TRANSCRIPT OF LECTURE, DAY 9

DR. G. HOWARD MILLER

"JESUS IN AMERICAN CULTURE"

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

SEPTEMBER 20, 2006

DR. MILLER:  Talk to me just a little bit about some of the theological problems that Christians might have ‑‑ of either variety might have in bringing their Gospel to the Native Americans.  Let's bridge the language gap.

What would they find difficult to explain to the Native Americans, to get across to them?  We talked about sin last time.  Couldn't get that.  Can you think of anything else?  The Trinity.  My God, western Christians don't understand the Trinity.

You know what?  They didn't actually really even try.  But they did try to explain who Jesus was.  And what kinds of problems might they run into almost immediately? 

VOICE:  [Inaudible]

DR. MILLER:  That's Paul.  Thank you.  What problems with explaining Jesus might they have?  Human and divinity.  We have problems like that, or don't we?  Now, the Native American world, like most of the world in the globe at the time, did not really distinguish between the material and the material world.  Right?

I assume you know this.  The cosmos is one.  There are spirits everywhere.  And the shaman take them back and forth.  They easily go through the boundaries of the material and the immaterial.  Is that clear?  All kinds of non-Western people have that kind of cosmology.

They do not make that clear cleavage between the material and the immaterial world that the Westerners do.  Have I got everyone with me now?  Now, what kinds of problems though does Christianity ‑‑ what problem does Christianity present in that area?

They say, cleavage between the material and immaterial world.  And then what do they do?  What do they do?  Jesus.  What happens with Jesus?  He goes through that boundary.  Now, I thought, maybe I can explain it that way.

That's too complicated, isn't it?  They couldn't understand the Incarnation ‑‑ how Jesus could both be up there and down ‑‑ they couldn't understand it.  So they kind of give up on it.  And they talk only about the incarnate God. 

Now, today I want to play for you probably an even more remarkable film about missions to the Native Americans.

Adam, do you have a question?

VOICE:  Would it be a problem for the incarnate God [inaudible]?

DR. MILLER:  Dies, from the very beginning.  Was it not, like Adam says, that the God dies, the Messiah dies?  We have to sort of sacralize that finally, don't we?  Of course it is.  But then in their cosmology it's good for the god to die, because what does that give us?

Salvation, redemption, eat his body ‑‑ what have you.  So there was that resonance, Adam.  Thank you.  Now, how many of you have seen The Mission?  Good.  This is a wonderful, wonderful film, directed by Joffe and starring Jeremy Irons ‑‑ this is before Jeremy Irons got weird ‑‑ and maybe Robert De Niro's most magnificent performance.

This is one in which he does not chew up the scenery, as he is often wont to do.  The Mission was in 1986.  It's about the efforts of the Jesuits in the mid-18th century to protect the Guarani people who live around the part of South America where Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay come together. 

It's filmed around Iguazu Falls.  Has anyone ever stood ‑‑ have you really?  Have you seen the falls?  Wow!  It's wonderful, I'm told ‑‑ like I've been there, right? 

Well, Jesuit missionaries go over there in the mid-18th century, and the Guarani kill one of them.  The Jesuits send a replacement then, played by Jeremy Irons, a man named Father Gabriel.  He and his oboe show up.  The Indians welcome him.  And he begins the process of westernizing ‑‑ they would say civilizing the Guarani.

He teaches them agriculture, and he teaches them music.  And they build wonderful Western musical instruments.  And you're going to see him leading the little choir, a little orchestra of these folks.  Jeremy Irons plays Father Gabriel.

How many of you will recognize Jeremy Irons?  Do you know whom I'm talking about?  How many of you have never seen Jeremy Irons in a movie?  Never seen him.  That's fascinating.  Robert De Niro ‑‑ how many of you have never seen Robert De Niro in a movie? 

Okay.  Go, Bob.  He's really great.  I think it's his greatest role.  He plays a slaver who makes his living enslaving the Guarani people.  But in anger, in jealousy, because his brother has bedded his wife, he kills his younger brother.

And it absolutely ‑‑ as it would ‑‑ devastates him.  And he begins to try to atone for his sins.  And he goes to the Jesuits and says, Redeem me.  He chooses his own penance, the sacrament of penance.  Someone who's seen the movie, tell me what he does. 

What does Robert De Niro do in this movie?  Come on; you've seen it.  Finally he does in fact ‑‑ that's not his penance.  He actually becomes a Jesuit.  What does he do? 

