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Too Many Gods: Re-reading the preamble

Aunty Beryl Carmichael comes from Ngiyaampaa country in western New South Wales and she is a custodian of many Ngiyaampaa stories.
The stories that we are passing and talking on today, we are hoping that, some way, it will help our people ... our young people in particular to get a better understanding about the lore that governs our lives today.1 Her stories are among many told in the voices of indigenous Australia at http://australianmuseum.net.au/Stories-of-the-Dreaming
One of Aunty Beryl Carmichael stories is worth reading because it goes to a basic creedal matter of the Christian Faith: creation .
Now long, long time ago of course, in the beginning, when there was no people, no trees, no plants whatever on this land, "Guthi-guthi", the spirit of our ancestral being, he lived up in the sky ...
Guthi-guthi came down and he went on creating the land for the people-after he'd set the borders in place and the sacred sights, the birthing places of all the Dreamings, where all our Dreamings were to come out of.
And he looked out over the land and he could see that the land was bare. There was no water in sight, there was nothing growing. So Guthi-guthi knew that trapped in a mountain - Mount Minara - the water serpent, Weowie, he was trapped in the mountain. So Guthi-guthi called out to him, "Weowie, Weowie", but because Weowie was trapped right in the middle of the mountain, he couldn't hear him.
Guthi-guthi went back up into the sky and he called out once more, "Weowie", but once again Weowie didn't respond. So Guthi-guthi came down with a roar like thunder and banged on the mountain and the mountain split open. Weowie the water serpent came out. And where the water serpent travelled he made waterholes and streams and depressions in the land ...
But then after that, they wanted another lot of water to come down from the north, throughout our country. Old Pundu, the Cod, it was his duty to drag and create the river known as the Darling River today.
So Cod came out with Mudlark, his little mate, and they set off from the north and they created the big river. And of course, this country was also created, the first two tribes put in our country were Eaglehawk and Crow ... My people, the Ngiyaampaa people and the Barkandji further down are all sub-groups of Eaglehawk and Crow. 2
Well, it is quite a nice story. It starts with exactly the same words as the book of Genesis Chapter 1, "In the beginning." There isn't God though. There is "Guthi-guthi" who or what isn't called a god exactly, just an ancestral spirit who lived in the sky. And though there were no people, animals nor plants, there was something already existing inside the mountain-and that something had existence that was different from both Guthi-guthi and humans, plants and animals. Creation of humans happened when Guthi-guthi banged on the mountain so that water came out, and with the water, somehow, humans, plants and animals.
But Guthi-guthi is not the same spirit, or god, who was introduced to 12th Assembly by one of the Aboriginal Congress delegates. It was reported, "Mr Garrawurra shared the name of that creator spirit: Wanga." 3
Why Mr. Garrawurra can say the name is ‘Wanga' at the same time Aunty Beryl Carmichael can call the ‘creator spirit in the sky' ‘Guthi-guthi' is because there were quite distinct groups of aboriginals across this vast continent of Australia and each had different stories to explain things: some had creator-like spirits or beings, others did not.
In fact there are numerous aboriginal religions. One scholar, W. E. Hl Stanner in 1988 observed,
We now realize there were and are profound differences between the various aboriginal ‘peoples' and that we have to speak of aboriginal cultures and religions in plural. When Captain Cook arrived in Australia there were approximately 750,000 divided into some 500 distinct groups using more than 200 distinct languages.4
Now, this information is not widely known. Certainly, the delegates of the 12th Assembly had no idea about this. And the few questions that were asked from the floor reflected this ignorance. It was reported, "However, a number of members raised questions about whether the God known by Aboriginal peoples was the God of Jesus."5 The questions were answered by one-liners from Dr. Budden "Let me remind you there is one God" and "He said the question of whether God had revealed Godself to the Aboriginal people was one for them to answer, and non-Indigenous members of the church should be guided by the wisdom of Congress and not assume their knowledge of God was better." 6
But something even stronger is what Dr. Budden got the 12th Assembly to agree to. Point three of the new preamble: 3. The First Peoples had already encountered the Creator God before the arrival of the colonisers; the Spirit was already in the land revealing God Christ sustained to the people through law, custom and ceremony. The same love and grace that was finally revealed in Jesus Christ sustained the First Peoples and gave them particular insights into God's ways.
That is equivalence: aboriginal peoples (some of them) knew the Creator God worshipped by Christians (some groups had some ideas about a creator) before Christian missionaries arrived. Here, "Wanga" is another name for "Gunthi-guthi" and is another name for Father, Son and Holy Spirit. One equals another. To refer to one is to refer to the other. This is a philosophical problem and Dr. Budden owes an explanation to members of the Uniting Church.
We need to look at the consistency of the new preamble with the Basis of Union-the document that Dr. Budden and all ministers in the Uniting Church vowed adherence to when they were ordained.
Christians believe God created the earth. It's basic in the historical line of theologians upon whom the Uniting Church relies for guidance in the faith: the Church Fathers, the Reformation witness of Calvin and later John Wesley, and certain useful modern theologians.
