What is culture? We must begin with this question. This is a fundamental question and not as simple as it appears. It is one of those questions for which a consensus is hard to come by. But there is one working definition that still commands hearing within diverse schools of theorists and gurus. It was put forward by Edward Tylor (1832-1917), an English anthropologist. According to him,

Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnological sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man [sic] as a member of society.

Is this too comprehensive an understanding of culture to be useful for theological purposes? But culture is a comprehensive thing and it is we Christians who have made it an "in-comprehensive", in the sense of both non-inclusive and unintelligible, concept.

We have tended to identify culture almost solely as belief systems that differ from Christian belief systems. But culture is broader and deeper than a particular belief system. Beside belief, Edward Tyler tells us, it includes "knowledge, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by human beings as members of society." It is obvious that culture is manifestations of what human beings are and what they do. It is the life and history of women, men and children in a particular society. It is expressions of their power to live, love, think, act and dream. In short, culture is us human beings as members of society.

To say culture is to say human beings. To weaken a culture is to weaken the humanity of the human beings who created it. To destroy a culture is to destroy the bond that binds together men and women as members of a society. This seems to be what the poem "Culture, my Culture" from the Pacific is saying:

Culture, my culture
why are you leaving
why are you running away
oh culture, stop, stop.

I want you culture
I want you
to be with me
to remain with me

Culture
please my culture
come back
come back to me

While western culture has driven away the Pacific culture, Christianity has rendered it a coup de grace. The cultural creativity of the Pacific islanders has been eroded.

That is why this Pacific Christian is pleading with his own native culture to return. He is struggling to regain his Pacific humanity. He is seeking to have his creativeness restored. How is he to do it? This is not his question alone. This is the question of many other Pacific Island Christians. It is also the question of more and more Christians in Africa and Asia.

There is no quick answer to the question. The first thing Christians have to do, particularly we Christians in the third world, is to recover elements that make up the culture of the society of which we are a part - elements such as knowledge, art, morals, law, custom, as well as belief. As Christians, how much are we familiar with them? In most cases we are ignorant of them. Worse still, we shun them because they do not belong to the culture that came with Christianity.

There is, for example, an Indonesian folktale showing that the culture of Indonesia is not lacking in tragic greatness and sublime beauty. It concerns the origin of the name of a city called Banjuwangi on the east coast of Java. Banjuwangi means "fragrant water" (banju = water, wangi = fragrant). It is a beautiful name. How did the city acquire such a name? Behind it is a tragic story that ends in the triumph of love between a mother and her infant child.

A king's great minister, so the story goes, had a beautiful wife. But he had a mother who was very cruel to his wife. The mother had her son sent on a long journey. During his absence his wife gave birth to a baby boy. The mother stole the baby and drowned him in a river. When her minister son returned, she accused her daughter-in-law of murdering the baby. Believing it to be true, he drew his sword to kill his wife. She pleaded to no avail that she was innocent. She then asked him to take her to the river so that she could prove her innocence. As soon as they reached the river, she jumped into the water and drowned herself. Then an incredible thing happened.

As the minister stood there in great sorrow, he saw two pretty flowers appear out of the smelly, dirty river water. One flower was bigger and taller than the other. And what a fragrant door they began to give out! The minister, already stupefied, heard to his great astonishment the big flower say to him: "Look at this flower beside me. It is our child I met at the bottom of the river. He himself will tell you who drowned him in the river." The small flower then said: "Father, mother never did anything wrong. It was my grandmother who drowned me. I am very happy now that I can be with Mother..." So saying the small flower bowed its head. It leaned close to the big flower as if mother and child were embracing each other. Still embracing, they slowly vanished into the river. They never appeared again. But they left behind them a fragrant door. And the smelly, dirty water turned into clean and pure water. Later, people crossing over to Bali from that city on the eastern tip of Java called it "Banjuwangi", meaning "Fragrant Water".

This is a living drama of life and the culture that sustains that life.