VOICE:  [Inaudible]

DR. MILLER:  What kind of stuff, Ross?  He does carry stuff on his back.  He carries his armor.  All of that stuff that signifies in many pounds his life as a man of violence and blood.  He straps them on his back.  And then he takes them up ‑‑ he goes with the Jesuits' replacement.  He goes with them.

And guess what that means.  He climbs the face of Iguazu Falls.  And when in sympathy and pity with him, one of them cuts the rope and makes the armor fall down, what does Robert De Niro do?  He's also terribly testosterone poisoned, I suspect.

He goes and gets it, puts it on his back, tells him, Mind your own damn business, and tries to atone for his sins.  And finally even he is satisfied that he has done that.  And as my young friend says here, he becomes the defender.

And he dies in the defense of the Guarani.  He becomes a brother.  The mission gets caught in the midst of all sorts of religious and political intrigues.  The Spanish and the Portuguese are contesting this area and control of the Guarani.

Right now they're under the protection of the Spanish, and they're not being enslaved.  The Portuguese and the Spanish are getting together, and they want to end all of the Jesuits' protection of the Guarani to make them liable for being enslaved again.

To mediate that the Pope sends to the Guarani part of South America an envoy, a cardinal ‑‑ you'll recognize him; he's fat and has a red hat on ‑‑ sends a cardinal to hear the different sides: should the Indians be enslaved or not.

And that's where we come in.  We're going to see only about nine minutes of this.  The film is told in flashback.  We start by seeing the cardinal writing to the Pope.  And then he begins to tell the story.  The story you see here shows him visiting the mission, seeing a little Native American boy singing gloriously.

And seeing him, he moderates the debate about whether or not the Native American little boy is a human or not.  And we will see here that for some of these guys they in fact didn't do what Dr. Miller said they did last time: they didn't grant that the Native Americans were human.

Well, can you figure out how it ends?  It ends violently, tragically.  The Indians are slaughtered, and the Jesuit protectors are slaughtered.  The church has to give in and allow it, because it has become so entangled in the politics of the world.

And 12 years later the Jesuits are dissolved in the Enlightenment, in part because their continuing involvement in the political developments of the world.  All right?  Now, that may sound all very complicated.  This is actually very easy to understand.  This is the cardinal.

(A video was played.)

THE CARDINAL:  "Your Holiness, the little matter that brought here before your light on Earth is now settled.  And the Indians are once more free to be enslaved by the Spanish and Portugese settlers.  I don't think I'm setting the right note.

"Begin again.  Your Holiness, I write to you in this year of our Lord 1758 from the southern continent of the Americas, from the town of Asuncion in the Province of La Plata, two weeks march from the great Mission of San Miguel.

"These missions have provided a refuge for the Indians against the worst depredations of the settlers and have earned much resentment because of it.  Father Gabriel.  The noble souls of these Indians incline towards music.

"Indeed, many a violin played in the academies of Rome itself has been made by their nimble and gifted hands.  It was from these missions the Jesuit fathers carried the word of God to the high and undiscovered plateau to those Indians still existing in their natural state, and received in return martyrdom."

(The video was stopped.)

DR. MILLER:  I neglected to tell you that it begins with the martyrdom, showing how the Indians killed the priest that Father Gabriel replaces.  This will show you young people that the Native Americans did understand some [indiscernible] with the very dramatic martyrdom.

(A video was played.)

THE CARDINAL:  "The death of this priest was to form the first link in the chain in which I now find myself a part, continue.  As Your Holiness undoubtedly knows, little in this world unfolds as we predict.  Indeed how could the Indians have supposed that the death of that unsung priest would bring among them a man whose life was to become inextricably intertwined with their own."

(The video was stopped.)

DR. MILLER:  Liam Neeson and Father Daniel Berrigan are these other two priests. 

(The video was played.)

DR. MILLER:  He is now at the mission.

THE CARDINAL:  "So I had arrived in South America, my head replete with the matters of Europe.  But I soon began to understand for the first time what a strange world I had been sent to judge." 

(The video continues.)

DR. MILLER:  "Ave Maria."  The Spanish representative.

THE CARDINAL:  "Don Cabeza, how can you possibly refer to this child as an animal?"

SPANISH REPRESENTATIVE:  "A parrot can be taught to sing, Your Eminence."

THE CARDINAL:  "Ah, yes.  But how does one teach it to sing as melodiously as this?"

SPANISH REPRESENTATIVE:  "Your Eminence, it's a child of the jungle, an animal with a human voice.  If it were human an animal would cringe in its vices.  These creatures are lethal and lecherous.  They will have to be subdued by the sword and brought to profitable labor by the whip.  What they say is sheer nonsense."

