Since the arrival of the explorers, traders, missionaries, and colonial agents, the world of the Melanesian people has dramatically changed. The Christian faith has been an engine of transformation. In adopting and inhabiting the Christian faith Melanesian people have both preserved and transformed their society, worldviews, and convictions, so that a specific Pacific way has emerged, perhaps an alternative to a modernization driven by economic exploitation of the nature and the individualization of the society.
I am grateful to a number of people who have made this book possible. First I thank all Christians in Fiji and Papua New Guinea who have shared their views in the interviews. Mrs. Deidre Madden, a former colleague at Pacific Theological College from Australia, helped proofreading and commenting, and Mission One World of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria sponsored and supported the research.
NOTES
1. According to the ethnological standard, the term “Melanesian” refers to the population and culture of the people of Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, and New Caledonia, who share many features of culture and religion, including a similar history of mission and conversion to Christianity. In this book, Melanesian refers mainly to the people of Fiji and Papua New Guinea.
2. Ennio Mantovani, Divine Revelation and the Religions of Papua New Guinea. A Missiological Manual (Melanesian Institute: Goroka, 2000). Gernot Fugmann, “Salvation in Melanesian Religions,” in An Introduction to Melanesian Religions, ed. by Ennio Mantovani (Melanesian Institute: Goroka, 1984), 279–96.
3. Garry W. Trompf, The Logic of Retribution in Melanesian Religions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
4. The Relevance of Lutheran Theology in an Afro-Melanesian Context. Final Report, Neuendettelsau, 1983.
5. Sandra Jovchelovitch and Martin W. Bauer, “Narrative Interviewing,” in Qualitative Researching With Text, Image and Sound, eds. Martin W. Bauer and George Gaskell (London: Sage, 2000), 57–74; Fritz Schütze, “Narrative Repräsentation kollektiver Schicksalsbetroffenheit,” in Erzählforschung, ed. E. Laemmert (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1983), 568–90.
6. Walter. J. Hollenweger, Pentecostalism. Origins and Developments Worldwide (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 1997), 218–57.
Conversion and Renewal in Fiji
The first attempts to establish Christianity in Fiji must be credited to Tahitian missionaries in 1830.1 However, effective mission did not commence until the arrival of two English Wesleyan missionaries, William Cross and David Cargill, who were sent from Tonga to the Tui Nayau, the chief of Lau in Eastern Fiji, in 1835. They established the pattern of approaching the chiefs, which determined the course of the mission in the future, because the Fijian church became a church of the chiefs and the people.
According to the ethnologist Arthur M. Hocart, the pre-Christian religion of the Fijians involved service to the chiefs who, as personified gods, guaranteed that the circle of agricultural fertility and prosperity continued.2 The chiefs were regarded as representatives of the gods and thus caretakers for the lives of their people. Resistance against the chiefs would inevitably provoke the wrath of the gods. Linked to the chiefs, the ancestors served as guardian spirits for each family. Various objects were charged with the power of spirits (mana).
The Methodist strategy of targeting the chiefs and establishing mission stations with their permission paved the way for their acceptance. The people would not convert in big numbers without the permission of their chiefs. The chiefs, however, became interested in the presence of the European missionaries to enhance their own power by accessing European knowledge and skills. They were also careful to avoid the possible wrath of the European god, who had proven to be powerful.
The missionaries were convinced that their lives were in God’s hands and that God had sent them to convert the “heathen.” They were appalled by Fijian customs such as cannibalism; the abandonment, strangling, or burying alive of the sick and dying; the strangling of a chief’s widows when he died; rape of women as a mode of punishment; and the killing of strangers.3 These customs made them believe that the Fijians were depraved and lost in sin unless they would convert to the God of the Ten Commandments and the gospel of love. Missionary John Hunt wrote from his mission station Somosomo in 1839: “Man is the vilest of the vile, the master piece of the creation of God presents in his moral character the very counterpart of the island which he inhabits. In him all is chaos and confusion and death” (referring to the killing of the wives of a chief during his burial).4 Against the idea of a natural revelation of God to all humans, Hunt reckoned that
God here is so new, the people so little instructed in the nature of religion and so unacquainted with even the most common principles of the government of the true God that we were afraid if he (their servant) died it might for a long time at least hinder the people from embracing Christianity. . . . They had no idea whatsoever of the existence, perfections and claims of God, of his love in the gift of his son or of the nature of that Gospel which teaches repentance, faith and holiness. It is hard to conceive how unprepared the human mind is to receive this glorious truth in its entirely uncultivated state.5
Hunt did not perceive the Fijian customs in their own right but judged them by the Ten Commandments and the gospel of love to one’s neighbor. He was convinced that the people would be lost unless they converted to the God of the Bible. However, the missionaries did not choose the way of outright condemnation and threatening with hell, but the way of preaching the love of God and the path of conversion to attain salvation. They respected the social structure and the authority of the chief and they did not question the whole cultural system, when they tried saving some of the victims who were put to death according to custom because of age, sickness, or idleness. Thus they gained respect from the people for their peaceful and humble attitude.
The rapid success of the Methodist mission can be attributed to a combination of several factors: the favorable political situation by which the support of the already converted Tongan king incited the conversion of Fijian chiefs; the general impact of European arrival; the tiredness of the people and chiefs with ever more brutal wars through the introduction of European firearms; the aspiration for European goods; and delivery from sickness and death. All these factors aided the mission efforts. Traders had begun to exploit the Fijians in exporting sandalwood from 1812 onward. The missionaries could prove that they did not want to exploit the people.
The conversion of the chiefs was a decisive step, because they were followed by their vassals, though this was not the only determinative factor in the conversion of the Fijians. For instance, 1,300 people followed the High Chief Cakobau during the 2 months after his conversion in 1854.6 On the other hand, some Fijians remained in their traditional religion after their chief converted.7 And some Christian villages faced bloody persecutions from their unconverted high chiefs but remained steadfast in their new faith, indicating that their conversion was not superficial. The mission proceeded quickly along the coastal areas. Even before the conversion of the first high chief (Tui Nayau in 1849) there were already 60 churches and preaching places, 4,000 people under instruction and a considerable number of local catechists (38), teachers (117), and preachers (68).8
I agree with Alan Tippett that the “Methodist struggle for Fiji was fought and won on a spiritual plane”9 by the first generation of missionaries and native preachers. John Hunt, posted on the small island of Viwa from 1842 to 1848, was the most impressive. Viwa is a small island close to Bau, which is the island of the high chief. Not only did Hunt translate the New Testament into Fijian: he