Missionaries as Grateful Guests
From the third century, paganus was equated with ‘non-Christian,’ since the majority of Christians were city-dwellers…. After the discovery of the Americas and Asia, the term designates the indigenous religions of these continents, and their inhabitants are called the gentes (or pagani) and are considered as the primary target of Christian missions, the missio ad gentes…..
It is a widely common experience of mission in Asia (and of course also elsewhere) that in evangelizing the gentes, missionaries themselves are evangelized by them, and indeed, that the effectiveness of their mission work depends on the extent to which they are open to being evangelized by the gentes…. I refer rather to the fact that in not a few areas of Christian life there are teachings and practices of the religions and cultures of the gentes that missionaries would do well to learn and practice in order to be a better Christian and missionary. Examples abound in areas such as sacred books, ethics, prayer, spirituality, and monasticism. This fact was recognized by luminaries such as Matteo Ricci in China, Roberto de Nobili in India, Alexandre de Rhodes in Vietnam, and countless other, lesser-known but no less effective, missionaries, both women and men, in the distant past as well as in the present.
Recognizing and celebrating the goodness and holiness of people outside one’s religious tradition and culture … is not an invention of progressive missionaries. It was practiced by Jesus himself. Jesus praises the Samaritan leper who alone among the ten lepers whom he has cured comes back to thank him (Lk 17:17-18). He also holds up a Samaritan as the model of love of neighbor (Lk 10:33-35). Jesus is said to have been astonished or amazed by “such great faith” of the Roman centurion (Mat 8:10)…. Even more tellingly, the “great faith” (Mat 15:28) and perseverance of the Canaanite woman, in spite of Jesus’ curt, even insulting, refusal to grant her request for her daughter’s healing, and her humble retort that even “the dogs [a Jewish term of abuse for the goyim, which Jesus himself used] eat the crumbs that fall under their masters’ table” (Mat 15:27) succeeded in changing Jesus’ understanding that he was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. Here, it is Jesus’ ethnocentric understanding of his ministry that was changed and enlarged by a Gentile, and a woman to boot!
In their work, in light of Jesus’ own practice, missionaries in Asia must be willing and able to open their minds and hearts to be changed intellectually and transformed spiritually by the “reverse mission” of the gentes Asiae to them. Admittedly, they are severely hampered in this by the fact that the traditional descriptions of mission as “teaching”, “proclamation”, “evangelization”, and “conversion” that form part of the theology of missio ad gentes do not dispose missionaries to adopting a posture of listening and humility. Indeed, if one comes to a foreign place with the conviction that one or one’s church already possesses exclusively all the truths in all their fullness; that one’s primary task is to “proclaim” these truths, as if standing at a pulpit or behind a lectern, with a megaphone in hand, and “teach” them like an all-knowing professor; and that the objective of one’s mission is to “convert” the gentes, would it come as a surprise that the gentes are seen as nothing but targets of one’s mission (as implied by the preposition ad) and that success in mission is measured by the number of baptisms, as victory in a war is demonstrated by the number of casualties and cities destroyed or occupied? Would it be strange that the gentes Asiae will look upon Christian mission as a neo-colonialist attempt to conquer and destroy their religions? How can we plausibly defend ourselves against this charge if in fact the goal of our mission is to convert the followers of other religions to Christianity?
In contrast, suppose, as a thought experiment, we no longer use terms that imply superior knowledge and moral excellence such as “evangelize”, “convert”, “teach”, and “proclaim” to describe the objectives and tasks of Christian mission, so prevalent in magisterial documents and used by theological watchdogs as a litmus test for orthodoxy? What would missionaries do and how would they act if they come to Asia not as proclaimers and teachers and converters and evangelizers but as guests — and uninvited, and even unwanted, guests at that — who totally depend for their physical and spiritual survival on the kindness and generosity of the gentes as hosts? What if we bring our Christian faith not as something to be proclaimed and taught in order to evangelize and convert the Asian gentes but as a humble gift, as a token of our gratitude for their hospitality, which our hosts have the perfect right to accept or refuse, use or not use? What if, as becoming of grateful guests, we do not insist that they abandon their beliefs and adopt ours, reject their moral norms and follow ours, condemn their rituals and practice ours, disown their religions and be baptized into ours? Suppose, with a sincere and humble heart, we let ourselves be “taught”, “proclaimed”, “evangelized”, and “converted” by our hosts’ beliefs, moral values, modes of worship, and religious affiliations because in fact there are things that are of great, or even greater, truth and value in these than in ours.
No comments:
Post a Comment