FATHER GABRIEL:  "Your Eminence, Father Gabriel of the Mission of San Carlos, from which the boy comes." 

THE CARDINAL:  "And that is where?" 

FATHER GABRIEL:  "That is here, Your Eminence, above the falls in Spanish territory."

THE CARDINAL:  "No.  That is territory which used to be Spanish, Father.  Now it's Portuguese."

FATHER GABRIEL:  "Surely that is what His Eminence is here to decide, Your Excellency."

SPANISH REPRESENTATIVE:  "No.  That is a state matter.  It was decided by the Treaty of Madrid and concluded by their Majesties of Spain and Portugal."

FATHER GABRIEL:  "Surely the missions will still remain under the protection of the church."

PORTUGUESE REPRESENTATIVE:  "Now, that is what His Eminence is here to decide, Father Gabriel."

DR. MILLER:  The Portuguese representative.

THE CARDINAL:  "Continue, Father."

FATHER GABRIEL:  "Your Eminence, below the falls the jungle, if it has to be divided, may be divided between the Spanish and the Portuguese as you have agreed.  But in reality above the falls it still belongs to God and the Guarani.

"There's no one else there.  And they are not naturally animal.  They're naturally spiritual."

SPANISH REPRESENTATIVE:  "Spiritual.  They kill their own young."

FATHER GABRIEL:  "That is true.  May I answer that?  Every man and woman is allowed one child.  If a third is born, it is immediately killed.  But this is not some animal rite.  It's a necessity for survival.  They can only run with one child apiece. 

"What do they run from?  They run from us." 

(The video was ended.)

DR. MILLER:  They run from us.  Any questions?  Any observations?  The question is where is it located.  Where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina come together, at the confluence of several rivers that makes the Iguazu Falls.  Am I correct?  What were you doing down there?

VOICE:  [Inaudible]

DR. MILLER:  Studying he says.  Good for you.  Questions?  Let us turn now then to the Protestant mission to the Indians very quickly.  Let us turn to Jesus, the Word.  Jesus comes Protestant New England not as the Catholic body, but as the Protestant Word.

And he comes without all the rich cosmos that accompanied him to Catholic America.  The Reformation as we know now had done away with most of those cosmos.  Now, Jesus stood alone.  And he stood for Protestants not in his body, but as the Word.

More so than any other part of the Protestant Reformation, Calvinism was a religion of the Word.  It was an incredibly intellectual and literate take on Christianity.  Calvinism came to England in the second half of the 16th century.

In all of the hubbub of English politics for a few years the rule of Catholics was restored in Protestant England under which Tudor monarch?  Queen Mary, a.k.a. Bloody Mary.  Some of the English Calvinist Puritans, Protestants ‑‑ they were called just Protestants then ‑‑ fled to John Calvin's Geneva.

And there they got infected by Calvinism.  And when Elizabeth succeeded her Catholic sister and took the Church of England back to Protestantism, the Marian exiles as they were called came back to England.  And they brought with them Calvinism.

They demanded that Elizabeth further purify the Church of England of its Catholic elements.  She by and large refused.  But in derision they were now called Puritans, and the name stuck.  In the early 17th century these English Calvinists ‑‑ Puritans ‑‑ made equal demands on the Stewart kings, James I and Charles I.

They also refused.  And to make a very long, complicated story short, as some of you know ‑‑ have you had Dr. Levack for some of this?  You know all those great stories?  Great class, wonderful teacher, wonderful man, Brian Levack, Tudor/Stewart England.

The Protestants, the Puritans who controlled much of England finally grew strong enough to control Parliament.  And the 1630s, early 1640s what did these Puritans do?  They had a revolution.  They fought a civil war.  With whom?  The King.

And in 1649 they chopped off the King's head.  And for eleven years Puritans controlled England, until in 1660 the English decided that's enough Puritanism and asked the Stewart heir to return. 

In the 1620s and the early 1630s a small group of English Calvinist Puritans left England and established colonies in the New England sea colonies of Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth ‑‑ the English Puritans.

They came to establish a saving remnant of the true church in the new world.  They believed that the wrath of God was about to descend upon England because they would not further purify the church.  And they were going to come over here to create the one true church, a saving remnant.

And after God had had his way with England they would go back.  Right?  Calvinism, as I told you earlier ‑‑ last Friday actually ‑‑ was a magisterial reformation.  They had no problems with the church and the state being together.

