Candomble, true faith and the Word of God

Sometimes different parts of our world mesh nicely together. This morning on Facebook Pastor Mary Holder Naegeli placed a comment on her site. She was “pondering Karl Barth, I,1,230-36, and implications for Christian teaching in the missional setting.” I was very interested so I took the time to read that section.

As I read, a seemingly minor statement by someone in the last Horizons, the Presbyterian women’s magazine, came to mind. While I had concluded that this particular issue was well done it did have a couple of problems and the statement was one of them. I feel the passage in Barth’s Dogmatics gives greater insight on the problem.

In an article entitled “Transformative Travel” by Ellen Birkett Morris, Judy Martin who traveled to Salvador Bahia, Brazil, to work in an orphanage made a comment about the religion of Candomble. Explaining not only that it was a combination of Catholicism and an ancient African religion, Martin also stated that “Even in poverty, their lives are filled with song and dance and celebration of their faith. My faith is practiced quite differently, but learning about and being exposed to this different religion and its value system added yet another dimension to what I know about faith.”(Emphasis mine)

I will explain first that Candomble is not a Christian religion although its adherents do hold some reverence for entities whose names are biblical such as Jesus. Several years ago when another issue of Horizons had a much more, I will not say complete, but larger article on Candomble I wrote this as an explanation.

“Candomble is one of the religions of South America that has a strong spiritualist foundation. The religion consists of a hierarchy of beings on several levels. The highest is the remote god Olorun. Andrew Dawson, Professor of Religious Studies and Sociology at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, in the book New Religions: a Guide, explains the cosmology of Candomble:

The souls of the dead (eguns) are dispersed throughout orun, [the spiritual realm] their cosmological position in the spiritual hierarchy determined relative to their spiritual development when alive on earth. The spiritual spheres nearest the earth share a similar level of cosmic energy with it, thereby allowing the orixas most central to Candomble practice to pass easily between the spiritual and the material. [1]

Dawson goes on to explain the most central part of the Candomble religion which is the possession of a medium by the orixas. In an exchange the orixas possess the medium, (inhabits their body) giving advice and in return receive food and clothing.”[2]

Now I will return to the connection between Barth’s text and Martin’s statement about faith, “learning about and being exposed to this different religion and its value system added yet another dimension to what I know about faith.”

Barth using Anselm and Luther as well as his own thoughts writes about what faith is in relationship to the Word of God. And he does show that faith unattached to Jesus Christ both as gift, revealer and object is not Christian faith.

Additionally Barth insists God is not the true God because of human faith in Him. A quote will be helpful, “What makes Him the true God is that someone believes in Him in true faith. And the fact that the faith in which the true God is believed is true faith is not due in any sense to itself but to the fact that the true God has revealed Himself to it, i.e., it is due to the Word of God.” This makes any kind of faith disconnected from the revealed Word untrue faith.

That means that there is Christian faith filled with the revelation of Jesus Christ and religious faith which has no meaning for a Christian at all except as the study of religion.

Another quote, “…when Luther speaks of the Word and faith he is saying, of course, that where there is no faith the Word cannot be, or cannot be fruitful, but he is primarily, and this is the point, that where faith is, it does not have its ground and its truth and its measure in itself as a human act or experience, but even through it is a human act and experience it has these things in its object, in Christ, or God’s Word.”

My thought then is that Martin has knowledge of two entities: her particular religious practice and knowledge of another religion. But she does not have knowledge about faith as a particular if she is speaking of what is not connected to Jesus Christ and connecting it to her own. She cannot connect Candomble to Christianity by the use of the word faith. They are two different entities.

(I am not saying here that Martin isn’t a Christian, I am saying that in her statement she is missing what faith is. And I must confess that the problem might have originated with the editors of Horizons rather than Martin.)

So here is my own point. Martin, in the article did not acknowledge any need or desire for those involved in Candomble to have true faith in Jesus Christ. And she was seemingly more interested in the phenomenon of religion and believed that knowledge of one more kind added another dimension to her own knowledge of faith. But it is not our experience of faith or another’s that is important, rather it is the object of our faith Jesus Christ, the one who fills our faith experience, which matters.

If the Word fills our faith, if our faith is in that one who gives faith and reveals himself in our faith we will undoubtedly have both discernment and concern for those involved with other gods. We will, perhaps even pursue the knowledge of other religions that we might more carefully proclaim what is true faith which is made true by the revelation of the true God as he is known in the Incarnation, Jesus Christ.

[1] Andrew Dawson, “Candomble,” New Religions: A Guide, Editor Christopher Partridge, forward, J. Gordon Melton, (Oxford: Lion Publishing; New York: Oxford University Press 2004) 287.
[2] Ibid.