Devoted to Christ: Missiological Reflections in Honor of Sherwood G. Lingenfelter

Introduction

Christopher L. Flanders

Several years ago, when Sherwood made public his plan to retire from full-time teaching and administrative work, I knew it was time to begin work on a volume that would draw together colleagues and former students that represented his broad and deep impact. In other words, it was the opportunity to produce a festschrift.

The German term festschrift literally means festival writing. In a sense, by assembling these essays together, we are throwing a party to celebrate the impact of the life and work of Sherwood. But, a festschrift is also an exercise in social honor. That is, all festschriften aim at the public recognition of an honoree. It is entirely appropriate that I have the distinct honor of editing the essays these authors have produced to honor Sherwood. This is because my relationship with Sherwood Lingenfelter has been an extended exercise in social honor.

I first met Sherwood at a seminar in Chiang Mai Thailand. I asked him to lunch, to which he agreed. At the beginning of the lunch, I immediately informed him that I had already determined to pursue a PhD at a school other than Fuller Theological Seminary, the one at which he was currently teaching. Unfazed, he noted how excellent the other school was and then proceeded to honor me with insight, encouragement, and helpful advice for pursuing doctoral work in anthropology and intercultural studies. I later changed my direction, applied to and was accepted at Fuller, and did work in the area of social honor and facework theory. I was blessed to spend 3 years as Sherwood’s teaching assistant. The numerous lessons I learned from him I can summarize in these words: humility, excellence, and honor.

In particular, I noted how a distinguished scholar and administrator at a world-class seminary routinely demonstrated to students and colleagues the greatest levels of honoring others above himself. As I waded deeper into anthropological and social-psychological studies, it struck me how I could see in tangible fashion through Sherwood’s life the very lessons I was learning about social honor. He was always learning from those around him. He, the honorable teacher, dean, and provost, opened himself up to being taught by others. He did this with incredible humility, admitting to his own faults and cultural blinders. He made it a habit to heap honor on others by giving credit, opportunity, and attention.

One example stands out. In his installation ceremony as provost, I was profoundly moved by how he manifested what my studies were teaching me about the dynamics of social honor. In an extraordinary example of diffused social honor, Sherwood, in his speech, drew attention not to himself or his credentials, but to the entire community it took to make an educational institution run well. Instead of claiming the appropriate social honor of becoming provost, Sherwood shared it. He accepted the proper reward for virtue (Aristotle’s definition of honor) and then simply passed it on to others. Clearly following the example of Christ as Paul notes in the book of Philippians, Sherwood did not consider becoming provost (or dean, or professor) something to be held on to or exploited for personal gain. Rather, he emptied himself of the honor that he had legitimately achieved and was being ascribed, which was in fact a major purpose of that installation ceremony of distinction. In this way, he showed himself to be not only one who was honored but also one who was honorable.

Ideally, a festschrift is not simply a retrospective look back, but also an exercise in prospective anticipation. That is, by highlighting distinguished work by a scholar a festschrift calls readers to imitate the virtues of the honoree. Indeed, this is one of the most powerful dynamics of social honor. Acts of honorification, such as the production of a festschrift, create a type of social gravity that draws others toward what is displayed as worthy of honor.

This dedicated volume is a tribute that calls Christian anthropologists to remain centered on the mission of God in Christ. And, it is a call to missiologists and missionaries to apply to the mission of God rigorous, critical, and current anthropological theory. Sherwood’s published books have enjoyed extraordinary success, primarily due to the ways he demonstrates how anthropological theory is useful in exegeting cultures and leadership. Indeed, Ministering Cross-Culturally is now published in a third edition with more than 125,000 copies in print. This is an extraordinarily high number for a mission text. The power of his life, however, is also due to his unwavering devotion to Christ and to living a life of obedient excellence. This is the legacy of Sherwood Lingenfelter. This is the legacy that we are delighted to honor and imitate.

