Salvation beyond tradition
January 23, 2008
Jolene Hildebrand
Justifying the concept of missions is a crucial question for Christians hoping to fulfill the call of evangelism. Addressing what missions really does forces us to examine the confusing relationship between salvation and the Western church. The commission that Christians are charged with holds us accountable to sharing the message of Christ, but how has the tradition of Western Christianity impacted our encounters with people from different traditions? And what exactly is the message of salvation that we are imposing?
Traditionally, doctrinal evangelism appears to be out-dated compared to how we now view missions. Far more attention is given to meeting the needs of other cultures and seeking to understand their language and customs. But when we look back to the history of missions and the motivations behind evangelizing foreign cultures, the cruelty and degradation that the Christian West has introduced and the bitter resentment left behind is painfully obvious. The message of salvation in these interactions has been perverted to meet the needs of an arrogant civilization. Instead of sharing the revealed truth of the incarnation through personal relationships, foreign customs and greedy interests have been imposed on other cultures with a zeal that betrays a blind faith in the powerful institutions that sent us forth.
In Simone Weil’s Letter to a Priest, she struggles with the Catholic faith so intensely that her questions would seem to destroy any belief in the Church. Among her many questions is the problem with salvation and the distortion of St. John’s message: that belief in the incarnation of the Son of God in the person of Jesus was the sole requirement for salvation. Instead, she sees that the Church has decided to enforce its dogmatic teachings on an unsuspecting world. In her words, “everything has proceeded as though in the course of time no longer Jesus, but the Church, had come to be regarded as being God incarnate on this earth”.
Weil makes the point that one must be inside a tradition in order to understand it. We can never adequately comprehend the deep currents of custom and tradition that influence the mindset of another culture. Missions is so often approached as a means to prove one’s cultural superiority, either legalistically imposing foreign rituals or by disaffectedly arriving to show “them” how to take care of themselves properly. These situations are ultimately narcissistic - they care neither for a relationship with the people nor for mutual respect.
The main problem is that we can’t distill the Christian message into a pure “Christian” religion without confusing the influences of our own customs that have nothing to do with Christ. If we can’t look into our own tradition and discern what influences and conventions are pagan and what are Christian, then how can we claim that we possess the authoritative religion of Christianity? We can’t, and the problem is when we approach other cultures that have their own traditions, not by sharing an authentic message of salvation, but by imposing Western categories on their lives.
Since my whole life has been in the Western Christian tradition, I find myself continually frustrated by the Church and its misguided notions of evangelism. Yet the search for divine truth that the message of the incarnation inspires can become the greatest thing we have in common with any other culture - only if we understand that by engaging another people with love and respect the dignity of our actions will give life to our words, revealing the purest message that the incarnation embodies.
Now you go...
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