A Humble Expression of my Need for a cultural Identity Neil Patterson Originally published in Issue XIII of Vulgata,May, 2004.

"The superior man is catholic."
    -- Confucius, Analects, Book II, v. 14.

Those of us who belong to western culture tend to have a tacit belief that western Christendom can more or less be equated with Christianity itself. At best we see it as some kind of default Christianity that can be modified slightly in far flung areas of the world.  If this were true, we would be forced to adopt the absurd view that Christianity itself is what is being killed by the culture of death.  Gone are the "glory days" of the Medieval Church.  Of course, there are still many Christians in the west; there is no need to panic, but we must admit that ours is no longer a Christian civilization.  The culture of the west is not rooted in the Gospel.  Meanwhile, other cultures, particularly in Asia and Africa, are taking on Christianity and making it their own.   This process wherein the Gospel takes root in a culture is called "inculturation" and it goes both ways.  In parts of the world where the Gospel message is still new, it is a force for cultural renewal.  In the west, the splitting of religion and culture, which Paul VI called "the drama of our time", has left us with the culture of death.  This is how we can see the good fruits of inculturation: by feeling its lack.  Not only has our culture suffered, so too has our church, which has tried, quite naturally but to its detriment, to inculturate itself into a vacuum.

Throughout the history of the Church we can observe problems arising from failures to recognize this phenomenon, to see one's own cultural instantiation of Christianity as the only one.  Critics of St. Justin Martyr, the first theologian to employ classical Greek philosophy to illuminate the teachings of Christ, complained "what does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?"  In other words, why should Greek philosophy and culture have any traffic with Christianity?  The point is that Athens has everything to do with Jerusalem because there are Christians making Christ present in Greece.  In fact, at the time of St. Justin, most Christians were Greeks.  What St. Justin was doing, besides creating the first systematic Christian theology, was rooting the Christian worldview in the classical intellectual framework.  Over time this process extended beyond philosophy.  Medieval Christendom's ideas of law, government, art, liturgy, etc. were all grounded in the Greco-Roman tradition, and rightly so.  This tradition, not ancient Judaism, is the basis of western culture.  To illustrate this point, look at the first seventeen verses of Matthew's Gospel.  Shockingly to the western reader, the first words of the New Testament are a genealogy.  If you or I were writing something, it would be unthinkable to begin with something so dry.  Oh sure, we may agree that it is important to show that Christ comes from the line of King David, but we would probably relegate the particulars to an appendix.  However, Matthew's readers were primarily ancient Jews, who not only cared for genealogies, they actually enjoyed them.  If he had left out the first few lines of his book, no doubt his original readers would have said, "So you say this guy's from the line of David?  Come on, where's the genealogy?"  St. Matthew's Christianity was inculturated differently from that of the early Greco-Roman Church, as it was from mine.  Christ is always the same, but each culture knows Him differently.
 
As in all things, there is an opposite extreme.  If Christianity is culturally relative, one might say, that means that anything that my culture says is okay can't be incompatible with Christianity.  This is the wrong idea.  Note that while the Church Fathers may have thought that God was somewhat like Aristotle's Prime Mover, they did not start editing the Bible so as to replace every instance of "The Lord God of Israel" with "The Prime Mover".  Nor did anyone suggest that since Bacchus advocated wild drunken orgies, this becomes a legitimately adopted practice for Greco-Roman Christians.

It may be beginning to sound like there is a lot of grey area between what is and is not acceptable when it comes to inculturation.  Where is the line between things that are universal and things that are culturally specific?  It is true that there are a few borderline cases, but it is not nearly as complicated as most people suppose.  Let us not be like so many contemporary theologians and philosophers who seek to complicate things that are really rather simple by endlessly musing, "what do mean by 'orthodoxy' anyway?" or "isn't 'Truth' an elusive concept?"  Faith and morals (i.e. the Catechism) are culturally universal, not culturally specific; it need not be more complicated than that.  However, this should not be interpreted in such a way as to weaken inculturation, so that we might, for example, believe it to be the mere putting on of a different aesthetic skin onto your liturgy.  This is the Canadian idea of diversity where Chinese culture is seen to be more or less identical with firecrackers, dragon boats and deep fried wontons.  Culture is much deeper than that, which is why it is not the case that we wrap Christianity in a culture, but rather let Christianity live in and renew a culture.