There are a number of important features about this Biblical account of creation. God created from nothing, ex nihilo. The creation is not God: God is other than his creation. And, thirdly, the creation itself is not evil.
None of these key features of the Biblical account are present in Aunt Beryl Carmichael's story. Guthi-guthi doesn't create from nothing, not ex nihilo.
The key action in her story was Gunthi-guthi coming down from the sky somewhere and banging on a mountain so that another spirit or creature or force that lived inside the mountain should open up the mountain and let the waters come out so further processes could take place that result in the establishment of her tribe.
Certainly, there seems to be no standing in fearful, wondrous awe of God in this story that is characteristic of the Biblical account of creation. Perhaps this is because the idea of ‘beginning' in Aunt Beryl Carmichael's story, only gives an account of the state of affairs existing now.
In other words, time is not sequential. Stanner describes it this way:
"It is a picture of time, not as ‘a horizontal line extending back horizontally through a series of pasts but rather of a vertical line in which the past underlies and is within the present... all existence cycled, being replenished from The Dreaming, which was inexhaustible." 7
It is a further quantum leap for the writers of the new preamble to say that all aboriginal creation-type stories reveal God in the same way that the Biblical creation story revealed God to Israel and an even further quantum leap to declare such stories reveal the person of Christ and also, the (Holy) Spirit, and more, to make this declaration without examination nor provide any explanation, nor to allow any discussion to take place (this last is a denial of human rights):
3. The First Peoples had already encountered the Creator God before the arrival of the colonisers; the Spirit was already in the land revealing God Christ sustained to the people through law, custom and ceremony. The same love and grace that was finally revealed in Jesus Christ sustained the First Peoples and gave them particular insights into God's ways.
Rather than make declarations like this of what and in whom aboriginals believed before missionaries preached Christ to them, it's perhaps more instructive for members of the Uniting Church to see how the Reformers developed the doctrine of creation.
John Calvin, whose 500th anniversary of his birth was celebrated in June 2009, explains in chapter three of his great The Institutes of the Christian Religion that, The Knowledge of God Has Been Naturally Implanted in the Minds of Men. And he builds his argument in a way that is relevant to our subject. Battles, in his summary of The Institutes condenses Calvin's argument this way: The knowledge of God has been naturally implanted in all men by instinct, in all times and all places. The proof of this, for Calvin is that men turn to religion when under stress or fear. Calvin insists that an ineffable sense of divinity is engraved upon men's minds and that even the perversity of the impious demonstrates this, as does the worship of wood and stone.
Calvin would therefore not be surprised that the Australian aboriginals had various ideas about creation. That confirms humanity as God's creation.
Calvin, however goes further than the simple acknowledgement of various ideas of, and beliefs in, creation. He insists in chapter six of book 1 of The Institutes, Scripture is Needed as Guide and Teacher for Anyone Who Would Come to God the Creator. John Wesley also regarded the doctrine of Creation and the authority of Scripture as the first and second of the Articles of Religion.
So tricky problems are raised by the removal of the historic preamble and replacing it with a new preamble that puts the aboriginal religion(s) firmly at the centre of the Uniting Church in Australia.
In aboriginal religion, there is no historical development, there is no idea of sin and salvation, nor is there any clarity that there is a creator and how such a creator is to be understood in relation to creation. Indeed, there is no conceptual means for aboriginals to understand those distinctions.
Max Charlesworth concludes,
In the light of these differences it is hard to see how the basic themes of Christianity might be meaningfully translated into Australian religious contexts and vice versa, without doing violence to one or the other, although of course there are general analogies and resemblances.8
What is the solution to this disaster-in-waiting? ...
The serious question for the Uniting Church is whether it is preparing to have within it different groups of people with irreducibly different religious visions or spiritualities, apparently both seeing themselves within a fellowship that used to be called "Christian".
That the Uniting Church wants to emasculate the very foundation of the Christian faith and its faithful witness to the 38 percent of aboriginals who are Christian in order to accommodate the 1.3 percent of aboriginals who practice widely various forms of traditional aboriginal religions is incomprehensibly stupid.9

Paul Langkamp is an ACC member based in Seoul

1. http://australianmuseum.net.au/movie/Why-the-stories-are-told-Aunty-Beryl
2. http://australianmuseum.net.au/movie/Creation-Story
3. Many words, one God Saturday, 18 July 2009 01:03 Assembly Report
4. Stanner, W.E.H. Some aspects of Aboriginal Religion 1976 in Max Charlesworth, Religious Business, Essays on Aboriginal Spirituality 1988
5. Many words, one God Saturday, 18 July 2009 01:03 Assembly Report
6. Many words, one God Saturday, 18 July 2009 01:03 Assembly Report
7. Stanner, W.E.H. Some aspects of Aboriginal Religion1976 in Max Charlesworth, Religious Business, Essays on Aboriginal Spirituality 1988
8. Max Charlesworth, Religious Business, Essays on Aboriginal Spirituality 1988
9. In the last census only 1.3 percent of people who identified as ATSI (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) put a traditional aboriginal spirituality as their religion, compared to 38 percent who identified as a Christian denomination. http://religionandsociety09.blogspot.com/2009/06/towards-aboriginal-christian-theology.htm