A Much Needed Corrective

Credible Messiness

We have just completed reading Keith Newman's Bible and Treaty: Missionaries Among the Maori--a New Perspective (New York: Penguin Books, 2010).  The title suggests a post-modernist tome.  If that is the reader's expectation, however, he will end up disappointed.  In fact, Newman's work is only a new perspective to our post-modernist ears which have been filled with repeated extrusions of revisionist wax to where we fear our society can no longer hear the true story of our past.

In that sense, then, Newman's Bible and Treaty is a must read for every Christian in New Zealand.  It is not the definitive word (few things ever are), but at the least it is a healthy corrective to the revising of our history by pagans (both Maori and Pakeha) who have very big axes to grind.

The preface provides an effective apologia for yet another book on early New Zealand history.  Firstly, Newman writes to correct the recent demonising of missionaries:

The role of missionaries in New Zealand's short history has too often been ignored, minimised or demonised by revisionist historians, who have blamed them for much and credited them with little, even dismissing their peacemaking efforts and contributions to literacy.  (Op cit., p. 7.)

Secondly, the Treaty.  Newman says he wanted to go back to the source--

. . . to the beginning of Christian influence in this country; how Maori responded to it; the events that led to the Treaty of Waitangi; and the outworking of the promises made in that covenant.  Here I saw another yawning gap in our written history that needed to be bridged.  It's not that the information wasn't available; it just needed to be collated and crafted into a non-denominational but respectful narrative to bring some balance and perspective. . . . Many historians have worked this territory, but unfortunately some have muddied the water with their post-Christian, postmodernist perspectives.  My challenge was not to sanitise or romanticise valuable firsthand commentary, but to make it easier and even enjoyable for future generations to gain a fresh perspective on the past.  (Ibid., p. 8)

Thirdly, cannibalism--which has been also subject to  brooms and carpets by postmodern Maori and Pakeha.

Missionaries throughout the Pacific Islands were confronted with cannibalism as a cultural reality.  In some cases it may have been practised out of necessity to satisfy hunger during long periods of warfare; or at times human meat was considered a delicacy.  In the main, though, it was part of the "theatre of conquest" to satisfy the "hunger of rage" either as a ritualised part of utu (revenge), often associated with offerings to the gods, or "wild feasting", which elevated the affront to the highest possible levels of horror as enemy bloodlines ewre extinguished and literally expelled out as waste.

Of course, the missionaries saw cannibalism as an evil practice, evidence of the works of darkness, which needed to be confronted and placed in the context of a living Creator who valued all peoples, "male and female, slave and free" as equal.  They sought to systematically stamp out the "horrid practice" wherever they could engage meaningfully with the chiefs responsible. (Ibid., p. 9)

Fourthly, Treaty betrayal:

The promises and principles contained in the Bible and the Treaty of  Waitangi were promoted vigorously by the missionaries; and the subsequent betrayal by independent profiteers, the Crown, its representatives and "high church" overlords, is the subject of this book.  It is also and attempt to restore some heart to the stories of the missionaries among the Maori. (Ibid., p.10). 

In the wider historical context,  at the time New Zealand's modern history was commencing, the West in general and Great Britain in particular had already entered the "long dark of Moria" which saw the ending of the First Christendom and the transition to a post-Christian world.  This has worked itself out in New Zealand's early history unto this day.

The first abiding contact between Western Europe and Maori New Zealand came from commercial interests: the trade of whaling, flax, and kauri.  The first substantial and systematic domestic intercourse between the two occurred  missionaries came to live amongst Maori, bringing them the Gospel of Christ, along with Western domestic technologies and agriculture, together with the documentation and learning of the Maori language.

But this intense Christian activity was eventually swamped by a third wave of British imperialism.  In this phase, Victorian England's "interests" bore a spirit of real politick that was wedded to the greater imperial prerogatives of  King/Queen and country and the supposed glories of the British Empire.

It is these latter-day interests--imperial, secular, and apostate--which have won dominance for a time in both the Antipodes and the West.  Therefore, New Zealand's history inevitably  has been rewritten in recent times by the apostles and prophets of the great apostasy.  The living have played tricks upon the dead.  Newman's work revises these revisionists, restoring the original, and exploding much of our modern mythology. He reveals a messy picture.  But the messiness adds credence to his research.