As mentioned before (read HISTORICAL BACKGROUND), the Torajan culture is strongly attached to its tribal religion, centered on clan-house kinship (Tor: tongkonan) and its ritual for the deceased. The main problem encountered in the mission among Torajan Christian was how to deal with their strong cultural traditions. In the past, the simple approach the Dutch mission—that of rejecting religiously related customs and adopting positive aspects of Torajan culture to Christian life—seemed to treat Torajan culture fragmentarily. The Torajan Christians were either uprooted from their cultural tradition or forced to schizophrenically adapted two different ways of life. A Torajan theologian, Theo Kobong, dedicated his life and thought to this problem of developing a Torajan Christian theology of culture. His main theses follows Richard Niebuhr’s fifth paradigm of “Christ transforming culture.”
For the Torajan Christian it means transformation of the Torajan culture by the Gospel of Christ. The clan-house kinship at the core of Torajan culture, therefore, should be transformed from its genealogically limited relationships and its feudal value system to be a universal non-discriminative fellowship. Dr Kobong’s thoughts on this theme are as follows:
"The criteria for Torajan traditional communities is the respective pangala-tondok (the patriarch, the man who founded the community village) with their own ritual and customary laws. It is clear that we have to deal with it here at this very point. It seems that the solution is not so difficult. We have to choose either Christ or patriarch; or between Gospel (Word of God) and ritual and customary laws. Christ and patriarch can not be united; both cannot become criteria simultaneously. A Christian, therefore, has to choose. He/she believes and is committed to Christ or to the patriarch. A genuine Christian cannot choose other than Christ, take up his cross and follow him. This choice must be radical, because one cannot serve two masters. The Christian has to choose for Christ or for patriarch. This either/or choice consequently leads to refusal to leave all that
belong to patriarch. It means to leave his ritual and customary laws, and at the end, his tongkonan (clan house), his community and culture. But the radical refusal of the structure of life pattern of patriarch is not the goal of this choice, because then it is a refusal to incarnation, or incarnation was not an event in the world and for the world. It will also mean that Christ did not come for the world, did not come for the people in the world as a whole. But incarnation means that Christ came to replace the patriarch. He came to his own people, included the
patriarch, the head of the tongkonan community. He is more concrete to people in the framework of tongkonan structure that unites all groups and communities. As the concerned target is man, community, i.e. tongkonan, therefore, Christ as the new Patriarch, the new Pangala Tondok, has to take over the old community as His own and gives it new meaning. The community, then, has to put its life in order according to the ritual and customary laws (i.e. religion) of the new Patriarch. It has to transform its life and lift it to the level of a life patterned according to God's will. This transformation is a renewal of the meaning of life according to God's will in Jesus Christ. Renewal means to take over and at the same time to reject. Tongkonan community can be taken over, but its new criteria is Jesus Christ, the new Patriarch, who renews the tongkonan community. He invites all people to enter His tongkonan, but with an absolute condition: that His ritual laws to be followed—all that people need are in Him. All aspects of life and therefore life in its wholeness is under His sole power."
Dr. Kobong regarded his ideas of transformation as “genuine contextualization”. For him, contextual theology (local theology) is the expression of a dynamic interaction between gospel, church and culture. He explained contextualization as a method of relating the text and the context as follows: Contextualization as a method is the dialectical interaction and communication between text and context.
Dialectical interaction and communication brings to the interpretation of the Gospel a context in the sense of culture and tradition where a transcultural Gospel defines and, at the same time, guarantees the genuine contextualization. Hermeneutic, as an effort to interpret and understand the Word contextually, can only guarantee genuine contextualization under the guidance of the Holy Therefore it requires a pneumatological base in the contextualization of every theology and church, and is, by the power of the Holy Spirit, breaking through all attachments to any static situation.
The authority of the Bible lies in its power to critique and judge, and, if necessary, break loose from the church. Genuine contextuality, therefore, is a result of a biblical and pneumatological hermeneutic (based on the Bible and lead by the Holy Spirit) on text and context. It should avoid nationalistic and cultural primordialism so as not to endanger the universalism of truth. Both the universal and the particular aspects should be included because truth is relational and creates relationships to every context.
The Gospel itself is above any particular culture, but also immersed in any culture but without being dissolved. It is the dialectic and dynamic of the culture that leads to cultural transformation. In the case of the Torajan culture it would mean that the Biblical text and Torajan culture enter a dialectic process where the Gospel transforms the Torajan culture.
