The Bible in the Modern World, 16 Series Editors J. Cheryl Exum

DECOLONIZING GOD The Bible in the Modern World, 16 Series Editors J. Cheryl Exum, Jorunn Økland, Stephen D. Moore Editorial Board Alison Jasper, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Hugh Pyper, Yvonne Sherwood, Caroline Vander Stichele DECOLONIZING GOD THE BIBLE IN THE TIDES OF EMPIRE Mark G. Brett SHEFFIELD PHOENIX PRESS 2008 Copyright © 2008 Sheffield Phoenix Press Published by Sheffield Phoenix Press Department of Biblical Studies, University of Sheffield Sheffield S10 2TN www.sheffieldphoenix.com The earlier versions of chs.3, 4 and 5 were, in order, published as: ‘The Loss and Retrieval of Ancestral Religion—in Ancient Israel and in Australia’ in M. Parsons (ed.), Text and Task: Scripture and Mission (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2005), pp.1–19. ‘Israel’s Indigenous Origins: Cultural Hybridity and the Formation of Israelite Ethnicity’ Biblical Interpretation 11 (2003), pp.400–412. ‘Genocide in Deuteronomy: Postcolonial Variations on Mimetic Desire’ in M. O’Brien and H. Wallace (eds), Seeing Signals, Reading Signs (London: Continuum, 2004), pp.76–90. Paternoster, E.J. Brill and Continuum have all provided permission to re-use this material, for which I am grateful. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without the publishers’ permission in writing. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Typeset by Vikatan Publishing Solutions, Chennai, India Printed by Lightning Source Hardback ISBN 978-1-906055-37-0 ISSN 1747-9630 (Deut. 6.20) FOR ANUSHA, MATTHEUS AND LIAM CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1 THE BIBLE AND COLONIZATION 7 Chapter 2 ALIENATING EARTH AND THE CURSE OF EMPIRES 32 Chapter 3 ANCESTORS AND THEIR GIFTS 44 Chapter 4 PIGS, POTS AND CULTURAL HYBRIDS 62 Chapter 5 DEUTERONOMY, GENOCIDE AND THE DESIRES OF NATIONS 79 Chapter 6 DISSIDENT PROPHETS AND THE MAKING OF UTOPIAS 94 Chapter 7 EXILE AND ETHNIC CONFLICT 112 Chapter 8 JESUS, NON-VIOLENCE AND THE CHRIST QUESTION 132 Chapter 9 PAUL AND HYBRID CHRISTIAN IDENTITIES 153 Chapter 10 POSTCOLONIAL THEOLOGY AND ETHICS 178 Bibliography 205 Index of References 225 Index of Authors 229 Index of Subjects 234 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The content of this book has arisen from conversations over the past twenty years with Indigenous colleagues and students from Burma, North- East India, the Pacifi c and Australia. I would especially like to acknowledge Edea Kidu, Anna May Say Pa, R.L. Hnuni, Inotoli Zhimomi, Pothin Wete, Peniamina Leota, Djiniyini Gondarra, Graham and Grant Paulson, and Mark Yettica-Paulson. While this remains a ‘whitefella’ book, the questions posed have also been shaped in no small measure by my work with Native Title Services Victoria and with the Victorian Traditional Owner Land Justice Group. Chris Marshall and Mick Dodson, among others, have helped to sustain my hope that another kind of social imagination may yet be possible in Australia. I am grateful to a number of people who were kind enough to com- ment on parts of the manuscript in earlier stages of its production: Deborah Bird Rose, Diana Lipton, Gershon Hepner, Norman Habel, Gerald West, Fernando Segovia, Stephen Fowl, Duncan Reid, Philip Chia, Merryl Blair, Howard Wallace, Kynan Sutherland, Fred Morgan, Gordon Preece and Mark Lindsay. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Tamara Eskenazi, Keith Dyer, Robert Francis and Bill Ashcroft who worked their way through all of the chapters in draft and whose critiques provided great encouragement. Finally, however, this work would not have been possible without my wife Ilsa’s ability to get to the heart of things, and whose mindfulness has steadily untied the knots in my soul. INTRODUCTION Our past is sedimented in our present, and we are doomed to misidentify ourselves as long as we can’t do justice to where we come from.1 Charles Taylor The argument of this book oscillates between ancient and modern contexts without suggesting, in line with current solipsistic fashions, that readers can only ever recreate the past in their own image. I presume, for example, that it is quite possible to distinguish between ancient and modern versions of colonialism or imperialism, and in modern times, we can discern important differences between what happened in eighteenth-century North America and our experience in nineteenth-century Australia. Those differences are sometimes signifi cant, as this book will show, but there are also important analogies between the various experiences of colonial expansion, and the implications of those analogies need rigorous scrutiny. In particular, the implications are worth refl ecting on in contexts where the after-effects of Christendom have not yet subsided. Robert Francis, a White River Band Cherokee theologian, recently sug- gested that decolonization will require a long process of reducing dependency on colonial order—theologically, psychologically and economically.2 The reduction of this dependency is not just a matter for Indigenous communities who are revitalizing their cultures and economies. It is also a matter for all communities who derive their identity—even indirectly—from the Bible, and who are exploring the signifi cance of postcolonial spirituality and politics. Part of this process will include a reconsideration of biblical traditions, both their production and reception, in order to discover less distorted habits of thinking and acting that may be brought to the unfi nished busi- ness of reconciliation with Indigenous people. In the case of Australia, for example, the legal basis for ownership of lands and natural resources rests for the most part on illegitimate actions taken in the nineteenth century 1. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), p. 29. 2. Robert Francis, ‘From Bondage to Freedom’, unpublished paper, August 2007. 2 Decolonizing God by colonial agents of the British Crown.3 The recognition of past wrongs and the restoration of mutually respectful relationships are projects that have barely begun. A critical theology requires the praxis of repentance and genuine dialogue with Indigenous people. Moreover, the construction of Australian national identity needs to free itself from legal and economic dependence on historic injustices. In Chapter 1, ‘The Bible and Colonization’, I provide a series of sketches illustrating how biblical texts were embedded in the discourses of colonialism. The focus is on Australia, with selected comparisons and contrasts from the Americas, Africa, India and Aotearoa New Zealand. It becomes clear that there were favorite biblical texts that appeared regularly in different contexts, which were used both to legitimate and to mitigate the devastat- ing effects of colonization. Generations of Europeans became intoxicated with their ideas of racial superiority and civilization, and the Bible was caught up in the destructive consequences. Most biblical traditions, however, as the subsequent chapters demonstrate, were produced by people who were themselves subject to the shifting tides of ancient imperial domination—whether in the form of imperial administra- tion exercised largely at a distance, or in the form of threatening colonies of migrating populations.4 Chapter 2, ‘Alienating Earth and the Curse of Empires’, notes how the divine command in Gen. 1.28 to ‘subdue the earth’ was frequently cited, from the sixteenth century onwards, both as a reason for imperial expan- sions and as a warrant for linking property rights to cultivation. I argue that this hermeneutical hubris actually inverted the communicative intentions of the biblical primeval narratives as we now have them. One virulent strain of agrarian ideology that developed in Australia helped to shape the legal assumptions of terra nullius (‘land belonging to no one’) that deprived Indigenous groups of ‘native title’ rights even up until 1992. Unlike the land rights legislation that dates from the 1970s—which pro- vides land to Aboriginal people in the form of a ‘grant’ from the Crown—it 3. This issue is discussed in Chapter 1, but for a recent analysis of the legal predica- ment of land title in Australia see Samantha Hepburn, ‘Feudal Tenure and Native Title: Revising an Enduring Fiction’ Sydney Law Review 27/1 (2005), pp. 49–86. 4. See, for example, Carolyn R. Higginbotham, Egyptianization and Elite Emulation in Ramesside Palestine: Governance and Accommodation on the Imperial Periphery (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2000); Eckart Otto, Das Deuteronomium: Politische Theologie und Rechtsreform in Juda und Assyrien (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000); Charles Carter, The Emergence of Yehud in the Persian Period (Sheffi eld: Sheffi eld Academic Press, 1999); Claire L. Lyons and John K. Papadopoulos (eds.), The Archaeology of Colonialism (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2002). Introduction 3 was in 1992 that the Federal Court of Australia fi nally recognized that Indigenous law and custom might actually qualify the Crown’s jurisdic- tion. The initial act of court recognition had a sting in the tail, however, as illustrated in this excerpt from the judgement: The common law can, by reference to the traditional laws and customs of an Indigenous people, identify and protect the native rights and interests to which they give rise. However, when the tide of history has washed away any real acknowledgment of traditional law and any real observance of traditional customs, the foundation of native title has disappeared… Once traditional native title expires, the Crown’s radical title expands to a full benefi cial title, for then there is no other proprietor than the Crown.5 The phrase ‘the tide of history’ has echoed notoriously through subsequent legal judgements that have denied particular Indigenous groups their native title on the grounds that the local system of law and custom has not, in the eyes of the Court, been continuously maintained.6 The formality of legal language here obscures the agency of successive colonial governments who adopted policies specifi cally designed to under- mine Indigenous laws and to sever the connections between Aboriginal groups and their traditional countries.

Load more