I have been somewhat long-winded in my explanation of all this so let me allow the Prefect for the Congregation of the Evangelization of Peoples, Joseph Cardinal Tomko, to summarize as follows:

"The gospel message, though it can never be identified with any one culture, is necessarily incarnated in cultures. From its very beginnings it was incarnated in certain specific cultures, and one must take account of this if one is not to deprive the new Churches of values which are now the patrimony of the universal Church. The gospel is a force for renewal, and can rectify elements in cultures which do not conform to it."

This point about cultural renewal is important.  Inculturation should not be seen as an missionary tool, like something we have to grudgingly do so that we can convert non-European cultures.  Why?  The answer to this lies in Confucius, who of course did not mean in the quote above that the superior man is Catholic, but that the superior man (or noble man or gentleman) is universal in his outlook.  This is true of our religion, too.  The Catholic Church is catholic. It is not our job to make the world into Europe.  Rather, just as individual people are sanctified through Christ, so too are cultures.  The Holy Spirit makes each thing uniquely what it is and brings out the intrinsic good within it.

Concerning Goat Blood

There is an interesting and informative case of inculturation in Africa.  Bishop Buti Tlhigale of Bloemfontein, South Africa, has suggested that animal sacrifice, the veneration of ancestors and other practices that form the foundations of African spirituality be incorporated into the Mass.  This may seem, at first glance to be inculturation taken too far, where the doctrinal essentials of the faith are being compromised.  This may be the case, although the Vatican hasn’t ruled on the matter, nor are there any specific plans to put these practices in place.  Bishop Tlhigale made the suggestion in The Southern Cross (also here) as something he believes is an important next step in the inculturation of the Gospel into Africa.  Because this hasn’t been ruled on by the authorities, it is not my intention here to place judgement on it myself, but what is most interesting is the reaction he has received from certain members of the Church belonging to the western culture.  These reactions typify what is exactly the wrong way to look at inculturation.

The most common reaction against Bishop Tlhigale accuses him of returning to paganism, or creating a syncretic mix of Christianity and paganism.  Fr. Richard Welch, President of Human Life International (a fine organization, I mean it no disrespect), wrote an article against Bishop Tlhigale in Raiders.  First, he demonstrates from scripture that animal sacrifice has no power to forgive sin or bring us to salvation (Tlhigale agrees with him on this point, as I will explain later).  Secondly, he goes through a survey of pagan animal sacrifice, focusing on Dionysian/Bacchanalian cults, but also mentioning Mesoamerican human sacrifice and modern Satanism.  He concludes by saying: “if a Greek bishop requested permission to unite Easter Mass with a sacrifice to Demeter, he would be an object of mockery. This is a blatant contradiction of the first commandment hiding in the sheep's clothes of diversity. These practices were begun in the worship of false gods."

With this statement he brings his error into sharp focus.  The whole point is that it is incorrect to draw an analogy between what it would mean for animal sacrifice to happen at a Greek Mass and what it would mean in Africa.  He has missed the point of inculturation and tacitly made Christian culture as a single entity based on European Christendom.  This is even more clear because he did not, anywhere in his article, say anything about animal sacrifice in Africa, nor has he apparently read what Bishop Tlhigale said.

