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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520289147 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 03/29/2016 |
| Series: | The Anthropology of Christianity , #19 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 330 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
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Praying and Preying
Christianity in Indigenous Amazonia
By Aparecida Vilaça, David Rodgers
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-28914-7
CHAPTER 1
The New Tribes Mission
"Why go out there and risk your lives on those Indians? They are not worth going out after. They're just animals."
"It is because the name of Jesus is not known here, and must be made known at any cost ... that we are going to the savages."
Dialogue between "Bolivian government men" and an NTM missionary, reproduced from Brown Gold, January 1944; bold in the original text
In getting information for the anthropological paper, we had to ask about all their miserable customs and superstitions and stories, but we explained that God's Book spoke differently and that His book is true.
ROBERT HAWKINS, Bob's Diary: Four Months in the Forests of North Brazil, 1954
THE HISTORY OF THE NTM READS LIKE A THRILLER, its happy ending a reward for surviving an unbelievable series of accidents and misfortunes, with the added peculiarity of the script being written by God. The ordeals sent by the Lord to test the faith and perseverance of the missionaries included the killing by arrows of the entire first group of missionaries in Bolivia; the disappearance of the mission's first airplane, filled with missionaries; and the collision of the second airplane with a mountain, when once again all those aboard died. The missionaries remained steadfast in overcoming what were taken to be trials set for them by God: the mission prospered and spread across the world. Let's examine this story in more detail.
According to the main "native" reference work on the NTM's history, Kenneth Johnston's book The Story of the New Tribes Mission, published in 1985 and based on his personal experience, interviews with missionaries, and compilations of articles published in the magazine Brown Gold, the mission was created by a young Californian, Paul Fleming, the son of Swedish Protestants. At the age of twenty-seven, enchanted by a pastor's account of worldwide evangelization in a sermon, Paul, by now married, set off to British Malaya as a missionary affiliated to the Christian and Missionary Alliance. After Paul had spent three years suffering repeated bouts of malaria, his health took a turn for the worse following a strenuous trip to the interior, and the couple were forced to return to the United States (Johnston 1985: 18–19). Paul then traveled the country with the 35-millimeter films recorded during the mission, showing the reality of the Malay peoples to audiences in churches, conventions, and seminars, where "many hearts were deeply moved and responded to the call of missions" (22).
The mission was founded some years later, in 1942, after Paul met the missionary couple Cecil and Dorothy Dye and other people interested in going to the "mission field" and "becom[ing] effective channels in God's hands" (Johnston 1985: 26). This initial group included Joe Moreno, who would later take part in the first contacts with the Wari'. At first, Fleming wrote, "we had no funds, no organization behind us: we were just a group of fellows who desired honestly to give our lives for Jesus Christ" (Johnston 1985: 29). In the first version of the mission's basic principles, it was established that missionary candidates "shall be chosen, not necessarily on scholastic acquirements, but upon evidence that they have a consistent passion for souls, are soul-winners at home," and that the mission was "directed toward those fields where no other missionary effort is being made and where no witness of the Gospel has yet reached" (29). It was also established that the central and most important objective was "reaching the last unevangelized tribe in our generation" (33).
For linguistic training, part of the initial group went to a training center at the University of Oklahoma run by the already established Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), an offshoot of the Wycliffe Bible Translators, a "faith mission" created by William Cameron Townsend in Texas in 1934, also dedicated exclusively to missionary work and unconnected to any national churches (see Stoll 1982; Gow 2006: 216–217; and Fernandes 1980: 146). As early as 1943 the NTM created their own training center in Chicago, and in 1944 the first boot camp was held in California, inspired by army training centers. Already in 1942, the year of NTM's foundation, the decision was taken to send the first group of missionaries, including men, women, and children, to Bolivia. Among them were Joe Moreno and his three children. After many prayers and with an unshakeable faith, Johnston reiterates, they eventually obtained money for the boat tickets and other travel costs, their passports (which during the war period were not readily granted to young men), and even, at the last minute, the vaccines and certificates that might be necessary. Once in the country, and having contacted missionaries from the Bolivian Indian Mission, they decided to head to Robore in the interior and try to contact "the Ayoré, known to the civilized as bárbaros [barbarians] who had never had a chance to hear of the love of Christ" (1985: 44). Part of the group entered deeper and deeper into the "Green Hell," experiencing numerous problems, which led representatives of the Bolivian government to ask them, as already noted in the chapter epigraph: "Why go out there and risk your lives on those Indians? They are not worth going out after. They're just animals" (45).
