The Danger and Beauty of Acculturation

Above left: Jaroslav Pelikan, the subject of the interview recording on the right. Source.

In a 2003 interview with Krista Tippett, Christian historian and Yale professor Jaroslav Pelikan discusses his project, ten years in the making, to collect and publish every Christian creedal statement he could get his hands on. At one point in the interview, excerpted in the audio clip above, he reads a portion of a creed created by a Masai church in east Nigeria, the Congregation of the Holy Ghost:

We believe in the one High God, who out of love created the beautiful world...We believe that God made good His promise by sending His Son, Jesus Christ, a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left His home and was always on safari doing good, curing people by the power of God, teaching about God and man, showing the meaning of religion is love. He was rejected by his people, tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died. He lay buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day, He rose from the grave.*

Pelikan points out that, "after a couple of generations" of reciting the Christian creeds given to your culture by others, "a Christian community gradually comes of age, achieves a level of maturation where you want to do it for yourself...speaking in your context, using the images of your culture. And the question is, can you do that without sacrificing the integrity of what you have received? It's easy just to repeat, but then it's not your own; it's easy to say what is your own, as though nobody had ever said it before, but then the question is whether it's authentically Christian."

Pelikan holds up the Masai creed as an example of the beauty and richness that is available to Christians when this process is done right. The Masai recast Jesus' life and death in their own cultural terms, and the result is both a Jesus who is wholly relatable to a new culture, and a fresh vision of Christ and creed for anyone to ponder, Masai or otherwise. However, "the dangers here are enormous!" Pelikan contrasts this creed with the "Nazi creed," that is, the creed of "Positive Christianity," a strain of Christianity in Nazi Germany which removed Jesus' Jewishness, refused to ordain ministers with Jewish heritage, and generally sought to conform Christianity to Aryanism.** Intuitively, we know that the Masai kind of acculturation or cultural blending of Christianity "has the ring of authenticity," and the Nazi kind does not, but Pelikan does not spell out exactly what makes them different.

Flag of the German Christians, group associated with "Positive Christianity" in Nazi Germany. Source.

(I feel like a good rule of thumb might be: if your church is putting a swastika on the cross, it's the wrong kind of acculturation. Maybe a bit too specific, though.) 

Listening to this interview brought immediately to my mind the most fascinating example of acculturation I'm aware of: a 9th-century poem called the Heliand. It's a linguistic and cultural adaptation of the Gospels, transferring them from their first-century, Mediterranean context and Greek language, to the language and context of the Saxons in Northern Europe. (The word heliand means "healing one" and is one of the Heliand's names for Jesus.) At the time the Heliand was written, the Saxons had recently been forcibly converted to Christianity by Charlemagne, the great conqueror and emperor of that time and place. It was written to them in order to help them transition to their new religion.

Needless to say, the Heliand is a fraught document. Unlike either the Masai creed or the creed of "Positive Christianity," the Heliand is not an instance of a culture adapting Christianity to itself, but rather part of an attempt to impose Christianity on Saxon culture from the outside. At the same time, it is quite beautiful. The Heliand manages to be quite consistent with both Christian tradition and the 9th-century Saxon view of the world, which is no mean feat. While it is whole-heartedly in favor of Christianity, it is (depending how you read it) at least ambivalent about and more likely wholly condemnatory of the conquest and forcible conversion of a people.

Page from a manuscript of the Heliand. Source

I had owned a copy of an English translation of the Heliand for years, but I'd never managed to read my way through the whole thing. After hearing the Pelikan interview, I set myself the task of finally finishing the book, so I could try to assess where it lies on the acculturation spectrum from Masai to "Positive" Christianity.

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My copy of the Heliand is a translation and commentary by G. Ronald Murphy. In reading it and thinking about the way it adapts Christianity to the culture of this northern Germanic tribe, I relied heavily on Murphy's notes. All this is to say that my assessment rests on the work of a single scholar and is, naturally, not in any way definitive. It'll be fun though!

Above: my copy of the Heliand, with my copious notes for this essay scribbled on a blank page at the front.

The anonymous author's task was to help convince the Saxon upper class that Christianity was for them, and he used a number of linguistic and rhetorical tools to carry it out.

The most basic tool, and one which I can only really see as fantastic, is to make simple changes to the concrete elements of the story, to make them conform to the hearer's understanding of the world. In the Heliand, Jesus is surrounded by things familiar to a northern European, Germanic audience. So when Jesus goes to the wilderness to be tempted, for example, he heads out into a forest rather than a desert. When John the Baptists' father, Zachary, writes what the name his newborn son will be, he inscribes it in runes on beech tree bark. Nazareth, Bethlehem, and Rome are Germanic hill-forts, surrounded by a wooden palisade wall and the huts of peasants. Jesus' disciples fish on a Sea of Galilee clouded in North Sea fog, and they watch Jesus walk on water from the deck of a viking-style longboat.

Source

The author's next strategy for drawing in his audience is to recast Jesus and his disciples themselves in Saxon cultural terms. The Heliand is addressed to the upper class of Saxon society: clan chieftains and the warrior vassals who served them. The warrior's loyally to his liege lord, and the lord's reciprocal kindness to and responsibility for his warriors, are among the highest values of this culture. So Jesus is depicted as a mighty chieftain who gathers loyal warrior-companions to himself before embarking on his quest to heal and save humanity. When Peter tries to walk on water with Jesus, but begins to sink because of his doubts, "he calls on Christ's feudal bond as Chieftain to a thane with its obligation on the lord to render help to his warrior-vassals":

The waves wound around [Peter], the high seas surrounded the man. Just at that moment he began to doubt in his mind. The water underneath him became soft and he sank inside a wave, he sank into the streaming sea! Very soon after that he called out quickly, asking earnestly that Christ rescue him, since he, His thane, was in distress and danger. (Murphy, pg. 96)

Upon hearing Jesus predict his death and proclaim his intention to go into harm's way, the disciple Thomas gives a rousing speech that recasts Christ's passion and death as the last stand of a chieftain surrounded by his warrior-companions: "[W]e should continue, on stay with Him, and suffer with our Commander. That is what a thane chooses: to stand fast together with his lord, to die with him at the moment of doom. Let us all do it therefore, follow His road and not let our life-spirits be of any worth to us compared to His—alongside His people, let us die with Him, our Chieftain!" (Murphy, pg, 130; compare Thomas's much shorter utterance in John 11:16).