To the end of not committing the same error, I will clarify what it is exactly that Bishop Tlhigale wants to do.  Firstly, he does not advocate having an animal sacrifice during Mass, but rather some kind of blood libation, probably during the offertory.  It should be taken as a form of prayer, a metaphor or sacramental like incense or holy water.  Rather than a return to paganism, it is meant to be Christianization of a pagan practice.  Animal sacrifice in Africa, as I have been led to understand it, is always seen as a way of connecting with one's ancestors, who are still very much a part of one's family, making "one bundle of life" with it.  The Archbishop says that "the ritual and the language of ancestors [are] deeply ingrained in the local African culture. Ancestors are very close to the living.... Because of them, the world of spirit is real. That is why to speak of the reality of God is not entirely foreign to African traditionalists."  The slaughtering of animals is a very common practice in Africa at any important event like a marriage, funeral, birth etc.  It is done even by the well-educated middle class segment of African society.  Bishop Tlhigale is just trying to say that it will either be Christianized or continue to flourish outside of a Christian context, even among Christians.  But more than that, whatever it is that the ritual slaughtering of animals expresses in the African cultural consciousness should be brought into the African Christian consciousness.

I think the most significant point here is the one about the spiritual world being "real".  Not being African, I am not going to speculate as to exactly what that means or what role it plays in the African cultural paradigm, but whatever it is it is the sort of thing that forms the foundations of culture.  Idea like these are so foundational that it is difficult to identify them, even in one's own culture.  They are ideas that are fundamental to culture in the same way that the eight note scale is fundamental to western music.  This is why each culture must inculturate the Gospel for itself.

Perhaps the area of the world that has done the least work towards inculturating the Gospel is the same one that has the lowest percentage of Christians: Asia.  The Federation of Asian Bishop Conferences, along with the Pope, expresses this lack of inculturation in terms of a need to find the "Asian Christ".  Each individual has a personal relationship with Christ and so too does each culture.  Different attempts have been made in Asia to find this relationship.  Some have advocated a Buddha-like Christ, a Brahmanistic Christ, a Gnostic Christ etc., but these attempts have missed the point on two accounts.  Firstly, the project of inculturation is not a project of syncretism.   Its not that we have to make Christianity more like Buddhism so that Asians can relate to it, in fact such a project is doomed to failure.  Christ and Buddha were two so radically different people who taught such radically different things that if you try to make Christ into Buddha, you just end up with Buddha.  Thus the Asian can say "if your Christ is like my Buddha, then I'll remain a Buddhist and you can remain a Christian."  The second way that these attempts at finding an Asian Christ fail is that they are just that, attempts.  Inculturation is not something that can be done by writing a book or publishing an article or developing a theology.  It has to be lived by those who actually practice the faith.  The Pope in Ecclesia in Asia suggests that the Asian image of Christ will place emphasis on "Jesus Christ as the Teacher of Wisdom, the Healer, the Liberator, the Spiritual Guide, the Enlightened One, the Compassionate Friend of the Poor, the Good Samaritan, the Good Shepherd, the Obedient One."  These seem like good starting points, but the Pope has also been persistent in saying hat the uniqueness of Christ and His sacrifice must also be proclaimed to separate Him from the hundreds of gurus, mystics and enlightened spiritual teachers that populate the Asian religious landscape.

A Dead Christ in a Dead Culture

At this point, we cannot help but ask ourselves, "who is the western Christ?", or even more pointedly, "who is the Canadian Christ?"  On the one hand, it is an impossible question to answer because, as I pointed out before, European Christendom is not some kind of default Christianity that gets changed in subtle and external ways when the Gospel is spread outside the west.  That is to say that the western Christ is just Christ as we know Him.  However, the western world, while it traces its cultural roots to European Christendom, has changed quite a bit, as one might expect.  But it has not been a mere change, it has been a decay.  There is a reason why the Pope calls this a culture of death.  It is not my intention here to describe this culture or to point out what's wrong with it.  Nor would I dream of advocating a return to the glory days (whenever those were supposed to be).  In fact, I'm not complaining, accusing, damning or anything of the sort.  I am just humbly expressing my need for a cultural identity.

