer (Exod. 15:26). Lele Christians expect God to be at work and to reach out to them in their circumstances through various ways, including methods that they know from their tradition. Relevant communication, or, in our case, the way of understanding God in the Lele context of sickness and healing, takes place when the inference matches the intent.
One could object and say that all of the healings from God in the Bible came through the hands of respectable people in God’s service: Moses, Jesus, and the apostles (in the examples I have highlighted). If one wants to learn anything from these stories, should it not be that Christians limit the circle of persons from whom they seek help to those who confess that they are Christians? Hiebert, Shaw, and Tiénou call for a “theology of discernment” and identify criteria to discern whether or not God is at work in what is happening. They argue that individuals who are involved (e.g., in a healing ritual) must acknowledge the lordship of Christ, submit to the church leadership, and show in their life the fruit of the Holy Spirit. 27 These criteria would exclude all traditional healing practices not carried out by Christians.
The Lele Christians I interviewed do not go that far. Just as a doctor at the hospital does not have to be a Christian in order to help (or better: lets us experience God’s help through him or her), so it is not absolutely necessary for the traditional healer to be a Christian. Lele Christians would not, however, use a healer who consciously accesses the power of the spirits to heal. For example, when I shared about a traditional healer who uses a tooth of his deceased grandfather in the healing ritual in order for the spirit of the deceased grandfather to fight against other spirit powers, the participants clearly saw this practice as unfitting for Christians. “This is not right!” said one; another went even further and remarked, “It’s from Satan!” The advice was not to use this person’s service. In contrast, other practitioners can heal cuts or broken bones simply by holding them together. Not all of them are Christians, but the participants had no spiritual objections to using their help. The Lele Christians claim that the ability of these healers does not come from the spirits but has been transmitted by someone else who also had this ability. While not fully comprehending how this transmission is possible, the participants would not have stopped me from using these people’s services. They argued that even if the healers are not Christians, Christians can use them and expect God to work through these means.
Hiebert makes an important contribution to our understanding when he applies set theory to the field of missiology. 28 He points out that we are sometimes too focused on the boundaries of what constitutes permissible behavior and should instead be more concerned with focusing on the center. In their reasoning about appropriate approaches to find healing, Lele Christians are not all agreed on what exactly demarcates an acceptable boundary, but they stress that Christ must be at the center in any approach they use. Within this framework, many traditional practices can have their rightful place, and thus mature Lele Christians build on traditional Lele concepts in dealing with sickness from a Christian viewpoint. However, they have not blindly copied rituals, but they have given these rituals new meaning in which God enters the thought-world and thus transforms traditional beliefs and practices.
Hybridity without boundaries?
The concept of hybridity emphasizes that the Gospel can find its place in every and any cultural setting. With this emphasis, hybridity aligns itself well with what Andrew Walls called the “indigenizing” principle. Walls, however, then adds a second principle: “Along with the indigenizing principle[,] which makes his faith a place to feel at home, the Christian inherits the pilgrim principle, which whispers to him that he has no abiding city and warns him that to be faithful to Christ will put him out of step with his society; for that society never existed, in East or West, ancient time or modern, which could absorb the word of Christ painlessly into its system.” 29
Taking Walls’s two principles as a point of departure, I see the need for hybridity to become part of a larger model of Gospel and culture in which the balance that the pilgrim principle provides has its rightful place. At various places in his article, Shaw mentions that a critique of culture is necessary (stemming from God’s intent for his people in that context) and that discernment is needed. 30
When we look at the life of Israel with Yahweh in their midst, we find numerous situations where hybridity did not work. Many Bible passages deal with existing beliefs, practices, or customs that simply could not be redeemed. Just as in the field of biology one cannot hybridize mosquitos with giraffes, there were certain cultural expressions that could not become part of Israel’s life with and under God. Anson Rainey writes: The biblical view of Canaanite religious practices is thoroughly negative. A frequent theme is inclinations of Israel to adopt the practices of the peoples among whom they were living in Canaan (Judg. 3:1–6). They are frequently exhorted to “put away the foreign gods and the Ashteroth from among you” (1 Sam. 7:3). The destruction of the northern kingdom was because “they went after false idols and became false; they followed the nations that were around them” (2 Kgs. 17:15; cf. Amos). Solomon also fostered the worship of the deities from the neighboring peoples (1 Kgs. 11:4–8). The reign of Manasseh was the most notorious for its adoption of foreign cult practices (2 Kgs. 21:2–9; 2 Chr. 33:2–9). Such a polemical attitude hardly permitted any biblical writer the opportunity to give an objective appraisal of Canaanite or other neighboring religion.
31
These texts (especially the account of Manasseh’s reign) should caution that, particularly when dealing with spiritual power and the unseen world, elements that work against knowing God better and trusting him more fully are present in many cultures. Other texts in Acts raise similar concerns (see, for example, the episode about Simon the sorcerer in Acts 8:9–24 or the report about the sons of Sceva in Acts 19:13–17). Is it not too optimistic, one could ask, to state that “each expression is capable of incorporating God in its context because God is already there”? 32 In my research, a number of people have mentioned that working with the power of the spirits as it is being done in the traditional system leads people away from God. One man said that using the traditional seer is against the first commandment and so, in his view, would constitute idolatry. For the people who were gathered in the focus groups, there is a dark side of the universe that cannot be combined and included in what God is doing. As one participant said, “Satan and God do not eat together at the same table.”
