The Echoes of Christ in Every Man in Every Land
Elisabeth Elliot provides us a wonderful contemporary version of this struggle in her book “The Liberty of Obedience.” It describes her work among the Aucas people of the Jungles of Ecuador. She writes;
“It is a difficult thing to live above reproach in one’s society where values are at least similar, how much more difficult it is in another culture. Each society has its own way of expressing itself, and what looks like sin in one context may look like virtue in another. ….Clearly, it is not possible to behave in a way which would be understood by all, let alone accepted by all. God alone, who is above all and in us all, judges rightly, and therefore it is before him that we stand or fall.”
Elliot declared that the success or failure of a culture to find God through creation and conscience is determined by God himself. She lived out this Biblical conviction among the Aucas people. She does however not leave the responsibility of understanding how these differences of conscience are manifest to God. She works vigorously to reconcile the distinctions so that the process of evangelism can be completed. She says she wanted to make;
“A sincere attempt to discover ways in which I might guide the Aucas in making moral choices (this) led me to the realization that I had sometimes called things sinful which the Bible did not call sinful; and if I imposed these on the Indians, I would have been guilty of the Pharisees’ sin of laying burdens too heavy to be borne.”
The Aucas represent one people group in which the Gospel of creation and conscience has been communicated to by evangelist bringing the Good News. We have a number of examples in the scriptures and human history that found or failed to find God through these means. The judgments of the Tower of Babble, Sodom and Gomorrah, Jericho, the Amorites are but some of the Biblical examples that will be considered. The endurance of China, the cultures of the Sub Sahara African Peoples, and the tribes of North and South America will also be looked at in these articles. The church has been called to preach Christ crucified and risen again. Like Paul and John the church must do so in a culturally relevant manner. It must value the people it interacts with and the wisdom gained in those cultures through the conscience, through creation.
There are two processes that strengthen the social or communal aspects of moral truth communicated by God to man through creation and conscience. They are the development of cultural memory and the codification of law. Elizabeth Elliot’s work was among an animistic people group. There are others that we will discuss as well in these articles. First I want to make the case that cultural memory is a means by which the knowledge of God is retained universally. It is universal because men all find their history in the persons of Adam and Noah respectively. The genealogies of mankind are ultimately one. Even though the truth of the knowledge of God has been distorted among human beings it has not been lost. The case I am making now is that one of the means in which it is retained is through cultural memory. This will be followed by a discussion on the development of law as a codifier of cultural memory in various people groups.
Cultural Memory:
“Cultural Memory is a concept introduced to the archaeological disciplines by Jan Assmann (1988a; 1988b; 1992: espec. 22). Assmann defines cultural memory as the "outer dimension of human memory" (1992: 19), embracing two different concepts: "memory culture" (Erinnerungskultur) and "reference to the past" (Vergangenheitsbezug). ‘Memory culture’ is the way a society ensures cultural continuity by preserving, with the help of cultural mnemonics, its collective knowledge from one generation to the next, rendering it possible for later generations to reconstruct their cultural identity."
'cultural memory' …denote(s) the collective understandings, or constructions, of the distant past, as they are held by people in a given social and historical context (see also Holtorf 1996). Such 'retrospective memory' manifests itself in history culture and can involve rituals and ceremonies at special occasions such as commemoration days, and at special places such as ancient monuments, which function as timemarks and sites of memory (Assmann 1992: 56–9; see also Connerton 1989).”
I define Cultural Memory from a religious perspective as the memory that is retained about the divine nature of God in the mind or psyche of all mankind. It is cited in the passages pinned by Paul the Apostle in Romans 1 and Romans 2. Universal cultural memory of God is retained in all people groups to one capacity or another. It is retained in festivals, rights and stories as Holtorf has referenced. Examples of this are the creation stories that we have cited. The story of the flood is the best example of this.
“The flood story is told again and again in similar but different manners and specifics throughout history and almost across the globe. The first reported tale is that of the Babylonian’s, often referred to as the ‘Sumerian’. It is thought that the Sumerian Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh is a flood story that is the source for the Noah story. The earth is flooded; the hero builds a great ark. In the end the hero is saved and both he and his wife are given immortality. This story later was expanded by the Babylonians to include a cycle of 3 floods each 1200 years apart and mankind being punished for overpopulation by being given barren women. On to Noah where the flood was the creator’s punishment for mankind’s evil and sins. An ark is built again. After the flood recedes the creator promised Noah and mankind that never again will live creatures be destroyed en-masse, at least by a flood of water.