A whole slew of Germanic cultural epithets pursue Jesus across the story, portraying him as the embodiment of the highest ideals in Germanic society; in Murphy's translation, he is "Chieftain," "Guardian," "Protector," "Champion." My personal favorite can be found in the crowd's reactiong to the feeding of the five thousand:

 All those people understood in their feelings that they had a mighty Lord. They praised the Heaven-King, they said that never would a wiser wizard ever come to this light who would have more power with God here in the middle world or a more sincere mind. (The Heliand: The Saxon Gospel, G. Ronald Murphy, pg. 93)

 That's right: Jesus is a wizard.

Source

Jesus is depicted as a wizard not because the author went off the deep end, nor because the translator didn't know what he was doing (Murphy makes a strong case for translating the Saxon uuarsago as "wizard"), but because magic was an important part of Germanic religion, and showing Jesus as a master of magic was a way of indicating his divinity. This brings us to the author's last tool for enticing his audience: the incorporation of Germanic religious imagery into the gospel story.

There are two main objections to this kind of thing. Christians sometimes worry about syncretism: the idea is that if you blend Christianity with another religion, the resulting religion will no longer be Christianity. A more universal qualm is that borrowing another religion's imagery to talk about your own is a kind of theft, a misappropriation, and that it can somehow lead to attempts to "trick" people into joining your religion (a claim that I've always thought was a bit insulting to the intelligence of converts and converters alike).

In any case, I don't think either objection applies in the Heliand. The uses of Germanic religion are typically quite subtle, usually respectful or at least neutral toward Germanic religious beliefs, and never seem like an attempt to trick the audience into thinking that this new religion is the same as their old one somehow. The primary purpose of incorporating these terms is comprehension, not trickery or theft: the author wants his audience to hear the message in terms that they will understand.

So, for example, when Jesus is baptized by John the Baptist, a dove descends from heaven, just as in the gospel accounts, but instead of hovering over Jesus, it alights on his shoulder. This produces a recognizable Germanic religious image: the god with a bird on his shoulder is Woden in Germanic religion. This subtly sets up the idea that throughout the Heliand, Jesus will be like Woden: a God associated with magical power and wisdom.

Odin, same as Woden but in Norse mythology. Easier to find pictures of.

Other religious images borrowed for the sake of comprehension include Satan being described like the snake that eats the roots of the world tree; the use of the cold Germanic underworld, Hel, to describe the bad side of the afterlife; Jesus' hanging on a tree in the manner of Woden; and Jesus' resurrection building a highway to heaven, very similar to the Bifröst.

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In the end, I think the Heliand succeeds in creating a gospel story acculturated to the Saxon way of life without losing the meat and bone of the gospel message. Along the way it creates some truly beautiful and striking images of its own, truly Germanic in nature but still wholly Christian:

Warriors were picked from the Jewish battle-group for the guard. They set off with their weapons and went to the grave where they were to guard the corpse of God's Son. The holy day of the Jews had now passed. The warriors sat on top of the grave on their watch during the dark starlit night. They waited under their sheilds until bright day came to mankind all over the middle world, bringing light to people.

It was not long then until: there was the spirit coming, by God's power, the holy breath, going under the hard stone to the corpse! Light was at that moment opened up, for the good of the sons of men; the many bolts on the doors of Hel were unlocked; the road from this world up to heaven was built! Brilliantly radiating, God's Peace-Child rose up! (Murphy, pg. 191)

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*The full text of that creed:
We believe in the one High God, who out of love created the beautiful world and everything good in it. He created Man and wanted Man to be happy in the world. God loves the world and every nation and tribe on the Earth. We have known this High God in darkness, and now we know Him in the light. God promised in the book of His word, the Bible, that He would save the world and all the nations and tribes. We believe that God made good His promise by sending His Son, Jesus Christ, a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left His home and was always on safari doing good, curing people by the power of God, teaching about God and man, showing the meaning of religion is love. He was rejected by his people, tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died. He lay buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day, He rose from the grave. He ascended to the skies. He is the Lord. We believe that all our sins are forgiven through Him. All who have faith in Him must be sorry for their sins, be baptized in the Holy Spirit of God, live the rules of love and share the bread together in love, to announce the Good News to others until Jesus comes again. We are waiting for Him. He is alive. He lives. This we believe. Amen 
**From the Wikipedia page on "Positive Christianity," the movement in mid-20th-century German Christianity to which I believe Pelikan was referring: 
In 1937, Hans Kerrl, the Nazi Minister for Church Affairs, explained "Positive Christianity" as not "dependent upon the Apostle's Creed," nor in "faith in Christ as the son of God," upon which Christianity relied, but rather, as being represented by the Nazi Party: "The Fuehrer is the herald of a new revelation," he said. To accord with Nazi antisemitism, Positive Christianity advocates also sought to deny the Semitic origins of Christ and the Bible. In such elements Positive Christianity separated itself from Christianity and is considered apostasy by Catholics and Protestants.