In the discussions I even tried to open a way to reconsider and reinterpret what is happening when a traditional healer works in the power of the spirits. I asked the participants for their comments about the following statement: “The traditional healer thinks he works with the help of the spirits. Let him think whatever he wants. On a deeper level, it is God who works through him and uses him.” None of my informants, however, gave any support for such an alternative interpretation. Similarly, turning to the ancestors for guidance was nothing the Lele Christians would support. For them, there is no way to include this practice in a Christian way of dealing with sickness.
The critique of the traditional culture in this case came from the Christian community, based on its understanding of God’s Word. The origin is essential. This situation is exactly where the word syncretism still makes sense, namely, when Christians in their local setting, together in community and after careful study of God’s Word, come to the conclusion that certain aspects of their culture are incompatible with their relationship with God. In this sense, Shaw also still uses the word with its negative connotations. 33
The role of outsiders
In the concept of hybridity as Shaw has introduced it, the focus is very much on the Christians in a certain context doing their own theologizing. The concern that an outside influence—despite all good intentions—might stifle a fledgling development of a theology in that context is certainly valid; mission history is full of such woeful examples.
Although, given globalization, outside influence is a given in almost all contexts, there is also a theological basis for Christians in one setting to listen to what brothers and sisters from another background have to say. Hiebert points out that we see the sins in others before we see our own sins, also misinterpretations of Scripture by others before we recognize our own. 34 The problem is that our own interpretation might not be fitting for the respective context and that what someone considers sinful or not sinful may have to do with that person’s own cultural bias or church tradition. Nevertheless, to ignore the voices of those who seriously follow Christ with us would mean to cut ourselves off from the enrichment and the critique of other Christians. Shaw’s model can help us see clearer that “those who bear the message will be transformed by those who respond.” 35 We learn from each other as we share what we have discovered about God in our respective contexts. 36 It would be inconsistent, though, if we drove the model too far to one side and excluded the possibility that those who hear the message might learn from those who bring it to them. Jesus’ commission to his disciples to teach the nations (i.e., nations outside Israel, with their different cultures) everything he has taught them implies the possibility that the message-bearers can actually contribute meaningfully to the theological understanding of those they share Jesus with. The danger remains, that the message-bearers do not teach what Jesus taught but what they, through their own cultural glasses, have understood about Jesus’ teaching. Since there is no “pure,” acultural theology, 37 the best way to handle this issue is to be aware of it.
My suggestion for the role of the outsider is that he or she be part of the conversation and accompany the process of developing theology in context from the second row, while making a contribution when invited to do so. Critical questions will help local Christians discover blind spots or find ways to refine and articulate more clearly how they arrived at their conclusions. People from the outside must avoid an attitude of theological hegemony. Otherwise hybridity will not work, and outsiders will condemn as syncretism what people in their local setting have discovered as God acting in their midst. At the end of my time with the focus groups, a number of participants expressed what they had learned through the discussions and how they now saw things more clearly. What was planned as a means to elicit people’s perspectives through their interaction as Christians contributed to the development of theology in and for their context.
Have we moved forward?
Does the concept of hybridity move us forward in the discussion of how to relate culture and the Gospel? I think it does in at least the following four points:
First, it emphasizes the fact that the Gospel needs a local setting in which to anchor itself. People will not find meaning in a foreign Gospel, dealing with issues alien to them or providing answers to questions they do not have. Along with this understanding, the role of the outsiders (often: the Gospel-bearers) should be more critically examined. Those who bring the Gospel to people of a foreign culture do well not to be too quick to critique the very elements of a culture that could serve to grow something new when combined with the Christian message. Too often Gospel-bearers, myself included, have criticized what they have not totally understood from the perspective of the local Christians.
Second, hybridity’s central concern is the relevance of the Gospel in a certain context. Hiebert, who shared this concern, nevertheless believed that when Christians from different contexts came together and discussed their different theologies, “a growing consensus on theological absolutes” might form. “It may bring us closer to the formulation of a truly supracultural theology.” 38 Such an achievement is not envisioned in the concept of hybridity. The value of the input of others and their theologies is to stimulate one’s own reflection.
Third, the concept of hybridity has put in a positive light what the discussion about syncretism has always suppressed, namely, that there is great potential in including existing rituals and practices in the formation of a Christian theology in a particular context. Along with this possibility, there is the opportunity to see something new and beautiful about the Gospel when it meets a new local setting.
Fourth, hybridity stresses the need not only to “get things right” (a certain word in the translation, the understanding of a certain teaching, etc.) but also to look at the process that leads to people discovering God in their midst, getting to know him better, and walking with him more closely. Cognitive studies and especially the question how relevance in the transmission of the Gospel can be deepened have informed this element of the concept, more so than many other discussions about Gospel and culture.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Notes
Author biography