Dr Kobong’s thoughts on contextualization and and its application to the Christian community (the Church) as the new Torajan’s Tongkonan is a big step forward compared to limited vision of the GZB missionaries and older Torajan theologians. But the main criticism of his thought should be the criticism of its Niebuhrian model of one way transformation of the culture by the Gospel. There is no universal truth of the gospel to be imposed on the Torajan cultural system, values and expressions. The gospel itself was wrapped in a certain cultural context, and its content was substantiated by the life and history of the people in that historical context. The history and culture of the Torajan is not less than thatof the Hebrews or Jews.
The truth of the gospel that emerged from the long Hebrew/Jewish history as recorded in the Bible should not be transferred to the Torajan, but should be the norm for Torajan cultural transformation. Dr Kobong, in fact, realized this option but he chose to develop a contextual ecclesiology with a very strong Christocentric approach whereby he imposed the Pauline messianism of the New Testament on the Torajan cultural system. His ecclesiology of the Torajan Tongkonan, therefore, is an expression of the gospel in the Torajan cultural expression without new and transformed Torajan values. The family kinship with all of its basic values, for example, was not given proper place in his Tongkonan ecclesiology. Figuratively speaking, he brought a Jewish Christ to the Torajan, but did not find the genuine Torajan Christ. Dr Kobong based his thought on his “master piece”—the Torajan Church Confession; a theological document he and some other theologians formulated to be the basic doctrinal reference for the Torajan Church. This heavily Christocentric theological formulation was considered as an answer to the need for a Torajan Christian identity.
Dr Kobong did mention three fundamental aspects of the Torajan Church context, i.e. traditional culture, relation to Islam, and modernization. But he concentrated his study on Torajan traditional culture as mentioned above.
Read related posts about Toraja:
Dialectical interaction and communication brings to the interpretation of the Gospel a context in the sense of culture and tradition where a transcultural Gospel defines and, at the same time, guarantees the genuine contextualization. Hermeneutic, as an effort to interpret and understand the Word contextually, can only guarantee genuine contextualization under the guidance of the Holy Therefore it requires a pneumatological base in the contextualization of every theology and church, and is, by the power of the Holy Spirit, breaking through all attachments to any static situation.
The authority of the Bible lies in its power to critique and judge, and, if necessary, break loose from the church. Genuine contextuality, therefore, is a result of a biblical and pneumatological hermeneutic (based on the Bible and lead by the Holy Spirit) on text and context. It should avoid nationalistic and cultural primordialism so as not to endanger the universalism of truth. Both the universal and the particular aspects should be included because truth is relational and creates relationships to every context.
The Gospel itself is above any particular culture, but also immersed in any culture but without being dissolved. It is the dialectic and dynamic of the culture that leads to cultural transformation. In the case of the Torajan culture it would mean that the Biblical text and Torajan culture enter a dialectic process where the Gospel transforms the Torajan culture.
Dr Kobong’s thoughts on contextualization and and its application to the Christian community (the Church) as the new Torajan’s Tongkonan is a big step forward compared to limited vision of the GZB missionaries and older Torajan theologians. But the main criticism of his thought should be the criticism of its Niebuhrian model of one way transformation of the culture by the Gospel. There is no universal truth of the gospel to be imposed on the Torajan cultural system, values and expressions. The gospel itself was wrapped in a certain cultural context, and its content was substantiated by the life and history of the people in that historical context. The history and culture of the Torajan is not less than thatof the Hebrews or Jews.
The truth of the gospel that emerged from the long Hebrew/Jewish history as recorded in the Bible should not be transferred to the Torajan, but should be the norm for Torajan cultural transformation. Dr Kobong, in fact, realized this option but he chose to develop a contextual ecclesiology with a very strong Christocentric approach whereby he imposed the Pauline messianism of the New Testament on the Torajan cultural system. His ecclesiology of the Torajan Tongkonan, therefore, is an expression of the gospel in the Torajan cultural expression without new and transformed Torajan values. The family kinship with all of its basic values, for example, was not given proper place in his Tongkonan ecclesiology. Figuratively speaking, he brought a Jewish Christ to the Torajan, but did not find the genuine Torajan Christ. Dr Kobong based his thought on his “master piece”—the Torajan Church Confession; a theological document he and some other theologians formulated to be the basic doctrinal reference for the Torajan Church. This heavily Christocentric theological formulation was considered as an answer to the need for a Torajan Christian identity.
Dr Kobong did mention three fundamental aspects of the Torajan Church context, i.e. traditional culture, relation to Islam, and modernization. But he concentrated his study on Torajan traditional culture as mentioned above.
Read related posts about Toraja:
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