Paul tells believers in Romans 13:7 they are obligated to render what is owed to different parties. In particular, Paul commands the Roman Christians to pay off the debt of respect and honor to those whom it is owed. It is our duty, an obligation of honor. All who know Sherwood would agree that the global Christian community owes a profound debt for his devotion, example, and work. This volume is but a small token paid toward the enormous debt we owe him.

Christopher L. Flanders

Associate Professor of Missions at Abilene Christian University

McConnell—

1

Anthropology, Missiology, and the Witch

Robert J. Priest

While cultures vary enormously, one surprisingly recurrent pattern involves people attributing affliction and death to malevolent third parties. That is, people accuse their neighbors or family members of harming and murdering others through occult power. While cultures historically varied widely in whether this power was described as psychic, magical, or mediated through sentient spirits, the core idea that misfortune and death are to be blamed on evil human beings is surprisingly widespread. Anthropologists typically translate indigenous terms for such a person as witch or sorcerer/sorceress.

Clarity in what we mean by a word is important. The word football, for example, can confusingly refer to either of two very different games. And, while a modern Wiccan may apply the term witch to herself, this is another game, as it were, from what anthropologists and missionaries have encountered across a wide variety of cultures and which anthropologists treat under the term witch. While America has many Wiccans or Neo-Pagans who would self-identify as witch, such does not fall under the traditional rubric of witch that involves malevolence or harm directed at others. In a recent survey of 48 American seminarians, only 4 percent said they had ever known a colleague, relative, or neighbor to be accused by anyone of harming someone through witchcraft, with one respondent (2 percent) clarifying in a note that he or she only experienced this while living overseas. In contrast, in a survey of 161 African seminarians, 85 percent reported that one or more of their colleagues, relatives, or neighbors had been accused of harming others through witchcraft. It is the latter meaning I address in this paper. As historically used by anthropologists, the term "witch" applies to a male or female human being who is said to be the cause of another’s misfortune, sickness, and/or death by means of psychic or other occult power. In ethnographic writings this is also the meaning of sorcerer/sorceress, although sorcery generally also implies that the harm is caused through learned and acquired, self-consciously exercised powers, which is not necessarily true of the witch idea.

While anthropologists encounter a wide variety of indigenous terms for healers, mediums, priests, diviners, magicians, shamans, witch categories differ from these in one important respect. Shamans, healers, priests, magicians, diviners, mediums, and pastors all have a social existence that is relatively straightforward. Their identity is agreed on. One can interview them about their identity and role, and under the right circumstances watch them at work. But indigenous categories, which anthropologists translate as witch, reference an identity constructed through discourse but whose actual social existence is problematic. That is, indigenous labels which anthropologists translate as witch exist primarily in discourse, more specifically in gossip and accusation, with the persons that others accuse of being witches usually, though not always, denying the attribution.

The label here is a contested one. Indeed in many cultures it is thought that witches might not be aware that they themselves are witches. Thus, self-knowledge is irrelevant to whether others construct one as a witch. While sometimes people confess that they have harmed or killed someone else through witchcraft, this is typically under psycho-social dynamics that lead anthropologists and historians to distrust the confessions as reliable. To take a simple example, in Salem, Massachusetts the only people killed as witches were those accused of being witches who refused to agree with the accusation.¹ The accused that did confess were not killed. Such motivated confession is hardly a reliable confirmation that such persons really are causing harm to others through witchcraft. Someone who confesses that at night they secretly traveled thousands of miles on a witch airplane to kill a distant relative is hardly the sort of claim that can be confirmed. Therefore, the witch category appears to exist primarily through discourses about witches, especially gossip and accusation, motivated claims-making discourses which, under analysis, appear to be created and sustained through psycho-social processes rightly distrusted by scholars.