Different elements of culture are found in the story. First of all, the story is art woven out of the woof and warp of human lived experience. It contains the insight that the moral texture of human relationships is subtle, brittle and tenuous. The love and hate that compose the fabric of human community can break it. There is further, the custom that dictates one's judgement and behaviour. And there is belief too - belief in the power that rectifies human wrongs and upholds divine justice, the power that rebuilds human community out of the ruins of human destructiveness.

A story such as this makes us Christians reflect more deeply on a culture that is ours but is alien to the culture closely associated with Christianity. And when we realize that a story such as this, in infinite variations, has nourished the minds and souls of our people from ancient times to the present day, how can our Christian mind help but be awed, on the one hand and be moved, on the other? We must ask ourselves a question: Does not a story such as this tell us that in our own culture, though unrelated to Christianity in origin and history, we are dealing with God's saving activity among our people?

Let us remind ourselves once again of those elements that make up the complex whole called culture: knowledge, art, belief, morals, custom, etc. These elements are interrelated with varied degrees of intensity. No element can be detached from the complex whole of a culture to which it belongs and compared with elements of another culture without distorting its meaning in the original culture. But this is what the Christian church often does in relation to cultures outside the western world.

The so-called "ancestor worship" is a case in point. It was, as we all know, a bone of theological contention among Christian missionaries in China, both Catholic and Protestant. It not only brought upon itself papal condemnation but also Protestant prohibition. At a Protestant missionary conference in 1907 it was declared that the "worship of ancestors was incompatible with an enlightened and spiritual conception of the Christian faith", and that it "could not be tolerated by the church." The debate still goes on today.

The fact of the matter is that ancestor worship in China has a long history. It goes back at least to the early period of the Chou dynasty in the twelfth century BC No wonder Chinese cultural ethos is infused with it - from human relations to human conduct in society, from custom to law, from art to piety. Understood within the complex whole of Chinese culture, the expression "ancestor worship" may not be quite accurate. Perhaps "ancestor rites" is an expression closer to reality. Ancestor rites are an extension of the rites that shape and condition family, society and even the nation. They have served as the ideological bases for the hierarchical structure that governs the five relationships - relationships between ruler and ruled, between parents and children, between brother/sister and brother/sister, and between friend and friend. The male-centred social, political and religious systems and traditions became the norm and frame of thought and conduct. Ancestor rites must then become less a matter of missiological contention than a matter of deep-rooted human problems within Chinese society. For these systems and traditions have given rise to countless human tragedies as well as maintained the stability of Chinese society. Human souls without number went to their death with injustice done to them unrequited in the oppressive society sanctioned by the rites that honour ancestors.

At the heart of ancestor rites, then, is the question of "human heartedness" (jen), one of the cardinal virtues of Confucian teaching. At issue is the understanding and practice of justice (yi), another Confucian virtue. The Christian church should have been engaged in the study and critique of ancestor rites within the complex whole of Chinese culture. Then it would have surely encountered many a "prophetic" soul in the political and social history of China who struggled against the absurdities, contradictions and hypocrisies that betrayed the dignity of Chinese humanity and distorted the spiritual aspirations of the Chinese people. In that engagement the inner world of Chinese people meets the inner world of meaning disclosed to the people of the Christian Bible. What emerges is a theological universe that breaks the barriers of religions and cultures, enabling us to have some glimpse of God's saving work not only within the Christian community but also within the communities outside it.

The question we are compelled to ask is, then, not: How does the Christian gospel judge cultures?, but: How do human beings entitled to love, freedom and justice fare in those cultures? What has a culture in question done and what does it continue to do to its people? Is it oppressive or liberating? Does it help create a space of freedom in the life of people or does it deprive them of that space? Is it a culture that allows no justice for the powerless and the marginalized? Such questions are different from the questions traditionally asked by Christians. Questions such as these call for a new understanding of the relation between the gospel and culture.