CHAPTER 69

Redemptive Analogy

Don Richardson

Don Richardson pioneered work for World Team (formerly RBMU International) among the Sawi tribe of Irian Jaya (now New Guinea, Indonesia) from 1962–1977. Author of the missionary classics peace Child, Lords of the earth, and eternity in Their hearts, Don later served as minister-at-large for World Team and a frequent Perspectives class instructor.

When a missionary enters another culture, he or she is conspicuously foreign. This is to be expected, but often the gospel is labeled as foreign, too. How can it be explained so that it seems culturally appropriate?

The New Testament approach is to communicate by way of redemptive analogy. Consider these examples:

• The Jewish people practiced lamb sacrifice. John the Baptist proclaimed Jesus as the perfect, personal fulfillment of that sacrifice by saying, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” This is redemptive analogy.
• When Jesus spoke to Nicodemus, a Jewish teacher, both knew that Moses had lifted up a serpent of brass upon a pole so that Jews, dying of snakebites, could look at it and be healed. Jesus told Nicodemus that “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” This too is redemptive analogy.
• A Jewish multitude, recalling that Moses provided miraculous manna on a six-day-a-week basis, hinted that Jesus ought to repeat His miracle of the loaves and fishes on a similar schedule. Jesus replied, “Moses gave you not the true bread from heaven. The true bread from heaven is He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world I am that Bread of Life!” Once again, redemptive analogy.

When some charged that Christianity was destroying Jewish culture, the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews showed how Christ actually fulfilled all the central elements of Jewish culture—the priesthood, tabernacle, sacrifices, and even the Sabbath rest. We call these redemptive analogies because they facilitate human understanding of redemption. Their God-ordained purpose is to precondition the mind in a culturally significant way to recognize Jesus as Messiah.

A Powerful Strategy for Today

This strategy of redemptive analogy can be applied by missionaries today as they discern the particular redemptive analogies of each culture. Consider the advantage: When conversion is facilitated by redemptive analogy, people are made aware of spiritual meaning dormant within their own culture. In this way, conversion does not deny their cultural background. Instead, they experience heightened insight into both the Scriptures and their own cultural heritage, and thus they are better prepared to share Christ meaningfully with other members of their society.

Finding and Using Redemptive Analogies

The Sawi “Peace Child”

As told in the book Peace Child, my wife and I were shocked to learn the Sawi tribe honored treachery as a virtue. Accordingly, Judas Iscariot seemed to them to be the hero of the gospel. Within the Sawi culture, however, existed a means of making peace that required a father to entrust one of his own children to an enemy father who would raise the child. This child was called a “peace child.” At a crucial juncture of tribal strife, we were able to present Christ as God’s “Peace Child.” The Sawi soon grasped the redemptive story of God as the greatest Father giving His Son to reconcile alienated people. Today, 70 percent of the Sawi profess faith in Jesus.

The Asmat and the “New Birth”

The concept of “new birth” relates to Irian Jaya’s stoneage Asmat tribe through another redemptive analogy. Nicodemus, a learned Jewish scholar, had difficulty understanding what Jesus meant when He spoke of people being born again. Nicodemus asked, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter into his mother’s womb a second time and be born?” Yet the gospel understanding of new birth can be understood by Irian Jaya’s Asmat tribe. They have a way of making peace that requires children from two warring villages to pass through a symbolic birth canal formed by the bodies of a number of men and women from both villages. Those who pass through the canal are considered reborn into the kinship system of their enemy’s village. Rocked, lullabied, cradled, and coddled like newborn infants, they become the focus of a joyful celebration. From then on, they may travel freely back and forth between the two formerly warring villages, serving as living peace bonds. For centuries, this custom has impressed deeply upon the Asmat mind the vital concept: True peace can come only through a new birth experience!

Suppose God called you to communicate the gospel to the Asmat people. What would be your logical starting point? Let us assume you have learned their language and are competent enough to discuss the things that are dear to their hearts. One day you visit a typical Asmat man—let’s call him Erypeet—in his longhouse. First you discuss with him the former period of war and the new birth transaction that brought it to an end. Then you say, “Erypeet, I too am very interested in new birth. You see, I was at war with an enemy named God. While I was at war with God, life was grim, as it was for you and your enemies. But one day my enemy God approached me and said, ‘I have prepared a new birth whereby I can be born in you and you can be born again in me so that we can be at peace.’”