Now, they might not like the way the English stated and run.  They came over here looking for religious liberty from that.  But what's the first thing that they did?  They established themselves as the established church and persecuted those who did not conform.

Part of their mission was to convert the Indians to Puritanism.  And ‑‑ I don't want you to be too cynical about this ‑‑ for a few decades, in the '40s and '50s and '60s particularly, there was something of an effort amongst a small group of New England Calvinists to do that, especially a man named John Eliot.

John Eliot dedicated most of his life actually to missions to the Algonquin-speaking Indians.  He translated most of the Bible into their Algonquin language.  In fact John Eliot's Algonquin's Indian bible in the early 1660s was the first bible of any description published in British America.

But if you take away Jesus, the Body and all of that good stuff that we were able to talk about last time that the Catholics can use, it could be very difficult, especially for Protestants to take their version of the Gospel to the Native Americans.

And the problem wasn't just in the language.  They got over that.  It was that Puritanism was an extraordinarily intellectual gospel.  I'm going to review some of that after a while as a matter of fact.  It was difficult.

Folks, it's difficult for you guys to understand Calvinism.  It proved virtually impossible for Native Americans to really grasp and to accept the convolutions of theology that attended Calvinism, even in the watered-down version that they made available to Native Americans.

And in point of fact John Eliot converted very few Native Americans.  And with that let us turn to a lecture that will take us into next week actually, on the role that Jesus played amongst the Puritans and their 17th and early 18th century heirs.

I want to begin by talking about Jesus in Puritan theology.  Modern people who are introduced to the theology of John Calvin are usually fascinated and then perplexed ‑‑ and then disgusted very often ‑‑ by the doctrine of predestination.

The doctrine of predestination: the belief that an utterly sovereign, omnipotent and omniscient God had been so offended by the fall of man, a.k.a. original sin, that this sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient God had predetermined, even before the fall of man actually, those who would and would not be saved, into the damned and the elect, and that nothing you could do in your life could alter whether you're the damned or the elect.

Now, folks, that don't sound fair.  That doesn't sound fair from whose perspective?  Moi, our poor damned souls' perspective.  But Calvinism and predestination, young people, is not about us.  It is about God and the absolute total sovereignty of God, he said overly dramatic.

Predestination taught not only that you could not do anything about it, you couldn't know which side you were on.  You could never know for sure if you were of the elect or of the damned.  And if you decided finally that you were of elect that probably meant what?  That you weren't.

Gotcha, coming or going.  So what are you supposed to do?  You look for the prompting of God's grace.  You live your life looking for signs of election and making yourself available to and subservient to the sovereignty of God.

You spend your life hopefully looking within yourself, into your interior landscape, for signs that you are of the elect.  Calvinism becomes an extraordinarily introspective religion.  People say, now, where did they get those ideas?  Young people, they are inevitable.

In what basic Christian doctrine is the idea of predestination absolutely grounded in?  I mean, just the general belief system.  The sovereignty of God.  Folks, if you really believe in the sovereignty of God, I submit to you that someone is going to come up with Calvinism.

Now, we're all too chicken.  We are.  That's why there are only three of you.  And I bet you would be a lousy Calvinist.  John Calvin would probably laugh at all of you.  You can't look at my God.  You know why?  Because we all live on this side of the Enlightenment.

And there's nothing you can do about living on this side of the Enlightenment. 

Yes, ma'am.

VOICE:  [Inaudible]

DR. MILLER:  Calvin wouldn't care about that.  Why?  It makes no difference to God.  By the way why did he save some of you sorry souls?  Say it, Miss Calvin.  You're for his own glory.  I'm God, and you're not.  Can I get a witness, says God.

It's not about you.  Calvinism is hard.  It's not about you.  And in our totally, obscenely, self-absorbed culture it's amazing that there are three or four of you, because everything's about us, isn't it?  Everything's about me.

Calvinism has a real hard problem with one of the things that Jesus says in the Gospel of John, like in the third chapter.  Which verse?  Sixteen.  What does John 3:16 say?  For God so loved the world that he did what?  He gave his only begotten son to do what?  That who? 

Whoever shall believe in Him shall have eternal life.  But Calvinism is not grounded in the gospels.  What is it grounded in?  In the writings of whom?  Paul, the man who really created Christianity, folks, for good and for ill.

I say for good and for ill.  Book of Ephesians, that is in several verses.  Predestination is also central to the writings and belief systems of what church father particularly?  Anybody know?  Catholic, church father has to be Catholic.  Augustin, St. Augustin.

There's a strong strain of predestination in Augustinian Calvinism.

(End of recording.)