Outcasts of the Gods? by Hazel Petrie

Author:Hazel Petrie [Petrie, Hazel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Australia & New Zealand
ISBN: 9781775587866
Google: E4tjCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2015-09-25T00:35:56+00:00

Spiritual redemption

Many of the attitudes expressed by the missionaries may have stemmed from their belief that Māori ‘slavery’ was more benign than the trans-Atlantic trade in Africans. But regardless of the extent to which that was the case, a fundamental shared conviction remained that liberty and freedom from slavery were blessings that British colonisation would bestow. And like most of their countrymen, they took it for granted that those blessings were symbolised by the British flag. Indeed, Henry Williams opted to fly the white ensign, based on the cross of St George with the union flag in the top left corner, on the CMS vessels. For him the flag would have symbolised all the noble ideals that Britain, or, perhaps more precisely, England, stood for — ideals that had been reflected in Marsden’s words as he prepared for his first service in New Zealand.

There was another, probably more important, aspect to missionary ‘redemptions’, though. Their writings frequently reveal that when they redeemed or assumed that they had redeemed Māori slaves, it was spiritual redemption, rather than physical freedom in this earthly world, that was foremost in their minds. That was their primary objective when entering missionary service and may explain why the word ‘manumission’ does not seem to have been used when payment was made in exchange for slaves.

It is widely accepted that many of Christianity’s earliest converts came from within the Roman Empire’s slave populations. That circumstance, and the fact that redemption has been offered as one of the three key words of the Apostle Paul’s theology, may help to explain the extraordinary role of slave metaphors in the symbolic structure of Christianity. In theological terms, redemption means release from enslavement. Sin condemns a person to slavery but believers are emancipated from sin through Christ.62 Christ is consequently referred to as the ‘Redeemer’, and the missionaries surely felt that they were doing his work in a very literal sense. So metaphors may hold the key to understanding not only missionary attitudes but also, perhaps, those of contemporary Britons more generally towards slavery.

Both Wesleyan and CMS missionaries emphasised the doctrine of Christ’s atonement over his incarnation in early nineteenth-century New Zealand. Nathaniel Turner wrote that his soul delighted to dwell on ‘the Doctrine of General Redemption’.63 John King embodied the same sentiment in his address to Māori at Rangihoua in 1823 about the ‘slavery of sin and the freedom of the service of Christ’, and again the following year when he offered his listeners a choice between being ‘children of Jehovah or slaves of Satan’, a concept referred to as the ‘hinge of Christian truth’.64 Some ten years later, Richard Davis wrote of his fears that Māori were ‘dying fast’ from their exposure to ‘haunts of vice’, adding: ‘O that the Lord would but subdue the power of Satan and save those wretched, though willing captives from eternal death!’ Freedom lies at the core of Christianity’s promise of salvation.65 Thus, Davis used the word ‘captives’ metaphorically to mean those Māori who had not converted to Christianity and were thus captives of Satan rather than prisoners of war.

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