The Celtic Way of Evangelism by George G. Hunter III

Author:George G. Hunter III
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christianity
Publisher: Abingdon Press
Published: 2011-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

I lie down this night with God,

And God will lie down with me;

I lie down this night with Christ,

And Christ will lie down with me;

I lie down this night with the Spirit,

And the Spirit will lie down with me;

God and Christ and the Spirit

Be lying down with me.13

The second example of Celtic indigenization focuses on a contextually appropriate way to interpret the death of Christ. Thomas Cahill tells us that the Irish were still practicing human sacrifice when Patrick returned. They sacrificed some prisoners of war to appease the war gods, some of their own newborns to appease the harvest gods, and occasionally a prince would offer himself as a sacrifice to some deity whose help was needed.

Three principles drove this sacrificial tradition. First, there were always devoted religious people who were willing to give up their lives to the gods for the people. Second, there were always "basely religious"14 people who were willing to sacrifice other people to the gods! Third, "it would be an understatement to assert that the Irish gods were not the friendliest of figures."15 Their gods were capricious; they prepared traps for people; and they blessed people only in response to flattery, liturgical manipulation, and sacrifice. That religious worldview produced a precarious sense of life; probably every Irishman was familiar with the experience of cosmic terror.

Patrick proclaimed the good news of a different kind of God. Christianity's God is not hostile, capricious, or selfseeking; he is for us, he loves people (and his other creatures), and he wills their deliverance from sin and terror into new life. Patrick, drawing from the Philippian Hymn, proclaimed that this God does not want people to feed him through human sacrifices; this God has sacrificed his only Son for us and wants to feed us through the blessed sacrament. No human being needs to be sacrificed ever again. This High God calls us not to die for him, but to live for him and for one another.16

The third example also focuses on a contextualized way to interpret the death of Jesus, developed by Saint Aidan as he came to understand the history and values of the Anglo-Saxons of northern England. In A.D. 625, eight years before Iona commissioned Aidan to Northumbria, Canterbury had commissioned Paulinus to the same region. Paulinus, in the tradition of Ninian, must have imported left-brained, culturally Roman Christianity. Bede's account begins by asserting that "The nation of the Northumbrians . . . received the faith through the preaching of Paulinus."17 Bede soon admits, however, that the "heathen" were unresponsive to Paulinus's preaching, and indeed Paulinus "labored much . . . to retain those that went with him, by the help of God, that they should not revolt from the faith."18 Paulinus did make some progress with King Edwin and his associates, though the king did not immediately accept the faith.

One day a neighboring king sent a messenger to Edwin's court. Inside his scroll was a poisoned dagger. As the messenger charged to stab Edwin, one member of the court, Lilla, was close enough to step across and take the dagger in his own stomach.

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