If this society has nothing but scraps of authentic culture left, how is it that Christ can take root?  We end up with Christ the nice guy, Christ the important historical figure, and other platitudes.  We end up with a church that doesn't know what liturgy is for.  We pretend that there is some distinction to be made between the "real faith itself" and the outward "window dressings" that we put on it, as if incense and vestments were at best quaint symbolism and at worst superstitious distractions from "worshipping in spirit". The project of inculturation here in the west has not even begun, because first we need a culture.  Asia is one step ahead of us.

But, you may say, such is our lot.  Most Catholics in the west agree that this culture isn't that great, but what can one do?  Our reaction is often to compartmentalize.  It is to be on the one hand a believing Christian when one is at prayer or in Church or doing some other explicitly religious activity, but on the other hand to be a full participant in secular western culture the rest of the time.  This can be true of people who do not fall into categories like lapsed Catholics, submarine Catholics or Sunday-only Catholics.  Maybe we should call this category "context-dependant Catholics".  Context-dependant Catholics are those who when they are with one group of friends or are in certain places are zealous, pious, and faithful, but when they are with other groups of people (e.g. at work) they are just the same as everyone else.    People are prone to think that the only alternative to this is to be like a zealous evangelical who greets everyone with a handshake and the words, "Hi, I'm Bill.  Are you saved?"  But this is not true and believe it or not it is your experience as a westerner, particularly if you are a Canadian, that should help you realize this.

If you live in North America, it is extremely unlikely that you don't know someone who is of a radically different cultural background from you.  I don't mean someone whose family background is different from your family background.  There probably aren't too many noticeable cultural differences between a Canadian whose great grandparents were from Russia and one whose great grandparents were from England.  I mean someone who actually has a substantially different cultural paradigm, perhaps someone who recently immigrated.   You will be aware of his cultural identity, and it will affect how he sees the world and behaves, as well a culture should, but he won't greet you with a bow and the words, "Hi, I'm Eiji.  Let's go eat some sushi and contemplate cherry blossoms."  Nonetheless, our friend Eiji belongs to the Japanese sub-culture that exists within Canadian society.  To some extent Catholics from other countries bring their inculturated faith to Canada and continue to live it within their own sub-cultures.  This is fine, and in fact gives us good examples of what inculturated faith looks like, but it doesn't really help those of us who belong to the broader western culture, that is, we born-and-raised culture of deathians.

There are two things we can do.  First of all, it is important that we try to renew this culture on a larger scale.  This can be done through the mass media and political organs primarily.  However, the most important thing we can do is to live in and create a Catholic sub-culture.  We must let our faith create a culture.  I'm not going to tell you what that culture looks like, mainly because I can't.  Imagine if I tried to some up any other culture in a few sentences (we would end up with firecrackers and deep fried wontons again).  I also am blocked by the fact that the Catholic sub-culture in this country is still emerging.  It definitely draws on half-forgotten Catholic traditions, but it can't be seen as merely a return to them.  Also, culture is not just a list of traditions.  Catholic sub-culture involves things like praying with your friends and family, homeschooling your children and reading Vulgata.  We have our popular literary figures like Michael O'Brien and Bud Macfarlane Jr.;  our favourite intellectuals like Peter Kreeft, Scott Hahn, C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton and a common mythological reference point in J.R.R. Tolkein. All these people and others like them are responsible for creating Catholic sub-culture.  I have recently taken an avid interest particularly in O'Brien and Macfarlane.  Their novels have given me the unique experience of reading works of fiction that are unabashedly Catholic, where the characters talk and think about the same things I talk and think about, where the worldview of the author is clearly my own worldview.  In short, they are books that come from my culture.  It is within this culture that I come to know what it means to be Catholic.  It is a culture in which Christ is not a strange foreign anachronism or a scotch-tapped non sequiter.