The Book of Hebrews in Toraja Context: Towards a Three-culture Hermeneutic

Abstract

The growth of Protestant mission in the nineteenth century raised questions about the role of culture in appropriating the Christian gospel, questions that remain to this day. As the Bible was translated, and as congregations formalised their understanding of the faith, the hermeneutical problem of the gap between biblical and modern cultures expanded to include a third culture, that of the non-Western local church. Be- tween translation and theology lies the task of interpreting the Bible, where the same issues apply. This project seeks to provide an account of the Bible as a hermeneutical object that provides both for a constant identity, namely the gospel of God’s saving action in Christ, and for its varied appropriation in local contexts. Since the project is non-foundationalist, this is developed not in the abstract, but in conversation with a particular Protestant Christian tradition, as expressed in Kevin Vanhoozer’s theo- dramatic account of Scripture, and a particular traditional culture, that of the Toraja in the highlands of South Sulawesi, whose local Protestant church was begun by a Dutch mission just over a hundred years ago. Contextual interpretation has received little attention until recently because of the modernist assumption that exegesis is objective, with application a further step of appropriation. The obvious problem with this is that the issues of greatest priority — remembering that the cognitive capacity of any culture is nite—are not necessarily the same between di erent contexts. More subtly, di erent styles of cognition a ect how the Bible is understood, and di erent values a ect how it is lived out. Exegesis that makes sense of a passage for the Western reader does not necessarily work in another context. The project broadly follows a pattern of observation and analysis in Parts I-II, followed by theory (Part III) and application (Part IV). Observation and analysis concerns both culture and the Bible. For culture, the goal is to understand relevant differences between the West and Toraja. The key distinction that develops is between sincerity and ritual cultures or orientations. This is connected with orality, individualism and re- lationalism, honour-shame, differences in cognition between North Americans and East Asians, and ritual theory. It is given historical and phenomenological depth in Charles Taylor’s account of secularisation. The differences raised by these frameworks are illustrated from anthropological research in Toraja and similar areas. The significance of these differences for Westerners bringing the gospel in a genuinely local way to an oral ritual culture is analysed through a detailed examination of A. Kruyt’s reflections on ministry in Poso (just north of Toraja in Central Sulawesi). The key points that emerge for our purposes are summarised in the concept of the Protestant Semiotic ideology, which connected meaning and agency for Kruyt in a way that obscured the gospel for the Poso. Part III provides an alternative account of the Bible to that which emerges from the Protestant Semiotic ideology. We adapt a Christocentric pragmatic realist account of theological language to our purposes, including giving an account of non-discursive theological representations. A dialogue between Hans-Georg Gadamer and Kevin Vanhoozer’s theo-dramatic account of the Bible provides an account of the Bible in a ritual culture as mythos and ethos. This provides a stable identity for the Bible in the mythos, and appropriate exibility of use with respect to the ethos. Part IV applies and operationalises this account with respect to the letter to the Hebrews. The relating of mythos and ethos in the text is operationalised through an appropriation of thick description. This is applied using local Toraja leadership structures as local metaphors for Christ’s divine sonship and high priesthood, and local honour-shame and ecological harmony ethical systems drawn from Toraja rituals. Having suggested these as appropriate prejudgments for understanding Hebrews within a Toraja context, an interpretation of the letter is offered. This points the way to what a genuinely local appropriation of the letter might look like. This project therefore establishes the possibility of local interpretation by tracing a path towards a plausible example. The missiological importance of doing so is demonstrated, and an alternative to the Protestant Semiotic ideology is offered which preserves a realist understanding of theological truth while allowing for genuine contextual appropriation. It turns out that Hebrews witnesses to Jesus the Community Founder, who provides for the community of those who join with him, and whose sacrifice promises a harmony encompassing God, the community, and the world to come.