… this same story is told across all cultures, whether it be Australian aboriginal who believe that the ark came to rest after the flood , and the animals and human disembarked , not in the middle east but in Australia itself , to the Babylonian Chaldean , the Persian Zoroastrianism, the Indian Hindu culture where a fish that was saved and protected repaid mankind by warning it of the impending great flood, the Greeks who believed that the great flood was punishment from the gods.
…. even across the Atlantic Ocean in the then unknown America’s the Aztecs and the Mayan Indians each had similar flood stories- the Aztecs being a punishment for an early type of man, and the Mayans whose flood story even included the dove figure. Even in many North American aboriginal first people’s mythologies be it Chippewa , Navaho, Hopi, or any of a greater number of unstudied mythologies of the first peoples of North America in one form or another a flood story or epic moral tale takes shape and is told and retold.
What is amazing is that a similar tale of a great catastrophic flood, which occurred in the early history of mankind, which was given or formed by the great creators of the earth and universe, is told across the globe. All cultures it seems, no matter where they were located on earth, or how distinct or isolated their people’s or cultures were or are today seem to have the same basic mythology with a similar message or moral tale.”
Cultural Memory in Monotheisms
The problem with cultural memory is that it becomes less reliable over time and distance, the consequence being that men lose sight the original design that God provided for us to follow.
“In proof of this drift toward deterioration it may be mentioned that the Chinese were monotheists from remote antiquity, and continued so until Persian dualism was introduced about two thousand eight hundred years before Christ. The polytheism that followed abundantly illustrates the facility with which faith degenerates. Hinduism furnishes similar illustrations. It has been argued by competent scholars that the most ancient hymns of the Rig Veda disclose a primeval monotheism.”
The worship of a monotheistic God as a means of pre-evangelism is a good place to start for understanding a God who gives redemptive gifts that are retained in the cultural memory of many people groups. Consider the following quote from an Islamic web site promoting monotheism from a comparative religious perspective. It provides a construct to discuss God’s plan of redemption of man through Jesus with people who either worship one God or have a history of worshiping one God. It quotes one of the Vedas Lorimer cited. It provides the opportunity for meaningful dialog that could lead to the knowledge of Christ for either the Islamic evangelist or the Hindu seeker.
“Monotheism is the natural instinct placed into the people by God (Quran 30:30). The message of ‘Worship God Alone’ is universal and was preached by all messengers from God. With time, the practice of religion frequently deteriorated to incorporate polytheistic elements. Yet traces of the original monotheism can be found in many, if not all, of these religions.
Hinduism today is perhaps the most prevalent of the religions considered as polytheistic. Yet, a number of authorities agree that the original principles of Hinduism advocate monotheism. In Hinduism, the Creator and Absolute God is called “Brahman”. Brahman is referred to as formless or “nirakara”, and beyond anything that we can conceive of and has no gender, form or features. The various gods and goddesses are thus merely manifestations of the One God. In fact many passages in Hindu scriptures seem to suggest the worship of One God.
To quote from the Gayatri Mantra in the Yajur Veda:
Let us meditate on God, His glorious attributes, who is the basis of everything in this universe as its Creator, who is fit to be worshiped as Omnipresent, Omnipotent, Omniscient and self existent conscious being, who removes all ignorance and impurities from the mind and purifies and sharpens the intellect.”
Evangelism obviously is not limited to monotheistic cultures. There are common truths that the church can build on in polytheistic cultures as well as animistic cultures. They are central to the premise of redemptive gifts being present in pre-evangelized individuals and people groups and are also found in their cultural memory. The nature of redemptive law in various cultures is seen in the common practice of sacrifice. It is in sacrifice that the promise of Christ is remembered most.
Elliot, Elisabeth, “The Liberty of Obedience.” Servant Books, 1968. Pg 25, 26.
Elliot, Elisabeth, “The Liberty of Obedience.” Servant Books, 1968. Pg 25, 26.
Assmann, Jan, “Cultural Memory,” (1988a) Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität. In: J.Assmann and T.Hölscher (eds) Kultur und Gedächtnis, pp. 9-19. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/citd/holtorf/2.0.html
Zoroastrian. “The Tale of Mythology of Noah’s Flood Story Across Different Cultures” copyright 2009 Free Online Library http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+Tale+of+the+Mythology+of+Noah's+Flood+Story+Across+Different...-a01073949585
George Lorimer, The Argument for Christianity, (American Baptist Publication Society, 1894) pg 29
http://www.submission.info/perspectives/monotheism/monotheism_since_ancient_times.html
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