In the chapter "A Living Sacrifice," Johnston reports the disappearance of five male missionaries who, at the end of 1943, had continued to journey farther into the forest, unarmed and seeking to meet the Ayoré. After establishing the first peaceful contact with the group, the search teams discovered that the men had been killed by arrows and buried in a swidden. The book later written about this episode, God Planted Five Seeds by Jean Dye Johnston (1966: 64), reveals that the sad incident was later construed as a divine challenge and stimulus, since it ended up generating additional support for the mission back in the United States and a surge in the number of volunteers (Fernandes 1980: 155). As I mentioned already, new incidents occurred, also interpreted as divine trials: in 1946 a blaze destroyed the dormitories at the boot camp, killing a baby; and in June 1950, the first airplane bought by the mission, the Tribesman, packed with missionaries, disappeared en route to Venezuela. The mission immediately received donations for the purchase of another airplane — as well as thousands of letters from volunteers. On the new plane's first voyage, also in 1950, it collided with a mountain, killing various missionaries, including the founder, Paul Fleming (156). After each disaster or obstacle encountered by the mission, new prayers were made to the Lord, who never failed to offer quick and miraculous solutions.
TRAINING
As I mentioned earlier, the missionaries are trained to survive in harsh physical conditions at training centers called boot camps or jungle camps, where they spend around six months learning to trek in the forest, chop down trees, build shelters, make fires, plant swiddens, and "a thousand-and-one other things that they would need to know out in the jungles" (Johnston 1985: 73, 123). This is a full-time activity, one that obliges the missionary to save money for training "or look to the Lord to supply his needs." Although these practical preparations for their work are emphasized, they are clearly subordinate to spiritual questions, the real determining factors in a mission's success. Johnston writes, "All the practical training in the world could never replace faith in God" (123), and individual failures to complete training are frequently blamed on the devil's work. A fine example of this view is the account by missionary Millie Dawson (2000), who worked among the Yanomami of Venezuela. The motif of her book, which describes the life of the couple and their children among the Indians, is overcoming endless difficulties through prayer and divine help.
Linguistic training, initially provided by SIL, was later organized by the mission itself, first at its boot camp and, after 19 55, at the New Tribes Mission Language and Linguistics Institute. From the outset all missionary candidates would receive — along with their jungle survival training, which included medical, dentistry, and nursing courses — "a smattering of phonetics, phonemics, syntax and morphology," as well as lessons in "literacy, Bible translation, and culture" (Johnston 1985: 183). Sixteen years later, more specialized linguistic training, lasting one or more semesters, was introduced for some missionaries, although the first semester of basic learning was maintained for everyone. The specialized trainees were selected "by testing (somewhat as the Army does) which specific students were of an analytical or detective bent in regard to language. ... The specialist is a person who can pick up the language almost like a child" and thereby "'feed' phrases to the linguist and cut down the time it takes to break down a language" (217-218). Hence each team of missionaries going to an unknown tribe would contain just one or a few members who would devote themselves to studying the native language and translating the Bible, supervised or advised by linguists outside the field. These specialized team members would also be responsible for providing basic instruction to the other missionaries, enabling them to catechize the population.
"STATEMENT OF FAITH"
For a clearer idea of the NTM's ideology, I provide a very brief presentation of its "Statement of Faith," as published on the mission website (www.ntm.org, accessed April 2010). The following list of principles reveals three central aspects of the fundamentalist doctrine: the literal reading of the Bible, the eschatological emphasis (the end of the world and Christ's Second Coming), and the idea of salvation through faith, linked to individual conversion, modeled on the conversion of the apostle Paul through a divine revelation that led him to exchange his life of sin for a life devoted to missionary work.
We believe:
1. In the word-by-word inspiration and divine authority of the Holy Scriptures.
2. In one true God, eternally existing in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
3. In the virgin birth of the Lord Jesus Christ, true God and true man, sinless. In His vicarious death, His bodily resurrection, His present advocacy and His physical and premillennial return.
4. In the fall of man, resulting in his complete and universal separation from God and his need for salvation.
5. In the voluntary and substitutionary death of Christ as a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.
6. In eternal salvation through Grace as a gift from God, entirely apart of works; that each person is responsible alone for accepting or rejecting salvation through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and that a soul once saved can never be lost.
7. In the Holy Spirit, which regenerates the believer with divine life through faith.
8. In the bodily resurrection of both believers and non-believers. Eternal joy with Christ for the saved and eternal torment for the unsaved.
9. In the responsibility of believers to obey the Word of God and be witness to all concerning the saving grace of Christ. Although non-denominational [sic], the Mission is not Ecumenical, Charismatic or neo-Evangelical.