Anthropologists have attempted to explain the pervasive presence of witch discourses in a variety of ways. First, they have stressed people’s need for cognitive explanations. People who face affliction, illness, and death need ways to make sense of and to explain their affliction.² Some cultures make sense of affliction and death through what Richard Shweder³ calls moral causal ontologies where, like Job’s four friends, wise counselors of the culture unite in generating narratives intended to validate the truth that the sufferer’s own moral failures caused his or her own suffering. Wise counselors in other cultures (diviners, healers, shamans) make sense of affliction and death through interpersonal causal ontologies⁴ by identifying a human third party felt to have less than exemplary feelings for the afflicted and who can be blamed for causing the affliction. Again a whole community expends great effort in discursively constructing the truth of the witch who is to be blamed for the affliction. In either case, the afflicted now have a way to interpret and understand their affliction. On this understanding, people are more satisfied with a cognitive explanation of their affliction than with no explanation at all.

Other anthropologists point out that witch discourses are really discourses about human evil, about selfishness, lust, greed, gluttony, envy, resentment, and animosity. Since people who exemplify such asocial or sinful tendencies are the ones most likely to be accused of being a witch, that is, accused of being the cause of another’s affliction or death, and since those identified as witches are often horribly mistreated, there is high motivation for people to avoid such asocial tendencies. On this understanding, witch discourses function to buttress moral virtues by motivating people to avoid the immoral attributes likely to result in them being accused of being witches. Other anthropologists adopt a hydraulic pressure-release model of society, theorizing that periodic unleashing of violence against supposed witches helps to siphon off and resolve social stress and aggression, returning society to a state of equilibrium.

While historians of Europe emphasized the horrific consequences of witch discourses and accompanying actions, many anthropologists adopted functionalist analyses, searching for positive explanations of witch discourses and downplaying the negative consequences for the accused. However, when anthropologists provide descriptive detail, it is clear that being labeled a witch is often consequential. Clyde Kluckhohn,⁵ for example, interpreted Navaho witch accusations as functioning to displace aggression and bring social equilibrium. But embedded in his ethnographic description was a more disturbing dimension. In the community of 500 people studied by Kluckhohn, 19 were accused of being witches, with another 10 already killed as witches. That is, in his data one out of every 20 to 25 people was accused of being a witch—many by their sons-in-law. The accused witch was often tied down and not allowed to eat, drink or relieve himself until he confesses,⁶ with hot coals applied to the feet to encourage confession. Kluckhohn tells us that the violent killing of witches (with axes, clubs, guns) was common and that the killing of witches is uniformly described as violently sadistic.⁷ Whatever one thinks of the supposed positive functions of this for society, the negative consequences for real people are significant.

Furthermore, ethnography demonstrates that human relationships in witch-accusing societies are fraught with interpersonal hostilities, envy, and resentment. This means that whenever someone gets sick and faces death, they are often surrounded by many sinful people who plausibly can be understood as having desired their harm. That is, they are surrounded by people who in the moral logic of the culture ought to love the afflicted but who in fact exemplify the very sinful attributes (selfishness, envy, gluttony, greed, resentment, enmity, lack of love), which are said to motivate witches. In German we might say there are many who feel schadenfreude, a witch-like surge of joy at another’s misfortune. Thus in cultures which attribute blame for each misfortune, there is high motivation on the part of many possible suspects to deflect attention off of themselves as possible witch and onto others. A whole community of sinners nervously denies their own sinful witchlike sentiments, and search for a consensus on some other socially marginal and vulnerable person that they can scapegoat as the witch. They attribute to this person the very sentiments they themselves exemplify, and join in acts of social exclusion or violence intended to remove evil from their midst. No one defends the accused, lest they themselves be accused.

Another pattern that historians and anthropologists have widely observed is that accusations follow lines of hostility and resentment. A poor old widow, with no one to care for her, constantly asks neighbors and relatives for help or food. Neighbors and relatives often turn her away, but feel guilty when they do so, with their unacknowledged guilt transformed into resentment and hostility towards her as well as fear of her. People often fear and hate those they have sinned against (see Prov 28:1). The next time some affliction occurs, their guilt, resentment and hostility towards her is easily channeled into accusations that she is really a witch who has caused their affliction, someone who does not deserve help, and who in fact merits the resentment, hostility, and violence expressed towards her by her accusers. Alternatively, a man dies and his brothers unite in accusing his widow of killing him through witchery, justifying through the accusation their expropriation of marital assets. Again and again, when scholars have carefully tracked the direction of accusations they often find self-interested accusations, which reflect hostility, guilt, and hatred on the part of accusers towards the accused. In short, the very act of accusing someone of being a witch can itself become a harmful, malicious and self-interested act, with the accusers themselves sinning in the very act of accusing. According to historian and social critic René Girard,⁸ it is less the individual being accused, than the whole community of self-righteous accusers, who most exemplify the attributes of Satan, the great accuser.

