Mini News interview
McMartin: teaching doctrine of God in a polarized culture is different

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Haiti missionary Bruce McMartin started the Doctoral program in Missiology at Western Conservative Baptist Seminary in Portland in September, 1986. He has continued to take classes during three different furloughs over the past twelve years, as well as doing the original research for his doctorate. It is entitled: 'Communicating the God of the Bible in the High Power Distance Haitian Context: A Course on the Doctrine of God.' The graduate program attracts experienced missionaries, including many international students.

Bruce will be teaching the course at the seminary in Haiti and using some of the materials for leadership training conferences out in the provinces. We talked with Bruce about his experience with the graduate program at Western and what he learned.

Mini News: I'm sitting here with Bruce McMartin … maybe to start out, you could define the field of Missiology.

Bruce McMartin: It encompasses the whole gamut of the study of missions, which includes the study of theology and social sciences. I had courses which covered mission strategy, church planting, education, leadership, cultural anthropology, missions history, communication, spiritual life, survey and research, contextualization, religions and ideologies.

Mini News: I believe your final project had to do with the teaching of the doctrine of God. When did you first get the idea to work on that? Bruce: It has kind of evolved ... most recently, I refined it to just include me teaching the doctrine of God. One of the aspects that I studied, both in the Haitian culture, and then applied it to the product, is called the power distance index. It is a measure of the acceptance of inequality in a culture.

The concept is taken from a Dutch anthropologist, Geert Hofstede. A culture may have a very large tolerance for inequality - a 'high power distance' - or a very low tolerance for inequality.

Hofstede did the study for IBM. He studied about 53 different countries around the world, and that was one of four things that he found in every culture. So I cued in on that, partly because Haiti has a very high tolerance for inequality. In that kind of a culture, they many times have a dictator. The person on the bottom (socially or economically) has no hope of ever reaching or having any contact with the person on the top.

When you flip that over to thinking about theological things, nearly everybody - even a Voodoo priest - would believe that God is a creator God. But because of this high tolerance for inequality, a person has no chance of having any relationship with that God. Because God is too high; he's too powerful; he's too far away.

Mini News: So by contrast, in our culture, our failing would probably be to be too buddy-buddy with God.

Bruce: That's exactly right. So helping a person in the U.S. understand that God is a sovereign God is just as hard as helping the Haitian understand that God wants to have an intimate, personal relationship with him. It's a cultural issue; it's the mind set of the culture that you've grown up with, that needs to be overcome.

Mini News: So this was the challenge - how to communicate about God in that kind of a culture. What do you think are the major barriers that the student would face coming into this - are you going to approach those cultural issues head on, and say 'this is how you think, but this is the wrong way to think'?

Bruce: No. I tried it that way, and I thought that was the best way. You know, blast before you build. Except that Haiti is a non-confrontational culture. So I thought, 'maybe I'm defeating myself.'

So I start with God as the creator God. And then I continue adding biblical information about God, and then ask them to apply it to everyday life situations. And little by little, have them try to draw some of those things out for themselves, and then I highlight them after they see them.

My whole approach is using Biblical characters to study the doctrine of God. Partly because relationships are so important in Haiti; in fact, relationships are more important than getting something done or even being honest. It would be better for me to keep my relationship with you than to tell you that you are doing something wrong.

The second thing is, the Haitians are very concrete people. They don't think abstractly. So if it's not concrete, they have a hard time grasping it. So to teach them the attributes of God - they'll memorize them, but they can't go from the abstract to the concrete.

Because they believe that God is a creator God already, I'm starting with that as common ground, and then going through Biblical characters.

The other thing that I've done in looking at this culture that has a high tolerance for inequality, is to try to pick out specific things that they have problems with that come up in their culture, and then address them very specifically.

Mini News: You mean in terms of their relationship with God or just in general?

Bruce: In terms of the way they look at life, their world view, their concept of God - who he is, how he acts, how he responds.

Part of those problems come out of what I've learned about the Haitian culture from Haitian proverbs. There's one proverb that I deal with that says 'God's justice is like an ox cart.'

At first I thought, 'that's pretty Biblical.' Peter talks about how God is not slack concerning his promises. I thought, 'hey, this is right on', until I realized there's another meaning to that. Basically: 'God's so slow, I'd better retaliate myself.'

Mini News: So this was actually the meaning, that he's slow.

Bruce: That's the under-meaning. So when I get done talking about Noah and the flood, I give them that proverb and say 'OK, give me as many different meanings for this proverb as you can. Now, take those meanings and compare them to what we just learned about God destroying the world because of sin.'

Mini News: At what point did you get interested in these proverbs? You have mentioned on another occasion that Haitian proverbs had become kind of a window to the culture for you.

Bruce: It's been quite a few years ago. One of my missionary colleagues was learning proverbs as part of his language learning. I started learning them. When I heard one in a conversation I'd write it down, and ask people what it meant.

Mini News: You've referred to two different uses of proverbs. The other night you mentioned the way a proverb captured a particular truth, 'drink the water and respect the glass.' And just now you mentioned that you can help people see their culture; they can look at this proverb and compare it to the Biblical version of reality.

Bruce: Haitian people use proverbs all of the time. Some of the proverbs, there is no correlation Biblically, but some there is. What I would like to do is work more, and find the ones that are Biblically apropos, and fit them together, and use them to underline biblical truth.

Mini News: Did you actually teach parts of this course already?

Bruce: Yes, several times. What I did on my final product was to take everything that I'd done before and revise it. So it's a completely new course.