BIBLICAL LITERALISM
Biblical literalism is the distinguishing trait of fundamentalists within the Protestant tradition. They attribute an objective, universal reality to the biblical narratives, taking them to refer to events that occurred in humanity's history. This history, and the moral principles embedded within it, can and must be transmitted to any people or individual through the use of translation. From this fact stems the centrality of translation in missionary work.
According to one NTM missionary, the author of a catechism teaching manual, the Bible is more than simply the real history of humanity. It "is the narration of ancient history, seen from God's perspective. It is God recounting the historical events occurring since the beginning of history" (McIlwain 2003: 104, my translation), a narrative mediated by the prophets to whom God "gave the messages that He wished to be written. Sometimes God spoke to them audibly, sometimes through visions, at other times God merely placed the message directly in their minds. God made the prophets write precisely what He said to them" (107). "Saving faith is based on Biblical facts that are objective and historical" (22). The words of the missionary Ronaldo Lindoro (2011: 135, my translation) dispense with the need for further examples: "The content of the Gospel is non-negotiable."
The Bible is not only the divine narrative of worldly events but also a plan, since everything that happens to humans is designed by him like a "Master Builder in the construction of His Church He is always in total control of all His works. Everything was created according to a perfect plan God leaves nothing to chance" (McIlwain 2003: 3). Filled with this certainty, but unsure about the true comprehension of the Christian message of natives of a "remote island in the Philippines," the missionary Trevor McIlwain obtained a divine response to his prayers, showing him, whose mind had been "limited to the traditional methods of Biblical teaching, ... the teaching principles that He has used in all His words" (4). It became clear to him that the teaching of the Gospel, the starting point of missionary catechism until then, required firm foundations. The "historical sections of the Old Testament form the basis for a clear understanding of the coming of Christ to the world and the necessity of His death, burial and resurrection" (6). The Bible is therefore more than the history of humanity produced by God and narrated by him: it is a didactic book for humans: "God designed the Bible with a teaching plan already included" (5).
Thus began the "chronological teaching of the Bible," "beginning with Genesis and ending with Christ's ascension" (5), an idea enthusiastically approved in 1980 in seminars held in various countries where the NTM was active, and which still today constitutes the NTM's institutional method for evangelizing tribal peoples. McIlwain himself systemized his teaching method in the book Building on Firm Foundations (1988). I was unable to consult the original work in English, but its Portuguese translation (2003) is a didactic book for catechist teachers that instructs them on how to produce lesson books chapter by chapter, with very clear moral and behavioral guidelines on the attitudes to be adopted in classrooms and during course preparation. Above all the teacher must read the lesson exhaustively and "pray daily for his students. He asks the Lord to help him to understand and teach His word clearly" (93). McIlwain emphasizes that this involves a "panoramic" rather than in-depth study of the Bible.
Since the work of translating the Bible into Wari' had started shortly after contact, as soon as the missionaries were able to communicate with them (see chapter 4), there was not yet an institutional policy to apply McIlwain's "chronological principle." According to Barbara Kern (email message to author, 2011, my translation), the person most responsible for translating the Wari' Bible, this work occurred in the following order:
First was the Gospel of Mark, then Acts, then 1 Timothy, all separate booklets. After that we translated 1 and 2 Thessalonians in a booklet, followed by Matthew 5–7 (The Sermon on the Mount) and some of Paul's epistles (Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Philemon) and John (1, 2, 3 John), all in one booklet. Then, if I am not mistaken, we translated more or less one-half of Genesis and Exodus, plus other sections of the Old Testament to accompany the chronological lessons. Afterward we translated sections of the Gospels to accompany these lessons too. And after that we turned to the rest of the New Testament. Everything is "translated" apart from the Gospel of Luke — in quote marks as we have to revise most of these books still, especially those we translated years ago. Those books that are "ready" (i.e., that have been checked by the consultant or are ready to be checked) are: Matthew, Romans, Ephesians, 1 Corinthians. I am working now on the Gospel of Mark and John they are almost ready to be checked.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Praying and Preying by Aparecida Vilaça, David Rodgers. Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
1 The New Tribes Mission 30
2 Versions versus Bodies: Translations in Contact 48
3 The Encounter with the Missionaries 75
4 Eating God's Words: Kinship and Conversion 97
5 Praying and Preying 121
6 Strange Creator 144
7 Christian Ritual Life 173
8 Moral Changes 194
9 Personhood and Its Translations 219
Conclusion 242
Notes 257
References 279
Index 301