In most cultures that stress interpersonal causal ontologies there are religious healers, diviners, shamans, or witchdoctors whose professional authority is pivotal to the validation of such ontologies. Their medical diagnoses affirm that another person is to blame for the affliction. They construct their own power and authority on their supposed ability to combat the dangerous power of purported witches. As the anthropologist Michael Brown⁹ has pointed out in an already classic article, while such healers are ostensibly in the business of healing, it is the very diagnostic system that they ratify and propagate that sows suspicion and retaliatory violence. The incredibly high rate of violence which Brown documents in Aguaruna society is grounded in witch ontologies fostered by shamans. Thus he argues that there is a dark side to religious healers who operate with interpersonal causal ontologies. They claim to bring life, but foster dynamics leading to death. Presumably he would also argue that there was a dark side to Cotton Mather’s endorsement of the witch ontologies underpinning violence in Salem.

When a community accuses a specific member to be the cause of community misfortunes, illness, and death, such is enormously consequential to the accused, who is now treated as outside of the community to whom moral obligation is due. The atrocities perpetrated on persons said to be witches have been and continues to be horrendous. And since envious resentment is thought to motivate witch evil, those most naturally suspected of envious resentment are those who are most needy and vulnerable, such as elderly widows or orphans. It is the weakest and most vulnerable members of society who most suffer the adverse consequences of a diagnostic system attributing misfortune and death to human third parties imagined as acting through evil occult means.

A quick example from the missiologist Neville Bartle¹⁰ illustrates the realities here. In a largely Christian New Guinea village, split evenly between Anglicans and Nazarenes, a dispute left a marginal old widow feeling wronged, but without social recourse. Weeks later the wife of the village headman died, and the old woman was blamed for the death, accused of being a witch. She denied the charge, but was beaten until her ribs were cracked and her arm and hand bones were crushed, and so she eventually confessed that she was a witch and had two accomplices whom she named. She confessed to doing what witches are thought to do in her culture, stare at people till they became unconscious, and then operate, remove and eat the organs, and seal up the incision through occult powers. The victim would wake up not aware of what had happened and die a few days later. The two women she named confessed more quickly than she had, and thus were not beaten as severely. Neville Bartle, who arrived days later in the village with his missionary team describes the old woman as the most pathetic, shriveled up woman I have ever seen. Locked up, she had not been given food or drink for 5 days. She had a high fever, and pus drained from her hand into a puddle in the ashes. A missionary gave her water and the Nazarene village pastor questioned the three women before the missionaries, where they reaffirmed their witch confessions. The old woman was then told, Although she had committed many evil deeds, there was forgiveness and salvation through faith in Christ. The pastor led the women in a sentence-by-sentence prayer of confession and repentance. The old woman died the next day.

Anthropologists and missionaries often thought of witchcraft accusations as part of a primitive past, on its way out. But increasingly anthropologists are recognizing that modernity in many settings seems to actually stimulate higher levels of witchcraft anxieties and concerns.¹¹ Across New Guinea, Africa, the Caribbean, and parts of Asia and Latin America witch accusations are flourishing and taking new forms, one of the most startling being the exploding trend across many African countries (Nigeria, Congo, Angola or the Central African Republic) for young children to be blamed for the deaths of relatives, branded as witches.¹²

Recently, as I traveled in Africa on other business, I heard the following accounts: A Christian High Court Judge mentioned to me that in the last 30 days she had dealt with ten murder trials where young adults killed their fathers or grandfathers because a diviner had told them that these old men were really witches who