By this time Erypeet is leaning forward on his mat. “You and your people have a new birth too?” he asks. He is amazed to find that you, an alien, are sophisticated enough to even think in terms of a new birth, let alone experience one!

“Yes,” you reply.

“Is it like ours?”

“Well, there are some similarities and there are some differences,” you say. “Let me tell you about them.” And Erypeet understands.

Why the difference between Erypeet’s and Nicodemus’s responses? Erypeet’s mind has been preconditioned by Asmat redemptive analogy to acknowledge man’s need for a new birth. Your task is to convince him that he needs spiritual rebirth.

Do redemptive analogies like these occur by mere coincidence? No, because their strategic use is foreshadowed in the New Testament, and because they are so widespread, we can discern the grace of God at work. After all, our God is far too sovereign to be merely lucky.

The Yali and the Osuwa

If ever a tribe needed a Christ-foreshadowing belief that a missionary could appeal to, it was the Yali. By 1966, missionaries of the Regions Beyond Missionary Union (now World Team) had succeeded in winning about twenty Yali to Christ. Priests of the Yali god Kembu promptly martyred two of the twenty. Two years later, they killed missionaries Stan Dale and Phillip Masters, driving about one hundred arrows into each of their bodies. Then the Indonesian government, also threatened by the Yali, stepped in to quell further uprisings. Awed by the power of the government, the Yali decided they would rather have missionaries than soldiers. But the missionaries could find no analogy in Yali culture to make the gospel clear.

Another missionary and I conducted a much-belated “culture probe” to learn more about Yali customs and beliefs. One day a young Yali named Erariek shared with us a story from his past. He said, “Long ago my brother Sunahan and a friend named Kahalek were ambushed by enemies from across the river. Kahalek was killed, but Sunahan fled to a circular stone wall nearby. Leaping inside it, he turned, bared his chest at his enemies, and laughed at them. The enemies immediately lowered their weapons and hurried away.”

I nearly dropped my pen. “Why didn’t they kill him?” I asked.

Erariek smiled. “If they had shed one drop of my brother’s blood while he stood within that sacred stone wall—we call it an osuwa—their own people would have killed them.”

Yali pastors and the missionaries working with them now have a new evangelistic tool. Christ is the spiritual osuwa, the perfect place of refuge. Yali culture instinctively echoes the Christian teaching that man needs a place of refuge. Ages earlier they had established a network of osuwa in areas where most of their battles took place. Missionaries had noticed the stone walls but had never discovered their full significance.

RETURN TO LESSON 10: How Shall They Hear?

Using Indigenous Names for God

Another special category of redemptive analogy relates to usable names for God—aliases for Elohim—found in thousands of languages worldwide. Christians err whenever we too readily assume that pagans know nothing of God. In fact, a startling number of pagan cultures possess amazingly clear concepts about a Supreme God who created all things. Scripture tells us to expect this because of God’s general revelation both through creation and conscience. For example:

1. “Since the creation of the world,” Paul the Apostle wrote, “God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (Rom 1:20 NIV). This belief, that men already know something about God even before they hear of either Jewish law or the Christian gospel, was a cornerstone of Paul’s theology of evangelism. He expressed it in a Lycaonian town called Lystra, proclaiming that “in the past, he [God] let all nations go their own way. Yet he has not left himself without testimony: He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven” (Acts 14:16–17 NIV).

2. In his famous letter to Roman Christians, Paul wrote that “when Gentiles . . . do by nature things required by the law . . . they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts” (Rom 2:14–15 NIV).

3. John the Apostle declared that Jesus Christ is “the true light that gives light to everyone” (John 1:9 NIV). And King Solomon wrote that God has “set eternity in the human heart.” He added the cautionary statement that no one of themselves “can fathom what God has done from beginning to end” (Eccl 3:11 NIV). According to the Hebrew scholar Gleason Archer, Solomon’s statement means that humankind has a God-given ability to grasp the concept of eternity, with all its unsettling implications for moral beings.¹

4. It was Solomon’s father, King David, who penned the eloquent appreciation of God’s universal testimony to Himself through creation that reads “the heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the works of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the end of the world” (Ps 19:1–4 NIV). David then focused upon the sun, describing it as a “bridegroom coming out of his chamber” and a “champion rejoicing to run his course” (Ps 19:5–6 NIV).

It’s not difficult to deduce Paul’s attitude toward the question of what name to use for God. When he preached the gospel among Greek-speaking peoples, he did not impose a Jewish name for God—Jehovah, Yahweh, Elohim, Adonai, or El Shaddai—upon them. Rather he placed his apostolic seal upon a two-hundred-year-old decision of the translators of the Septuagint version of the Old Testament. They had given the God of the Jews a completely Greek name—Theos. Paul followed suit.

