Lanham: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2020. xii, 215 pp. US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-9787-0993-5.
In Salvation in Melanesia, Michael Press, a pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria, Germany, aims to explore how the concept of salvation is experienced by Melanesian Christians. Press focuses on the Methodist Church in Fiji and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Papua New Guinea and builds on archival research and 75 interviews with members of both churches, including pastors and church leaders. During his time as a lecturer at the Pacific Theological College in Fiji from 2002 to 2010, Press conducted studies in the region. In addition, the book makes available in English several themes covered in Press’s Kokosnuss und Kreuz: Geschichten von Christen im Pazifik (Neuendettelsau: Erlanger Verlag für Mission, 2010).
The book has five chapters, of which chapter 2, on how Christian faith is experienced, is ethnographically the richest. The chapters that follow (chapter 3 on renewal and chapter 4 on Pentecostal ways) fail to build on that richness and chapter 5 wraps up the study with a classical sketch of the contrast between Western secularism and a Melanesian world that is enchanted by spirits and God.
While Press states that the purpose of the interviews was to compare life stories of salvation and conversions (ix), much of the analysis remains abstract and often meanders indistinctly between mission theology, anthropology, and mission history. This shortcoming is largely due to the lack of theoretical framing regarding salvation. Press deliberately grounds salvation in classical theology because he thinks that it still offers guidance to Melanesians navigating a new world (xii). He looks at Melanesia with the assumption that its people live in confusion, between tradition and modernity (xi–xii). According to the pastor, religion for the Melanesians is an interventionist practice that offers a promise of salvation.
The logic of salvation thus becomes the work of God that is committed to guiding the transition from tradition to modernity. But current predicaments of life in Melanesia include poverty, failing health and education services, growing gender inequality, mounting domestic violence, and struggles over regional autonomy that often bring to light the limitations of alternative forms of leadership and governance. Press does not pay much attention to such issues, let alone the variety of local social, political, and theological responses to them.
A recurring theme is that salvation is often seen as the act of being rescued by God from the consequences of wrongdoing. This, as Press highlights in chapter 2, is the result of early missionaries’ focus on law, a tendency that continues in the traditional churches they helped to establish. While Press presents some interesting material on people’s fear of God, reflecting views of ethical behaviour that are mostly drawn from missionary teachings, he pays less attention to continuities and discontinuities with pre-Christian and contemporary customary ethics.
On top of that, Press curiously interprets people’s fear of God as a result of the incommensurability of the idea of the grace of God in the atoning death of Jesus from the eschatological perspective of the New Testament with the “presence-oriented Melanesian worldview” (65). Press founds this observation on the assumption that people in Melanesia have no conception of an afterlife. “The spirits of the dead were believed to roam around or to live on specific mountain or island areas” (65). Many anthropological studies of Melanesian culture point to the fact that the lives of ancestral spirits exist through their multiple relationships with humans in the past, present, and future. People relate to these spirits as a continuous presence: in mythological times, during contemporary activities, and in the future.
Chapter 4 focuses on the advent of Pentecostalism. Pentecostal theology results from personal encounters with God and often evokes wondrous things that will be fully realized at the end of times, which for many is to happen now, in the time that remains. Where Press sees “a danger in the instability and deceitfulness of emotions” (175), one of these wonders is that through Pentecostal theology and worship a believer can become a new person, in the sense of feeling justified and empowered by the presence of the Holy Spirit. These kinds of conversions have political consequences as well, as illustrated by a recent attempt by Theodore Zurenuoc, the House speaker of Papua New Guinea, to prepare the nation to become a New Jerusalem. Zurenuoc’s move was part of the Restoration, Reformation, and Modernization Program of the Unity Team formed by public servants, priests, and professionals, all inspired by Evangelical/Pentecostal theologies.
Finally, in his approach to conversion, Press focuses too much on the event, despite the field of conversion studies having moved towards a more process-oriented, whole-life approach. In addition, conversion does not simply have to refer to a move from one religion to another but can include more subtle changes in religious affiliation and commitment between denominations or even within the same faith group. Some of these subtleties come to the fore in the interview materials reported in this book but are often not constructively taken up by Press.
Though Salvation in Melanesia does not provide significant new insights into how people in Melanesia see and live salvation it is still worth a read, especially for regional specialists interested in how mission Christianity reflects on a people’s past, present, and future.
Jaap Timmer
Aarhus University, Aarhus
Macquarie University, Sydney