Christianity versus tradition

THE recent controversy around body-viewing pitted a church against some of its own members, where the family wanted a viewing and the church said no. The family cited tradition, and the church felt that the practice conflicts with a Christian teaching that the deceased himself used to enforce.

The public debate immediately turns into a question of Christianity versus Tradition, and specifically Christianity versus African tradition, to the extent that chairman of the Traditional Medical Practitioners Council, Sekuru Friday Chisanyu said, “. . . no African person will ever be able to live as a complete Christian, they will be lying to themselves considering Christianity is a foreign belief and we have our own way of life.”

Christians - it is said - are in a “quandary” as they (we) try to balance tradition and ritual with Christian teaching.

The biggest problem however is not a conflict between Christian belief and African tradition, but between Christian tradition and African tradition, with man-made rituals being mistaken for God-given commands. So you have a church that has decided for reasons not found in the Bible to prevent people from having viewings of a body, which is upsetting and causing resentment among many trying to hold to their own personal or cultural traditions.

It’s the same kind of problem you find when a religious leader tells people God told him they have to give a certain amount of money at a particular time or risk missing out on a blessing from God.

Jesus came across this problem during his ministry on earth (Mark 12:18-27), when some religious leaders called Sadducees tried to trap him into incriminating himself, without realising how ignorant their question was.

Old Testament law (or simply ‘The Law’ as it was to them at that time) dictated for the sake of preserving the family line, that if a man died without heirs, that his brother marry the widow, with the first son of the new marriage being deemed a son of the deceased first husband.

The Sadducees, trying to mock Jesus’ belief in the afterlife, asked him whose husband a woman would be in heaven if she had married a succession of seven brothers on earth. Jesus’ response was not a new insight or revelation, no new word from God. Rather he told them that they didn’t know what they were talking about:

“Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God?” (Emphasis mine). Jesus’ point was that if they knew their Bibles, they would know that there is no marriage in heaven, so their question was, well…dumb.

The Sadducees had a long-held tradition based on a willful misunderstanding of what God had said, adding their own opinions and theories on top of the Bible, and claiming it was God’s truth. Just like they did when they made up a bunch of extra rules for the people and called them God’s rules, which is why Jesus cursed them all for driving people away from God. Because that’s how serious this is - when you add rules of your own and call them God’s, you are adding to Scripture. When you are adding to Scripture you are lying, pulling people away from God and in direct conflict with the Almighty.

And yet the world never lacks for people who think they speak for God or get extra rules or insights from Him. Whether it’s those clinging on to ancient traditions that they claim are rules sent from God, or someone telling you that God commands you to do something that isn’t in the Bible.

Which brings us back to the question of Christianity versus Tradition and the concern that true Africans can never be Christians because of the clash in their rituals. Thank God that isn’t true. The only ‘rituals’ God commands are baptism for those who become Christians, and commemorations of Jesus’ death and resurrection through the drinking of wine and eating of bread in church ceremonies known as ‘Lord’s Supper’. He tells us to invest in our relationship with our local Bible-preaching church family, and everything else God commands is effectively no more than telling us to be more like Him.

There is therefore no conflict between being faithfully African and a true Christian, because God invented Africans just like he invented everyone else, and to be most true to yourself is to be most true to God.

Christians generally, and church leaders especially, need to take a hard look at why they do what they do and recognise that there is probably far greater freedom than they think or feel. Freedoms in how we can worship, freedom in how to conduct our meetings so long as prayer, singing and Bible preaching is present, freedom in when we met, for how long and certainly freedom in whether to view a dead body.

Christians can be quick to tell non-Christians that if God says ‘No’, we shouldn’t say ‘Yes’, and that’s true. But all too often we can make the opposite and make the religious mistake of telling people that God has said ‘No’, when he has said nothing at all.

Christianity is made to look like a mere set of traditions, a cultural competitor to some African traditions.

Then you lose the gospel – the heart of God’s message to mankind of sin, forgiveness and reconciliation through Jesus. And when a church loses the gospel, that church is worthless.