Interestingly, translators of the Septuagint did not try to equate the Greek god Zeus with Yahweh. Nor did Paul. Although Greeks esteemed Zeus as “king of the gods,” he was also viewed as the offspring of two other gods, Cronus and Rhea. Hence the name Zeus could not qualify as a synonym for Yahweh, the uncreated. Later, the Latin cognate of Theos—Deus—was accepted as the equivalent of Yahweh for Roman Christians!

And when Paul preached the gospel in Athens, he boldly equated Yahweh with an “unknown God” that was associated with a certain altar in the city. Paul said, “What you worship as something unknown I am about to proclaim to you!”

An Opportunity for the Gospel

A principle emerges. There is nothing innately sacred about any particular combination of sounds or letters as a name for the Almighty. He can have ten thousand aliases, if need be, in ten thousand languages. It is impossible to talk about an uncreated Creator without meaning HIM. Anyone capable of protesting that “some of His attributes are missing” is responsible to fill them in! Any theological vacuum surrounding any culture’s concept of God is not an obstacle to the gospel—it’s an opportunity!

As it has spread around the world, Christianity has continued to confirm, from Paul’s time to now, the concept of a Supreme God in a thousand human traditions:

Don Richardson doing translation work with a member of the Sawi tribe of Irian Jaya/Papua, Indonesia. Photo courtesy of Don Richardson.

• When Celtic missionaries reached the Anglo-Saxons in northern Europe, they did not impose upon them Jewish or Greek names for deity. Instead, they used Anglo-Saxon words like “Gött,” “God,” or “Gut.”
• In 1828 American Baptist missionaries George and Sarah Boardman found the Karen people of southern Burma believing that a great God named Y’wa (shades of Yahweh) had long ago given their fore-fathers a sacred book! Alas, the forefathers, rascals that they were, had lost it! But according to a persistent Karen tradition, one day a White brother would restore the lost book to the Karen people, bringing them back into fellowship with Y’wa. The tradition predicted that he would appear carrying a black object under his arm. George Boardman, who had a habit of tucking his black, leather-bound Bible under his arm, became the White brother, and a hundred thousand Karen people were baptized as believers within a few decades!
• In 1867 Norwegian Lutheran missionary, Lars Skrefsrud, found thousands of Santal people in India wistfully regretting their forefathers’ rejection of Thakur Jiu, the genuine God. Skrefsrud proclaimed that Thakur Jiu’s Son had come to earth to reconcile estranged humanity to Himself. The result: Within a few decades, over a hundred thousand Santal received Jesus Christ as their Savior!
• Presbyterian pioneers in Korea discovered a Korean name for God—Hananim, the Great One. Rather than sweeping Hananim aside and imposing a foreign name for God, they proclaimed Jesus Christ as the Son of Hananim. Within some eighty years, more than two and a half million Koreans have become followers of Jesus Christ!
• During the 1940s, Albert Brant of the Sudan Interior Mission found thousands of Gedeo tribesmen in Ethiopia believing that Magano, the Creator, would one day send a messenger to camp under a certain sycamore tree. Unsuspectingly, Albert camped under that tree and an awesome response to the gospel began, bringing 250 churches to birth in less than three decades.

These breakthrough narratives can be multiplied by the hundreds from the history of missions. Truly Paul, John, Solomon, and David were right! God has not left Himself without the witnesses of general revelation.

In our generation, the choice of language to refer to God is a crucial matter. For example, some Christians believe that Islam’s Arabic name for God, Allah, should not be accepted as a viable synonym for Elohim. Let it be known that millions of Christians in Indonesia use Allah for God and Tuhan Allah for Lord God. Perhaps because of this, Indonesian Christians have been much more effective in winning Muslims to Christ than any other Christians.

Concepts like the Sawi Peace Child, the Asmat new birth, and the Yali osuwa are at the heart of the cultures of humankind. When messengers of the gospel ignore, discredit, or obliterate distinctives like these, resistance to the gospel may harden into cultural concrete. But as redemptive analogy identifies and confirms the cultural components that result from God’s influence through general revelation, the Bible itself, God’s special revelation, can be lifted up as the consummate revelation of God, from God and for God.

RETURN TO LESSON 10: How Shall They Hear?

Notes

1. From a personal interview with Gleason Archer.