Mini News: So this is a case where if you were just to take a standard course on the doctrine of God, as taught in our Bible schools or seminaries, it would probably be more abstract. It would be about the omniscience of God, the omnipresence of God -

Bruce: That's right. You memorize the definition for all those attributes.

Mini News: It would be totally inapplicable.

Bruce: Well, they'll get an A on it, because they memorize everything. But it has no application to their daily life. So instead, I'm saying, 'what do we learn about God from Abraham?' We study Abraham's life and how God interacted with Abraham, the promises, and what he expected from Abraham. We look at God's response when Abraham decided to do his own thing when he went to Egypt.

That last one is a good one because the Haitians use that proverb 'the ends justify the means' a lot. It doesn't matter how you get there, just so you get there.

So I've woven Haitian proverbs into these lessons, but focused on individual people because they're concrete. A transcendent God is interacting with an individual person. If I can see how he interacts with that person, then I can make an easier application to my life.

Mini News: What had you experienced as the effects of Haitian people having such an inaccurate view of God? How did that do damage to their Christian life?

Bruce: One of the things that pushed me into this thing … into further study at the very beginning was, I saw that the Gospel had been in Haiti for quite a while, and wondered why there hadn't been much change. Was it the way we were teaching? Was it that we were not communicating?

If a person's doctrine of God is off, how can the rest of their life be in order? I mean, the doctrine of God is the very foundation on which every other doctrine is built. If they are understanding the God of the Bible from their Voodooistic, animistic, high tolerance of inequality perspective, it's going to be skewed. And if that's wrong, when they get way out here (to personal holiness), it's going to be way, way off.

We have people in the church that are living like the devil. We preach, we talk, we teach, and it seems like we're not getting through.

Mini News: So it's almost like the word 'God' doesn't have the correct set of meanings, because it's been applied to other gods.

Bruce: Not exactly. It's their concept of God when they look at him. For example, one of the ways they see God is that he is like an old grandfather that they will able to justify things with. He'll realize that they did the best they could. 'We didn't mean to live together, we just didn't have enough money to get married. He'll understand that, so it's OK.'

Or, the idea that because in their spirit worship, you keep the spirits satisfied by doing things for them, and then they are obligated to do something good for you. Looking at God in the same way, 'well, if we go do this for you, and this for you, then next time I ask you a favor, God, you're obligated to give it to me.'

Mini News: So becoming a Christian and going to church and so on, just becomes a set of things you do -

Bruce: That's right. So God will do things for you. Which comes out of their way of thinking. It's influenced from Voodooism, but they're not conscious of it. If you ask them why they did stuff, they'd say 'for God.'

Mini News: I know in my earlier years, I thought of salvation in quite a mechanistic way. The gap between God and man; the problem is solved by Christ dying. It was very abstract.

Bruce: We're products of our culture too in our way of thinking. But it's interesting, what are the things that people remember about a sermon?

Mini News: The stories. And the Bible is full of stories.

Bruce: That's right. And most of my study is in the Old Testament stories, Old Testament characters. Because that's where we learn about God. And the character of God is so displayed in the Old Testament, that if you don't have that, how can you understand the New Testament? The doctrine of God is taught in the Old Testament, and the New Testament builds on that.

Mini News: Other than being out of the country and so on, were there any other difficulties that you grappled with while you were working on the project?

Bruce: Well, one of them was just trying to get it done. Time and discipline, I guess. The other thing is, I haven't found anybody else that's approached the doctrine of God this way. In all the looking I did, I found nobody that did it, in terms of teaching the doctrine of God by using Biblical characters. So in some ways, I was all alone on this trail, trying to chart my way along.

Mini News: In our own culture, it's always difficult to see our own hang-ups, since we're so immersed in them. What would you say is our error in the way we view God?

Bruce: Well, we talked about it already. I think our concept of God is that he's a user friendly God. He's our big buddy. He's our big brother.

I think we have a very difficult time grasping that he is a sovereign God. He has ultimate, absolute authority. That just does not compute for us. It's so foreign to our culture, and we're almost repulsed by that kind of power.

Mini News: Could you give some examples of how this approach to teaching about God's character has affected some students?

Bruce: One student when asked to give concrete things they had learned during the semester and how it had changed their daily life wrote: "God held Moses and David responsible for their sin and even judged them for it. God is going to hold me responsible for my sin too."

Another student (let's call him Joe) was looking for a Haitian proverb about God for a midterm exam. The student told me privately about how he had gone to a Christian bookstore to get a book on Haitian proverbs. He found the book he was looking for, but the book cost eight dollars and he didn't have that much money.

Joe began thumbing through the book in the store. A clerk came up and asked if he could help him. "No," was the reply. Joe continued looking and found a section of the book which gave proverbs about God. He pulled our a piece of paper and a pen from his pocked and set out to copy the proverbs down. As he did so, he began to feel uneasy. Joe glanced around and all the store clerks were looking at him.

He said to me, "All of a sudden it hit me. Here I was a Bible school student doing an exam for a course on the doctrine of God and stealing a proverb about God from a Christian book store." He put the book back on the shelf and left the store.

He was confessing to me and told me that if he didn't find the proverb somewhere else, he wouldn't use it for his exam. Feeling guilty for "degage pa peche" (the ends justify the means) is unheard of in Haiti. Whatever it takes to accomplish the end result is not considered wrong. The Spirit of God had used the Word of God to penetrate the life of Joe and to hold him accountable to a different level of responding to situations.