TL;DR: A Sawi tribal ritual—in which a chief gives his infant son to an enemy tribe to establish peace—provided a powerful “redemptive analogy” for explaining the Gospel: Jesus as God’s “peace child.” A redemptive analogy is a cultural belief, ritual, or story that mirrors or illustrates a Gospel truth and can serve as a bridge for understanding. Using redemptive analogies does not mix religions or imply that all faiths are equal. Instead, it uses the known to teach the unknown, illuminating biblical revelation without diluting it. The page includes reflection questions.
“Redemptive analogy: A practice or belief native to any given culture that distinctly parallels or illustrates the Gospel.”
Missionaries Don and Carol Richardson seemed to be making no progress communicating the Gospel with a Stone Age tribe in New Guinea. The discouraged young Canadian couple felt like giving up and moving to a different place.
Then, one day, they watched a Sawi tribal chief make peace with an enemy tribe. To seal the peace pact, the chief gave his infant son to the other tribe. As the Richardsons listened to explanations of that solemn ceremony and its underlying meanings, parallels with the Gospel story jumped out at them. The Sawi needed to see that Jesus was God's "peace child" who has made lasting peace possible between humanity and its Creator. If the Sawi could wrap their minds around that idea, a spiritual leap forward might come.
The Richardsons used that peacemaking ceremony to explain the coming of Jesus into the world. The illustration from the Sawi people's own culture opened their eyes and then their hearts. Members of the tribe began accepting Jesus as their Savior and Lord.
Richardson wrote a book about the Sawi spiritual awakening. Titled Peace Child, it became a bestseller. He followed up by producing a 30-minute dramatic film under the same title.
He began referring to the use of the Sawi peacemaking ritual as a "redemptive analogy." He got missionaries around the world to look for cultural rituals, folk beliefs, and tribal tales in which a parallel to one or more key elements of the Gospel could be seen. As Don Richardson reflected on the "redemptive analogy" concept, he became convinced that cultures everywhere contained starting points for Gospel proclamation. Such thinking reflects the time-honored strategy of using the known to teach the unknown.
The use of redemptive analogies does not reduce divine revelation to those cultural parallels. Cultural traditions are not on the same level as inspired Scripture. Christian teachers and preachers simply use them to shine a light on God's unique revelation so it can be truly understood.
Using redemptive analogies does not involve mixing different belief systems any more than Paul mixed religions together when he began a sermon by referring to an altar erected by the people of Athens to the "Unknown God." Using redemptive analogies does not mean all religions and ways of thinking have equal value. Rather, using redemptive analogies is simply a way of teaching biblical truth by starting with something familiar to people.
Actually, analogies are used throughout the Bible. People of Bible times raised domestic animals and were fishermen and farmers. References to farming, fishing, and the raising of domestic animals are used in the Bible to explain divine truth. Jesus himself used analogies or parallels, often saying, "The Kingdom of God is like . . ."
Using parallels or analogies from culture as illustrations does not mean we preach a different "Gospel" in different cultures. It simply means that some of the most eye-opening and heart-unlocking metaphors and analogies may be culture-specific rather than universal.
—Howard Culbertson, hculbert@snu.edu
This blog post on a key issue in world missions outreach is an article in the "Mission briefing" series published in Engage, a monthly online magazine produced by the Church of the Nazarene.
People sometimes think that looking for redemptive analogies means that we should study the beliefs of another religion, looking for something similar to a Christian concept or practice. If similarities are treated as proof that different religions teach essentially the same truth, the result can be syncretism rather than faithful communication of the Gospel.
That is not what happened with the "peace child" incident that gave Don Richardson the key to proclaiming the Gospel to a tribal group in Irian Jaya. Based on that experience, Richardson began encouraging Christian missionaries to look for things in other cultures— folktales, children's stories, customs, and so on—that could illustrate facets of the Gospel. That has been done for a long time by preachers and teachers in the English-speaking world. Encouraging the search for and use of redemptive analogies does not give a green light to syncretism (the merging of beliefs from different sources into one "package").
Some have criticized Richardson's use of the "peace child" as a redemptive analogy, noting that the child in that ceremony that ended tribal warfare would eventually die, while Jesus Christ will live forever. That's a misguided criticism of the concept of redemptive analogy. No analogy or illustration is perfect in every aspect as a point-by-point explanatory metaphor.
For example, Jesus said, "I am the bread of life." Well, bread gets stale, moldy, and even hard on its way to decomposition. Every analogy Jesus used—or, for that matter, every sermon illustration ever used by preachers of the Gospel—can be picked apart in that way.
Redemptive analogies that have been used by preachers in the United States and Canada include:
While these three analogies can be very powerful in the United States and Canada, they might not speak as powerfully in other contexts, just as Richardson's use of the "peace child" analogy spoke powerfully to the Sawi people but made only a minimal impact on most Americans.
Canadian missionary Don Richardson used the term “redemptive analogy” to describe a God-given cultural bridge within a people group's existing beliefs or stories. That bridge can help them understand the Gospel.
Richardson encouraged missionaries to look within cultures for what he regarded as God-prepared “signposts” of redemption. Such themes, rituals, or values may resonate deeply with people and help them understand the biblical story of Jesus Christ, even though that story comes from a different time and cultural setting. Thus, rather than beginning with concepts totally foreign to a culture, a cross-cultural missionary can start with something already meaningful to its people and use it to illustrate how Jesus Christ is the true and complete answer to their deepest longings.
