Now I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that, prior to this training, I barely knew a thing about Cambridge. Colleagues had described it as: small, idyllic, "white", affluent, and (curiously) "horse crazy".
During my first night in town, I took a walk and came across a series of pavement mosaics, celebrating the many champion horses Cambridge has produced. Intrigued, I continued wandering, wondering about the history of the town and the origins of its equine love-affair.
While this is a rather dull anecdote, perhaps it illustrates how easily we humans (or some of us, at least) can be provoked into phenomenological reflection, and that such reflection typically leads to thinking about origins.
When it comes to our worldview, the topic of origins is incredibly important.
It seems that whenever people get seriously involved with the meaning of things in life, they unavoidably end up thinking, and talking, about origins. The fundamental presuppositions expressed through our origins’ accounts, perspectives, and stories, take precedence over all else. These basic beliefs are illuminated in the everyday, shared experience of mankind, and employed in our efforts to obtain meaning for the events, and phenomena, that come into our purview.
They are, as Albert M. Walters put it, "... an inescapable component of all human knowing".
To secure the sort of meaning we need for things like the spread of a virus, a war in a foreign country, or why our bodies are the way they are, we must reach out to the ultimate context of all — the origin of our world.
During the leadership training, we had a series of worldview sessions led by notable Maori theorists, researchers, and public health practitioners. They all laboured under the conviction that to truly understand the reality of Maori health today, one needed to reach back into the origins story of Te Ao Maori. Only by doing so, it was argued, could one hope to secure the sort of stable categories of meaning required to generate positive, lasting (health) action in the present. However, Te Ao Maori fundamentally depends on the idea that all things in the world are continuous with each other.
Hence, Ko au te whenua, te whenua ko au – I am the land, the land is me. Unlike the biblical worldview, with its underlying principle of transcendence and its Creator-creature distinction, worldviews of continuity are ultimately unable to provide stability, or guarantee reliable categories and boundaries, for things in the world.
Things, like you and me.
Yet there remains an ineludible need in the human heart to not only presuppose meaning and stability, but also to preserve it.
The Bible informs us that this need was designed into the heart by God (Ecclesiastes 3:11), revealing in each of us an awareness of God’s sustaining and creative power (Romans 1:20). This ‘need’ was on display in our worldview sessions, whenever our educators appealed to a binary understanding of sex/gender, to ground efforts for improving Maori health.
Whether it was combatting the erasure of wahine in contemporary society or trying to give tane a masculinity worth living for, male/man and female/woman were relied on as fixed and stable categories. What’s more, it was argued this could (and should) be done, precisely because the categories have divine origins.
One of the key presuppositions of the Biblical worldview, is that to be human is to be either male or female. The Bible unashamedly sets forth a binary understanding of sex/gender in its opening book, Genesis.
Certainly, contemporary culture is very creative in its efforts to obfuscate, oppose, and suppress anything vox Scriptura. The problem is it’s very hard (if not impossible) to suppress the inherent structure of creation, especially aspects as pronounced as human sexuality. It’s much easier to just bury the truth about who, and what, we are, under generations of storytelling.
Indigenous cosmologies are typically looked down upon as being tales full of pre-modern naivety, making it easy for them to be dismissed outright. Yet buried within them, you will often find the truth of our origins and fragments of the blueprint for how we best live out our days here, "under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1).
While God’s design plans for mankind may have been fractured by the Fall, the pieces do have a habit of turning up, as borrowed capital, in indigenous worldviews like Te Ao Maori.
Consequently, as Romans 1 informs us, God’s "... invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made" — things like you and me.
By Sam Mangai, Cornerstone International Bible Church
