Decolonizing God

Decolonizing God: The Bible in the Tides of Empire by Mark G Brett (2008, Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press which is an imprint of the Department of Biblical Studies, University of Sheffield). Volume 16 of the series The Bible in the Modern World, editor Cheryl Exum.
How the Bible should be viewed in the light of the work of missionaries who sought to supplant and replace ancestral spiritualities. The author is Professor of Hebrew Bible, Melbourne, Australia and Policy Officer at Native Title Services, Victoria.

Post-colonial study examines a range of issues, fields and knowledge from the understanding that savage things happened in the name of empire. The Australian Aboriginees did not culturally benefit from being colonized by white settlers. They were shot, raped, fenced out and fenced in. Their bones, and their ancestors' bones, ended up in white museums. Aboriginal children were seized and given a 'Christian' upbringing and education in boarding schools to break their cultural ties. How might we view the Bible and use of the Bible in that context, as a weapon of cultural war. Is the Biblical message more or less spiritual than the aboriginal spirituality? Are Bible myths more powerful, and is Bible redemption and salvation more credible? The reality was that religion, health, education and food handouts came as a package - to accept one you accepted all. How are Aboriginal descendants today to relate to the savagery performed on their spiritual traditions?

Readers need to understand Bible criticism and scholarship to appreciate the complex argument. This example is from chapter 3, on reverence of ancestors. In Aboriginee culture, the chain of continuity through ancestors is paramount. How does that link with the new faith missionaries are bringing? Or is a cultural dictator seeking to destroy past traditions? In the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) ancestral reverence is sealed through memorial pillars. Worship of their God, Yahweh, was carried out anywhere appropriate. Other ancestral deities such as Elyon and even the plural elohim (the spirits of ancestors) were incorporated into Yahweh worship. Two kings, Hezekiah and Josiah, tried to reform religion to centralise worship in Jerusalem for tax purposes, and to outlaw most ancestral practices. Products of this period was Deuteronomy, which also contained a savage instruction to wage holy war/genocide (Deut 20) against some neighbouring tribes, and the "Deuteronomic" history corpus including the books of Samuel and Kings, which furthered the group message.

This new ideology was imposed on the local people (we do not know with what effect) whose ancestral spirituality was therefore condemned as heresy and heathernism. This message became the message of missionaries towards ancestral spirituality everywhere.
We need today to reverse that process and give some respect again to these ancestors and their spirituality, within of course the framework of rationality that helps it makes sense to us today.